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.
LePatner is survived by her husband, two children and parents.
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