Wesley LePatner, who rose through the ranks to become chief executive officer of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, died yesterday in the shooting at 345 Park Avenue. She was 43.
LePatner took reins in January from the retiring Frank Cohen as chief executive of the $55 billion BREIT— among the world’s largest REITs by net asset value.
After graduating from Yale with a history degree, LePatner started in the real estate division of Goldman Sachs. After a decade at the investment bank she joined Blackstone in 2014 as a managing director and rose through the ranks to chief operating officer and board member of BREIT.
LePatner spoke last year about her career and being a woman in the business at a symposium of women in real estate hosted by New York University’s Schack Institute.
She said real estate was often the topic at the dinner table when she was growing up in Midtown East.
“My mom is a real estate attorney and my father was a bankruptcy attorney, and a lot of what they talked about in our home life was what was happening in the ’80s and ’90s in the real estate space, particularly in New York City,” she said. “You could see the way in which the evolving landscape where I lived was impacting our lives.”
As a young woman with a liberal arts degree, LePatner said she often felt self-conscious early in her career.
“I realized about 18 months into it that I was actually approaching it in the completely wrong way,” she said at the forum. “I was self-conscious and insecure about those two things versus leaning into the fact that those things didn’t necessarily make me different in a bad way. They actually made me different in a good way.”
LePatner said she worked her way up in the business by seeking out mentors, soliciting feedback from colleagues and learning to ask for what she wanted. In 2007, then-Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn gave her and a group of female analysts advice that has stuck with her.
“The goal is for all of you to embrace change and get comfortable being uncomfortable because the market is about to change a lot,” Cohn told them. “And if you’re not going to be able to change with it, it’s going to be really hard for you.”
She served on the boards of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Abraham Joshua Heschel School, The UJA-Federation of New York, and Yale University Library Council and was a member of the Advisory Board of Governors of NAREIT.
At the symposium, she spoke about her life as a working mother: “I had two working parents, actually, both of my grandmothers, who I was very close to work as well, so I came from a family where everyone worked outside of their home. So to me that was very normal and everyone was very focused and making sure they were excellent at what they did professionally.”
“I think the advice oftentimes people tell other people, women and men is like when you’re at work, lean into work and when you’re at home, like, don’t look at your phone and focus fully on your family,” she said. “Of course, we all want to be doing that. Theoretically, the reality is, you know, depending on the type of job you’re in or depending on what’s happening at home or at work, that’s not always gonna be possible. And so if you approach it with that framework, you can be kinder to yourself when things don’t go according to plan or when you need to be working at seven o’clock because you’ve made the choice to come home earlier.”
“I talk about this in front of my kids, it’s the way I was raised, my parents both had very demanding careers. They talked about what they were doing and why they were doing it, why it was important to take this phone call, why it was important that they had to go to this meeting. I understood the sacrifices they were making for both myself and my brother. And I think it allowed us to also have a sense of maturity about what certain types of careers look like. And I’m trying to model that frankly for my two young children, who aren’t actually that young now any more.”
LePatner is survived by her husband, two children and parents.
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