What Is the PERE Global Retail Real Estate Investor of the Year Award? Blue Owl Capital’s Third 2025 Honor

Retail real estate and net lease investing are often discussed as separate categories, but they overlap more than most people realize. A large portion of the properties in a net lease portfolio are occupied by retail tenants — single-tenant stores, freestanding restaurants, pharmacies, auto service centers, and other consumer-facing businesses that operate out of standalone buildings on long-term leases.

That overlap helps explain why Blue Owl Capital won both the Global Net Lease Investor of the Year and the Global Retail Real Estate Investor of the Year from PERE for the 2025 cycle. The same underlying portfolio and deal activity contributed to both awards — but the editorial board evaluated them through different lenses.

Retail real estate and the PERE category

PERE reduced its total number of award categories for 2025 and shifted to an entirely editorial selection process, discontinuing the voting system used in prior years. Editors review each submission and weigh fundraising and deployment within the last twelve months, market impact, and — for some categories — performance metrics. Access to comprehensive company information is available at annualreports.com.

For the retail category specifically, the editors were assessing which firms had the most meaningful presence in retail-occupied properties during the judging window. Blue Owl’s net lease platform — with $43.1 billion in AUM, more than 5,815 properties, and over 840 tenant relationships as of Q3 2025 — includes a significant number of retail-tenanted assets acquired through off-market, sale-leaseback transactions. The firm’s leadership and corporate details can be explored on their LinkedIn company page.

Blue Owl Capital’s approach to retail-occupied properties

What distinguishes Blue Owl’s retail exposure from a typical retail real estate fund is the triple net structure. Blue Owl doesn’t manage stores. The firm doesn’t deal with foot traffic, merchandising, or consumer trends. It owns the physical building and collects rent — with the tenant responsible for taxes, insurance, and maintenance on top of base rent. Lease terms of 10 to 20 years with contractual escalators provide income predictability regardless of what happens to the broader retail sector in any given quarter.

Blue Owl’s net lease investment trust continued to accelerate inflows through Q4 2025, while the firm also raised capital through its seventh vintage drawdown product. The prnewswire.com/news-releases/blue-owl-capital-receives-seven-2025-pere-and-infrastructure-investor-awards-302704364.html press release highlights the seven total industry awards the firm collected across both PERE and Infrastructure Investor programs. Blue Owl’s net lease investment trust led all non-traded REITs in net fundraising during 2025, with inflows rising 55% year over year.

Combined with the Global Net Lease and Global Data Center Investor of the Year honors, the retail award gave Blue Owl Capital a clean sweep of three PERE categories — part of the seven total awards the firm collected. Information regarding the firm’s recent market performance demonstrates continued investor strength across all platforms.