Managing Director
Austin Peña is a Managing Director and Head of Portfolio Strategy for the Blackstone Real Estate Debt Strategies (“BREDS”) team, based in New York. Mr. Peña is also President of Blackstone Mortgage Trust (NYSE: BXMT), a publicly traded commercial mortgage REIT managed by Blackstone. He is responsible for overseeing portfolio management and strategy across BREDS’ investment vehicles and for BXMT’s investment, capital allocation, and balance sheet strategy. Previously, he was a member of the BREDS Private Investment team, where he sourced loans and other real estate debt investments for BXMT and other Blackstone-managed investment vehicles.
Before joining Blackstone in 2013, Mr. Peña worked in the Real Estate Investment Banking Group at Barclays, where he was involved in advising REITs and other real estate companies on mergers, acquisitions, restructurings, and capital markets transactions. Mr. Peña previously held a similar role at Lehman Brothers.
Mr. Peña graduated magna cum laude with a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the Board of Trustee of the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey.