Afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Brookfield Corporation's 2026 Investor Day. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. Whether you are here with us in person or participating virtually, we really appreciate your interest in Brookfield and are excited to spend the afternoon with you. We have a great lineup planned. We will begin with opening remarks from our CEO, Bruce Flatt. Then Nick Goodman, our President, will provide an overview and the financial outlook for the Corporation. From there, we will hear perspectives across our real estate business in a panel moderated by Brian Kingston, Executive Chair, joined by Ben Brown, Co-President, and Kevin McCrain, Managing Partner in our Real Estate Group. We will then hear from Sachin Shah, CEO of Brookfield Wealth Solutions, who will take us through the continued growth and evolution of that business. Finally, we will wrap it up by opening up the floor for Q&A.
When we get to the Q&A, if you are here in the room, microphones will be available. We ask if you please wait until the microphone reaches you before asking your questions so everyone can hear you clearly. Following the Q&A session, we will display a QR code. We kindly ask you to take a moment and scan the screen and complete our short survey. Your feedback is important and helps us improve future events. As always, I would like to remind you throughout today's discussion, we may make forward-looking statements, which are predictions about future events and trends and are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. For further details, please refer to our filings with the security regulators and the cautionary statement in our presentation, all available on our website. With that, please join me in welcoming to the stage our CEO, Bruce Flatt.
Hello. You get me back. The presentation that I have is really about what we are intending to do with the next chapter of Brookfield. I just go back. The last five years, we have spent significant effort to reposition BAM as a leading global investor in wealth for institutions and individuals. That took many steps along the road, both creating the insurance company that exists today, and Sachin will talk about repositioning the balance sheet, spinning off the asset management business, and directing a number of our efforts across the board. On top of that, we have had decades of work creating the businesses that we have between infrastructure, renewables, asset management, and turning them into powerful compounding annuities.
Even the carry that we now have in BAM is a royalty on the performance of the asset management business, which 25 years from now will be incredibly valuable asset. Over that period of time, over the last 30 years, we have compounded from $200 million of earnings to $6.2 billion of distributor earnings, which is a 13% compound rate of earnings growth that enabled us to compound at 19% in the stock markets against a 3.11% S&P 500, which amazing compound earnings over time is a 10x what you would have done within the S&P 500. It has also enabled us to now have a very large discretionary pool of capital that we can invest with our clients and otherwise into opportunities for Brookfield Corporation. The balance sheet combined is about $345 billion today, and the total assets within the franchise are about $1.3 trillion.
Despite all of that change over the five years, and thank you for enduring with us while we did it, because when we started, many of you said, "That seems confusing. What are you doing?" But what you did is trusted us that we would get here. What I can report to you is that we are here, but the objective we have is really simple and is still unchanged. We want to build long-term returns and wealth for institutions and individuals. By doing that, we want to compound at 15% over a very long period of time. If you do that, the same miracle will happen that happened over the last 30 years. If you reflect on the environment today and the conditions we have versus the last period, there is no doubt the world is evolving faster today than it has ever evolved before.
I would say as a personal statement, I would say it has always been evolving, and it is faster, but one just has to pay attention and change with what is going on. We are though, and hopefully this came through for those that were in the Brookfield Asset Management presentation. We are though, in the very early innings. Many of you think, where are we? There is all this money going out, and there is going to be a problem. But we are in the very early innings of an investment cycle in technology, energy, industrials, and real assets, which I think has 15 years to run as we really rewire the economy in every single country for the future that is going to be different than what it was before. It is like building the railways and the roads and the infrastructure of yesteryear.
What is going on now is the rewiring of really the whole economy as we look out. This opportunity, it is tens of trillions. I know that sounds really large. I do not make light of the fact that it is really large, but it is tens of trillions of dollars. On AI build-out, it is $3 trillion, $4 trillion, $5 trillion. It is being led by the largest, most sophisticated, highest credit quality companies on the planet and countries which are not as high quality credit as them, those companies. But it is led by companies that are like countries and countries. That is the difference. It is led by countries and companies that are like countries. That is really, really important.
The power needed to do all this, both for electrification of, I will not say everything, but many, many things, and the computing power stacked on top of that is what is going on is an unprecedented build-out of power that we are starting to see and should and will last probably for 10 -1 5 years. It is hard to build this stuff. You need skills to do it. But it is very large. This is reinforcing grids, it is putting batteries in to stabilize, it is building more power, and it is a whole enormous build-out of the electricity grid. Which contributes to very significant rewiring also of all of the things around AI and power. Lowell Baron, at the BAM presentation, talked about industrial warehouses. Those are being reutilized, but also reformed where they are, what they do, what you do in them.
That all takes enormous amounts of capital and new investment into the future. This is creating, on top of the equity investments, very significant credit opportunities because the banks do not have the capacity to be able to deal with this size of credit, and that is what private credit is. Remember, what private credit really is outside of the banking system, we access sovereign funds and pension funds. They can buy bonds on a public basis, or they can put money on a direct basis into private credit into these opportunities. To do that, many of them need sponsors like us to create products for them so that they can invest into them.
As simple as it is, that is what private credit is, and the situation that is developing needs an enormous amount of that because the banking system does not have enough capital to be able to deal with this. The good news is that at the same time, we need an unprecedented amount of capital in the world to deliver these investments. The opportunity is expanding because the savings in the world in sovereign plans, pension funds, and individuals is growing. The aging populations with retirement savings are growing dramatically. They are $7 trillion. There are new pathways opening specifically in the United States, and then it will go elsewhere for a lot of these products to fit into U.S. defined contribution market. That $14 trillion that is there is zero penetration in these type of products.
The products that we have are ideally suited to be able to fit into those, and earn return over long periods of time. So this market is opening up and will become very significant investor into these products over time, and it will go all over the world, and this money continues to compound. Capital alone does not get the job done. Capital combined with the skills of execution are required. To emphasize the point, it is not easy to run electricity grids, install batteries, build nuclear plants, operate industrial facilities. These take sophisticated, large-scale individuals and people to be able to do them. So it is a combination of capital and operating skills which will win in this environment.
In addition to that, the relationships that we have with many of the very large institutional investors in the world allow us to source the capital, and the relationships we have with many of the great corporations in the world that are leading this next chapter in investment are very valuable for us to be involved in this. Over the last five years, we have accelerated the depth and scale of our competitive advantages, our access to capital, our operating capabilities, and the relationships. Each one of those is incredibly important to the value. We expanded our access to capital. We spun out, as you know, Brookfield Asset Management. We scaled the institutional capital business. We built a long-duration insurance float that is heading towards $200 billion. We enhanced our access to retail capital in a very methodical basis. We are raising $8 billion a year today.
It could be more if we so choose, but we go slow because we want to get it right. We've created a very diversified, flexible, and growing capital base, which almost no other sponsor, between all the things that I showed you, has what we have. Some are better in some things, some are worse in some things. We're different, but not many have the scale that we have. This has enabled us to pursue a much broader set of opportunities, equity strategies, preferred structured mezzanine, senior debt, across all the different sectors across the world, and with clients where we have extremely broad relationships between some of the sovereign funds, helping them deploy infrastructure within their countries, running mandates across all of our strategies, helping their people grow. These are very long-term, multifaceted relationships. We've also broadened our capabilities, and we've tried to learn.
We've tried to get better. We've tried to evolve. Three things we've done. AI infrastructure didn't exist four years ago, and we've tried to be at the leading edge of that and understand everything that's going on. On energy, we're dominant. But we continue to, as I mentioned earlier, when some of you would have heard this, we continue to move into areas that didn't exist before. Batteries did not exist before. They weren't relevant because they cost so much. Today, they're very relevant because the costs have come down dramatically. Private credit did not exist 10 years ago. We're a leader today. All of those things have broadened our capabilities.
We've also deepened our relationships with companies, and we can always do better, but I like to think we're one of the calls when people need capital, between hyperscalers, governments, and strategics, when they're thinking about what they want to do with their business. We now sit at the intersection of capital and the real economy, and our goal is to be able to deliver something to our counterparties that is differentiated from almost anything that everyone else does. Because of our scale, sometimes we have more confidence than others, or said differently, they may have the same confidence, but they can't act like we can act because of our history, our balance sheets, and our scale, and all of the things that we have. This allows us to put together businesses which are extremely unique and ahead of everyone else and at greater scale.
It's allowed us to create opportunities which I think we're only getting started, but are very differentiated. Just three of them. We recently committed with Naver, which most of you probably don't use, but Naver is the Google and Google Maps of Korea. It's the local mapping and the local search in Korea. It's a $24 billion company. It's an amazing little company, has no debt, A-rated. We bought $10 billion of chips from NVIDIA. We're providing the capital to them, and they're going to use it in their compute capacity. We recently, separate from the other deal we announced a year ago, we agreed a $17.5 billion program to support long lead time items on five nuclear plants, five further nuclear plants that we will build in the United States in Westinghouse. The government is supporting us to order early so we can build fast.
This is going to change the entire industry of nuclear in the United States. As Sam mentioned earlier, we have a partnership with Bloom Energy where we're building fuel cells behind the meter, and we're providing them $25 billion of capital. There's not many others that could provide $25 billion of capital in that, and it's a super exciting opportunity for our AI infrastructure fund. What you should be worried about with all of this is there's lots of growth, but you're going to blow your brains out. Just to be clear, we've been doing this a long time. We try to make small mistakes, not big ones. We grow methodically. We've never compromised our financial performance to do anything, and we do not plan on ever starting now. We never compromise our credit checks, and we do not plan on starting now.
We're very disciplined even though this is a large growth period for the company. Over the last five years, we doubled the scale of our investment platform to $1.3 billion of total assets. We matched that growth with earnings. Growth for the sake of growth does not matter. Growth for the sake of franchise building and profitability matters a lot. In fact, it compounds even more. Now we're entering what I'd say is a larger phase of growth. Our evolution has been about adapting what we have to facilitate what we see coming. What we saw coming five years ago was we needed more capital to be able to facilitate exactly what I've been talking about. We did what we did over the last five years to set ourselves up.
The last step was creating the flexibility of the entire structure by pushing together the investment assets we have with the five years of work that Sachin and his team did to build a $200 billion insurance company. We will now push together, we will have a $400 billion balance sheet to be able to capitalize on these opportunities and to facilitate Brookfield Asset Management doing things nobody else can do, and to earn an excellent return on capital. It allows us to have a more efficient capital structure. We will be more flexible than anyone else, and it will lead to broader index inclusion in the future. All three of those things are only facilitated by the steps that we've taken over the past five years.
The combination of the two businesses which you approved, thank you, allows us to take the permanent capital base of $175 billion with the insurance float of $170 billion and create new BN, which will have a balance sheet of about $345 billion of capital to invest. That will allow us, if we chose, we may not choose, but if we choose, to grow our insurance book to $1 trillion and be way over-capitalized. We're ready for opportunities if they so should come along. It enhances our ability, therefore. Why do all these things? Why not just sleep on Saturday morning? We did all of these things because what we're trying to do is continue to grow at 15% without taking undue risk. That's the whole goal of the organization. We continue to grow. Nick will come up in a minute and talk about our plan.
Our plan shows, and he'll show you what we showed you five years ago, our plan shows this business should compound without too much effort at 16% from the current $67 that you own today to $140 a share in 2031. Therefore, the opportunity is large. The compounding engine we have is very strong. We remain very laser-focused on returns. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Nick, and I'm going to come up afterwards and answer questions. I think I won't take questions now, and I'll do it after the other presentations. Thank you.
Please welcome President of Brookfield Corporation, Nicholas Goodman.
Good afternoon, everyone. Bruce really wasn't joking about Saturday mornings. Thank you, everyone, for joining us both in the room and online. I want to echo the sentiment of Connor and Bruce. We really appreciate your support and taking the time to join us today. In keeping with prior years, my approach is going to be about taking the comments that you've heard from Bruce, what you're going to hear in the rest of the presentation, and putting it into the numbers. Providing a look back at our past performance, touching on some of our key achievements, and then rolling forward our five-year plan and giving you an update on our outlook for the business.
Before I end on our key takeaways, I will touch on new BN as well, going through some of the advantages that we see, and also some of the changes that we expect in our financial reporting moving forward. Starting with an overview, and in these next five slides, I effectively want to give you the conclusion and some of the key points that I'm going to make throughout the presentation. Over the last five years, we have doubled our core earnings. We have grown them at a compound annual growth rate of 16%. As Bruce touched on, over the last five years, we have grown the scale of our business, we've added depth, we've broadened out our capabilities. As we've done that, we've done it with a strong focus on profitability and returns.
Which means that as the business has grown, the earnings power has grown in lockstep. We think about that in the next five years, it leaves us well positioned to double our core earnings again over the next five years, taking our DE before realizations to just north of $11.5 billion, a compound annual growth rate of 17%. When we add on the benefits of carried interest and capital allocation, it takes the total DE in the plan at the end of the five-year period to $16.8 billion. That is an annualized growth rate of 24% over the plan period. If we put that in the context of our current share price, that is a 6 x multiple on five-year forward earnings. 6 x multiple on five-year forward earnings.
If we are successful in executing the plan, our plan value at the end of the plan period will grow to $140 a share from $67 today, exceeding our long-term targets of 15% + total returns. Taking a look back at past performance. Our growth over the last five years, as we have stated, has accelerated. It has been supported by several powerful tailwinds. The electrification, digital infrastructure. In real estate, we started to see the early stages of a recovery. We moved from an oversupply and lack of demand into a phase where we started to see supply really fall off and demand really start to pick up over the last five-year period, significantly improving fundamentals across the sector. Capital formation continued to accelerate, with alternatives continuing to capture a growing share of institutional, high net worth, and individual, and especially retirement savings over the last five years.
At the same time, we had a macroeconomic environment that continued to evolve. What was consistent was economic growth was resilient. We saw inflation come back, moderate, starting to come up and being sticky above central bank targets. We saw interest rates increase, decline. They stabilized somewhat. Now we are seeing the back end of the yield curve moving up. With inflation and rates moving almost in lockstep, it has been a very constructive environment for our business. We saw financing markets, they really tightened for some sectors five years ago. Liquidity dried up, spreads blew out. Over the last five years, again, we have seen the markets turn incredibly constructive for our assets. What is very evident in the last five years is that the long-term tailwinds in our business are significantly more powerful than any short-term macroeconomic environment.
We saw that in our earnings, and we have seen it in how we have been able to scale our business over this period. If we just look at this page, over the last five years, we have doubled our asset management business. We have doubled it in size over five years. Our wealth solutions business, effectively a business that did not exist five years ago, we have scaled it to almost $200 billion in assets. Our operating businesses' high-quality assets backed by regulated and contracted cash flows, essential service nature of our private equity businesses, and the improving fundamentals of real estate, have allowed us to continue to grow these resilient cash flows.
You can see that here in this chart, where our earnings, on a consistent basis, have scaled over the five-year period, underscoring the fact that the long-term tailwinds are more powerful than the short-term macroeconomic environment. It also highlights the real return nature of the cash flows that are underlying our business. Now, five years ago, when I would have stood up and laid out our plan for you for our core earnings growth over the five years, I would have said our plans sometimes appear aspirational. We don't view them that way. We look at the scale of our operating capabilities and of our platforms. We almost view the growth as somewhat predictable and consistent based on what we have. It's about execution. As I said, we have the businesses, we have the platforms, we have the capability. It's just about executing the plan.
We lay out these plans, we view them as very realistic and achievable over the five-year period. We planned for $5.6 billion of cumulative DE before realizations over this five-year period, and we marginally exceeded it over that five years. This is really important context, I think, as we start to move forward to the next five years and give context to why we have conviction in our new plan. Now, very importantly, and Bruce touched on this, we scaled the business without changing our risk profile. We continue to operate with a conservative capitalization with strong liquidity and proven access to capital, very active risk management, meaning that we are managing risks to try and limit and protect downside in our investments. We're maintaining a very diversified exposure across the business, meaning we have no significant counterparty exposure.
If we zoom in on the last 12 months, again, we've delivered very strong financial performance. Our asset management business had its largest fundraising year ever, $163 billion of capital raised, and grew its fee-related earnings by 19%. Our wealth solutions business increased its asset base by 40% and grew its annualized distributable earnings to $2 billion, an 18% increase. In operating businesses, we continued to see strong FFO growth, and in our real estate business, achieved record rents in markets around the world, driving strong growth in NOI, and importantly, embedding future growth into the earnings profile of that business. Now, on top of that, we also returned $1.3 billion to shareholders, $700 million in opportunistic share repurchases and $600 million in dividends. The timing of this is done June- to- June.
If you actually look back at the last two calendar years, we've repurchased $1 billion of shares in each of those calendar years, and we're on pace to achieve the same this year. Now, we continue to value our business as the sum of its parts. We take our public holdings, and we add to that our private holdings. Our direct investments, these are the investments that we have directly into funds managed by Brookfield Asset Management. Our carried interest, our share of the profits generated by the funds managed by BAM. Our wealth solutions business, and our commercial real estate business. When you net off that, our debt and preferred capital, it's $158 billion plan value or $67 a share. Which if you look at the share price today, offers a very attractive opportunity or entry point for investors and a very, very large margin of safety.
That's the past. What now? What is next for the business? Let me provide you with the updated five-year plan. The tailwinds that we talked about that supported the growth over the last five years are only accelerating. You've heard it today in the BAM session, and you heard it from Bruce across energy and AI and digitalization. The capital needs are unprecedented. The quality of the investment opportunities is there, and the opportunity to drive growth and deliver excellent returns is in front of us. In real estate, what we're now seeing is those improving fundamentals that I talked about means that different to five years ago, today, we have pricing power in our real estate business. We are now in a market where there is a chronic shortage of supply of the highest quality real estate.
There is an excess of demand, and the movement in rents that we're able to achieve is significantly greater than any impact that interest rates would have. The real estate business is now moving from improving fundamentals to converting that into improving cash flows. Capital formation continues to accelerate. We're seeing the institutional bond grow, high net worth individual, and potential new pools of capital opening up, supporting the growth in alternative investments. At the same time, I would say that the interest rate and inflation backdrop continues to be supportive for our business. I think if you look at the energy and infrastructure business that we have with rates and inflation move together, that's a very constructive environment for those two businesses.
In real estate, I touched on the pricing power that we have today, and a piece we often don't talk about, and we should, is in BWS, we have a natural hedge against the rest of the business. Sachin will touch on this more, but it means as a business, the backdrop today is incredibly supportive of our future growth. That leaves us well positioned to continue to scale the earnings of the business. Planning for that 24% compound annual growth rate, as I said, over the next five years, with the large bulk of that coming from our core businesses, from our existing platforms, where it's just about execution. Let's start with the core businesses. Our three core businesses span both our public and private holdings across asset management, wealth solutions, and our operating businesses. We will focus our comments today on our private holdings.
I will go through the totality of our earnings growth. I will spend specific time on carried interest. We have a real estate panel to talk about our real estate portfolio, and then Sachin will talk in greater detail about wealth solutions. With asset management, the earnings growth comes from two sources. It comes from Brookfield Asset Management, as you heard earlier, their plans to scale fee-bearing capital to $1.3 trillion, an 18% annual growth rate in DE. Direct investments are investments into funds with a proven track record of delivering strong returns. We expect over the plan period to earn and resurface up to $6 billion of capital that will be available for reinvestment. Within wealth solutions, we expect to grow insurance assets to $375 billion over the plan period.
The business has the benefit of a tailwind from demographics, from significant growth in the need for retirement savings products. At the same time, we have scaled a platform in North America that is now focused on broadening and deepening its distribution capabilities, providing an organic engine for growth in assets. Our global expansion, we have invested into a new business in the U.K. and recently started in Asia, focusing on Japan, and plans to grow more broadly in the region. When you pair that with our investment capabilities, our ability to source long duration investment opportunities to match long duration liabilities, and importantly, as was just discussed on the panel, it is an ability to invest larger amounts of capital into larger deals, but without sacrificing returns. That is a huge advantage for our business as we continue to grow.
When you pair that with the permanent capital of BAM, it gives us the confidence that we can grow earnings in this business at a 23% compound annual growth rate over the plan period, but with a focus on returns, i.e., we will maintain or focus on maintaining a 15% + return on our equity. Our operating businesses, as we said, they continue to benefit from the tailwinds across infrastructure, energy, private equity, and real estate. We expect these businesses to continue to deliver strong FFO and earnings growth over the plan period. If we put all that together, it provides a strong base of growth in our core earnings.
The 17% compound annual growth rate I touched on at the start, again, a doubling of our earnings over the plan period with growth from BAM, our direct investments, asset management in totality, then wealth solutions, and our operating businesses continuing to drive cash flow growth being slightly offset by the capital recycling that we have planned over the period. Touching on carried interest, as we know, it provides a significant source of additional growth for BAM. Last year, we said that we felt carried interest was approaching an inflection point, and we absolutely believe that to be the case. Over the last 10 years, we have realized $4 billion of carried interest into income. Over the next 10 years, we expect that number to be $25 billion, of which we expect $5 billion to be realized into income over the next three years on a net basis.
Now, I think it is important to do a quick refresher of how we earn and recognize carried interest into income. We earn carried interest from two sources. The first is from the funds that were raised before Brookfield Asset Management was separately listed. Against those funds, we earn 100% of the carry. We also incur 100% of the costs. We earn a roughly 65% margin on that income stream. The second is what we call the royalty. We earn a 33% share of gross carry, and we incur no costs. So it is effectively a royalty at a 100% margin. Now, when it comes to recognition of carried interest, we adopt a conservative approach that effectively backends the realization of carry towards the end of a fund life.
We wait for all of the original capital to be returned to clients to work our way through the preferred return, and when there's a very remote risk of callback, we realize carry on incremental dollars realized. It does create a delay in the realization of carry. It creates greater alignment, on the other hand, with our clients, and it also creates greater visibility as to when we expect that carried interest to be realized. Let's look at the life cycle of carry. The first step is to raise capital against which we have the opportunity to earn carried interest. This is a signal of future earnings potential. The more capital we raise, the more carry we have the potential to raise in the future. The next step is to take that capital and deploy it for value. We then drive value creation.
We implement our operating and business improvement plans, roll up strategies, and create value in our investments. Then, when we've executed our growth plans, value creation plans, and the markets are constructive, we look to monetize investments. Once we've returned the capital, earned the preferred return, then we realize carried interest into income. If I take each of those in turn, first, the earnings potential coming from carry. We've doubled our carry eligible capital over the last five years. Today, it sits at $273 billion. We continue to scale the earnings potential of carried interest. Second is deployment. Again, we've doubled our capital deployment over the last five years. Last 12 months, we deployed $160 billion of capital into new investments. Let's think about how do we create value once that capital is invested.
A good measure of this is the carry that we're generating in the background. That reflects the value that's being created in the capital that's at work. We have $7 billion of generated unrealized carried interest today. That means in those investments, the value has been created. It's now just awaiting realization, which means as we monetize assets, that carry will be coming into income. As you've heard today, you heard on the panel and you've heard repeatedly, monetization activity is strong and it's picking up. It's 3x what it was five years ago. There's $90 billion of monetizations over the last 12 months, and the pipeline continues to grow. It's this pipeline that gives us the conviction that we will be seeing that inflection point in carried interest. $5 billion of net carried interest expected to be realized into income over the next three years.
60% of that comes from funds where 100% of the invested capital has already been returned to clients. That gives us that strong visibility into the recognition of carried interest. My key point on carry to you is the foundations are in place. As we now enter a meaningful period of realizations and monetizations, carry will be at that inflection point, and we should expect to see a significant pickup into income over the next 3, 5, and 10 years. The carried interest potential, which talks to how we think about valuing carried interest. If we run forward the plan that BAM laid earlier, carry-eligible capital scales to $600 billion five years from now. It's a 17% annualized growth rate. It will triple the net generated carry that we expect BAM to be benefiting from on an annual basis.
You can see the scaling potential and value of carried interest to us. We value that the same way we've always valued it, a 10x multiple on the annualized target number, plus that $7 billion of carry that's been realized and now is just waiting to be recognized, gives you a total value of $34 billion. So when we add carry to the earnings that we're projecting from our core businesses, it's a 20% growth rate from those two sources. It will create significant excess cash flow for reinvestment back into the business or to be returned to shareholders. If we are successful in executing the plan, we will generate $54 billion of free cash flow over the next five years, and here you can see the different sources contributing to that $54 billion.
At the risk of stating the obvious here, the value that we can create with that cash depends entirely on what we do with it. Our approach to capital allocation, as we've talked about in the past, is centralized. It's a disciplined, institutionalized approach to how we think about reinvesting our capital. We distribute all of our cash flow up from our companies to the corporation to centralize reinvestment decisions where we have a unique lens on the investment opportunities at any point in time across the entire organization. Once we identify the highest and best use of the capital, we then allocate it and reinvest it back into the business. The checklist, the focus areas for that capital is to support the growth and invest alongside our existing businesses.
It's to invest in new businesses that offer attractive returns and afford us the ability to build and learn, build knowledge that will benefit the entire franchise. It's to pursue strategic transactions. We always focus on retaining ample liquidity to defend against downside risk and to afford financial flexibility to the entire organization. After that, there will be return of capital to shareholders. If we look at the potential uses of the cash over the plan period with the $54 billion, we net off against that the dividends that we expect to pay over the plan period, and then we have the reinvestment that is built into the plan. Importantly, this is not reinvestment that is committed to today. That will be entirely subject to us being able to earn and achieve our desired returns for that capital.
Assumed in the plan that we can, and there's nothing to suggest we won't be able to, that we've $26 billion of excess cash flow available for reinvestment. Absent attractive reinvestment, and the bar is high, the entirety of that capital will be available to be returned to shareholders. One example of our capital allocation that we've profiled recently that we thought would be worth touching on is investing in new businesses shaping the real economy. We've made some targeted allocations of capital over the last few years to new businesses, again, that we think afford strategic benefit to us and where we think we can assist them to build scale. We've put some of them up on the page here. It is not significant dollars in the context of BN's balance sheet, about $2.8 billion today.
Now, the way we think about these investments is we have large relationships and partnerships around the world, and we are always talking about potential to partner and invest with through our relationships. I am going to focus specifically on technology companies, as I showed on the page before. If you think about our relationship with technology companies today, we are bringing capital, we are bringing operating and execution capabilities and energy to them today. Through every one of these avenues, we are developing deeper and deeper relationships. That is affording us the opportunity to look at investments at the intersection of technology and real assets. I think about these in a couple of ways. First, it is the opportunity to earn attractive returns on our capital. But two, it brings strategic benefits to our firm. First, it makes us better operators.
I think Anuj touched on it in his panel. Being at the forefront of the understanding of how technology can be applied to our businesses and to our operations to ensure that we can maximize returns and operational efficiency is a huge advantage. Two, it makes us better investors. We think about these as having many benefits to the organization. It is not significant amounts of capital, but they are proving to be more and more strategic. If we look at SpaceX as just one example of those investments, we invested $325 million. It is about $1.5 billion of total value. That is $1 billion of value created for the organization in nearly five times multiple on our capital and a 55% IRR. Again, these are attractive investments.
They in no way cannibalize in a material way the other uses of capital that I have talked about, but they are attractive and they are in front of us today. Bringing it all together, we are set up to deliver a 17% growth in our DE annually, our DE before realizations and carried interest, sorry, DE before carry and reinvestment over the next five years. That is a double of our core earnings again over the next five years. When you factor in the benefits of carried interest and capital allocation, it takes it to a 24% compound annual return over the plan period. If we are successful in executing the plan, we should be able to grow plan value in excess of our long-term targets, growing at 16% annualized to $140 a share at the end of the plan period. Now, before I go to the key takeaways and hand over, I will just touch briefly on new BN.
New BN, as we have stated, is a simpler structure that expands the set of growth opportunities available to us. The pairing of our permanent capital with our insurance float, we believe gives us the capacity to sustain the returns on equity that we have achieved in the past, not just for the next two, three, four, five years, but for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years. It is very powerful structure. It gives us flexible capital to pursue growth, to participate in the generational investment opportunities that we see in front of us, and the ability to preserve greater balance sheet flexibility. Ultimately, as Bruce touched on, we believe over time it could open up a path to broader index inclusion. Now, in connection with the transaction, as we have said, we will be transitioning our financial reporting to U.S. GAAP starting in Q1 of 2027.
We believe that moving to U.S. GAAP will simplify our financial reporting. Effectively, our financial reporting will be more reflective of our underlying business, and it will enhance comparability with U.S. peers. We will provide a lot more detail on how to think about the transition and the key changes, but two key ones that we just wanted to touch on. We make significant investments directly or through the list of affiliates into our private funds. Under U.S. GAAP, we will be able to present this at NAV, again, more accurately reflecting how we invest and earn earnings and cash flow from these investments rather than having to consolidate them line- by- line. Unrealized carried interest that today does not appear on our financial statements is recognized under U.S. GAAP and will start to be included in our audited financial statements.
Two key advantages we think in helping the comparability and the understanding of our financial statements moving forward, and we will provide more details. Key takeaways. Our business is larger, more diversified, and more cash generative than it was five years ago. Our core businesses are positioned to deliver very strong growth and earnings. As we have said, we have the platforms, we have the operational capability, we have the depth. Now it is about execution. Carried interest is becoming a larger and more recurring source of earnings and cash flow, and we expect it to scale significantly over the plan period. That will afford us significant free cash flow with substantial capacity to invest that back into the business. Our global scale gives us access to a vast range of investment opportunities.
When we package that all together with the power of new BN, we believe it will expand our capacity to grow beyond the plan period and deliver 15% + annualized returns to our shareholders over the long term. Thank you. That concludes my comments, and we will now have the real estate panel.
Please welcome our real estate panel, moderated by Brian Kingston, with panelists Ben Brown and Kevin McCrain.
All right, we get the comfy chairs. Good afternoon, everyone. I think everyone would know Kevin and Ben, but just in case you do not, Ben is the Co-President of our real estate business, and Kevin runs our retail shopping business. We thought for a discussion today about real estate, rather than walking through a number of slides in a presentation, we would try to set it up as a bit more of a conversation, but this is a Brookfield event, so there will be slides. I thought I would maybe just start out before we get to the guys and their views on the markets, just a bit of a refresher on the real estate business. Most of you will remember, our real estate business really is in two pools of capital.
Lowell talked a little bit earlier about our various real estate fund strategies where we invest alongside our institutional partners. That is a broad-based, multiple asset class business. In addition to that, we own a number of assets directly on the balance sheet. Both of these businesses are important. For the conversation this afternoon, we are going to focus on the balance sheet investments because Lowell covered it off earlier. It is about $38 billion of Brookfield's equity that is tied up in Nick's plan value that is invested in real estate. Two-thirds of it is what we describe as our super core portfolio. These are the best of the best assets, and we are going to spend a little time talking about those.
In addition to that, is about $9 billion of core plus, some value add, and about a $3 billion residential land business. The super core business is roughly split 50/50 between office and retail. As I say, this is sort of the core of the business. It is about 46% leverage, so very low levered business. Importantly, it is concentrated in a relatively small number of assets. Our super core office portfolio is really just 10 complexes, in major cities like New York, London, Toronto, Dubai, and Berlin. These assets are 95% occupied, very long-term lease profile. Similarly, we own 100 shopping centers in the business. Only 18 of them are what we define as super core, and this is where the bulk of our capital is invested.
Just like the office business, these are fortress-like irreplaceable assets with very high productivity retail tenants in them and conservative leverage on them. The balance of that super core portfolio is made up of some residential and urban retail that really complements the large office complexes and shopping centers in sort of a mixed-use environment. Really, I think our strategy with these has been pretty straightforward, which is to work the assets hard and continue to drive value out of them. The last five years, I suppose, have been a little eventful for real estate.
We've certainly seen a lot of disruption from higher interest rates, from disrupted capital markets, from disrupted leasing markets, et cetera. But we're now in a place where, Nick touched on this a little bit earlier, fundamentals are very strong, and that's really as a result of stabilizing interest rates to some extent, certainly stabilizing tenancy changes, and we're really in a position now where the portfolio is set up. Ben , maybe why don't we start there? Before we get into office or retail specifically, maybe just start out more broadly on real estate. Where are we in the cycle right now, and what are you seeing?
Yeah, so I'd say across global real estate markets, we've entered a new cycle. Real estate markets are in recovery now. It starts with how you framed it up, which is the operating fundamentals. I think we've seen across our business, and we've been pretty consistent, and I think if you say something long enough, you are proven right at some point. But the fundamentals across pretty much every sector in our business for the past handful of years, even through turbulent times and some volatility in markets, have been really good and really strong. The debt capital markets have recognized that, and they've been really supportive. They've been wide open to finance real estate assets, and now I'd say much more broadly and deeply across sectors and geographies.
When the financing markets start to open up, that really facilitates a lot more transaction volume, and that's really what we've seen over the last 12 - 18 months is transaction volume has picked up. All of those things are contributing to a much healthier framework, a much more active framework, but frankly, improving markets, and that's really what is going to drive the performance that I think we'll see out of markets broadly, but more specifically out of our real estate business over the next couple of years.
Yeah. That's sort of true, but obviously office has had plenty of headlines over the last five years. So maybe let's turn to office directly. What are you seeing in that market now? We talk a lot about the importance of quality, but how is that actually sort of flowing through?
Yeah. This is very specific, specifically true to office, it's true to retail, but frankly, it's true to most real estate sectors today. The most important thing, I think, to realize on real estate sectors, Lowell mentioned this in one of the earlier panels, is demand has been robust, supply is really constrained. Supply is really constrained across the board. We want to talk about office specifically. That's probably where it's most acute. We've seen office construction really fall off of a cliff, and future supply is really nonexistent. When you think about all the contributing factors of both the economics around new office development, the inflation in costs, the cost of labor, and now obviously with financing costs increasing more and more, the likelihood that you'll see new supply come on, even as the occupier fundamentals are strong, rents continue to grow.
I still think it's multi-years off of seeing any real meaningful amount of supply come to the market. That does mean, Nick said it a couple of times, that means we start to have pricing power again. I think you're starting to see that show up in markets. For sure, we've seen it show up in occupancy and net absorption. We've had going on nine quarters now, at least in the U.S., of positive net absorption. That's a great signal. But where we're really starting to see it is the growth in the rents, where that demand is obviously outpacing no new supply, but in many places, supply is actually coming down because we're actually taking existing static office supply out of the market, and that is starting to be a flywheel of growth.
But how does that translate specifically into our portfolio?
Yeah. As you said, our strategy for decades now has had us focus on the best global gateway markets and the best assets in those respective markets. As we've seen performance in operating fundamentals, that means we have been able to ramp occupancy. We are now at a stabilized occupancy, really across the entirety of our office portfolio. When you look across the globe, what we are really seeing is not only is there performance in rent growth, but we are actually starting to see that flow through into our leasing activity and our future revenues and earnings, where the existing embedded mark to market is pretty meaningful.
We show it on the slide here where you see averages, but I would tell you, in many cases, while those mark to markets look pretty healthy and we would be really happy with those, many individual deals are multiples of that. The last, to give you an example, the last three deals that we signed at our Manhattan West project, would have been 100%-120% mark to market over those initial leases that were done.
Those are like 10-year-old leases.
Yeah, 10 years old.
Yeah.
I would tell you probably 75% of that rental growth has happened in the last five years. I think the next five years, you will still continue to see a lot of that performance. We are seeing it in London, we see it in Toronto, and that has everything to do with the demand still focusing on a finite amount of the supply in the market, which is the higher quality buildings that are amenitized, that have institutional landlords that have been investing in those assets, and that is really what makes up the bulk of our portfolio. I think the backdrop of an improving market is helpful. I think when you own the right assets, you get disproportionately rewarded.
Kevin, you were in the papers for a while, then Ben was in the papers, and now you are back in the papers, but for a good reason. There was an article this week, Wall Street Journal, on how retail has been performing. Contrast that with what we are talking about in office here. What is happening with the higher quality retail centers?
Well, it is a very similar story, right? It is about consolidation, it is about limited supply, right? It is about the customer and tenants all wanting to go to the same place. But if you really look at the twofold, there is no new supply coming online, but that is a broad metric that you see on all types of retail. The centers that we own, it is virtually impossible to recreate a center, a mall, a big shopping center where 20 million people, 30 million people are going to walk through that singular center every day. And the tenants want that kind of concentration, that scale, because they feed off of each other. They want that environment. The flip side is the customer. The customer continues to shop. These are not malls of the past where it is here is 30, 40 apparel places.
These are shopping, dining, entertainment hubs that people congregate at. Customers want to go, people want to go, and the retail sales continue to perform, and that compounds to us, and we are able to continue to grow NOI. It is really the pricing power that we have through the customer and tenant demand with an inability for new supply to come online.
But give us an example in the portfolio of where you're seeing that. How does that translate when you look at our portfolio?
I've got a million examples. Look, on the stats here, we are virtually fully occupied in super core and core plus, and we create vacancy in these assets to upscale our tenants, right? That leads to significant leasing and positive re-leasing spreads. Let's talk specifically, which is where I think you want me to go. If any of you guys have teenage daughters or teenage girls in your life that shop, they likely shop at a brand called [Aritzia]. [Aritzia] is a digitally native brand that's rolling out a store strategy. We see this everywhere. Whenever we open an [Aritzia] store, it's 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 sq ft store. Our operating team has to set up queues because it's a two-hour wait every weekend because the women and girls are lining up to shop there. It's not just [Aritzia]. The demand from the tenancy.
We've got Uniqlo out of Japan doing massive store expansion, Korean beauty brands doing massive store expansion. Aritzia, who's probably the most prominent retail brand today, maybe the most powerful retail brand today, expanding both in place and growing in store size as well as growing stores. This demand creates pricing power for us and ability to drive rents and continue to drive leasing spreads. We stand in a great position. We're able to consolidate because there's virtually no competition in our markets, and we're well positioned for growth.
Okay. The markets for both of them are getting better. Tenant demand is there, so it's pretty easy. But the boss said we have to work on Saturday mornings.
Yeah.
Talk a little bit about, we always talk about the importance of the operational advantages that we have. How do you take some of that and then actually compound on it?
Yeah. I think we have heard this example throughout the day because I think it is pretty universe across all of our businesses. It is, again, that roll your sleeves up approach of active asset management. We are not passive owners of real estate. It is the fact that we run a global business where we have tenant relationships that we are the go-to landlord around the world, whether it is for large corporations for their office space, or it is for multinational retailers that rely on us to provide them the storefronts for those experiences and that growing customer cohort that they have. Then I think it is all the other things that we have really situated our business around for the past two decades to be able to execute on, which is the experience.
I think today in real estate, we see this across our broader real estate business, experience is everything. That is true if you are talking about a housing asset or a hospitality asset. In those B2B businesses or B2C businesses, your customer is expecting and wanting and desiring a great experience, and I think we have built an entire organization around delivering just that. Then it is actually being able to execute on that, having the teams in-market speaking to a local customer base, and frankly, I think providing a differentiated experience and relationship, which means it is great if we own great buildings people want to be in. It is really great if we are a trusted provider of those services and those experiences to those tenants, and I think that is what is driving, and has driven a lot of our outperformance.
Right.
I want to give you a couple examples of where we have done that in our office business. Kevin, you can touch on a couple of the retail. A perfect example, we obviously own an 8 million sq ft mixed-use complex next door, but we are one of the largest landlords of office space in Lower Manhattan. We own an office building, One Liberty Plaza, which is just on the other side of the World Trade Center. I would tell you, three years ago, we started to see a real momentum around tenants' interest back in Lower Manhattan, but for a really high-quality, mixed-use, amenitized destination for their office space. We captured a lot of that at Brookfield Place. We are virtually full at Brookfield Place. Where we did not see it was in assets like One Liberty Plaza.
Unbelievably well-located asset, sits on the cross-section of pretty much every subway line and transit hub that goes through Lower Manhattan. But it was an asset that needed to be repositioned, it needed to be re-energized, it needed to be reimagined, and we embarked on that a couple of years ago. We've now seen the fruits of our labor. We're doing a meaningful amount of leasing there, but we're finally starting to see a real ability to push rents. And it's a great example of if you invest capital and you invest it creatively, but you're providing the sort of environment that tenants want, you'll get paid for it today. And I think that's part of the calculus around how you have to think about investing in office. Take Canary Wharf, for example.
What we've done there is probably a little bit more around placemaking, not a singular asset where we really need to reimagine that asset for a specific tenant, but a place that has living, it has retail, it has office. And we needed to bring all of those things together and make it the best example of itself, which really has been what we've been doing for the last decade there. It's finally come to maturity. And this has been, I don't know, probably the best leasing year on record for Canary for us. And we've seen diversity of tenants, we've seen increase in rents. But it's a flywheel where the retail benefits the office, the office benefits the housing, and we're seeing performance across all of those things.
But that takes vision, it takes capital, it takes time, it takes hard work, but I think that's exactly what we've set our business up to be able to execute on.
Retail on the asset management and leasing side is very similar. It does start with the customer and knowing what that customer in any geography or area wants, and then truly understanding your tenant. The tenants expect us to understand who they think their customer is and where they want to go, so that when we present them opportunities, they can move quickly on it. One anecdote, then I'll get into a couple of these examples. I went down to Little Rock a few months ago to see a tenant, and we have an asset called Pinnacle Hills in Bentonville, Rogers, Arkansas, about a three or four-hour drive north of there. That's where Walmart's executives are hunted. It's actually a very high net worth demographic market, high household incomes. The asset is fantastic.
Drove up with one of our senior leasing guys, toured the asset, went through the plan, and I said to our team, "If you could have one tenant," because it's a virtually full asset, "if you could have one tenant come here, who would it be?" And they said, "Everybody wants The Cheesecake Factory." I said, "Great, we'll call The Cheesecake Factory." It's a great tenant. It does really well. I went out to dinner that night with our senior leasing guy, I'm standing in line waiting for dinner, and I'm talking to people in line, getting to know who the people are, and told them we own Pinnacle Hills, and asked them, "If you could have one tenant at Pinnacle Hills, who would it be?"
"The Cheesecake Factory." But that connectivity to what your customer wants allows us to pick up the phone and call The Cheesecake Factory, who we have 50 or 60 stores with, and say to them, "You need to get here because you're going to do really, really well." And that anecdotally is how our operating team runs and thinks about our assets, and how our local leasing rep, who is grinding every day on the ground in northwest Arkansas, is calling our head of F&B to say, "Let's get those guys down here." Two more practical real-world examples of how we reinvest and reposition our assets are Plaza Frontenac and Stonebriar.
Plaza Frontenac is probably the best retail asset in St. Louis. More boutique, luxury-driven, had two department stores, Saks and Neiman Marcus. We got one of the Saks boxes back out of the bankruptcy. And three, four, five years ago, people probably thought that was a challenge. Empty boxes are opportunities. The tenant demand is there. This created a massive opportunity for us to get rid of a tenant who was probably paying a few hundred thousand dollars a year for 50 or 60 years and allow us to invest into this asset, take advantage of the massive tenant demand that we have there, and we're projecting a 15% unlevered yield on cost on that repositioning and having it fully occupied before we've even committed to cost. The other is Stonebriar Center, which is in North Dallas, Frisco, Plano. It's a fortress asset for us.
We had an empty Sears box at the asset. Dick's Sporting Goods is rolling out their House of Sport concept. They are moving from 80,000 sq ft stores to these 150,000 sq ft experiences where they have tracks and turf fields and climbing walls, and they wanted to move. We secured a move for them to move to the empty Sears box. Now we had the empty Dick's box on the other side of the asset. Our team said, "We really have a dearth of quality restaurants. Let's create a whole node here." We have created a complete restaurant cluster on the other side of the asset. We have pre-leased the second floor, only entrance from the mall, to an international restaurant chain that will do $30 million- $35 million a year in sales. That anchor is letting us re-lease the balance of the space.
It is projected to do 9% unlevered yield on cost. What that does not include is the effect that that $30 million restaurant is going to have on the second floor of that wing and that traffic. We are going to be able to continue to push rents and recurate that space over that time, and it is going to be significantly accretive. We want to be intellectually honest when we do our yield on cost, so we just focused on that. The benefit to the entire center when you do things like that, and you move tenants around, is huge. Those are a few examples of.
We just need more Cheesecake Factory.
More Cheesecake Factory.
More Cheesecake Factory is the answer I heard.
Pretty simple.
Yeah. Look, all of that, everything so far we've talked about sounds really good.
Yeah.
On my way up here, Nick wanted me to ask you, when does that actually start to translate into earnings?
Yeah. It's coming. Look, leasing today is tomorrow's earnings. Specifically, when you think about the office side and the customer acquisition life cycle, these tend to be, especially in our business, large companies moving large premises, and they make those decisions with plenty of advance notice and out in time. Which is a really good thing, and Nick should be really happy because we've got really predictable earnings, and we've a great visibility into our earnings. But it does take some time to yield into our earnings. But I think there's a couple of other levers, Kevin, you could probably touch on in terms of not just when we sign leases, but where we also find value.
Yeah. Two things. One, retail leases are generally a little bit faster because we have simple build outs, white box space. It's usually about six months between when a tenant leaves that you've kicked out because you want to improve it, to when the next one opens. It's really all about permits. But how we bridge this 4% CAGR on NOI growth, particularly in the retail business, is our leases have embedded growth rates in them, on average, about 3%. So that's one in just regular embedded growth. When our retailers outperform expected sales, we get a percentage of the overage of those sales. It's negotiated in every lease, but there's always a break point where we get top ups there. So, on the expected sales, we get extra rent there. Then there's general leasing and repositioning.
As I said, we're constantly moving tenants in and out in order to increase our overall sales, increase our rents, increase our overages over time. Then look, there's operational placemaking. Is it right that we should be doing events? Is it right that we should be bringing in entertainment concepts or more restaurants? Ultimately, that will drive sales up over time, and our rents, and that'll be accretive to our 4% compounded annual growth.
Okay. In addition to running the assets hard, one of the other key parts of our strategy is recycling capital. Once you get these assets leased up and mature, selling out of them. So let's maybe talk about transaction markets for a second. What are you seeing there in terms of volumes? What are buyers looking for? What's trading?
Yeah, look, I think across the board, as we showed earlier, transaction volume is up. Both across office and retail, we are seeing a renewed focus from the investor environment of returning to think about these assets that have proven to have very resilient, robust, and pretty attractive growth profiles. So I would say liquidity is returning. The debt capital markets have probably returned faster and more robust, specifically in office. They actually were pretty supportive for quite some time across retail. My expectation is when we have the benefit of sitting with our clients all around the world, and obviously, in many ways, we are telling them what we think we should be investing in. We are listening, too, and we are taking all those inputs. I would tell you that the anecdotal conversations that we are having, the renewed interest in office specifically, is much greater.
I would say the lack of office investment desire had less to do with it looking like an attractive asset class for new capital deployment, and frankly, a lot of legacy challenges many of the investor environment had with existing assets that they hold that they have not been able to get liquidity on. I would tell you bid pools are up. There is a much broader depth of liquidity for office, but it is nuanced. It is not monolithic. People have recognized, the assets that perform really well, those are the assets they want to buy. So I would say there is a lot of liquidity and appetite for really good assets with really good credits. All the obvious stuff that you would assume. Financing markets are there to support these transactions.
But I think as the broader recovery sets in off of a larger swath of the office market, you will start to see those buyer pools broaden out their appetite, both by market and quality. I think you will just see a much bigger return of investment dollars going back into the space.
Yeah, on the retail side, there is real depth in the market on the transaction side. I think the investor market was hesitant for a while. But the belief in the durability of the cash flows, the stickiness of the tenant, and the stickiness of the customer are really being believed in now. A few years ago, there was probably a bit of an implied cap on transactions at about $100 million, setting apart some one-off transactions that happened. Now there is not really a cap, it is really just about price. There are a number of bidders that are in there looking for these types of assets because there is huge desirability and huge value in what is the growth profile, right? It is underpinned by a much better CMBS market.
We are up only two times, and has been noted, it has been supportive, the debt markets of retail assets. What we've seen over the last year is credit spreads really tightening for retail assets, specifically the best ones. We just refied one of our super core malls a couple of months ago, and our credit spread was 109 basis points. That's approaching historically tight credit spreads. Base rates are base rates, and there isn't much you can do about that, but that shows you where the CMBS and SASB bond buyers are, and where they think the creditworthiness of the underlying tenants and cash flows are. So we're being really supported by the debt markets, and that's only going to benefit, ultimately, the acquisition and disposition markets.
Yeah, I think most people have the impression that the market for malls and office buildings, frankly, has been very quiet. It's actually been pretty active. Do you want maybe, Ben, touch on a couple of the deals we've done, but we've sold 37 assets over three years, right?
Yeah, look, we have gotten plenty done, I think in a pretty challenging environment, and our pace over the last 12 months is up 40-ish % on sort of a run- rate in terms of assets sold. But I would say we are finding the spots in the pockets where there is, for an idiosyncratic reason, really aggressive and keen capital. One Churchill Place is the perfect example of this. An office building leased to Barclays. They were about to embark on a refurbishment of their space. They had a lease with some term left, but not a tremendous amount of term relative to the investment that they were going to make into that asset. Notwithstanding, when their lease was going to be up, they knew that their rent was going to go up pretty tremendously.
We were able to actually sell that asset onto them at a really great price. A large asset, GBP 750 million, is not where I would tell you traditional liquidity is for office today. But it was a spot where we had the right asset in the right market with the right user or the right buyer. I think we are starting to see that in plenty of markets around the globe that we operate in, where there are reasons people want exposure to certain types of assets or certain quality of assets in certain locations, and they are scarce. But we are starting to see scarcity premium on pricing. It is selective, and I think that is the point I would make on our pace.
We will take advantage of that when it is there, but we will not rush into a market if we think that the market is not properly valuing assets just for the sake of monetizing.
Yeah, that is a great example. That asset, that GBP 750 million price is GBP 100 million above where we were carrying it on the books as well. I think when you find opportunities like that, you got to take them.
Yeah, you have to be opportunistic about it.
Look, if the fundamentals are good and the markets are still relatively quiet, are we putting any money to work in office or retail right now? Where are you investing these days?
Yeah, look, as you know, and all of you can imagine, our teams are always looking for the right opportunity to invest capital. Capital is not the constraint on investing for us. It's finding the right opportunities, and frankly, the opportunities that make sense and that are accretive to what we have. You saw on Nick's slide, we have the optionality when we recycle capital, what we can do with it. So the bar is pretty high because the bar isn't, "Hey, Ben, go find the best office deal." The bar is, "If we have capital at BN, let's figure out the best risk-adjusted return for that." So the aperture is pretty wide, which means when we are looking at potential retail investments or potential office investments, they've got to be highly strategic, they've got to be highly accretive.
I think the market has still got enough dislocation in it that we will always find interesting opportunities. Sometimes that's where we can add a tremendous amount of value, and those things come to us because of the platform we have, or sometimes it's because of the information asymmetry we have with some of our occupiers, where we can go find assets where we know we can add value. There's something that we'll announce shortly in New York, which is highly strategic to what we have, exactly that sort of opportunity where the existing incumbents probably felt like it was under-managed, wanted a partner that could add a lot of value, a partner that could invest alongside with them and be aligned, and a partner that could actually bring some tenant-incentivized demand and reposition it, and placemake.
Those are the kinds of opportunities that I think we can earn a lot of upside and a lot of alpha on when we find the right one. So I'd say we're selective, we're patient, and we're looking at everything on a relative basis across all the investment opportunities in the business.
On the retail side, it's similar. We are looking at opportunities to deploy capital into our business for growth and externally. Inside our business, we saw two examples earlier, like Plaza Frontenac and Stonebriar. We think we're going to be able to surface a lot more opportunities like that in the near- to medium- term, just with where tenant demand is and where customer demand is. But as Ben said, look, we're going to deploy when we do those sorts of redevelopments in our best assets at compelling risk-adjusted returns with a really clear business plan and strategy over what we want to do. Another avenue where we've been successful very recently this year about deploying capital into our assets. One of our JV partners at one of our core plus assets was looking for liquidity, and we were able to buy their interest out at a compelling cap rate.
We had clear line of sight to what our business plan was, real conviction around it. It was the dominant center in its market, and we were able to put capital out at double-digit cash yields and approaching 20% returns. That's what we're really looking for. When we look to buy assets, new assets, it's not a dissimilar approach, right? We're looking at everything that comes out so that we have perfect information. But we want to make sure we're buying the best assets in their markets, in growing demographic areas, high household incomes, but really a clear business plan and strategy where our platform can come in and create value at the right risk-adjusted returns. We don't just want to put capital out there, but we're going to do things that are complementary to our business where we can leverage our expertise and get outsized returns.
Those opportunities are there, but as Ben noted, across our business, we're going to be pretty selective about how we deploy capital in those ways.
Okay, I think we're running toward the end of our time here, but I'll maybe just try and bring it together. Look, I think obviously, in terms of objectives for the portfolio, a lot of the focus today is on the operational improvements and taking advantage of this tremendous embedded mark-to-market opportunity as leases are rolling over to really drive that NOI and FFO growth. Nick, the earnings are coming. But also, at the same time, being thoughtful about how we're allocating capital, both to the existing assets, the ones that we're choosing to invest in versus the ones that we're choosing to sell, versus things we may be acquiring down the road. I think that has always been the focus. I think that continues to be.
I think as we look at how the plan rolls out and what's built into Nick's numbers, if we're successful in doing all that, renewing those leases, and marking them to market, it drives a 4% same-store NOI growth across the business over the next five years. That's going to allow us to pay $3 billion of distributions up to BAM out of the real estate business, just from regular operating cash flows. If the transaction markets continue to be supportive, we're able to execute on some of these asset sales and recycling programs. There's another $10 billion net of new investments that is potentially available for either redistribution up to BAM or investing into new larger opportunities out there. That really is pretty consistent with how we've run the business for a long period of time.
I think hopefully the impression or the sense you're all getting from this is the market has turned, fundamentals are good, and we feel pretty confident about this plan. I think we're having questions at the end, so I will thank Ben and Kevin and turn over to the next speaker.
Great.
Yeah. Thanks.
Please welcome from Brookfield Corporation, Sachin Shah, Chief Executive Officer, Brookfield Wealth Solutions.
Okay, we're almost at the end. I know it's been a long day. Thank you everyone. I hope to explain the business. I hope I leave you with something that you can look forward to that's exciting for the future, which is what we're building here. Sadly, no Cheesecake Factory stories on my part of the presentation. What I want to lay out is what we've achieved and where this business is going, and there's been a lot of questions about it. Hopefully I can answer most of them through this presentation. I'll start with where we are today. We have built Brookfield Wealth Solutions into a global leader in retirement. That's a meaningful step change from where we started, and I'm going to explain a little bit about how we got here.
The easy story is that we bought a bunch of companies, stitched them together, and built a large platform. Maybe the more important piece of it is we acquired companies for value that were highly scalable in the markets we want to be with a demographic backdrop that is super important that we can service. Each of the companies that we acquired has the operational foundation, the risk management culture, the technological backbone, the regulatory moat, and the distribution capabilities that position us to scale for many years to come. It leaves us in this tremendous position where we are not reliant on M&A for further growth in this business. We have geographic diversification in all the Western markets. We're going to grow in the U.K. We have ambitions to grow meaningfully in Asia.
We're in Japan, but Hong Kong, Singapore are important markets for us, and I can explain why. All of this is facilitated because we invest in all of the strengths of Brookfield. I won't belabor each of these. You've heard every one of the groups come up and talk about it, but the skill sets we have at Brookfield are uniquely complementary to the business that we have. What that's meant is five years of work building out the business, acquiring companies, repositioning, growing, and what do we have to show for it today? First, every one of our insurance companies is rated A by S&P, by AM Best, by a number of the rating agencies. Number two, we've scaled up to almost $200 billion of insurance assets.
Size is important, but it's not the most important thing. We generate $2 billion of distributable earnings annually in this business. We generate over $3.5 billion of capital in the business per year. We have stayed true to our compounding objectives that we set out five years ago. Year-over-year, we've been able to deliver mid-teens compounded returns on all of our equity capital. We've done it by using our own capital at Brookfield rather than relying on clients or third-party investors. It's meant that we could be highly flexible, we could be nimble, we could move quickly, and most importantly, that we're aligned with policy holders, which in today's environment is very important. You've heard all the themes today. They're all exciting. AI is super exciting. Compute is going to solve many problems that have been a mystery to people for many decades.
Health innovation is happening at a rapid pace. There's cancer treatments, there's longevity treatments, GLP-1s, all the things you read about. Private credit has been, to a degree, highly innovative. It's a new source of capital, and it's flown into the markets and provided capital for all the growth that you're seeing. But the one piece of, or the one theme that maybe doesn't get talked about as much, but may have the most profound implications over the next 40 years, is longevity and demographics. All of the topics of the day are interesting and exciting. But in the Western world, people are getting older and living longer, and the implications of that at the exact same time as global migration patterns are changing and people are putting up walls and barriers will have dramatic implications to the way we service people in older age.
Let's start with the Western world, the U.S., Europe, Japan, parts of Asia. Today, one in six Americans is 65 and older. That's going to go to one in four in 25 years. If you go to Europe in 25 years at the same time, you're going to have a population in Europe where everybody who's over 20 years old, so let's say everybody over 20 is working age. Two-thirds of that population will be over 65. One-third will be under 65. That has a dramatic implication on productivity, on fiscal responsibility, on social safety nets, and there's no government program that can solve for that. What we're building here today directly addresses that problem. Therefore, retirement deficits are large, they're going to keep growing, and the need for wealth products is growing every day.
Maybe the most amazing thing and why we've been successful is that what Brookfield does has been solving for that problem for 30 years, and the business we have built is uniquely at the intersection of that phenomenon. We invest in the global economy, in backbone assets that allow people to increase their productivity, and when you have less and less in the labor force, there's going to be more pressure on technology improving productivity. Then those returns accrue back to our investors who are solving for a problem far down the road. Think of a pension plan who would have been a traditional investor in Brookfield Asset Management. No different, that problem exists for individuals. With that backdrop, with our scaled platform, without the reliance on M&A, we have a growth plan that we think is highly credible.
It's ambitious, but it will change the face of Brookfield. First, let's stick to what's not going to change, our approach to investing. We maintain a very flexible approach on the insurance balance sheet. We've talked about it last year. It's called the barbelled approach. Half of our assets here are liquid assets, bonds, equities, cash. On any given day, we're sitting on $10 billion-$15 billion of treasuries and cash in the business. We operate with very strong ratings. This is a trust business. In a trust business, you need a fortress-like balance sheet, and A ratings helps validate that, and a lot of liquidity. Then we plug in the other half of the balance sheet into Brookfield Asset Management. All of the expertise that you heard about today really help drive maybe the most important differentiator, excess returns.
We can generate excess returns by virtue of having expertise in private real assets relative to just investing in the public markets and being a price taker on value. If you look at an illustrative portfolio, and this moves around, but in general, this is our portfolio. You can see it's well-diversified between the things we do, real estate, infrastructure, energy, industrials, corporates, and it cuts across the capital stack from senior lending all the way down to equity. That half of the pie generates very meaningful excess returns for us, underpinned by a strong capital base and allows us to build this business out very thoughtfully. Maybe more importantly, and the thing that never gets seen is in the middle of consistent results, as our results are stable year-over-year and growing. That strategy insulates us from volatility, inflation, and rates.
You hear it all the time from my colleagues who talk about our assets. Real assets have inflation pass-throughs, appreciate in value over time, and that ability to be insulated from the volatility of the short-term market allows us to grow with confidence and to deliver consistent results. On top of that, we obviously have to be thoughtful. We can't just plug and play and drive on. By being thoughtful, it means understanding where you are in the economic cycle. Early part of the decade, private credit spreads were very wide. Access to capital was scarce. Of course, we were going to inflect more into private credit, pick up all of that value. As we saw spreads come in, we moved more into our traditional equity strategies because we saw that real estate and infrastructure and other pockets of what we do well presented better relative value.
Today, we see elevated rates. We kept our asset portfolio pretty short for this entire period, and we kept our liability profile very long. Our average cost of funds on the liabilities we have on 200 billion of liabilities is 4%. So in effect, we have a 4% pool of liabilities that we need to out-earn, and we have kept our asset position short. Why? Because we wanted to be ready if the back end of the curve steepened. We are seeing that today, and we are starting to term out. I think this week the 10-year hit 5%. So think about it. We can buy a 10-year treasury at 5%. We wrote a pension at 375 three years ago for 15 years, call it. Zero capital charge. It is infinite leverage, and you can earn 125 basis points.
That is an example of the types of things we can do in this business. Where you do see it, you don't see all the day-to-day decisions. You don't see us allocating to our different strategies. But where you see it in a very simplified way is credit spreads tightened 300 basis points over the last several years. Everyone's seen it, the drive to credit. At the same time, annuity rates went up in excess of 200 basis points. So what happened is, for most of our peers, margins compressed, and margins we call spreads here. Our spreads have stayed largely the same. That is one data point that demonstrates the power of the Brookfield Asset Management platform to source great investments, our ability to then pivot as the markets evolve, and the ability to generate consistent results over a long period of time.
This investment strength allows us to confidently scale this business. In the early days, we were learning, and we were figuring it out, and once we saw the power of our platform in practice and our ability to actually allocate these inflows that were coming in, it gave us that conviction. I think Connor touched on it earlier. We start small, we start small, and then we have conviction and scale, and that is effectively what we did here. What that means is we are now in stage two of this business, organic growth. The M&A is behind us. The seeds have been planted. We have all the platforms we want to have. Of course, things come up from time- to- time, and if we see a value opportunity, we will execute.
But we are now in a position where we can scale every one of our platforms around the world based on what we have in place. This is an example, but in the U.S. today, there is $350 billion of fixed annuities that get sold annually. Two-thirds of that gets sold through banks and broker-dealers. We bring in $25 billion of inflow a year. Only one-third of our product gets sold through banks or broker-dealers, and in the U.S., it is only 20%. So you can see how much opportunity we have just to grab market share as we start to look like everybody else in terms of the wealth channels. It is early days. We are on five bank channels today. We expect to be on a dozen or so in the next couple of years.
As we increase our penetration with the banks, because of our franchise, we have excellent relationships with the large financial wealth houses, you will see natural growth in our distribution and our sales. We acquired Just in the U.K., and a number of people today at lunch were asking about Just. Just to level set, 45 billion of assets. A platform that specialized in small pensions in the U.K. They have a technology backbone that allows them to aggregate small pensions much more efficiently than most, and they also have a retail annuity business. Again, with the same demographic dynamics, we think both of those will be very important. 40 billion - 60 billion GBP of pension schemes in the U.K. come to market every year. It is an enormous opportunity. That is just one of our markets that we think we can grow.
What that means is in this next stage, as we look at the next five years, without heroic assumptions, our annuity business, which is largely in the U.S., can grow from $17 billion a year to $25 billion. Our pensions in the U.K., the U.S., in the United States, can double. Our funding agreements, our property casualty business, modest increases in that, and you can start to see a path where we are generating between $40 billion and $50 billion a year of inflows. Again, these are modest increases to everything that we have built out. None of it relies on M&A, and you can see dramatic increase in the size of this business. What would it do if we executed down this path? Our assets will grow to almost $400 billion in the next five years, net of outflows.
Our assets will grow to almost $400 billion, net of outflows, in the current environment we are in with the business we have. Our distributable earnings will grow to almost $5 billion a year, from over $2 billion today. If we get there, the value of this business, just this business, is almost $40 a share. Brookfield Corporation today trades at almost $40 a share. Forget what its value is, much higher, but this business will be worth $40 a share. We have planted the seeds. We have the platforms in place. We have all the distribution capabilities. We have an incredible demographic backdrop. We have the investment capabilities through Brookfield Asset Management. In this environment, in the next five years, we can recreate the value that is in the share price of Brookfield today. Where does that leave us?
As I said, there is an enormous retirement deficit. This is not going away. This is not a short-term phenomenon. This is a 50-year phenomenon that will have profound implications. Our business can serve in all of these markets. BAM is truly a unique differentiator given its diversity in what it does. We are focused on compounding our capital. In conclusion, I will leave you with these three things. When we were up here five years ago and we said we would do this, we did what we said we would do. Number two, we have a tremendous platform with very meaningful upside from here. Combining back into Brookfield, the integration into Brookfield Asset Management, the synergies that this business has with the entire ecosystem across Brookfield, there is nothing like it. It is entirely unique, and it will deliver tremendous value to our shareholders.
I will leave it at that.
Please welcome back Bruce Flatt.
Hello. Hello. Okay, Sachin, I am keeping my shares. He has given us back the share price in five years, so I am excited about that. We are after a long day, so we do not have to have any questions, but because there are drinks outside, but I will take any that are here. Do we have mics? Right here. I saw it first, in front of me.
Thanks, Bruce, and thanks for a great presentation. Bart Dziarski from RBC Capital Markets. You highlighted the 40% margin of safety in today's share price and wanted to ask, how are you thinking about ramping up buybacks above the $1 billion historically? Then maybe more broadly, what levers are you looking at with the management team to try and help close that valuation gap?
First, we have no control over the markets. We have so many amazing things to invest into the company. Yes, we should buy more stock back, and we will buy more stock back as prices go lower. It's an amazing investment, and that offers a phenomenal investment portfolio investment with very, very little risk. There's two things that are super important in every business, but in particular in this business. We need to have excess fortress capital at all times because the great things that come about in this business are because we have enormous amounts of capital flexibility to achieve things that most other people can't, especially when markets are tougher. There will be days when it gets tough, and having excess capital is super important at those times.
The easiest thing always, if I look back, if you want to achieve, tomorrow morning, we could give the 67, probably a 75 or 80 or 90 back to everyone, meaning split the business up and distribute out all the stuff. We have $65 billion worth of BAM shares we can distribute into shareholders tax-free tomorrow morning should we want to do it. All that can come back to you. It can all come back. It can be out. So the discount's gone tomorrow morning. In the longer- term, and it's been true for 30 years, and I didn't know this for the first 10. I didn't get it, but for the last 20 years, I get it. Having it together is unbelievably powerful. Like what Sachin was just talking about, it's unbelievably powerful.
That doesn't exactly answer your question, but what I would say is we always try to have a balance between taking the easy money, which is just buying stock back, take the easy money. So do some of it. But always have capital to be able to do things which are exceptional. In the insurance business, if we didn't have $20 billion that we invested in the insurance business over the past five years, we wouldn't have a business that generates $2 billion going to $5 billion of cash flow. So I just say it's a balance. There is no science in share buybacks. It is an art, and it's a guesstimation as to what you need, because you don't actually know how much capital you need.
What I can tell you is any capital we give away, at some point in time will be required and could do unbelievable things for us. I realize the easy money is buying back 37 today or whatever it trades at. Hopefully that partly answered the question.
Hey, Bruce. Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. This is going to piggyback a little bit on this question and your response with respect to capital. If we go through the plan, your cash flows are going to accelerate really materially. Carry is one example, insurance is self-funded. Real estate is presumably going to start selling more assets. Help us maybe frame what is that buffer that you feel you really want to have on the side of this. Otherwise, capital just continues to build and investors don't always see it.
Look, I think, yes, it looks like there's a lot of my money piling up in the business plan, and there is. I don't know how much is enough to have. The things that we see today are incredible. The value, the deal, stuff that comes to us is amazing. The accidents that can occur in the world and those which have capital, at times will offer unbelievable opportunities, and again, it's just an assessment. But as the cash piles up, at some point in time, if you would've asked me this 15 years ago, I would say, if you had this much cash, we'd be giving it all back to shareholders. But the business changes all the time, and it's really exciting.
You could look at Berkshire Hathaway and say they have too much cash and what they've been able to do with excess cash sitting on the balance sheet, and arithmetically, it doesn't compute. We get it. Arithmetically, it does not compute. But the optionality, what's not recognized in that calculation is the optionality of having capital when the world needs it. It doesn't need it today. Capital's freely available everywhere. Not for everyone, but for those with resources. Therefore it's just, again, it's back to it's an art as to how much it is.
I look over time, I suspect 10 years from today, we might be returning more capital to shareholders, which could be in the form of greater dividends, could be in the form of share buybacks increasing, or it could be in the fact we may swap things we have for shares of the company. That would be, again, an easy one to do for us. We think of all those things. Thank you. We're doing well right here, right behind you.
Thanks so much. Mike Cyprys, Morgan Stanley. Maybe just following up on this substantial free cash flow generation. I think on one of your earlier slides, you mentioned the possibility, contemplating the idea of maybe one day the insurance balance sheet getting to $1 trillion, whereas I think your plan is maybe $400 billion, something along those lines. I guess what would be the environment that could take the insurance business to that sort of size and scope? How might you see that sort of potentially unfolding? Then just more broadly with the free cash flow generation of the business, where might there be scope for adjacency extensions across the business? Maybe getting closer to the individual investor, maybe extending your footprint in Asia. Where might there be some opportunities?
We should have had Nick and Sachin up here. I do not know why I am answering these questions. They should really be answering them. I would say, starting with the last part. I think there is a fourth leg. Right now, we have three legs. We had two, we added a leg in the last five years. There is a fourth leg out there for us, and the definition of a leg, of another great business that we add into this company. The bar is firstly very high because we earn very high returns. You can buy our stock 37, divide it by 67. That is a high bar. The things that Sachin produces, opportunities are incredible. The investments are incredible. So it is a high bar.
I think our view is there is a fourth business out there, and the definition for that business is it has to earn a high return on capital. It has to be distinctly helpful to the other businesses. When I say that, what insurance did for, and hopefully Sachin's presentation provided that information. But he earns a high return on capital. Part of the reason he earns a high return on capital is because our asset management business is very important to him driving value, and it is a circular. That asset management business helps the return on capital, and therefore he wants to put more capital with them, and it is additive in many, many ways. It adds income to Brookfield Asset Management. It allows him to earn an excellent return on capital, and that is sort of the definition of another business for the future.
There is something out there, whether it's in wealth, whether it's in distribution, whether it's in another area of financial float. There's something out there, I'm quite sure, but we'll be patient. We'll find the right one. It'll have to be highly additive. On the first question, just going back, we have a $345 billion balance sheet. We'll keep growing that because the insurance business keeps growing, and the capital keeps growing into the business. When we merge everything together, we have a parent holding company and then an insurance holding company.
Over time, we basically have $150 billion of equity in the parent holding company, and we can freely, should we require it to strengthen and help ratings for our insurance companies or expand the business, we can push capital down, and we easily can do that, meaning we either sell the assets and turn it into cash and put cash into the companies, or some of the assets we have are very impactful and good for the insurance business, so we can just value them and put them in the insurance business. Why Sachin said it's been very important that we own 100% of the equity, A, it's good for the insurance regulators and our policyholders, but two, we have no conflicts, and we can therefore put the capital directly down.
We will do that if we want to grow, and that could be in the U.S. if there are opportunities that come about where we could be involved in more insurance. In addition to that, Europe possible, Asia for sure, as we grow the business. I think there were some questions over there.
Hi, Bruce. It's Cherilyn from TD Cowen. You've emphasized the difference between private markets and public markets many times in your letters. I wonder if you could address the current discourse in public markets just around higher interest rates and maybe a need to slow down AI infrastructure on the U.S. side.
On interest rates, I would just say, our general view is when interest rates went up in 2021, 350 basis points, that was a lot, very quick. It came from zero. It was highly material to what was going on. Businesses were having trouble, and that was very significant for the world. Today, this is irrelevant. It is relevant for our business, but it is almost irrelevant to business. It is not like 25 basis points. Who cares? 50 basis points, it does not matter. This is a transitory situation that we are in. Oil prices are high because we have a war. Inflation is higher because of those circumstances, and interest rates went up because of it. The war will end. Oil prices are going down. Interest rates will then go down. I do not know when that is, but it is coming at some point.
Until then, you will have a little higher interest rates, and it is not really relevant to what we do. It does matter if you buy bonds, fixed income. It does not really matter if you do what we do. The second question was on artificial intelligence. I think what is really important for artificial intelligence, or the most important thing to think about for our business is building power and building compute are hard to do, and everyone today says they are going to do it. We cannot, we individually ourselves, but we as an industry cannot build enough. We cannot even build a fraction of what everyone thinks they need. The compute of the world for artificial intelligence.
When they say they are going to slow it down, it is slowing down anyway because there is not enough compute to be able to deliver what everyone thinks they need. I do not know if they actually needed all of it, but it is not happening. It never was happening. It cannot happen. I think getting more realistic about that is good, and that will bring more discipline into the system. That is not to say that enormous amounts of money are not getting invested. Probably all the amounts that we put on the screen will get invested. It is just going to take more time, and that is probably good for the industry, because when you go too fast, you make mistakes. I think a little bit of slowing down would be good than where we have been.
Hi, my name is Denny Poole, and I am a shareholder from Pittsburgh. I think it was page 73 of the presentation showed forecasted five-year declines in distributable earnings before realizations for both the direct investments line and the operating businesses. Could you please just describe what the drivers are for those forecasts?
Okay. That's really killing me. Nick Goodman, I need you now.
That's very.
Do you actually know page 73?
Yeah.
If you do, you're getting it.
I don't even.
He's getting a bonus this year if he does.
You don't. First time for everything. It's just the direct investments or investments we have into our funds. It's just reflective of the fact that over time, as Brookfield Wealth Solutions starts to do more investing into the funds, the amount coming off the BN balance sheet will come down. We're not decreasing, it's just shifting more to wealth in the plan as they take more into these funds. It's just the earnings and the capital runs off. Earnings is great. It's just a shift from one balance sheet to another.
There's less capital.
Less capital at work.
In that business.
Correct.
To be able to generate earnings.
Right. In the operating business, as I said, the earnings are growing, infrastructure growing, renewable growing, real estate growing. But factored into that is that there will be some capital recycling in real estate, so some capital coming out the business, and that then reduces the return. In our model, we then put the return on that into our capital allocation return as opposed to the core businesses, just to be conservative. It is just a reflection of a refocusing in real estate onto our best assets and a monetization of sort of value add opportunistic, and that creates a sort of lower earnings profile over time. But it is not a lower earnings on the assets, it is just less capital at work. Correct.
Actually, one of the slides, the thing I think was not as clear as it could have been.
Did we not say we are going for drinks now? Now we.
Yeah. We say capital allocation. What that really means is we generate, like if you have a model, it generates a huge amount of cash.
Yeah.
We do not know where to put it. It will earn a return. It should earn a 15% return. Maybe not right away, so maybe it goes like this. That is what is called capital allocation.
That is capital allocation.
It will be invested in something, or shares will be purchased back. That's just a holder for that return on all that cash. That's lying there. If you don't ask a question about page 72, then I'm good with your question. Please.
There's a mic right there.
This is not about.
Thank you.
Page 72. You are welcome. I considered it, but I.
Hey, Nick, where are you going?
My name is Eric. I am in Austin, Texas. I have been a shareholder for 12 years. Obviously, the capital allocation of the company is wonderful. You have talked a lot about how you think the stock is cheap. I would agree. I guess two things is, one, why advertise that? As a shareholder, I would like you to get the most bang for your buck for buybacks, and if the stock gets cheaper, I do not want to know. I would get excited, but I do not want the world to get excited about that. The second part is why even give a dividend? If, let us say in 10 years from now, the stock is very fairly valued or maybe a little overvalued and you want to give a special dividend because there is excess capital on the balance sheet.
For now, why not suspend the dividend and then use that money for buybacks, especially at these prices?
Okay. First, thanks for coming.
Of course.
Thanks for being a shareholder for 12 years. Those are two excellent questions. Let me try to answer them. As many of you know, we do lots of special dividends. We've probably done five, six, seven of them over the last 20 years. When we spun off the BAM shares, those were all big. The BAM spinoff was, well, it's $20 billion today. It was probably $12 or $15 at the time. So we generally do special dividends out to people. We have a small dividend in place. I don't know. I can debate this one because index investors, some index inclusion, it throws you out if you don't have a dividend, and therefore we have a small, modest dividend because some people like a small dividend, and we get included in indexes because you have a small dividend. It's modest. It's our only justification.
Do you think the value of being included in an index sort of outweighs Have you thought about that?
I do not know. Again, it is an art, not a science. I do not know.
I would say no.
Which leads me to your first question. Look, thanks. No, thank you. I get it. Which leads me to your first question. We run the business for the owners of the company. I cannot be more clear with that. We think of ourselves as co-owners with you, and we happen to run the business. We provide the information we provide to you because we think it is fair that people just understand where we are heading and what the value of the company is. I do not care. We do not really care what the share price trades at. It is better if we buy back cheaper. It is clearer nobody is listening to us. Or something. I do not know what it is.
It is clearer that. I do think it is unfair for, if we ran a partnership and you were my partner in private thing, and I ran it and you were an investor in it would be fair for us to give you the information that we. Just look at it and you can think about the business. You can assess it. It is possible that it is not helpful to some people, but I think it is held highly relevant and I think it is fair. We think it is fair to the investors, to people, especially it is a public company and therefore. The last thing I would say is, if you run a single industry business, somebody can put a multiple on it. We have many, many businesses and we are just trying to provide.
We have always just tried, and we have been doing it for 30 years this way. I do not know. Maybe we should not, and we should take a poll on that. But I suspect if we provided no information, then people would just be asking for the information, or misinformation would be out there. It is not to get the stock price up, quote unquote. All it is to do is to provide information in a format that people can feel like they are an owner of our business with us.
Fair enough. I respect that.
Thank you.
Got it.
Any other questions? One right there.
Thanks, Bruce, for taking the question. Mario Saric from Scotiabank.
You're going to be the last one because it says zero time down there.
I'm honored. It's a lot of pressure. You've mentioned several times the world's constantly changing. But we've also heard over and over again, the investment principles and the discipline remain the same at the organization, driving that 15% total return target. With that said, what would you say worries you the most about Brookfield's ability to continue hitting those growth targets over the next five years, and how are you addressing that risk today?
These are all excellent questions. All of them are actually unanswerable. They are all art, not science questions, and that is why I appreciate all of them. I just say there are no certainties in life. The only thing I would say is we have been doing this a long time. The business today is stronger, better, has more pricing power in almost every way than it has ever had before. We earn those returns. We have earned those returns in hindsight without those attributes, therefore, I think it is easier today to achieve the returns that we think we can get. Again, no guarantees, but it should be easier today just because of everything we have. We used to be a banking client before. Today, we are the largest banking client in the world out there. We used to be a counterparty to people.
Today, we are one of the most favored counterparty to corporate clients. We used to be an investor for sovereign pension funds, and arguably, we are the group out there for investing people's money in many ways. We have the number 1 franchise in almost every business we have. In the fundraising, we used to have size, which was like many others, tier sizes way bigger than most. The advantages we have, it just brings advantages, and I think it is just easier. There are no guarantees in life, but I think we should be able to do better than we did in the past, which does not naturally accord to investing at scale. Usually, investing at scale gets harder as you get bigger. We came upon a business, actually, amazingly, and we did not know this when we started. Amazingly, that gets easier as you get bigger.
That is a remarkable, actually, thing. With that, I am going to say, am I ending this? I am going to say thank you all for coming. We really appreciate your support. We will all be around afterwards to talk to or answer other questions. But thanks for being here.