Blackstone Strategic Partners

Strategic Partners launched in 2000 as an independent secondaries manager, built a track record of more than 700 transactions and over $11 billion raised, and along the way became part of Credit Suisse's asset management arm before Blackstone acquired the business from Credit Suisse in 2013 for a platform then managing roughly $9 billion.

Under Blackstone, Strategic Partners has scaled into one of the largest secondaries platforms in the industry, extending beyond private equity fund stakes into dedicated real estate and infrastructure secondaries strategies that mirror Blackstone's broader footprint in those asset classes.

The platform reported record secondaries deployment in recent years as LP-led and GP-led deal volume across the industry has grown, benefiting from Blackstone's scale in sourcing and underwriting large, complex portfolio transactions.

Strategic Partners buys LP fund stakes across private equity, real estate and infrastructure, and participates in GP-led transactions. The multi-asset-class scope is the point: an institution selling a mixed portfolio of buyout, property and infrastructure fund interests can transact with one counterparty instead of running three separate processes.

Sellers are large institutions, and the transactions are frequently among the biggest reported in any given year. For a reader trying to understand headline market statistics, note that a handful of very large portfolio sales can move annual volume figures substantially — the average transaction is far smaller than the ones that make the news.

Secondaries desks and franchises that operate inside a larger private-markets manager, usually built by acquiring an independent specialist and folding it into a broader platform.

This site groups buyers into four categories, because the category tells you more about how a firm behaves than its size does. See the rest of theplatform within a diversified managergroup in the directory.