Brookfield Battling Real Estate's Rep Post-Property Spinoff

A plan to make Brookfield more attractive to investors may be coming back to bite the Canadian company amid persistent concerns about what the future holds for office real estate.

“They obviously have a lot of footprint in office — and it’s better kind of office — but it’s still office,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst Alex Blostein told Bloomberg. “The market is penalizing them for it.”

In December 2022, Brookfield spun off its asset management business, now called Brookfield Asset Management, renaming itself Brookfield Corp. in the process. 

The split was made in order to allow investors the ability to directly buy shares of either Brookfield Asset Management’s growing business managing investments for institutional entities as well as in Brookfield Corp.’s diverse array of holdings including real estate, infrastructure and other physical assets, Bloomberg reported at the time. 

But now, Brookfield Corp. is seeing its stock prices tumble. 

Share prices have fallen about 7% since December and the stock’s performance has fallen below that of some major competitors such as KKR & Co., Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

The spinoff was supposed to create an asset-light entity that investors could buy shares of but it also meant that what remained at Brookfield Corp. was decidedly asset-heavier. Brookfield Corp. has more than $30B of its own capital parked in property — $15B of which is in office properties, trophy and otherwise. 

The “implied value of the real estate group is now ‘close to nothing’ per Brookfield share,” Blostein told Bloomberg. 

Office properties have caused pain for Brookfield already. In Los Angeles and near Washington, D.C., Brookfield funds have defaulted on loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars for office properties.