Blue Owl agrees to buy healthcare REIT Sila Realty Trust for $2.4 billion

By Isla Binnie and Kritika Lamba

NEW YORK, April 20 (Reuters) – Blue Owl Capital’s real assets division has agreed to acquire Sila Realty Trust, a healthcare-focused real estate investment trust, in an all-cash deal valued at about $2.4 billion, the companies said on Monday.

Blue Owl will pay $30.38 per share for all the outstanding shares of the Tampa, Florida-based REIT, a 19% premium to Sila’s closing price of $25.53 on April 17, the day before the announcement.

Sila, headquartered in Florida, owns 137 real estate properties and three undeveloped land parcels across 65 markets in the United States.

Shares of Sila Realty Trust soared more than 19%. Blue Owl’s shares hovered around the unchanged mark after opening on Wall Street and were last up around 0.5% on the day, in line with the Dow Jones US Financials Index.

The real assets division accounts for around one quarter of New York-based Blue Owl’s roughly $307 billion in assets under management. It also invests in industrial facilities and datacenters, and credit secured by other properties.

That unit added assets much faster than the other two segments of the business last year. It grew by $17 billion, boosted by a deal originally struck in 2024 to buy data center developer IPI.

Blue Owl’s stock has fallen more than 30% so far this year and dipped below the price where it launched onto the public market in 2021. It was created through the merger of private credit firm Owl Rock and the Dyal Capital Partners division of Neuberger Berman.

Large alternative asset managers have seen their stocks buffeted over the past year by fears that the software businesses that they bought and lent to heavily would be disrupted by artificial intelligence. Investors have also fretted their overall growth prospects, and lending standards in the wake of a few high-profile bankruptcies. 

Blue Owl has taken a particularly deep dive since a proposal last year to merge a non-traded private credit vehicle with a traded version raised the prospect that wealthy individuals could take losses.

(Reporting by Kritika Lamba in Bengaluru and Isla Binnie in New York; Editing by Anil D’Silva, Devika Syamnath and Nick Zieminski)