Blackstone is dumping a $1.8 billion senior housing portfolio at brutal losses some properties selling for 70%+ below purchase price, totaling over $600 million in realized and projected losses. They bought aggressively in 2016-2017 betting on the "silver tsunami" demographic wave meaning the Baby Boomer generation (73+ million people) is aging into their 70s, 80s, and beyond creating explosive demand for senior living facilities. They financed the bet heavily with floating rate debt then COVID crushed occupancylabor costs exploded, and rising rates turned their leverage into a money furnace. Of 39 properties tracked by WSJ, they paid $755 million but are selling for $536 million, a straight 29% loss with roughly 70 of 90 total properties already offloaded. The truly absurd part? Senior housing is actually crushing it right now. Occupancy is near 90%, the 80+ population is exploding (28% growth by 2030, nearly doubling by 2035), and the sector needs 35,000-45,000 new units annually but only gets around 10,000 delivered. Competitors are actually buying senior housing at premium valuations. Blackstone is selling into what could be a decade long demographic supercycle, they just bought the asset at $1,500/unit, got destroyed by a pandemic they couldn't operationally handle, then got crushed by rate hikes on leveraged positions. The senior housing market is brutally complex (healthcare +hospitality + staffing nightmare) and private equity's cookie cutter playbook got shredded This is part of the broader private equity real estate crisis. The commercial real estate market is facing a $1 trillion refinancing wall in 2025 plus another $3 trillion maturing through 2028 with valuations down 20-80% depending on asset class. What this means in practice is that PE firms borrowed massive amounts at low rates in 2020-2021, bet it all on real estate continuing to appreciate indefinitely, then got absolutely blindsided by rate hikes and occupancy shocks that tanked valuations, now they're forced to refinance at 2x the interest rates or sell at discounts just to survive. Blackstone's fire sale is a perfect case study of this dynamic playing out in real time, good long term thesis, terrible execution, overleveraged into rising rates and forced liquidation into a sector they're now exiting at exactly the wrong time.