How Blackstone made billions betting on sheds

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“Real estate has been quite old-fashioned, conservative and slow to catch up with the use of modern technology,” says Ilkka Tomperi, chief operating officer of CapMan Real Estate, which operates in Scandinavia. “It isn’t traded on a screen.” New information, analysed by data scientists, allows companies “to make better investment decisions and to get an edge,” says Tomperi, who’s also a professor at Aalto University in Finland. With M7’s help, Blackstone created a company that became Europe’s largest owner of warehouses, 1700 across the UK and Europe. Big institutions need to write big cheques to make a difference in the...