Wall Street’s Blackstone Made Billions in Real Estate Bet on Urban Warehouses

Parkfield Industrial Estate in London's Battersea district.

Photographer: Carlotta Cardana for Bloomberg Markets

Blackstone reaped billions because it figured out early that scruffy urban warehouses were a gold mine in the internet age.

Jack Sidders

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At 7:15 a.m., David Ebbrell scrambled up a ladder and onto the roof of a warehouse in Germany's industrial hinterlands. It was pitch-dark, the wind was whipping, and he didn't care for heights. "It was petrifying," he says.

Ebbrell's company, M7 Real Estate Ltd., has sent scouts to hundreds of remote places across Europe and the UK. On that December morning in 2014, Ebbrell was in ­Korntal-Münchingen, a town of about 20,000 outside Stuttgart. At this battery storage building, he took an old-school approach. He was checking its roof by walking across it—and hoping for the best.