Alternatives

Alternatives are essential

As allocations grow, alternative investments play an increasingly critical role in portfolios. The need for an approach that is scalable, disciplined, integrated, technology-enabled, transparent and based on fiduciary partnership has never been greater.

Championing a new era of alternatives

Growing demand and complexity in private markets calls for a new era of alternatives to overcome long-standing hurdles for investors. We are helping to evolve the industry to overcome those challenges and defining a new kind of partnership for our clients.

2025 Private Markets Outlook

Hear from our private markets senior leaders as they discuss the past year, explore where the opportunities are for each asset class, and take a close look at some of the structural shifts that are reshaping our world.
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Partnerships in action

BlackRock partners with companies that possess deep local operational knowledge to unlock private market investment opportunities in Asia Pacific.

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Hamish MacDonald, Head and CIO of APAC Real Estate, BlackRock

Alastair Nash, CEO, Wentworth Capital

Hamish You can see thematically we’re actually leaning into what is often called alternative sectors and, in some cases, called social infrastructure. Real asset investors leaning more and more into infrastructure assets, if we can find real estate that looks like infrastructure from a cash flow perspective, then we think that that’s going to have a deep liquid exit.

Hamish Alastair, we’ve known each other for coming on 15 years now. We’ve worked together for nearly five years.

Hamish And we are very, very proud of the portfolio that we’ve built together with Urban Logistics Co. We had an absolute alignment of, of interests as partners going into that strategy. Onto our new thesis, and this is in life sciences where we have recently done a deal to establish a new operating platform called Area 53. I’m very proud to say with Wentworth Capital and we’ve bought two seed assets in Sydney. Can you tell us a little bit about the thesis? Why life sciences.

Alastair It is a sector that, as you mentioned has played out offshore. And there’s a lot of growth in the Australian context. There is no focused, pure play life science real estate platform, but converse to that, there is a very vibrant and healthy life science sector. there’s a number of universities that have huge requirements for lab space and office space, but not just the universities. It’s corporates, government, venture capital, a whole ecosystem of tenants that that interact with each other So that really began the exploration phase of the strategy. And it felt like a very natural follow on to what we’ve been doing together in logistics.

Hamish Specifically, what types of investment opportunities are you looking at in the life sciences space in Australia?

Alastair The most active at the moment is targeting REITs that need to raise capital to fund development pipelines The second area where we’re getting a lot of traction is with the universities themselves. They all have large life science programs and ambitions around life science, but don’t necessarily have the capital to invest into the infrastructure to provide that.

Hamish As a private equity real estate investor, why do you choose BlackRock to partner with in those circumstances?

Alastair A number of reasons. Speed of execution has been everything. We definitely benefited from the first mover advantage in last mile logistics, and we are now benefiting from the first mover advantage in life science. Having a capital partner that has global perspectives has seen this play out in other markets. Therefore, has high conviction, can mobilize large pools of capital and move quickly, allows us to take advantage of these very compelling opportunities.

Alastair And following on from the trend around global insights, what else are you and the BlackRock platforms seeing globally that could be applicable to the Asian market?

Hamish We definitely see a continued path to finding sectors that have been well established and are successful in these Western markets and bringing them down into Australia or at least finding where those assets are in Australia and then aggregating those. We need to find sectors that have got good growth prospects at the same time. So we’re really looking for sectors that A. Have strong supply and demand prospects; B. Are going to be deeply in demand by large scale global investors at our exit and; C. Are quite new or nascent in their journey in the Australian context. So we look at sectors like childcare centers, for example. We like sectors like self-storage if we can find a way to access it. And so you can see thematically we’re actually leaning into what is often called alternative sectors and in some cases called social infrastructure.

MKTGH0125A/S-4135299

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Hamish MacDonald, Head and CIO of APAC Real Estate, BlackRock

Alastair Nash, CEO, Wentworth Capital

Hamish You can see thematically we’re actually leaning into what is often called alternative sectors and, in some cases, called social infrastructure. Real asset investors leaning more and more into infrastructure assets, if we can find real estate that looks like infrastructure from a cash flow perspective, then we think that that’s going to have a deep liquid exit.

Hamish Alastair, we’ve known each other for coming on 15 years now. We’ve worked together for nearly five years.

Hamish And we are very, very proud of the portfolio that we’ve built together with Urban Logistics Co. We had an absolute alignment of, of interests as partners going into that strategy. Onto our new thesis, and this is in life sciences where we have recently done a deal to establish a new operating platform called Area 53. I’m very proud to say with Wentworth Capital and we’ve bought two seed assets in Sydney. Can you tell us a little bit about the thesis? Why life sciences.

Alastair It is a sector that, as you mentioned has played out offshore. And there’s a lot of growth in the Australian context. There is no focused, pure play life science real estate platform, but converse to that, there is a very vibrant and healthy life science sector. there’s a number of universities that have huge requirements for lab space and office space, but not just the universities. It’s corporates, government, venture capital, a whole ecosystem of tenants that that interact with each other So that really began the exploration phase of the strategy. And it felt like a very natural follow on to what we’ve been doing together in logistics.

Hamish Specifically, what types of investment opportunities are you looking at in the life sciences space in Australia?

Alastair The most active at the moment is targeting REITs that need to raise capital to fund development pipelines The second area where we’re getting a lot of traction is with the universities themselves. They all have large life science programs and ambitions around life science, but don’t necessarily have the capital to invest into the infrastructure to provide that.

Hamish As a private equity real estate investor, why do you choose BlackRock to partner with in those circumstances?

Alastair A number of reasons. Speed of execution has been everything. We definitely benefited from the first mover advantage in last mile logistics, and we are now benefiting from the first mover advantage in life science. Having a capital partner that has global perspectives has seen this play out in other markets. Therefore, has high conviction, can mobilize large pools of capital and move quickly, allows us to take advantage of these very compelling opportunities.

Alastair And following on from the trend around global insights, what else are you and the BlackRock platforms seeing globally that could be applicable to the Asian market?

Hamish We definitely see a continued path to finding sectors that have been well established and are successful in these Western markets and bringing them down into Australia or at least finding where those assets are in Australia and then aggregating those. We need to find sectors that have got good growth prospects at the same time. So we’re really looking for sectors that A. Have strong supply and demand prospects; B. Are going to be deeply in demand by large scale global investors at our exit and; C. Are quite new or nascent in their journey in the Australian context. So we look at sectors like childcare centers, for example. We like sectors like self-storage if we can find a way to access it. And so you can see thematically we’re actually leaning into what is often called alternative sectors and in some cases called social infrastructure.

MKTGH0125A/S-4135299

BlackRock is tomorrow’s alternatives platform

Our US$327.5B platform is designed to deliver outperformance with true partnership across a range of investment solutions in: real estate, infrastructure, private equity, credit, hedge funds and alternative solutions. We continue to innovate, leveraging our technology, our scale and our fiduciary model to better serve our clients.
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Alternative investment strategies

Private Debt
Discover leveraged finance, multi-strategy and credit solutions

Opportunities include: direct lending, opportunistic, special situations, distressed

Hedge Funds
Solutions across equity, event driven, relative value global macro and risk

Opportunities include: long/short equity, event driven, relative value, global macro, risk premia, hedge fund solutions

Infrastructure
Learn about BlackRock's infrastructure platform

Opportunity include: infrastructure equity, infrastructure debt, infrastructure solutions, listed infrastructure

Multi-Alternatives
Meet BlackRock’s multi-alternative portfolio management team

Opportunities include: diversified alternatives, alternatives solutions

Private Equity
Explore direct, co-investment, primary and secondary private equity

Opportunities include: direct co-investments, primaries, secondaries, open-end direct, direct

Real Estate
Learn about BlackRock's real estate platform

Opportunity include: real estate debt, real estate equity, real estate securities

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