Good morning! Welcome to Brookfield Asset Management's 2023 Investor Day. My name is Jason Fooks. I head Public Investor Relations for BAM, and on behalf of our management team, we're delighted to have all of you here today. We've planned a full agenda for you. We'll kick things off with introductory remarks from our CEO, Bruce Flatt. After that, our President, Connor Teskey, will discuss the Brookfield ecosystem and the advantages we derive from it. Milwood Hobbs, Jr., who's Head of Sourcing and Origination at Oaktree, will speak about our capabilities and strategy in the growing private credit opportunity. And Bahir Manios, our CFO, will present our financial forecast and capital strategy. We also have two panels today for you to hear perspectives from the team on global fundraising trends, and later, on global fundraising themes across our businesses.
A couple housekeeping items. We're gonna save the questions until the end of the BAM presentations. For those of you online, there's a text box where you can ask your questions, and for those of you in the room, we just ask that you wait for a mic, there'll be one roaming around, before you ask your question so that everyone can hear it. And as always, we'd like to remind you that in responding to questions and in talking about new initiatives and our financial and operating performance, we make forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. law. These statements reflect predictions of future events and trends and do not relate to historic events. They're subject to known and unknown risks, and future events may differ materially from these statements.
For further information on these risks and their potential impacts on our company, please see our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and the United States, which are available on our website. And with that, please silence your phones, sit back, and enjoy the presentations. And let's welcome to the stage, Bruce.
Okay, I'm Bruce, not him. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for being here. We enjoy doing this every year. It's nice to meet new people that I've not met before, which I just met or will meet during the day, and also many friends from past. So thank you for being here, and thank you for your interest in Brookfield. Thank you. Maybe I'll just start off by level setting where we are. We're here to talk about Brookfield Asset Management. The security was distributed to our shareholders in December of last year. We currently have approximately $850 billion of total assets, just under $450 billion of fee-bearing capital, and we generate $4.3 billion of revenue. The growth has been very significant since we started this business from scratch around 25 years ago, but the best days are ahead.
We've built one of the leading global managers, which in our mind, means a few things: a market-leading platform in many different areas that's diverse and around the world, a strong growth profile as we look out, a diversified and very resilient business model, and we'll talk about that when we go through the numbers. A very strong liquidity position, flexible capital, and synergies within the system that allow us to enable our clients to earn better returns than they might otherwise with somebody that doesn't have what we have. So what has enabled this success? Maybe just to start off. In our mind, there's four things: operational expertise, global reach, large-scale capital, and a winning culture in our people. Starting with operational expertise.
As most of you know, we started as an industrial business owner and invested only for ourself. That differentiates this franchise from many others. We have a vast operating history and over 200,000 people in the franchise today. Our reach has been extended every year across the globe, very methodically, to build the business so that it could endure time. We have a significant operation all across the world, from the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia- Pac, with 1,200 investment professionals, but increasingly, something that differentiates us with this—which is a 300-person client service organization. You're gonna hear from some of them today. Our capital clearly differentiates us, especially in an environment that we're in today.
Our access to institutional capital, insurance capital, our global banking relationships, our permanent capital vehicles, our balance sheet in the corporation, and our private wealth business that's growing make this business very diverse and very resilient. Lastly, I, I'm proud, I guess I'd say, of the culture that we've built within the organization. It's collaborative, it's entrepreneurial, but it's also very disciplined to make sure that we're here to win for our clients. But it's actually not about what happened in past. The past is the past. I only give it to you just to level-set where we're going. It's about where we're going in the future. Just to, to talk a little bit about that, we've established ourselves trying to put ourselves in where the largest and fast-growing, fastest-growing parts of the economy are.
The world is changing. Demographics are changing. Trillions of dollars are shifting every day. The global world is altering with geopolitics, and what we've identified, and always are trying to identify, is what trends can at least give us a winning advantage when we're investing? And there's really three that I'd like to mention today: decarbonization, deglobalization, and digitalization. And many of the things that we do today are affected by all of those. First, on decarbonization, many, many, I'm gonna say it a third time, many trillions of dollars are going to be pushed into getting carbon out of the system, and this is really simple. Today, carbon-emitting industries, mostly in power, are emitting enormous amounts of carbon, and what companies need to do is just get less carbon.
And we're not making decisions about good or bad, or black or, black or green. We're just helping companies have less carbon within their system, and that's wind, solar, nuclear. We're transforming businesses. We're providing capital to people for battery storage, and there will be other emerging solutions, like hydrogen and other things. Whereas we're not an early-stage investor, we're certainly paying attention to all of them. But this is a very, very significant trend. Second, the world is clearly splitting backward towards countries, and what that means is that supply chains are being centralized back into countries. Not all supply chains, but some supply chains. And what that means is that some things are coming back to certain countries.
M ore manufacturing capacity is moving to India, more manufacturing capacity is moving back to Europe, more manufacturing capacity is moving back to the United States. What we've been trying to do is position ourselves in all of these industries to provide capital for that transformation as it happens. Third, probably the most exciting one from a perspective of investment, is the digitalization of everything in the world. This has been happening for a long period of time, 15 years, 20 years, but what's happening today is exponentially increasing. The amount of data center capacity being taken by large-scale businesses to use for AI is dramatically up from where it was before.
The whole process of digitalization, from the towers that transmit, to the data centers that build, to the processing that goes through it, to enterprise software, it's all in a transformation, and there are enormous amounts of capital that are required to do that. Businesses don't have that much money to accomplish it, and we're providing money to do it. Intel would be an example of that in the last 12 months. Large amounts of capital are needed to make sure these businesses succeed in the next 30 years. Our goal is to provide that capital to them. We've already been investing behind these trends. As many of you know, we've been doing strategic partnerships with a number of companies. We've been doing public-to-privates , and we've been doing structured securities.
So we continue to diversify the business and the ways that we can play with our counterparties by providing different forms of capital to them, and it allows us to make the business stronger. The fundamentals are strong despite market volatility and higher interest rates, and we'll talk about this as we go through the presentation today. While many investors over the last year have been stuck in place, I'd say we've been extremely active across the businesses because of the position we put ourselves in and because we believe in these long-term trends and are able to act on it. This year, we've committed to almost $50 billion of transactions. I think that ranks as the most in the world by any sponsor. Some of them are on this slide, but there are many, many others.
We've also monetized $15 billion of assets during that period of time. We've continued to sell businesses, and you might ask why, but it's mostly because what we own and what we buy are the great businesses in the world. We've always focused on quality, and we'll continue to do that. We're on track for a record fundraising year, upwards of $150 billion, and that's a large amount of money in any single year, anytime, but in the last year, it's even more successful. Some of the biggest concerns today are about what's going on in the macro environment. And I would say that generally, those things play to our strengths. On inflation, many, most or many of our assets actually benefit from higher inflation. Contracts go up by GDP growth.
You get benefit through increased revenues. Interest rates are higher, but they're not that high. They went unduly low for a couple of years, but we're back into a normal range of interest rates. And our returns that we earn for our clients are much, much higher than what this range of interest rates is. On the funding side, our ability to access capital gives us a clear differentiation in the marketplace. Our success has been driven by strong organic growth, combined with selective, strategic acquisitions, which will continue going forward. On Oaktree, we expanded the franchise into a major credit business, which has been very successful in many ways. It gave us a scale credit platform, allowed us to build with a combined business, a private wealth channel, which I'm sure David Levi will talk about later.
It enabled us to have the confidence to build out our insurance business because of the ability to put money to work. It accelerated our pace of fundraising, and it positioned us with just greater knowledge from a private markets perspective on information flow in the private markets. Over the next five years, we should be able to grow total assets under management in the manager to $2 trillion and fee-bearing capital to $1 trillion. But here, we'll tell you about that a little later. Any acquisitions we make would be on top of that, and they're not included in these numbers. An acquisition of similar strategic importance will have to meet some very specific rules. Number one, it better be additive to the businesses we do, and not duplicative with what we actually do today.
It should hopefully add geographic or operational capabilities that we don't have today. And hopefully, it adds access to clients that will be additive to what we have today. And one or all of those three things are what might fit on the acquisition front. Our platform today, though, doesn't need to do that because it is highly differentiated. Our business has been established over a very long period of time. We have a history of producing very strong returns. These returns on this slide are a very long-term returns and are excellent in the real asset space. And that's why our clients come back year after year. We built a global fundraising organization on the client-facing side that is very large and continues to scale.
We're seeing the benefits of our asset manager spin-off. I've always believed, and we've always believed, that when you divide things in components, you get more focus by the management team that you put in place. Better product development is happening today. Increased focus on client development is happening. A dedicated management team is there, and there's an increased focus in the asset manager on scaling our most profitable strategies. Not that we weren't doing them mixed into the whole, but when you divide them down, there's just so much more focus on it. But we're still in the early days for alternatives. Our experience and capabilities, our global platform, the macroeconomic trends that are giving us tailwinds, and our ability to deploy large sums of money for our clients gives us a strategic advantage.
We expect growth in the next few years will be driven on the client side from institutional investor capital, private wealth, and our insurance management. On institutional capital, our clients are still diversifying, and they're focusing in on their best partnerships. On private wealth, we're continuing to scale, and our Brookfield Oaktree Wealth Solutions business is growing. On insurance, we're getting better and better, and more knowledgeable and more knowledgeable of how do we take our products and create them to sell both into the private wealth, but also into insurance capital of many of our partners. To summarize, before I turn it over, our belief is the best is yet to come. I'll leave you with four key takeaways. The world always has challenges, but we're well positioned for whatever comes next.
We're actively deploying money in our investment strategies. We continue to deploy capital all over the world, and our relationships are the cornerstone of this franchise, and we continue to protect those dearly. With that, I will turn it over to Connor, who will continue with the presentation.
Thanks. Good morning. My name is Connor Teskey, and I'm the President of Brookfield Asset Management. Both internally and externally, we often reference the benefits of the Brookfield ecosystem, but we almost never define what that is. The Brookfield ecosystem helps us generate better risk-adjusted returns and source better investment opportunities, and it's really driven by three unique dynamics. One, the information we have from managing over $800 billion of assets around the world. Two, the relationships we have that help us source better investment opportunities for our clients. And three, the different ways that our existing businesses can work together to provide more value-add solutions that drive greater growth. So what are the benefits of the Brookfield ecosystem? Put simply, it gives us a leg up in identifying key investment trends and pockets of value.
And two, it helps us execute on the most attractive investment opportunities. This is because we have enhanced access to information and intelligence to underwrite new investments. And two, we can leverage operational levers or business plan strategies that we have executed before in other parts of our business. These two things allow us to invest with confidence across the economic cycle and in every market environment, often allowing us to be contrarian and find the most deep value opportunities. So how would we define the Brookfield ecosystem? It is the interaction between our assets, our counterparties, and the capital flows that we have visibility over, and it's how we use the information from those interactions and the capabilities of all of Brookfield's businesses to enhance our competitive advantages and unlock new investment opportunities.
And it's not just the businesses that we own today. It's also the businesses that we owned previously and the many investments that we look at every year that we don't actually execute on. Each of those gives us perspectives on key drivers of the global economy and can help us inform our next investment. This is the key: Because we have such good, unparalleled visibility into the key drivers of global investment trends, we can use each of those perspectives and pieces of information and leverage them across our entire business. Said another way, the assets and relationships that we have today help us make better informed investment decisions tomorrow.
That allows us to grow more profitably, grow more quickly, and increasingly position ourselves as the partner of choice for both investors and corporates around the world, and it becomes a very virtuous cycle. Because so many of Brookfield's businesses are interconnected, this ability to leverage perspectives and knowledge is particularly pronounced for our business. In fact, one of the best and greatest ways to extract value from the Brookfield ecosystem is when our different businesses can work together to provide multifaceted solutions to their customers and their counterparties that few around the world could match. Extracting value from the Brookfield ecosystem doesn't happen without effort.
Our business and our investment teams are consciously structured to ensure that whenever we are putting a dollar of capital to work, we are leveraging the best knowledge from within our business and any expertise that we have available. This cuts across every part of Brookfield and is core to our culture. It's aligned with our value-based approach to our investing. It's aligned with our operations-oriented approach to creating value, and it cuts across everything from business planning, to compensation, to investment team structure, where we have boots on the ground in every major market around the world and expertise in every asset class that we invest in.
This focus of always ensuring that we're using all the knowledge available within the platform, not only a specific team or a specific business, ensures that we're not only making the best investment decisions, but we're also constantly positioning ourselves in front of the largest investment themes around the world. So let's highlight some examples. Today, because of the ways that our real estate, infrastructure, and power businesses can work together. We are one of the key enablers to the growth of the largest and fastest growing technology companies around the world. We don't actually produce the AI or cloud services, but our infrastructure business can provide data center capacity, our power business can provide clean energy, and our real estate business can provide office and industrial properties to support the tremendous growth of these businesses.
And we can do it on a scale and a global basis in a way that truly differentiates us and makes us the partner of choice for these growing businesses. Another example of how the ecosystem works. When we see a good opportunity or trend in one part of our business, we look to see, can we capitalize on that opportunity in other parts of our business as well? It was clear to us that we were seeing more and more capital flow towards advanced manufacturing at very high returns around the world. So we found ways to take advantage of this opportunity across both real estate, infrastructure, and private equity.
In the past and today, we invested heavily in life sciences and advanced manufacturing as businesses and regions around the world look to capitalize on the deglobalization and onshoring trends that Bruce mentioned. And our business today is well positioned to continue to benefit from these dynamics as they play out in years to come. And what is an example of knowledge sharing? Many in this room will know Brookfield for its global leading renewable power and tech and transition business. But what you might not know is that we are using the expertise within that business to help decarbonize every single asset that Brookfield owns around the world.
In fact, some of our biggest decarbonization initiatives actually sit within our infrastructure or private equity businesses, and our focus on energy-efficient buildings continues to ensure that our properties are viewed of the highest quality. Because we believe that businesses that are decarbonizing are lower risk and therefore higher value, we are using the expertise in one part of our business to drive value across the entire platform. So let's change gears for a second now, and let's look to highlight examples of the Brookfield ecosystem at work in deals or transactions that we have done over the last 12 months. And we're gonna do this by focusing on five tangible value levers for our business. How do we identify new investment themes early, perhaps before others?
How do we source the best investment opportunities, underwrite with more accuracy going forward, enhancing our operations, and finding new value-add initiatives? How do we ensure that we always have access to the most efficient forms of capital? When it comes to identifying new and emerging investment themes, it is the benefit of conscious decisions made years, if not decades ago, that today we have leading global platforms in some of the largest and fastest-growing investment opportunities around the world, whether it be credit or infrastructure or transition. And this is a result of a structured approach, where we look at data that we can see within our own business to identify themes early, invest with confidence, conviction, and scale, such that we have a material exposure to these key investment trends, perhaps years before others are looking to get exposure to them.
As such, when others are looking to get exposure to what will now be global trends, we may actually be looking to sell. In our infrastructure business, we have been transporting, processing, and storing commodities for decades. If you go back over 10 years, it was clear that data was becoming the largest and fastest-growing commodity around the world. But what was also clear was that the infrastructure required to transport and store that increasing amount of data would far outstrip the incumbent market participants' ability to invest. This created a large and attractive investment opportunity. Almost 10 years ago, we made our first investment in digitalization, buying a tower portfolio, and fast-forward to today, we have a leading global tower portfolio and data center business.
Similarly, if you go back 12, 15 years, our renewable power business sold all of its power to either centralized grids or centralized utilities. But in the middle of the last decade, we began to see some forward-leaning corporates look to procure clean power directly as the first step in their decarbonization plan. We identified that these corporates would need operating partners and capital providers in order to meet those decarbonization goals, and we leveraged our knowledge to create the largest energy transition platform in the world, through which we now have the largest pool of capital globally focused on the transition to net zero. The second benefit of the Brookfield ecosystem is how we use it to source unique investment opportunities. This one comes down purely to relationships.
Relationships with our strategic partners, our LPs, our customers, and our clients around the world. And really, what this comes back to is Brookfield's reputation as a strong owner and operator, a long-term investor, and a good partner. So where has this showed up in the last 12 months? We were able to acquire Network International, a leading payments processing business, that we bolted on to an existing investment to create a regional leader. That investment was made with a consortium that included regional partners, LPs, existing financial institutions. That deal does not get done unless all of those investors support it, and all of those investors are looking to partner with Brookfield. Similarly, Compass Datacenters. This is our hyperscale U.S. data center business.
We were well-positioned to acquire this asset because, one, we had a preexisting relationship as a lender, and two, one of the major shareholders happened to be one of our largest LPs globally, and was looking for a new long-term partner to drive the next stage of the company's growth. And then we get to Deutsche Telekom, the leading German telecom operator. When they needed to pick a new long-term partner to own their critical infrastructure in their home market of Germany, they selected Brookfield because of our reputation as a strong owner and operator in the space, and a partner that they would be thrilled to be engaged with for decades to come. The third benefit of the Brookfield ecosystem, our ability to more accurately underwrite new investments, and we spoke about this a little bit already.
But really what it comes down to is it ensures that we don't fall into value traps, and we can separate ourselves from when the headlines aren't actually reflecting what's happening at an underlying fundamental business operations level. Today, it is a result of a conscious decision that over 95% of our real estate is Class A or trophy assets in a world that is increasingly being bifurcated between well-performing, high-quality haves and low-performing, low-quality have-nots. That is because the data that we had access to, the leasing, occupancy, and rental data, has been suggesting this trend for years. This is why we will continue to own these assets with conviction, and may look for new deep value opportunities in this space. This is also why you might see us actually make a number of investments that sometimes look similar.
This is because if we identify unique value levers, a blueprint, a blueprint or a playbook, sorry, that we can se to create value in a business, we may look to execute on that more than once. This is why we own multiple data center businesses, multiple student housing businesses, and multiple renewables developers. And as a simple example, our 2018 investment in Luminace, the largest commercial and industrial distributed generation power business in the United States, has been very successful for us. We found unique ways to grow that business and expand its market share, and to drive margins far higher than anyone expected.
It's that knowledge and that confidence that allows us to invest last year in Standard Solar, a similar U.S. distributed generation business that focuses on a slightly different portion of the market, and that investment today is off to a flying start. The fourth way the Brookfield ecosystem adds value is the ways that we can drive increased value creation in our operating portfolio by having our businesses work together. And this isn't just knowledge sharing. This is cross-selling products, like the large tech example, and working together to provide new, unique, multifaceted solutions that can drive value in our business. And the examples here are abundant. To name an obvious one, our renewable power business sells low-cost, clean energy to our industrials and real estate businesses around the world.
This not only helps those businesses reach their decarbonization goals, it lowers their electricity bills. But as a further example, we'll use an exciting one. Our largest corporate partner in India, Reliance Industries, has now partnered with Brookfield to try to bring clean energy equipment manufacturing to Australia in an effort to support our Origin Energy transaction, one of the largest decarbonization investments globally. There are very few businesses around the world that have the global reach to pull parties together to drive business initiatives of such scale. The last way that the Brookfield ecosystem drives value is it ensures that we always have access to capital in the most efficient forms of capital.
Across our business, we're constantly funding new assets, and as a result, we have ongoing discussions with the most important lenders around the world, and similar to when we make an investment, we can use all of the knowledge and intelligence from each funding transaction to better inform our next funding strategy. This gives us unparalleled visibility into the liquidity and capital flows of the global financial system. When you pair that with our reputation as a prudent funder of businesses, we tend to always have access to the most efficient and largest pools of capital. An example was just a few months ago. After a relatively long period where the leveraged loan market was essentially dormant, through our conversations and our relationships, we began to see that that market might open up.
In just four weeks, we were able to refinance 4 of our marquee private equity businesses, perhaps before many others even realized that the market was open. The most important thing, because we had that intelligence and we were able to move quickly and issue product into a capital-starved market, despite the interest rate environment, we were able to complete almost $6 billion of high yield financing at all-in interest costs that are lower than the debt we were replacing. In summary, the Brookfield ecosystem, the knowledge from the businesses we own today and the relationships we have, is a perpetual and growing competitive advantage. It allows us to invest across all market cycles and in all economic environments. 2023 has demonstrated that.
W hen markets are more uncertain, businesses can differentiate themselves. There is no question that 2023 has had more market uncertainty than 12 or 18 months ago. We have been able to continue to execute, committing over $50 billion to new investments at very attractive value entry points, while also being very active on the monetization front, selling some of our de-risked and mature assets. We've done all of this while expecting a record fundraising year and continuing to drive our best-in-class investment returns. Now, there's probably a number of reasons for our strong performance over the last 12 months, but it's no doubt that the Brookfield ecosystem had a major role to play. And maybe before we move on, we'd like to leave you with one final thought.
The best part of the Brookfield ecosystem is it will only continue to get bigger and better. Today, around the world, our clients trust us because of the information we have and the capabilities that we have built up over decades. And these benefits of the Brookfield ecosystem are only going to expand as we manage more assets, build more relationships, create more solutions, and diversify our business. This is a differentiator for us today, and we believe strongly will continue to be a significant and growing differentiator for us in the future. Great. So next up on the agenda, we have a panel that will discuss the fundraising themes that we are seeing around the world on a global basis.
Before we get to the panel, we would like to show a short video with leaders from four major investment consultancy firms around the world, Aon, Mercer, Aksia, and Callan. Maybe for those who may not be familiar, investment consultancy firms are key stakeholders to our business. They advise their institutional and high-net-worth clients on everything from portfolio construction to investment strategy, and particularly for us, manager selection. Therefore, today, you will speak, you will hear from four of the most well-informed investment consultancy firms around the world that together manage trillions and advise on trillions of their clients' capital. They will provide you their perspectives on investments in alternatives and how they make up a critical role, whether it be real estate, infrastructure, private equity, or credit, in the construction of their clients' portfolios. Enjoy.
The benefits of alternatives in our client portfolios is, first and foremost, diversification. Real estate, infrastructure, private equity, private credit, the diversification, the different drivers of returns is most important to building durable and resilient portfolios that will last over the long term. We think of the role of alternatives in a client's portfolio as, one, return enhancement relative to what otherwise might be available in the liquid markets. two, downside protection, and then three is really income generation. So we think that a lot of alternatives, especially private credit and real assets, can provide better yields than what's available in fixed income. The allocations to alternatives have grown significantly because it has worked. Clients have benefited from the diversification and the returns from alternatives. As they become more and more comfortable, they've increased their allocations.
But over the last 20 years, investing in private markets has shown to outperform the public markets over that long period of time. The asset classes that are most in favor on alternatives with LPs today are private credit, infrastructure, and energy transition. Asset owners who are investing for the long term see infrastructure as a long-term asset class, where they can invest over many, many, many years. It provides a hedge against inflation, as well as matching assets and liabilities with their own portfolio. We expect to see the largest amount of growth in alternatives in the infrastructure and private credit areas.
Investors really have a strong appetite for those two areas, and the reason for that is 2022 was a very difficult market in stocks and bonds, and what we saw from private credit and infrastructure is exactly what investors expected, and that was resiliency and diversification of their portfolios. Private credit is the fastest-growing slice of the alternatives pie today. Number one is supply of capital. Number two is, I think for borrowers, it's been for the last two years and through today, is the private credit firms are up and running and willing to lend at the right price and the right terms, whereas other borrowers, other lenders are pulling back from lending now. And I think what the borrowers are seeing is, "Hey, private credit's here.
We see over the next decade, the allocation to alternatives doubling for those who have a 10% allocation at a minimum. We see allocations can reach 30%-40%. Clients don't want to be too dependent on equity beta to drive returns. So we think that some areas of alternatives really provide return enhancement, either in addition to or as a substitute for liquid equity. We do see institutional investors consolidating their lineup of managers, so there's a constant push and pull of consolidation and addition. One thing that we've seen in terms of as LPs and investors have become more experienced investing in private markets, oftentimes they start investing in co-investments alongside managers.
And so an area of focus is oftentimes, will the manager provide adequate co-investment opportunities, and will it be a meaningful percentage of capital allocated, as opposed to capital just going into the to the main fund? We and, you know, I think a number of our investors are very focused on longevity of institutions and making sure they have real operating resources to work their way out of the inevitable problems and challenges that happen in the future. And so I think risk management is really the most important reason, number one. Number two, it's putting capital work in good ventures. What excites me about what we'll see coming from the alternative marketplace for institutional investors and for individual investors is the added diversification that it'll bring to portfolios.
If you look at the stock and bond indices in the public markets, we are seeing greater concentration, so it is of paramount importance to diversify portfolios. What I'm really looking forward to is continued execution. Like, there are numerous high-quality firms who are doing a great job in the alternatives marketplace, and then institutional investors, all investors, should avail themselves of that skill set to build better portfolios.
All right. Excellent. Welcome to the fundraising panel. As you heard from Bruce, and you'll hear more from Bahir later in the session, we have a lot of work to do in fundraising and working with clients over the next 5+ years. We'll do more with our existing clients, we'll bring new clients in the door, and we've got several parts of the market, even channels, that we're just starting to scale up. So, sounds easy, right? Joining me today is really a cross-section from our fundraising relationship management team. To my left is Chase Moran. Chase is based here in New York, and works directly with some of our state pension plans and other large pools of capital in the U.S.
Niel Thassim, who is based in Singapore, has built up our client relationship management team in the Asia Pacific region over the last 10 years. David Levi, based here in New York, initially established and now oversees our wealth distribution channel, which we call Brookfield Oaktree Wealth Solutions. And then, Dolapo Aminu , who is based in our Dubai office, who works in that team, dealing with a lot of our sovereign wealth clients and others in the Middle East. So, as I said, a cross-section, and we'll jump right into it. But first, starting here, Chase, in the U.S.. We just heard this video with some of the themes and the trends, but maybe to put it into your own words of what are we seeing and hearing directly from clients on the ground in the U.S.?
Sure. Well, thanks, Craig, and good morning, everyone. So the themes that we heard in the video are absolutely resonating with our clients in North America and really around the world. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of demand for infrastructure for all the reasons that the gentleman talked about, so durability of cash flows, inflation protection, and just the consistency of the return profile. So I think somebody said on the panel that the asset class held up remarkably well during the pandemic. We're also seeing a ton of demand for energy transition for all of the reasons that Connor mentioned earlier today. You know, our partners, our investors, they recognize that we're leaders in the space and that you need scale in order to be competitive and impactful. And then last but not least, real estate.
Our sophisticated investors recognize that real estate is cyclical, and there's a generational opportunity to invest in the asset class in a meaningful way, and they simply do not want to miss out on this vintage. I will say there's this one overarching trend of manager consolidation. So once investors identify managers that they know and trust, who have invested across multiple market cycles, and have delivered strong returns, they want to do more with those investors like Brookfield. I was actually on the phone last week with a large U.S. public plan who said exactly that. They said, "Look, we're looking to cull our manager list." Don't worry, Brookfield made the cut, and they love partnering us with for all the reasons that I touched on earlier.
So I think, and we think that Brookfield is just going to continue to be a beneficiary of this trend of manager consolidation over time.
Perfect. We'll do a quick trip around the world. Dolapo, let's go to the Middle East next. If the U.S. is maybe the largest, most mature market, the Middle East is large for us already, but is probably our fastest growing. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what we're seeing on the ground in that region.
Definitely. I think what I would say is the continued balance sheet strength of many investors in the region means that they continue to allocate to alternatives and choose us as their path to market. Now, we're seeing this across the spectrum, from the very largest sovereign wealth funds, those with hundreds of billions of dollars of assets under management, to mid-sized institutions, to family offices, to individual investors. The rhythm and the pace of commitments to our funds has continued really, really strongly, and we're seeing this from, you know, new to Brookfield investors, you know, investors choosing to work with us again in a new vintage of a strategy they know well, to investors crossing over into something new for them and choosing again, Brookfield, as that path to market.
I'd say the growth in AUM and the number of investors, new investors coming onto the platform in the Middle East is growing very strongly. One example of this I'd give, which I like to talk about, is this year alone, we saw the formalization of one of our longest relationships in the region into one of our largest single fund commitments and partnerships. And that's something we expect to continue to grow over time. Perhaps, maybe more importantly, would be the increasing discernment of investors in that region. They've been investing, many of them, many of the largest investors there, for, for decades in private markets, and they are incredibly aware of the supposed inconsistencies of capital flows globally.
They know investors are seeking their capital, which means that they are able and far more willing to be astute in how they pick who they want to work with. Sure, strong track record, but what, what more can you provide? What sort of relationships, what sort of partnerships can you bring? And I think we are incredibly well placed to deliver that.
Great. We'll come back to some of those, some of those, the, the partnership model in particular. But Neil, let's go first to Asia Pacific. You've been in the region, building up the team and some amazing institutional relationships for the last 10 years. Maybe a bit of color on what we're seeing on the ground in the region today.
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Craig. And, it's interesting you, you said Middle East was the fastest growing capital market for us. For the last few years, you've been saying that about Asia Pacific. But, there still is an incredible number of exciting trends that are in Asia Pacific that are driving capital into alternative investments. Let me give you a couple of examples. We've heard comments around, the denominator effect, moderating some investors' portfolio allocations to alternatives. Well, in Asia Pacific, that's just not the case. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. If you look at markets like Japan, Korea, Malaysia, they're still significantly increasing their portfolio allocations to alternatives from 10% to 20% to 30%, even to 40%.
So even with the denominator effect, investors in these markets are so structurally underweight alternatives relative to their targets, that they're continuing to, continuing to invest significant capital into alternatives even today. Another trend we're seeing in Asia Pacific is similar to what, Chase, you mentioned in North America, around large investors reducing the number of managers to a small number of very strategic manager relationships. And that's particularly the case with really large investors in Asia Pacific, such as the sovereign wealth funds in Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, China, but also as a result of the consolidation of the pension fund market in Australia, which is likely to result in the establishment of four to five mega pension funds.
And these really large investors are looking for managers with the global scale and the multidisciplinary capabilities to develop and maintain strategic global solutions for these investors. There aren't that many investment managers around the world with those capabilities, and so as a result, there's going to be very significant capital that will flow to those managers who can develop and maintain those solutions for those types of investors.
Perfect. That's a quick trip around the world on the institutional side. And David, that's where we've gathered really almost all of our capital over the last many years, is with large institutions. But about three years ago, we made a very deliberate decision to enter the wealth space in a meaningful way. So maybe give a bit of an update on where we are today, that decision process as it relates to wealth.
Sure. Yeah, no, thanks. I, I love, by the way, the fact that, for institutions, we talk about people going from 10% to 20% to 30% to 40%. In wealth, you probably know this, the number is closer to 0%-2%, depending on which study you look at. So the pie will grow for sure, which is obviously the impetus behind what we've done. But, to your question, Craig, what, what we did was, about two and a half years ago, we basically picked up a handful of people who sat at Oaktree and focused on private wealth platforms, and a handful of people who sat within Brookfield, who focused on private wealth platforms, and put them together into one new business unit. And we actually think of it as a business unit. It's not a sales organization.
It, it is a fully integrated business unit, whereby we have everything from legal to product development, to marketing, to investor relations, representing everything we do across Brookfield and Oaktree. And we do that, of course, across all product types. So that's everything from a traditional, private, longer locked up fund across Brookfield and Oaktree, all the way through funds that offer periodic liquidity and even some mutual funds that we, we would consider liquid alternatives. It's early days, and we can come back and talk about some of the details of what we've achieved thus far. But I would say we're very, very pleased with the receptivity in the market. The brands of Brookfield and Oaktree resonate, the products resonate, it's exciting.
And so today we have about 150 people around the world operating in about 10 countries. When we started 2.5 years ago, we had about 20. And so the commitment to the wealth business is meaningful, it's real. And as you probably know, this is not the kind of business that you can succeed while dabbling. You need to commit, and that's exactly what we've done.
Yeah, excellent. And I think in prior discussions, we've talked about what we're building and what it will be, but we'll come back, David, to a little bit of even, even this year, there's some tremendous success and some real numbers.
Absolutely.
Which is great. So Chase, you're based in the U.S., but maybe to broaden the lens a little bit to North America, and I'll talk about Canada, which is where we had some of our earliest supporters in the early days.
Institutional investors from the beginning. We have worked with roughly 60%-70% of public plans in Canada, and we've actually partnered with eight of the largest Canadian public plans in the country, commonly referred to as the Maple Eight, which is so Canadian. And you know what? I actually might go out on a limb here and say, very few, if any, are doing what Brookfield is doing in Canada. And why is this important? We're seeing investors across the world really emulate this partnership style of investing. We're seeing it in Japan, South Korea, we're certainly seeing it in the Middle East, and definitely here in the U.S. as well.
Chase, I think that l ook, I think that's a really important point. You know, we work with some of the largest and growing investors across Asia Pacific, and the number of conversations that we've had over the last decade, where they've said, "We've watched the Canadians evolve and mature over the last 20 years in alternatives. We want to emulate their success. We know, Brookfield, that you have been working side by side with them. Can you work with us in the same way?
Right.
So that unique relationship we had with the Canadians over the last two decades has led to very unique relationships across all of Asia Pacific. We've had those conversations in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore. It's. That's a really important point.
Sorry to interrupt. The wealth guy has to interrupt, otherwise, I won't get a word in edgeways. I would say that phenomena is not specific to institutional. You may have seen a recent announcement that Fidelity and Brookfield partnered in adding private real estate to their balanced and target date funds in Canada. That was a partnership discussion, exactly the same way. It's a customized product designed specifically for Fidelity. We're having many, many conversations with other wealth platforms around the world who look at us and say, "Oh, my goodness, if you look across Oaktree and Brookfield, the capability set of what you could customize for us as we're trying to grow the alternatives pie, is huge.
Another example of how we're doing this in the U.S. So we are in discussions right now with a top U.S. public plan, who's looking to make a sizable fund commitment, but then an even larger co-investment and co-underwriting commitment. So, you know, we think that Brookfield is uniquely positioned to work with some of the largest and fastest growing institutional investors around the world. And just this partnership style model of investing is going to be a huge area of growth for us.
Dola, let's stay on this theme of the partnership model, 'cause it's been important around the world, including the Middle East. How has that played out really over the last 7, 10 years?
Great question. But maybe to answer it, I'll step back maybe a bit earlier in time to really give context to this. So just a few facts. Brookfield has been in the Middle East for two decades. Two decades, 20 years. We have, in partnership with one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, the best office building with high-end F&B, with concepts which are new to the Middle East, in Dubai, in the heart of the financial center. We have done deals in private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and no doubt, renewable power and transition will come with the most strategically important investors and businesses in the Middle East. We have, I think the last number I recall, is around $8 billion of assets under management in the Middle East.
The sort of connectivity and conversations that we are able to have with the most important parties and pools of capital is unmatched. I really loved Connor's comments earlier about the Brookfield ecosystem and the little graph that we had about this central node, and then a few other small nodes connected to it, because I think that really speaks to how a lot of large pools of capital in the Middle East operate. You have, you know, parties which are multifaceted, you know, multi-limbed entities, typically reporting into central pools of capital, with slightly different foci at each one. And what we're able to present to them is not just, you know, a foreign entity which sweeps in for capital, and it's kind of off. What we're able to present is a merging of ecosystems.
We can speak to, you know, the people, you know, looking at funds, the people looking at local investments, and within that ecosystem, Brookfield's reputation, our style of doing business, what differentiates us, reverberates, reverberates in that system until we become and are truly established as a very, very different type of manager for them, and are able to bring solutions which, frankly, completely differentiates us.
A lot of this discussion, I think falls under the category of doing a lot more with existing clients, doubling, tripling the size of the relationships, and in some case, more. Neil, maybe you can talk about more the white space, which some of that is bringing brand-new clients in the door. David's wealth business is an example of that. But in not just Asia- Pac, but around the world, what are some of the examples of the white space where, we've been dabbling or we're underrepresented, but we're really, have a business plan around that we're pushing forward now?
Yeah, yeah, look, Craig, the white space is, is tremendously exciting for our business. It's, it's sort of ironic, because given the large and diverse capital base we already have, it does still feel like we're only scratching the surface, given just how much white space and untapped capital channels there are all over the world. And, and let me give you a couple of examples. I've already mentioned in Australia, the consolidation of the pension fund market, and when that, when the dust settles on that consolidation, those three to four mega pension funds are going to invest tremendous amounts of capital into alternatives all around the world with just a few small strategic global managers. But there's a, a second act playing out in the Australian market at the moment.
With the population in Australia moving from a young population to an aging demographic, there's a really significant amount of capital that's gonna roll out of pension funds and roll into retirement annuity products. And those retirement annuity products are going to invest a very significant proportion of their capital into alternative investments all around the world. This could represent hundreds of billions of dollars that move into alternative investments globally. Moving around the world, the Japanese corporate pension market is really significant, and historically has invested domestically and almost entirely in fixed income products. Similarly, given the aging and shrinking population in Japan, those corporate pension funds are feeling the pressure to invest both offshore and in alternative strategies.
Moving here to North America, we talked previously about the foundation and endowment market, often referred to as the mid-market investors. Our colleagues in Oaktree have been very successful in accessing capital from that market, and at Brookfield's private funds, we're only just tapping the surface of bringing that capital into our private funds. And maybe finally, just moving to the U.K. The U.K., the consultant-led U.K. pension market, is going through the same institutionalization today that the Canadians went through over the last two decades, and we've all seen how that has played out with capital moving into alternatives. So despite the fact that we have an enormous, diverse capital base and institutional relationships all around the world, there is very significant white space that's gonna drive the future capital for Brookfield.
And business plans on each of those to make sure that we, we're making progress. David, let's get a little bit more micro. Within the wealth channel, you represent our Brookfield and Oaktree existing funds, but over the last few years, you've worked with each of the different businesses to build four semi-liquid funds that are specifically designed for individual investors and for the wealth platforms. And two of them, in particular, are brand new and have had phenomenal early success, not even a year old these two funds on the infrastructure side, and then Oaktree's semi-liquid fund. Maybe you can talk a little bit about why they've been so strong out of the gate, and but more importantly, what's the business plan? What's the path forward?
Sure, sure. Yeah, so as Craig said, we developed for what we'll call semi-liquid funds here, which really are designed for individual investors. They're designed for the wealth market. We don't sell them to the institutional market, two that Brookfield manage. One is related to infrastructure, as Craig described, and two, that Oaktree manages, both credit-oriented strategies. And by the way, you could all invest in these strategies, so go to brookfieldoaktree.com, and you can read about them. Talk to your financial advisor. But to your question, Craig, the infrastructure strategy is called Brookfield Infrastructure Income. We launched it in February, outside of the U.S.. The idea is quite simple: give individual investors access to infrastructure. That sounds easy, right? But nobody has done it.
The reason nobody's done it is because you have to have a scaled platform to be able to do it. You have to deploy capital immediately, you can't have a J-curv e, you can't call capital, and to do that, you have to have the kind of infrastructure that we have in our infrastructure business. We've designed it in such a way that it gives clients access to all of our infrastructure assets, whether they are debt or core assets, et cetera. As I say, we launched it in February outside the U.S., and have been very, very pleased with the results. We've raised about $1.4 billion, really with just a couple partners outside the U.S. That will be launched in the U.S., imminently, within the next month or so.
The appeal for it, obviously, is all of the things that my colleagues here have said about institutional investors wanting infrastructure exposure. Individual investors want the same. They want it, the inflation hedge, they want the stability of cash flows, et cetera. The other strategy that you asked about, Craig, is a private credit direct lending strategy that is managed by Oaktree. You'll hear Milwood in a few minutes talk about the private credit markets. I don't need to tell you about the demand for private credit. It's quite high right now, but we've been incredibly successful with that strategy because Oaktree does it differently.
And again, I won't steal Milwood's thunder in telling you about how they do it differently, but suffice it to say, we're quite different than the rest of the market, and we've been very pleased with the fundraising for that strategy, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S.. And maybe the last comment I would make about those strategies and others is our partners around the world have been very, very receptive to what we're doing in putting products on their platforms. We, in the last year and a half, have added 80 different investment strategies to different partner platforms around the world. Really unheard of with that kind of scale, with that speed.
David, we're not alone in our optimism about the wealth channel. So I think the idea that individual investors will go from 0%, 1%, 2% to something meaningfully higher, we're not alone in that view. But maybe you can talk a little bit about our how we differentiate ourselves, how the partnership with Oaktree, we think is something different and something special.
Yeah. You, you're right. We're not, we're not alone, and, and, and I would say that's, that's a great thing. We love having peers out there educating investors as we're educating investors. It's gonna grow the whole pie, the, the, the platforms themselves, the banks, the private banks themselves, want to grow that pie, for sure. What, what is unique about what we've done is we've, we've brought together these two brands in one platform. So if you're a financial advisor, you can access both Brookfield and Oaktree through one relationship. If you're a private bank and you want to bring a new product on platform, and you need to do due diligence and need to do legal contracts and whatnot, you work with one organization. So there, there was discussion before about consolidation in the institutional space.
I would say financial advisors, in general, don't want just the name of one firm on their client statements. They need more so that people know that they're doing their work. So in the context of what we're doing, you have Brookfield products, you have Oaktree products, but you have one relationship manager. That's, that's very, very differentiated. And what we do, the essence of what we do from an investment platform perspective, and you heard it from Connor, you heard it from Bruce, is quite different as well. So, as I said before, the way we invest in private credit is very different from what's out there. The way we invest in private equity, real estate or infrastructure, which really is, is, not broadly available.
Perfect. Let's stay maybe on the Oaktree topic, and Chase, if you could talk a little bit about a lot of benefits to the partnership. It's been phenomenal the last several years, and really meeting or exceeding our hopes and expectations. But talk specifically about working with clients. And one of our aspirations was that this would allow us to do more with our clients. So maybe talk a little bit about Brookfield and Oaktree together and fundraising.
Sure. So you are absolutely right, Craig. The Oaktree partnership has been excellent. David touched on what we're doing in the wealth channel. I'll briefly comment on the institutional side of things. Just as a reminder, so Oaktree largely still runs separately on a day-to-day basis. But at the outset of the partnership, we were always focused on bringing one firm to our clients, so that's always been our focus. And because of this, I guess two things, really. So one, we're able to offer more solutions to our investors, whether through fund commitments or broader arrangements, and just being able to engage with our investors more strategically and holistically has been very beneficial.
And then the second point, which is a little more tactical in nature, you know, when we looked at our investor bases, there wasn't a lot of overlap. So we've been making introductions to Oaktree and vice versa, and because of this, we both now have access to a broader pool of capital and deeper investor bases. So really, by working together, we've raised billions of dollars of additional capital commitments over the last couple of years, and, you know, the partnership has been incredibly additive to our asset management business. So we're very encouraged that we're on the right track here.
Could I be able to jump in there? Because I think I have a great example of this. So the, sort of, Oaktree counterparts, who are also based in the region, are also in the same building, as, you know, as we are. And so, you know, I get to meet and speak with them on a weekly basis, and the sort of connectivity that provides, especially in a market like the Middle East, is incredible because now, you know, people really understand and know the Oaktree brand, understand and know, Howard and his team, and they go to them for specific products, and they know Brookfield for specific products. So over time, what we realized is that we sort of have our own sort of centers of focus and investors that crowd around those.
But by simply speaking on a relatively regular basis, we're able to sometimes sort of double the number of investors we can sort of speak to and know about and have communication and, and knowledge again, to that point, the Brookfield ecosystem that we otherwise would not have.
Yeah, that's great. Let's stay in the Middle East. We've talked about how it's growing rapidly, a significant amount of capital being allocated. What are the, what are the types of strategies, the types of funds that resonate the most in the Middle East? Each region is different t o some degree, but what are the types of investment strategies, funds that resonate the most, most popular?
We've been fortunate to have really good success across a number of platforms and strategies because our partners trust us in that. I'd say the strategies which tend to resonate best with investors initially, when they don't know us that well, are strategies which are large in nature, those which are typically high-returning, global, and perhaps most importantly, strategies which give an investor with one single commitment, access to the breadth and depth of Brookfield's expertise in a particular asset class. So for us, that's usually meant our flagship strategies. So investors, by working with us and partnering with us in these funds, get access to professionals, sectors, insights in sectors and geographies they would otherwise be unable to draw from.
And for us, this is really, really powerful, especially when we think about growing them within the Brookfield franchise, because these flagship funds are probably the clearest windows into, and the best expressions of Brookfield's investment style, process, and value creation engine. So investors really get to see and understand what it means when we say we can source the best and critically important businesses around the world for value. They understand and get to live, sort of, quarter by quarter, as they get their reports, the step changes in the business's performance, driven by our operational expertise. And once they're comfortable with that knowledge of those value levers, it becomes very easy for them to believe and trust us to deploy those same levers in new strategies.
They can go into, for them, uncharted territory, but areas we know well, or sometimes into newer strategies, such as our transition fund.
Perfect. Neil, last question goes to you. We've talked a few times about our partnership model and how that is different. Can you maybe bring that to life a little bit? Co-investment was mentioned, but maybe beyond that, what are some of the ingredients that go into making something not purely a transactional relationship, but truly a strategic relationship for those LPs who are looking for it?
Sure, Craig. Well, the partnership model is everything. At Brookfield, we live, breathe, eat, sleep, dream, the partnership model. It really is that important. Maybe just taking a step back, Brookfield is built on a foundation of a very solid, robust fund investment platform. But institutional investors today are large, they're global, they're sophisticated, they're demanding. And so to be successful as a fund manager in alternatives, is no longer about just going on a roadshow with a pitch book and saying, "Hey, we've got this fund, would you like to invest in it?" It really is about being a true investment partner. And being a partner means many different things to different investors.
It means creating and generating a large and attractive pipeline of co-investments and joint ventures for investors that want to develop that direct investment capability, or just get deeper insights into the investments that they have with us.
Can I jump in on that co-investment point? And not only because you said Asia- Pac was growing faster than the Middle East. This co-investment point is so real because, especially in the Middle East, there's some investors are so large that they won't even engage with you unless they know and believe you can provide co-investments to them of a scale that makes sense. $Hundreds of millions of an equity commitment. And not only that, but you're able to connect them with the relevant investment professional at Brookfield. So they don't wanna speak to just me, they wanna speak to the person who is in North America looking at utilities or looking at pipelines, and they're gonna connect them with their lead.
And the ability to do that is so rare for any firm, but I think it's something that we have. I think, Chase, you mentioned something about. we were talking about this in the office yesterday, that so many partners in North America are saying the same thing.
Right. No, absolutely. As I mentioned before, we have an investor in the U.S., looking to make a sizable fund investment, but an even larger co-investment. So we're definitely seeing this partnership style of investing really, really replicate.
Yeah, look, definitely. So, I think, you know, the ability to generate attractive pipelines of co-investments are tremendously important to the partnership model. I think investing in and creating knowledge transfer initiatives is also incredibly important to the partnership model, to help investors just become better at investing around the world. As an example, four years ago, we launched the Brookfield Academy, which is a week-long, intensive, residential, case study-based training program exclusively for our investment partners. We've held academies in Asia, in the Middle East, here in North America, and over the last four years, we have trained over 100 of our investment partners across 60 financial institutions.
The partnership model means investing in and creating investment structures and wrappers and feeders that make it more cost and capital efficient for our investors to actually invest in the funds with us. And finally, it's about being truly aligned, I think, with our investors. We invest so much of our own capital alongside our investment partners, that they no longer see us as simply a manager of their money, but more so as an investment partner walking side by side with them through the markets.
And so if we get this investment partnership model right, it not only will result in the growth of capital with new investors, but more importantly, it will result in the growth of capital with existing investors, both investing more in the same strategies with us, but more importantly, investing across our business from one strategy to another. And so that partners, bringing that partnership model and, and what Connor mentioned before, the power of the Brookfield ecosystem to our partners, is very unique to Brookfield, very powerful, and it really does just underpin everything we do.
Okay, let me see if I can summarize. I'd say, we're hugely optimistic about the next five years, but we have a lot of work to do. We think we're in the backdrop of, we're in the right place in the market. Allocations to private funds and alternatives more broadly are still going up. I'd say secondly, not all institutional capital is impacted the same way by some of the macro trends, and we heard a lot of examples here, in the Middle East, in Asia- Pac, but also elsewhere around the world, where there's lots of allocations that are accelerating. Third is the consolidation. It is real. We heard reference to it in the video.
We're seeing it every day, large pools of capital wanting to do more business, and be more strategic with fewer managers, and, we're very well positioned for that. Fourth, the wealth business, as you heard a little bit about today, it's early days. We're just getting started, but we're not only encouraged by what we are experiencing, but we're already having some very good numbers this year. And lastly, there is white space, whether it's, the insurance business, which we didn't talk a whole lot about up here today, some of the markets where we're underrepresented, mid-market in the U.S., we, are scratching the surface in a few areas. So we've got the platform and the people, and, we continue to stay, very focused on the execution.
So with that, thank you for joining us for this panel. We'll reset up here on stage, and then Milwood Hobbs is going to do a presentation on the opportunity in private credit. Thank you.
Oh, clicker. I need my clicker. Good morning. I'm gonna address the elephant in the room. I'm not Charles Barkley. Nor am I related to him. And my real name is Milwood. So with that n o presentation is bad if you start with a quote from Howard Marks. So to frame private credit, I'm gonna start with a quote from Howard Marks. "Investors can now potentially get solid returns from credit instruments, meaning they no longer have to rely as heavy, heavily on riskier assets to achieve their overall return targets." So what is private credit? We hear it, we talk a lot about it, but what is it? And it's really just become a more efficient way to transact.
And what we've done is we've minimized, and not eliminated, but certainly reduced the necessity of banks to be the intermediary between borrower and ultimate credit provider. What that's really allowed for is lower mark-to-market volatility. You've got increased creativity, increased customization, more importantly, increased certainty in getting your deal done, which I think we all care about. So we think private credit is really, if not the fastest, one of the fastest alternative asset classes. Really, this is driven by a few trends. Number one, the banks. Both large-scale banks and regional banks today are more capital constrained, and some of that was a result, a direct result of the regulation placed on them through Dodd-Frank. But also, the other thing you're seeing with banks is there is just more volatility in pricing risk.
And so there's a time lag between when a bank underwrites the risk and ultimately when that deal goes to market. And while they try to capture it through flex, a lot of times that flex may not be enough, and the amount of capital that needs to be provided in a transaction really sort of makes the risk really a lot for the banks. Number two, we've just got a lot of money, a lot of money sitting on the sidelines from private equity firms. The dry powder is just over $2 trillion. So what you'll find in this market, while equity markets are down, I think valuation expectations are coming in line, and you will see private equity firms use that dry powder to do a couple things we'll talk about a little later.
I think lastly, you know, the public markets are really hard to transact. I think Brookfield is probably, as Connor said, $6 billion. $6 billion, I think that was the number. You know, they do it best, but I think if you don't have the scale and you don't have the breadth of a Brookfield, it's becoming harder to transact in the public markets. And then the second thing is they're less liquid. And so generally everyone's going the same way. Everyone's either a buyer, everyone's a seller. And what ends up happening is, you know, the price movement to get in or get out gets exacerbated, and so you're not necessarily paying the fair price for an asset.
And then I think the last point I want to make is that the public markets are just less efficient, and the certainty is certainly a lot lower. So we see today that the private credit market's about $1.5 trillion, really coming off the heels of Dodd-Frank from just under $0.25 trillion. And then we think tomorrow it should exceed $2.3 trillion. So let's talk about the platform. Oaktree, we've heard the name, we know Howard Marks, but really, I think our hallmark and our DNA at Oaktree is we price risk. And I think what you'll find a lot of our competitors who have letters that begin with A, maybe B, I won't say their names, but they tend to price capital.
What that means in a market that we've been in since 2009 up till 2022, you know, it was hard to get it wrong because the equity markets were open, there were a lot of new, private credit vehicles, and there was a lot of transaction, a lot of movement. Once you have a dislocation, though, you really have to price risk. So what that really means is, in a market we've been in historically, if I thought a deal should price at 8%, it priced at 6% because everybody wanted to do it. In today's market, when it dislocates, the 8 becomes 10 just because of the increased volatility, and you can actually get a 12 because no one really wants to do it.
So we find in this market, a dislocation, our competitors tend to freeze, and we've seen that in private credit today. Number two, we have a breadth of products. You know, the market has moved towards capital solutions providers. And what we have found is that if you can find a solution, be efficient, be effective, and clearly communicate your solution, you become a lender of choice, if you will. And I think our job is to become a lender of choice, because I don't think we're the cheapest, but I think we do what we say we're gonna do, which is just as important. A few legacy portfolio issues. You know, we really at Oaktree were not what I call the on the run lender over the last five or six years.
We really were a little bit more opportunistic. I f you play golf, we didn't want to be in the middle of fairway, but we like being on the fringe of the fairway. Good lie, great look at the green, but it's less crowded. And again, like I said, you could actually price risk. But because we weren't in that market, we have just fewer legacy portfolio issues where, you know, you're underpriced and LTVs have changed just given the valuation in the marketplace. And then lastly, the private equity relationships. I'll say this, I probably said this before, capital is the commodity, right? Relationships matter. And what we're trying to do is get the first call so we know about the deal, and the last call so we can actually price the risk.
And generally speaking, the first eighteen calls are deals you won't want to do. The last two out of 20 are the ones you want to do. So how do you pass on opportunities 18 times with the same person or same counterparty so you see the last two deals? And I think that's one of our hallmarks, is maintaining those relationships to get the last look. This is a little bit about our different products. I'm not gonna say they're unique, but what I will tell you is that what is unique is the middle one, non-sponsor. So most of our competitors, and most in this business of private credit, cater to private equity firms. And look, private equity firms own 70%+ of the leveraged finance market. They're an important client.
I think when we're trying to achieve alpha, the one thing we will try to do is go after non-sponsor deals. And how do we do that? So we've got a team of eight professionals, geographically dispersed. I'll tell this story. I used to fly to Dallas all the time, and everyone would sit down and have dinner, and they'd be like, "Oh, Miller, you're great. We're gonna send you deals." I'm like: Great! The problem is, by the time the deal is made in New York, everyone in Dallas had already passed. And so what I realized sitting in New York, getting deals in Dallas, from Dallas, it was a long way risk. And so we put someone in Dallas. By the way, if you don't talk about football in Texas, no one really wants to talk to you.
So, the person in Dallas, Stan, played Stanford football, but more importantly, he's part of the community. Because, again, we want to build a relationship, so it's not us calling you saying, "Hey, we heard." It's you calling us and saying, "Hey, we would like to." And I think being partnership-oriented and being local to the communities, and that hub-and-spoke sourcing model has really accrued to our benefit. The other thing I'll tell you is, on the, on the product capabilities, hard asset lending, I think Brookfield's the best at it. I think they do it already very well. And so we at Oaktree are really learning from them in terms of taking our lending on the private credit side to the next level. And then NAV lending is becoming an important trend.
You know, what NAV lending is doing, is basically allowing you to lend at the GP, and you're just, you feel more diversified. You feel like your risk is more dispersed. And so to that end, we have an investment in 17Capital . We think that augments our PE relationship because the most precious amount of information about a GP is handled through NAV lending. 17Capita l had a robust PE network in Europe. They were less penetrated in the U.S., and we had the opposite issue. And so as we build out our origination team in Europe, we put someone on the ground in Europe, in London, and we'll add and replicate what we're doing in the U.S.. So there, there's a lot of factors driving demand for private credit.
We'll go through each of these, but just so you have them, again, the bank retrenchment, we're seeing it on the regional bank side as well. Regional banks have figured out that deposits are expensive, and for every dollar deposit, they put out 10, 10 dollars of loans. And so there is a focus now at the regional bank level to ensure that deposits stay in the bank, and there's a little bit less focus on lending on the middle market side, and certainly on the real estate side. But on the middle market side, and we think that's an opportunity. And the way we like to do that is we partner with them. They've got commercial bankers all over the U.S., right?
So how do we partner and leverage that commercial banking network to get the first call and the last call? And that's what we're spending our time with regional banks. The growth in private equity, I'll talk about on a later slide as to how that's benefiting private credit. Traditional buyers of loans are sidelined. Like I said, there's really not a lot of liquidity in the public markets. The pricing in public markets doesn't necessarily reflect credit risk. It, a lot of times, reflects liquidity. So you have to be mindful that the marks in the public market aren't necessarily an indication of value or an opportunity. And then just limited competition in what we find in large cap lending, and I'll go over that a little bit as well.
So in 2007, I was actually at Deutsche Bank, and Tommy Gahan, who runs Benefit Street, we were looking at the large LBOs, Ceridian, Nuveen, First Data, and he said in the management meeting, he said, "You know, the only thing in common between all these deals is Milwood." And so I was like, "Okay." So then I moved to Goldman. And what you found in '07 was that the risk was concentrated with seven institutions, right? And so it was easy to see the risk. I think the problem and the challenge you have today is the risk is dispersed, and it's spread out. And so sitting there today, it's hard to see the risk in private credit.
We haven't had a dislocation in private credit, but I think what makes our platform interesting is we're also preparing for the dislocation we think could happen in private credit. And that's gonna be exacerbated by just the lack of support from the banks. So private equity, dry powder. The good thing about the dry powder is, number one is, there are deals that are being done today. They're better assets, they're better LTVs. We did a deal for a big sponsor. It had a 10% LTV on it, and the loan was priced at SOFR plus 650. Not bad. And with SOFR at 5%+, 11.5%, 11.5% on a 10% LTV loan, we'll do that all day long. But the other reason why the dry powder is helpful is because they're actually supporting their portfolio businesses.
So as companies are struggling on the large sponsor side, as they're struggling to figure out how they're gonna pay the increased interest costs, we're seeing the sponsors use some of that dry powder to put into those portfolio companies, like in a recent deal, Finastra, where the sponsor put $1 billion of fresh equity in that business. So dry powder helps not only on new deals, but on existing deals. The big point on the public markets and the CLOs is that roughly 40% of CLOs are exiting their reinvestment period. So as you think about y ou probably heard about the maturity wall or the refinancing wall, back in, you know, 2013, 2014, 2015. The next wall could actually be a lot more challenging without private credit.
We saw this in a recent amend and extend that we, we took out of the public markets at Oaktree, and funded the loan directly with the sponsor, because the sponsor couldn't tell where it was gonna ultimately end up, partly because 40% of CLOs are ending a reinvestment period. And the other phenomenon you see is that those who've been in an asset for three or four or five years wanna move on, and they wanna redeploy that capital in a new, fresh situation. So we think the backdrop in the traditional buyer of, of large loans being sidelined will further augment private credit growth. And then lastly, just overall, you know, the hung bank, the hung LBO risk was about $78 billion at the end of 2022, and these were actually good, you know, good loans.
Frankly, one was Brookfield with Nielsen. Good assets. The challenge becomes if they were just underwritten in a different interest rate environment, the only way you can move $17+ billion, for example, in a Citrix, is through price. And so what you find is that price became the sort of way to move the risk off their books, and if they underwrote it at 97 and have to move it at 85, the bank's taking a pretty significant haircut. So we think that volatility of where we price it in the public markets versus the certainty in the private markets will just shift more to private markets. And lastly, the pendulum has swung quite a bit. I think if you looked at the chart, which is a very basic chart, by the way, I think I did that chart.
The banks were, like, 90%, and direct was, like, 10%. And today, it's a little bit more balanced, but I think more importantly is, you know, banks are partners, and we still, we still rely on them for a lot of, of our deal flow. But there are very few managers out there with, with the platform and the scale and, frankly, the tenacity to put money to work when markets are choppy or dislocating. And like Howard said in the beginning, if I can make 12 or 13% on an asset and sleep better at night, that's on an unlevered basis. That's, that's pretty interesting and very compelling. Another one of my slides. So what does it mean for private credit?
Again, lower leverage, better LTVs, better pricing, and again, some of the pricing is just a function of, you know, where spreads are on interest rates. But like I said, when you have less capital available, risk tends to price wider because there's just fewer players, and then better terms. We recently did a deal, and it's a funny story. Delayed draws and revolvers almost got some of our competitors in 2020 during COVID, because no one predicted that the sponsor would draw the whole revolver and take that cash down immediately. And so we're doing a deal with a sponsor, one of our competitors, and I may have referenced the letter, but was originally in that loan for a really big size, and that loan originally was priced at SOFR 500.
Another sponsor wanted to add another asset and put another $500 million in that asset into the company. So now you got $1 billion of equity in that business. We repriced the risk to SOFR 700, and there were. Sponsor said, "No, there's no delayed draw term loan." I said, "Yeah, I know, I know." He said, "Well, we've never done a deal without a delayed draw term loan." I said, "Well, today's the day." And he said , "Well, why?" I said, "Well, you're putting A and B together. If you don't integrate them, that's your issue.
That should be your money to solve that." With delayed draw term loans, you know, what sponsors are able to do with them, because you can pro forma pretty much whatever you want to get to using that delayed draw, it puts the pressure on the lender versus the sponsor to solve that issue. And so he said, then he said, 'cause he's smart, he's a private equity firm. He said, "Well, let someone else fund it. Just put it in the doc." You know, I said, "So isn't that, isn't that sort of the same thing? Now I just have no control over what happens?" So we did that deal with no delayed draw term and no revolver, because during the cycles where it is dislocation, we can actually get a better product for our investors.
So again, what's the, what's the opportunity today? I think I've highlighted, but I'll, I'll touch on it again. Large cap buyout financings. Again, these are large sponsors putting up large checks, and we saw it with Emerson, Syneos. There are a lot of recent LBOs where there's large sponsor checks going in those deals. Add-on financings. Incremental capital is the need to continue to grow. This is a great market to grow your business. Unfortunately, the capital is harder to find, and so to the extent that we can provide add-on financing, that would be great. NAV lending has become very important to allowing sponsors to put capital in businesses in a much quicker fashion versus going back to LPs and saying, "Hey, I need more money." So NAV lending has been, been really interesting.
In rescue financings, there's some really good companies out there, and if you go back to 2007, LIBOR was 5%, and the spread to LIBOR on most LBOs back then was only 200-250 basis points. So as interest rates decline, companies actually generated cash flow coming into the cycle in 2008. Today, SOFR is at 5%, and so what's happened is there's no flex, and no one predicted interest rates would go this high, and no one hedged. Whereas historically, 50% of floating rate debt was hedged, and then there's no covenants. So by the time something hits the wall, it's generally a bad outcome.
So rescue financing is gonna be interesting, and some competitors don't have that capability anymore because the last distress cycle, which Oaktree was in the middle of, was 16 years ago. So it's hard to convince LPs to keep giving you distress capital when there's not been a distress cycle for 16+ years. I think the other opportunity that's not on here is that some of our competitors weren't structured like Brookfield and Oaktree are structured, were more hedge fund, and we've already bought two positions of significant size from competitors whose LPs were saying: "Wait a minute, you didn't tell me you were doing that."
And the interesting thing is that the private equity firm doesn't want that to be sold to someone who's new to either that sponsor or the loan group, and so you limit the flexibility of that potential seller, and the price becomes made up. No different than the public markets. Where there's no liquidity in the private markets, we can actually create price and structure that really is advantageous for us. I'm out of time, it looks like. So last couple slides here. So what's the opportunity on large cap lending? We've talked a lot about it, but really what's interesting, these are large companies, EBITDAs of $100 million+, loan sizes of $500 million+, and more importantly, unlevered yields of roughly 12%. And I think for us, we've launched that. It's called OLP.
We're in the middle of a $10 billion capital raise for that. But being able to speak for an entire deal or at least a significant amount of it, as well as, you know, filling the void left behind for banks, we think that is incredibly interesting. And frankly, it's not been our core market or our core focus, but given where spreads are and that capital is more expensive, and we can price the risk, we think that's a very interesting way to play the private credit model. And so what does all this mean in conclusion?
We've got an enormous platform between Brookfield and Oaktree, and I think Connor said it, we've got tremendous scale, we've got breadth of products, we have the Brookfield ecosystem, and I think if you put all that into the pot, I think what you'll find is, hopefully, over the next few years, you see what's today a $170 billion private credit opportunity grow significantly, and hopefully, it exceeds this $500 billion target through multiple products and just scaling what we already have and using the Brookfield ecosystem to do that. That concludes my formal remarks. Thank you.
Thank you. All right, good morning, everyone. So I'm here today to take you through the financial profile for Brookfield Asset Management, and also to touch on our corporate finance strategy for the company. I'll start off by touching on what we said we would accomplish five years ago. In 2018, while we were at the same event, we laid out quite an ambitious plan for the asset management business. We set out and presented a plan that had us nearly doubling our fee-bearing capital, or FBC, and taking that by a little bit over $100 billion to $245 billion by this time. In reality, we grew our FBC by over $300 billion over the last five years, more than tripling where we were at that time.
Over that same period, we also beat on our targets for FRE that we set out also five years ago, as you can see from the slide. So how did we do all of that? We did it by executing very well on the following three pillars that I'll discuss. First, we launched new business lines and new strategies that were complementary to our existing platform. A couple of examples of that would be the launch of our transition strategy in 2021, in addition to the Insurance Solutions business that we formed also in 2021 on the back of Brookfield Corporation building a dedicated reinsurance vehicle. Another driver of outperformance has been our ability to raise larger flagship funds compared to our plans, especially that was true across our infrastructure and private credit strategies.
Last, but certainly not least, we managed to outperform on our plans, also due in part to the large strategic partnership that we had, we built together with Oaktree in 2019, where we added $100 billion of fee-bearing capital to our business. So in short, we've come a really long way as an organization just over the last five years. Continuing on with our report card, let's look at the past year in review, and it's been a busy year since we were here last year talking to you. As most of you know, and as Bruce alluded to, we spun out Brookfield Asset Management back in December of 2022.
We've had the opportunity to speak with many of you over the past 10 months, and we're very encouraged by the positive reaction that we've received, both from existing and new investors. BAM has industry leading metrics. I think I skipped a slide, probably. I'll go back to s o we spun out BAM to simplify our narrative and to make us more comparable to our direct peers in the space. And we now have a very simple story to tell investors, focusing our investors on a business that's anchored around stable, predictable, and sticky fee streams that are derived from long-dated or permanent capital pools of capital. And we've also put in place a dedicated management team to oversee the day-to-day operations of the asset management business.
Bruce touched on this also earlier in his remarks, but we'll be looking to replicate the outstanding success that we've had as an organization growing our infrastructure, real estate, private equity, and real estate business. I touched on this earlier, but BAM has industry-leading metrics. From our discussions with investors, we gathered that the market is quite attracted to a number of our key attributes here that we laid out in the slide. Some of you may be newer to the story, so maybe I'll summarize them as follows. First, our cash flows are highly predictable and very stable. I can't emphasize this point enough.
100% of our distributable earnings, and that's our proxy for the cash that's available for distribution that we generate in the business, is derived from these fee streams that we get from these long-dated or permanent capital pools of capital. Second, we operate with industry-leading margins. Third, we have a strong balance sheet that has no debt on it, and $3 billion of cash and equivalents. And lastly, we have an attractive dividend policy. We set out our payout ratio to be about 90% plus of our distributable earnings, and that should grow quite meaningfully over the plan period, and I'll touch on our growth rates, potentially in our dividend, later on in my remarks. 2023 has also been a good year from a financial results perspective.
We posted a 12% increase in our fee-bearing capital during a time of great volatility in the market, with all five of our operating groups achieving great growth in their fee-bearing numbers. That has enabled us to drive strong earnings growth over the past 12 months. To briefly recap, fee revenues grew to $4.3 billion. That's an increase of 15% compared to the last 12 months. Fee-related earnings grew by 16% to $2.2 billion, and we've also taken our distributable earnings to $2.2 billion, and that's an increase of 14%. While we're pleased with our results to date, we expect a further acceleration in our results in the second half of the year and heading into 2024.
With closes expected on a number of our large flagship vehicles that are coming in the second half of the year, in addition to BNRE, or Brookfield Reinsurance, closing on its AEL transaction, which provides Brookfield Asset Management of $50 billion to manage, that should take our fee-bearing capital on a projected basis here to almost $530 billion by year-end. That's an increase of $110 billion or 27% compared to this time last year. And that should set us up very nicely for a strong 2024 from an earnings growth perspective. To enable much of this growth in fee revenues and earnings potential, we've invested heavily in our platform in the last 18 months.
Since the beginning of 2022, we've hired almost 200 investment professionals, bolstering our various teams around the world, and we've also added 300 corporate professionals as well. Predominantly, that's growing our fundraising organization and the continued build-out that we've been doing on the private wealth side, as David Levi took you through in his remarks earlier on. This has been critical to support the growth that we've seen in the business to date. The good news, though, is that we think this material investment that we've done, for the most part, is largely behind us, and so we'll be looking to see or reap the rewards of that in our results going forward, and I'll come back and touch on that further. Okay, so that was a bit of a look back.
I'll pivot, start looking forward. We expect our fee-bearing capital to surpass $1 trillion, as Bruce referred to earlier, within five years from the current levels of approximately $450 billion. This growth should be coming across all our business lines. First, on renewables, that platform's expected to double in size, led by the expansion in our flagship transition strategy and the continued growth that we see in our renewables product offering. Second, in infrastructure, we expect to see also very strong rates of growth there, driven by our flagship fund that still has a great runway ahead of it, in addition to a number of complementary strategies that we manage in that group that should be growing at a very strong rate going forward.
Private equity and real estate are also expected to see good growth rates across the various strategies that they manage. And then you see credit and Insurance Solutions , by far, will be the biggest driver of our fee-bearing capital going forward. Milwood did a nice job outlining to you the private credit opportunity set that's in front of us today, and that, coupled with the growth of our insurance vehicle, sets us up really nicely, especially as that platform has been, for the most part, set up and in place, and now we should see the great growth trajectory for that business going forward. This slide here shows the breakdown of our fee-bearing capital by capital sources.
The punchline from this slide is that we expect to be operating with fee-generating capital base that's 90% derived from long-dated or permanent pools of capital. This 90% metric compares very favorably to where we're at today, which is about 85%, and this is, again, very additive to our company-wide story on cash flow predictability and stability. We typically use this bridge just to showcase how we're gonna get to that fee-bearing growth over the next five years. Three big drivers here. $160 billion of the growth is gonna come from our flagship strategies, but $300 billion will come from the complementary strategies that are coming on the Brookfield side, if you summed up the Brookfield side and the Oaktree complementary strategies as well.
Some examples of those would be some of the open-ended strategies we have, the various credit funds. We have in infrastructure, real estate, and then on the Oaktree side, the secondaries businesses we're building across the business, et cetera. Then lastly, the growth in insurance, where our forecast is to take that business to $250 billion of assets in the next five years. That represents growth of almost $225 billion compared to where we're at today. So we should be able to deliver all that growth, all the while returning $150 billion of capital back to our clients, and that would be the most amount of capital that we'll be returning back to our clients over a five-year period, which would be great. I touched on margins a bit earlier in my remarks.
We'll be able to showcase to you the operating leverage that we have in the business starting in 2024. As I noted earlier, that's driven by, first, the material investment that we've made on the people side is predominantly behind us now. And second, we have a number of highly profitable strategies that are closing, going into next year. So we believe we've put in front of you today a very visible plan of how we intend to execute over the next five years. Doing so will take w ill have us doubling again our fee-related earnings over the next five years.
We expect to grow our FRE by a compound annual growth rate or CAGR of 17%, and that's again driven by fee revenues that are forecasted to grow by 16% on a CAGR basis across the plan period, getting up to over $8 billion by 2028. That, in addition to the operating leverage that we have in the business, we're forecasting for margins to surpass 60% over the plan period, which will be a nice pickup also to our bottom line. As I mentioned before today, our fee-related earnings comprise approximately 100% of our distributable earnings and will continue to do so for the next five years.
For some of you newer to the story, the reason for that is Brookfield Corporation retained all of the carried interest on most of the legacy or mature funds that it had in place at the time of spin-off. However, Brookfield Asset Management will be able to earn, or is eligible to earn, carried interest on the newer funds that it raises from the time of spin-off and into the future. We thought it's important to start on getting you in front of these numbers so that you can understand the magnitude or the potential for this fee stream going forward. As you can see, right now, the capital that we manage, for which BAM is eligible to earn carried interest, is relatively small today in the grand scheme of things, sitting at $79 billion.
Going forward, though, that carry eligible capital is forecasted to scale up quite dramatically, and should get up to about $465 billion as we raise larger and larger funds across it during our plan period. And that's just from the organic growth plan that we've laid out in front of you today. So this should drive significant carried interest that's expected to be generated in the business. The CAGR on that is 43%, so it's gonna be, it's gonna be quite significant going forward. And just to give you a sense of on, again, on the magnitude of what this could mean from a realization perspective, we expect by 2029 to generate annual carried interest realization in the order of magnitude of about $2 billion. And that number should get up to $7 billion-$8 billion by 2033.
So to summarize, just the potential for the earnings growth in this business is enormous, as we highlight here in the slide. It's all driven by the growth in FBC, which then leads to the growth, strong growth in FRE and DE, and then there's that, significant carry potential that's gonna come down the line. Similar to our plans from five years ago, there's additional upside, potential here that's not included in the forecast, and that could come from strategic acquisitions, launching new business lines or new verticals, and to the extent that we get some market value appreciation, that would benefit our permanent capital, vehicles, et cetera. So that's a good segue, probably, to get into how we can utilize our strong balance sheet to support the growth, over and beyond the organic growth plans that we've laid out today.
You know, I'll start off by saying we're in a very strong financial position. Again, to emphasize, we've got no debt on the balance sheet and $3 billion of cash. We've also solicited recently a private indicative credit rating from a global rating organization, and we believe we have debt capacity to issue $4 billion-$5 billion of debt based on our current metrics today, while still maintaining an A-minus rating. Can't emphasize the point enough, though, that that will only be used for strategic growth, for strategic growth going forward. And lastly, we now have a currency that's well understood in the market that we can use also for strategic purposes or M&A, which is one of the key reasons we did the spin-off of Brookfield Asset Management in the first place. So where can we use this capital?
I'll cover our four areas where we see our balance sheet could be used strategically. Again, first, to make a strategic acquisition. Second, to make a GP commitment towards a number of our funds. Third, to support the growth of our permanent capital vehicles. And lastly, to stand up a new strategy or vertical or new business line. First, on acquisitions, and Bruce touched this on this in his remarks earlier, we've got the optionality to acquire an asset manager. We've laid out what the different criteria it is that we'd be looking for here. So I won't spend too much time going through that. On GP commitments, we expect our permanent capital vehicles, and this would be Brookfield Infrastructure Partners or Brookfield Renewable Partners or Brookfield Business Partners in addition to Brookfield Corporation, our parent company.
They will continue to invest in the large-scale flagship funds that we have today, similar to what they've done in the past. Brookfield Asset Management, though, is expected to fund the GP commitments related to our complementary equity strategies going forward. We believe that's a good use of BAM balance sheet, especially from a returns perspective. The numbers are quite modest. If you look at our plan period, we expect for that to be anywhere in between, you know, $500 million-$1 billion over the next five years. Third, within our permanent capital vehicles, those are an integral part of the asset management franchise. We could look to utilize Brookfield Asset Management to support the growth of these vehicles by participating in equity issuances that they may do in the future.
These vehicles represent a critical fundraising channel for Brookfield Asset Management, and therefore, we're incentivized to help support their growth and to make sure that they're thriving in the capital markets. Finally, we're constantly looking for new products, new strategies, and different ways we can work with our clients. An example of this would be the recently launched technology secondaries business, which we're in the process of launching in partnership with Sequoia Heritage. We could look to utilize the Brookfield Asset Management balance sheet to help stand up these new verticals or business lines, whether it's for providing them with working capital to get the strategies up and running, or to make an initial investment in these funds that might be larger out of the gate, just so we can show support and align interests side by side with our clients.
Typically, again, typically speaking, these would have strong returns associated with them. In the case of this technology secondaries fund, these could be returns that exceed 20% on the capital that we would put in, which would be very attractive for us. Putting all these pieces together, we expect that our FRE will continue to represent essentially all of the distributable earnings that we expect to generate over the next five years. In fact, just doing the numbers, in 2028, it represents 96% of our total distributable earnings. Our DE is further bolstered by early contributions coming from some realized carried interest that we expect to have by the latter part of the plan period, in addition to investment income from the modest investments that we expect to make.
Cash taxes are expected to be 16%-19% over the period, and so with all of that combined, we anticipate our DE will get from $2.2 billion today to a bit over $5 billion by 2028, and that's an annualized compound growth rate of 18% over the plan period. We are committed to returning most of that capital back to you as owners of the business. Most of that will be in the form of a dividend, and given, again, the strong growth rates that I just talked about in, in our distributable earnings, that could imply dividend growth rates in the magnitude of 15%-20% on a per annum basis for the plan period. Just maybe I'll conclude here with a few key takeaways.
You know, first, we've got a clear path to getting to $1 trillion of fee-bearing capital by 2028. Second, there's a lot of operating leverage in this business. We expect our margins to expand over the plan period. Third, the strong fundraising numbers that I talked about, in addition to this operating leverage, should mean that we should produce excellent growth in our FRE and DE. Fourth, carry will become very meaningful in the future. And then fifth, similar to the last five years, going forward, we've got many levers that we expect to pull on, from M&A to new business lines, new strategies, new verticals, et cetera, to drive additional or upside growth to the numbers that we've laid out in front of you. And so I'll leave it here. Thanks for your time today.
Next on our agenda is a senior panel of senior investment professionals, moderated by Jaspreet Dehl, to take you through all the various themes that we see in the business. It'll probably take us five seconds to set up the stage. So I'll leave it there. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Jaspreet Dehl. I'm the CFO of our private equity group here at Brookfield. I'd like to welcome everyone to our discussion on global investment themes. Bruce highlighted the fact that we've been one of the most active asset managers this year, with over $50 billion in announced transactions, and it's my pleasure to be joined by my colleagues, who make a lot of that magic happen. We have representation from across the different sectors where we're active, as well as the regions where we invest. Daniel, from our renewable team based out of Shanghai. Alex, from our real estate team based out here, out of here in New York.
Dave, from our private equity team, who's probably got whiplash between Toronto and New York, commuting back and forth, but you manage all of our investments in North America for private equity. A nd Caroline from our infrastructure team, based out of Houston. So thank you guys for joining, and ladies for joining. Maybe Daniel, we'll start with you. The renewables team has been incredibly active this year. Maybe talk to us about, you know, how Brookfield's thinking about investing in renewables and transition. What are some of the big transactions we've done? Maybe just give a lay of the land there.
For sure, and maybe where I'll start is just take us back in time a little bit. Around the same time last year, we had talked about the fundraise of our inaugural transition strategy, and at $15 billion, at the time, it was the largest first-ever fund. And we said we were in the process of deploying it. Fast-forward to today, we have completely committed that fund, and it's only across a period of two years, and across 19 distinct investments. That is the headline. But to dive into a little bit more detail, that included our largest transition investment to date, which is Origin Energy, and that's a take-private valued at almost $13 billion.
We will invest a follow along with another $20 billion to build out 14 gigawatts of renewables to help decarbonize that business and reduces carbon emissions by almost 70%, or equivalently, almost 8% of the entire country's emissions. And this floor of activity is really a reflection of two key things in our minds. The first one is just the amount of capital that are required and needed by corporates to decarbonize. A second is the sourcing execution capabilities of Brookfield, and how the market is highly attractive for those not only who have the capital, but also the development operating capabilities, as well as the global scale to capture it. But perhaps even more so and exciting than the level of activity itself is simply the value entry points that we were able to secure on these investments.
We felt that we did a lot of these transactions where we were differentiated and avoided a lot of competition, and got in front of a lot of the macro tailwinds that are really going to help these investments perform. And, to be able to do that in light of a quite uncertain, certainly more uncertain economic environment, I think only speaks to the resiliency of our business. And we certainly don't expect things to slow down. And, in fact, what we're encouraged with the level of activity in the past 12 months, we're equally, if not more thrilled, about the next 12, because the market is only growing and, on an accelerated basis.
That, that's an incredible pace of deployment for our first fund. And I guess, Caroline, that's true in infrastructure as well. We've been very active, done a lot of deals. Maybe take us through what's been going on in the infrastructure team.
Yeah. So I would start off by saying that the past few months have been very active, and really only rivaled by the activity level that we saw during the onset of COVID in 2020. And similar to that market uncertainty, this year's macroeconomic volatility caused many market participants to pull back from investment activities, which provided us with a great opportunity to cherry-pick the best assets for value. And through that, we were able to commit $19 billion of infrastructure capital across the BIF V series of funds, our Super Core strategy, and our credit platform. So within BIF V, we saw this opportunity through take privates and joint ventures primarily, but across all of the 3D investment themes that Bruce discussed earlier. And now we've committed roughly 40% of BIF V.
So within those investment themes, first, within digitalization, we acquired a joint venture carve-out of a large telecom tower portfolio in Europe called DFMG. We also acquired a carve-out of a leading hyperscale data center platform, also in Europe, called Data4. And we acquired a leading hyperscale data center platform in North America called Compass. And then in deglobalization, we acquired Triton, the largest owner and lessor of intermodal containers in the world, through a take private. And that followed our semiconductor joint venture with Intel last year. And then in decarbonization, we acquired a commercial renewables business from Duke Energy. So all of that was within BIF V. Our Super Core strategy was able to increase its stake to co-control in its carve-out joint venture with FirstEnergy, a premier FERC-regulated transmission utility.
And this investment will be utilized to modernize the grid for a low-carbon future. And then finally, our credit platform saw significant opportunity. We were able to deploy over $3 billion across 13 new investments, which actually exceeds the previous six years combined.
Wow! So that's a lot of activity. And, Bruce highlighted the fact that we're very collaborative here at Brookfield, but we're also always up for a little friendly competition. So, Alex, what's real estate been up to?
Yeah, our peers have set a very high bar for us to aspire to over the last 12 months. You know, we've committed about $4 billion of equity across our global property business. But I'm gonna focus in particular on our logistics business, where we've been particularly active. And it's a sector that continues to benefit from from some growing demand trends due to e-commerce penetration, but also some of the shifting supply chain dynamics that our infrastructure colleagues are also taking advantage of. Overall, in the US, vacancy is below 5%. Rents grew about 9% year-over-year. And it, it's amidst that very healthy operating backdrop that our team has been active, acquiring new properties to develop or redevelop, and then pursuing leasing value add plans.
The important part is that we're able to do this with our operating teams that are operating on the ground and aggregating single assets or portfolios, often off-market ways from distressed or stressed sellers. Over the last 12 months, we've committed to about 13 million sq ft of acquisitions and new developments, and we have the confidence to remain active in this kind of environment because we're one of the largest global property owners, so we just have tremendous access to data. So within our existing portfolio, we saw that we're leasing 7 million sq ft over that same time period at rents that are about 30% above those we underwrote at the time. We've also been very active on the financing side.
We've been out with a diverse group of lenders who are willing to lend money to experienced sponsors with high-quality properties. Over the last 12-month period, we've been pretty active, but two I'll highlight in general. One is our GBP 600 million financing of our U.K. hospitality park business . It's a very strong business that relies on local leisure demand, drive-through leisure demand, and a relatively healthy consumer locally. We also did an AUD 1.4 billion Australian financing for our senior living business that benefits from some very healthy demographic trends in Australia. So overall, we're seeing a lot of appetite for lending to experienced sponsors like us, who have high-quality properties. And what we're really taking advantage of is this disconnect between some negative market sentiment, but day-to-day, we're seeing fantastic operating results within our business.
The vast majority of our properties are achieving record rents and very strong demand, and that's a really exciting environment for us to make new acquisitions in.
That's great. And, you know, you touched on financings, and Connor touched on, financings within private equity. Maybe Dave, I know we've been very busy on that front. So maybe just tell us about some of the activity there, you know, the acquisition front. What's the PE group been up to?
Yeah, Jaspreet's laughing because she had quite the busy summer. We've been one of the most active private equity groups in the financing market. Over the course of the summer, there was one period, a two-week period where we did four financings within that time period, which I know was quite intense. And I remember, actually, the first year I joined Bruce saying: "Remember that businesses don't go bankrupt, balance sheets go bankrupt." So a big part about what we do is we manage the risk on our balance sheet. And when we're doing our financings, it's much more than just executing on the deal. We wanna optimize the financings, and what I mean by that is we wanna ensure that we get the best pricing but also get the most flexible and favorable terms that are possible.
Through the activity we've done, we've been able to do that, which is different than a lot of our peers, who often have to make a choice between pricing and terms. I think part of the reason why we're able to do this, maybe give you three answers to that. One is the high-quality nature of our businesses. They lend themselves quite favorably to financings. The second is we have a dedicated capital markets team that gives us the subject matter expertise. But more than just knowing market terms, what they're able to do is actually have a window on when they think the markets might be available. And as you know, the markets are incredibly fickle, and sometimes being ready to go and to hit those windows is as important as anything in a successful financing.
Then the third point is the differentiated access to capital, and you know, that comes through the partnerships we have with a lot of banks. Many of the key relationships in the audience here today, they've supported our business over the years, especially during the difficult times, and hopefully, they see respect for the markets and the partnership that we have.
Yeah, and, you know, respect for capital is always high on that list, whether we're dealing with our banking partners or LPs, and I think, you know, there's a recognition of Brookfield around that. And maybe on the acquisition front, Dave, it's been an interesting environment for private equity investing. What's been active on the acquisition front for us?
Yeah, it's been a volatile environment. We've been busy on the BSI strategy, which is our tailored financing in non-control situation strategy. We do things like converts and prefs with warrants. They've been quite busy. They've closed on the Sono Bello transaction. They're actively in the market fundraising, which is a you know well-received strategy in this climate. In the BCP side, we did a series of add-on acquisitions in DexKo and Modulaire. We closed on Nielsen as well as Trimco. We announced the Magnati and Network International transaction, which is quite an exciting one for us. And then we onboarded Scientific Games and CDK, which were high-quality businesses that we were able to buy for value.
Not that I want to monopolize and only talk about private equity, but I got one more question here for you. You've used the word high quality a few times as you've been talking. And when you hear high quality, you typically think, "That must be expensive." How you know, at the heart of it, we're value investors, so how are we able to buy these high-quality businesses at value or good value? And then how do you take a high-quality business and, you know, make our targeted returns?
So you're getting insights to the tough questions we get from Jaspreet when we go ask her for capital. So on the face of it, it may seem that buying something for high quality and value sort of contradict one another and are not possible, but it is actually possible for the purchase price to be less than the intrinsic value of what the potential cash flows could be for the business. And generally, we find that there's really two instances in where we can buy for value. The first is we get involved in complex situations that are misunderstood, or we take a contrarian view to a situation. And we're able to do this because we have an information advantage. And I know Connor talked earlier about the Brookfield ecosystem.
Our information advantage most often comes from insights and knowledge that we have within Brookfield, from assets that we own in different parts of Brookfield. And so a good example is Westinghouse, which is one of our more successful investments in private equity. We worked with our colleagues in the renewable groups to really understand the regional power markets around the world. And the conclusion that we came to was, despite all the political rhetoric about decommissioning nuclear facilities, if you did that, you wouldn't be able to meet the local power demands. And so we came to the conclusion that the perceived risk and the actual risk were disconnected. The second way that we often find ourselves being able to buy for value is a lot of the businesses we get involved with are mismanaged.
It's been a long part of our strategy to employ an operations-focused strategy to improve cash flows through our ownership. Taking these mismanaged businesses and applying some of our best practices really is what helps us drive the returns. Over 50% of our returns can be attributed to this type of work, and we have a playbook in which we repeat the same practices over and over. So things like having the right strategic priorities identified and sticking to them. It's driving operational excellence and commercial execution for things like supply chain management and modernizing businesses through digitization.
The last point I'll make is to give you an example of where we've done this, Everise, which is a tech services businesses that we have, we've tripled EBITDA through our ownership, which, you know, hopefully sets us up nicely for monetization.
We did that over a pretty short period of time on that one. Maybe just sticking to that operational improvement theme. You know, our history has been as owner-operators of businesses. An operational improvement plan, rolling up your sleeves, doing the heavy lifting, that's what we do. Alex, that's true on the real estate side as well. Maybe you can tell us, you know, how do you add value on the real estate investments that we make?
Yeah, I think we have a fairly diverse set of tools available to us to add value and pursue these operational strategies. I think something that you mentioned resonates, which is we wanna start with good raw material and a well-located property or a reasonably well-functioning industry leader that we can improve on with capital or operating expertise. And so we have quite traditional real estate strategies where we go in and do something like acquire a undermanaged and mismanaged hotel. We may improve management, cut some costs to drive hotel margins, but we'll also invest capital to improve rooms and common areas and really drive room rates.
We'll also do more private equity style investment opportunities, where we're gonna buy a vertically integrated property company, improve the management team, put in place sophisticated revenue management strategies, and look for inorganic growth opportunities. An example of that would be Simply Self Storage , a vertically integrated self-storage business, that we own and doubled the size of that business over a whole period and exited, achieving a high-20s IRR. On the property side, an example is the PGA National Hotel in Palm Beach Gardens in Florida. Very similar plan, invest capital, improve operations, and then sell on to a lower cost of capital. The important point is, no matter what we do, we're focusing on operational improvements and using our operating colleagues across Brookfield Properties.
So we have about 30,000 colleagues who are working day to day across four continents and touching almost every property type. Many of our peers outsource that work to third parties. That's a real different differentiating factor for us, and it means we have greater access to real-time data, and we can create better financial alignment with the people that are doing the work day to day. You know, it's our sincere belief that, particularly in this environment, returns are gonna come from growing operating cash flow and improving earnings, not just acquiring assets and financing them cheaply, and we have the people and a plan to effectuate those business plans.
So, you alluded to kind of the current environment, and, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't follow that up and ask, like, does any of that change today, given kind of the interest rate environment, you know, the inflationary environment, some of the macro factors that we're seeing?
Well, high inflation and high rates have had a relatively uneven impact upon the global property sector, and that includes some legacy hangovers from the pandemic. But I would say one thing that applies to every single asset type, regardless of its location regardless of the continent it's on or the type of asset, is really that higher quality properties that are well-located are really outperforming in this cycle. And historically, those are the kind of properties that we're focused on. The other thing that we're seeing happen is those high-quality properties, they can really drive revenue in excess of inflation. So our U.S. full-service hotels increased their rates by about 18% over the last 12 months. Our U.S. multifamily properties increased rents by about 7% over the last 12 months.
The other thing we're seeing is, in high inflation, is flowing through to construction costs. So that's increasing replacement costs. It's making our existing holdings more valuable, but it's also setting up for a really attractive future environment where we're gonna have less supply to be competitive with this next fund vintage. And obviously, higher rates also mean higher borrowing costs, and in particular, also for groups that don't have a sophisticated capital markets, in-house teams, and aren't as thoughtful about their capital structure prudent, that's gonna create a tremendous opportunity for us. And it's one of the reasons where they're most excited about the potential for this fund vintage for Brookfield.
Did you say, we increased our hotel rents by 18%?
Over the last 12 months.
Yeah, I think that.
Some people have noticed.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But I, I'm glad to see it's going to a good cause. Daniel, just, just on that, you know, in the renewables, investments that we've been making with the rates and inflation, has that changed your return expectations or what how you're thinking about the investments that you're making?
We'll say I would say it hasn't changed the way that we invest, but it certainly has validated and reinforced it. You know, we always look to make investments where we can de-risk upfront, and we typically try to do that by leaning into our platform capabilities, by securing cash flows and underpinning them on long-term contracted basis, that are indexed to inflation. And also taking a very prudent approach to leverage u sing investment grade debt that are with fixed interest rate, long duration in nature, and also non-recourse, and also leaving a lot of liquidity on our balance sheet. And a great example of this really lies in our development activities globally. Brookfield Renewables is one of the largest developers of renewable assets around the world, and we're actively advancing about over 130 gigawatts of assets.
And while every single market and every single project is a little bit different, the one constant for us is we, we don't build on spec. We try to lock in as many variables upfront as we can. E xamples include CapEx, where we engage a very credible EPC under a full wrap basis, revenues under long-term contracts that moves with inflation, fixing the O&M costs, fixing the financing costs. If we do all of that and incorporate the higher interest rates and the higher CapEx costs because of inflation recently into our underwriting, inflation doesn't actually impact our returns all that much. And maybe there are three other observations from that approach that I'll just quickly touch on.
The first is a large chunk of our returns is all fixed upfront, and what that provides us is a very stable and visible set of path to that return, and allows us to invest really through the cycle at the same risk-adjusted returns, without having it tied to the natural and inevitable swings of the economy. The second is, because of that liquidity and prudent and robust balance sheet, we can remain active in capital deployment, even in a down cycle, and that gives rise to opportunities to actually invest at higher risk-adjusted returns. With respect to our existing investments, we're actually seeing our equity cash flows rise in an inflationary environment because of the dynamics of rising revenues and fixed operating and financing costs.
So our business continues to perform really well under the current macroeconomic environment, and we certainly have seen that come through across our portfolio globally in the past couple of years.
Inflation's accretive to EBITDA?
Absolutely.
That's great. That's the type of businesses we like. Maybe Caroline, just shifting to infrastructure, you know, there's no doubt that there's gonna be a massive build-out on the data side to support AI, 5G. We've also seen a lot of the supply chains being reconstructed in the current environment. And you know, Bruce highlighted this earlier, but Brookfield is kind of at the epicenter of the themes of digitalization and de-globalization. And I'd say the infrastructure team is picking the trend. You've specifically worked on a couple of deals, the Intel deal, the Triton deal, which are both on the same theme. So maybe you can tell us, tell us about those deals. How, how did we source them? You know, what was the value add there?
Yeah. So I'll start with de-globalization. Within this theme, we're really seeing two trends. The first being onshoring or nearshoring of critically strategic imports, such as semiconductors, EVs, or biomedical. That's exactly what we saw in our partnership with Intel. The second trend is the diversification of global supply for consumer goods that are viewed as discretionary or non-strategic. This could be furniture, or toys, or clothes. This decentralization of global trade is actually resulting in more globalization as goods are traveling longer distances. T hat supports our recent investment in Triton, as more containers will be required to meet the same demand. So we continue to see great opportunity in onshoring, but we also see opportunity to build out new infrastructure in these diversifying markets across the globe.
So between these two subthemes, we see a wide array of large-scale investment opportunity in de-globalization. So then next, to your point on digitalization, the exponential increase in data consumption has driven the need for significant capital in recent years, and that largely started with the migration to the cloud. But now, with the rise of generative AI, we're seeing another step change in data consumption. And now, with our acquisitions of Compass and Data4, we are one of the largest hyperscale data center developers in the world, and this step change will create tailwinds for our business. We continue to see fundamentals improving, with longer contract durations at higher rates. Additionally, with this scale, we'll better understand customer demand across the globe. Interestingly, despite that backdrop, we actually have seen less competitive tension in data.
We think this is largely due to our competitors having either historically filled their data appetites, some have experienced fundraising challenges, and others have pulled back due to market uncertainty. All of which provides a great opportunity for us, and definitely explains our heightened activity in recent months.
Right. And heightened activity and growth are always exciting. David, we've been spending a lot of time in private equity, developing capability, and, you know, the more nascent investment opportunities for us. Maybe, tell the audience a little bit about what we've been up to there.
Sure. So we've widened our aperture a bit and tried to look for logical extensions of our strategy, our strategy being high-quality businesses for value, where we can drive improvements in cash flow, cash flow through the operations. And two of the areas that we're spending a lot of time are technology and healthcare. And what we'd say is, as we invest in these spaces, that they will very much look like Brookfield deals. I'll give you an example. In 2022, we invested in a company called CDK. What CDK does is it provides the software to auto dealers, and it's a great business, high quality. It has a 50%+ market share. It has 75% of its revenue being recurring, and it's basically an essential product that you have to have in order to operate an auto dealer.
It's something that we understood, we think, better than most people. There was misinformation or a misperception between how the dealers interacted with the OEMs. We had the benefit from the real estate folks of their ownership in cars, of understanding how the dealers worked. They were the largest financing company to the North American auto dealers. And then in the private equity group, we own a company called Clarios, which manufactures batteries for automotives, so we have interactions with all of the OEMs. Then the other part was it was out of favor because until recently, any tech business that didn't have high growth, nobody wanted to go near it. So there were a limited universe of buyers.
The last piece to the puzzle was the ability to go in and drive change through better operations, and this was a business which had incredible margin deterioration. In our underwriting, we had underwritten a margin improvement plan where we thought we could contribute $200 million to earnings. We're 14 months into the investment, we've already achieved $241 million, which is quite significant. And then on the strategic side, we identified a non-core asset. We sold that for 24x EBITDA. Now, the net result.
Sorry, did you say 24?
Twenty-four times.
Just wanna make sure.
The net result of that is, the buy-in value is 13x EBITDA. You take that down to 8x. We are carrying it at 1.4x multiple of capital, but we're reasonably confident we have a line of sight to a return that could be north of 4x multiple of capital. And it's just an example of what we've done in the technology side, and you should expect to see the same type of investment as we looked at things in healthcare.
So 4 times.
It's not the new norm.
We're calculating the carry that Dan's gonna be generating on that. And so just maybe shifting gears to carry generation, because, you know, who doesn't like that? On the monetization front, you know, we've monetized about $15 billion worth of investments this year. And Alex, the real estate team has been quite active. The infrastructure team has been active. Maybe tell us a little bit about the Indian portfolio that we sold, the U.K. housing, student housing business that you sold. Tell us about the investment and the incredible returns you generated for your fund investors.
Yes, those are two large exits over the last 12 months. Starting with the Indian property portfolio, this was a combination of assets from two of our opportunistic funds and a total portfolio value of about $1.4 billion, that we sold. The first set of assets were the final assets of a distressed portfolio investment that was extremely successful for us, generating almost 4x equity multiple. In that business, over our hold period, we doubled the size of it to about 16 million sq ft, and we leased about 60% of that space during our entire hold period. The second set of assets were the stabilized assets, where we completed our business plans out of a larger 22-property portfolio with about 7 million sq ft.
So because we had completed our business plans, we monetized those assets. We're still working the remainder of the portfolio, and we're projecting more than a 20% IRR on the overall balance of it. Those are great exits for us in India. We had completed our business plans, but I will say we're still long-term believers in that market, and we'll be looking to grow opportunistically there. Shifting to Europe as well, and the U.K. in particular, we sold our U.K. student accommodation business named Student Roost. To your point, we returned about $2 billion of capital to fund investors on that exit. And the business plan evolution really speaks to what we can do operationally, globally. At acquisition, we only bought 13 properties. They were all externally managed by the previous sponsor.
Over a hold period, we internalized operations and created a vertically integrated student accommodation business, properties, operations, leasing, property management. We grew it from 13 properties to 56. We had a few ongoing developments, and then we had. Ended up with 23,000 beds next to the U.K.'s top universities. It's a fairly scaled business, exits in U.K. and India, and I think that shows that there's still a tremendous demand for high-quality properties and assets globally.
Great. Maybe, Caroline, just really quickly on our New Zealand deal.
Yeah. So in June, we sold our interest in One New Zealand to our joint venture partner. Since our investment in 2020, we were able to implement margin improvement measures, and then we also decided to carve out the mobile tower portfolio from the remaining business to enhance the sum of the parts valuation. And those value enhancement initiatives proved to bear fruit prior to the end of our typical hold period in May, our partner approached us to buy our interest at a premium, resulting in an over 30% IRR and over 2.5x MOIC for BIF IV. And we really saw that shorter hold period just catalyzed by our ability to implement our value enhancement plan more quickly than we had originally anticipated, which, you know, resulted in this great result for us.
That's incredible. I know we're running short of time, but there was one other and I know I'm keeping you all from lunch, so just bear with us for another two minutes. There's just one other thing I wanted to make sure we touched on. I know Bruce, on one of his slides, had the incredible capital raising that we've done at Brookfield. I think it was like $150 billion. And you know, infrastructure has got a fair share of that. Our flagship infrastructure fund, I think, is at $27 billion now, making it the largest fund or the largest infrastructure fund that's been raised. And we're not done fundraising. So, what are you gonna do with all of this capital? Where are you gonna deploy it?
Yeah. So to your point on fund size, infrastructure is competitive, but we do see less competition at larger check sizes. And more to the point, while we have seen fund sizes continue to increase, in parallel, we've seen the opportunity set exponentially expand. So let's not forget that just a few years ago, infrastructure was largely considered to be just toll roads and utilities. But now, with the onset of themes like digitalization and de-globalization, we're seeing significant infrastructure capital needed for things like towers, data centers, semiconductors, supply chains, et cetera. And in addition, we have clients looking to increase their allocations to infrastructure, and these larger fund sizes provide that opportunity. I would say there are many reasons that differentiate Brookfield, that, you know, lead to our ability to deploy all of this capital.
That's great. And, talking about large-scale capital, you know, our transition strategy is definitely differentiated here at Brookfield. We raised significant capital. You touched on how quickly we deployed it. Like, what gives us a competitive advantage there, and what's the differentiation that Brookfield has?
Yeah, I would say fund size and our operating capabilities, and we can say this with confidence because both really differentiated us in the deployment of BGTF I. And not to belabor the point, and very consistent with what Caroline had said, a large fund size allows us to execute on transactions of scale, which benefits from less competition, simply because the number of investors that can write large equity checks tend to dwindle off pretty quickly as the deal size becomes increasingly larger. And not only does that translate to more attractive entry points on valuation, these are sometimes also the most attractive risk-adjusted opportunity that we're seeing out there, because these investments and companies are often leaders in their space.
The other one, just on operating capabilities, to transition to net zero, and we've said this countless times, we have to go where the emissions are. And if we trace them back to their source, more than 75% comes from the energy and power generation sectors. And, what is the most proven, mature, and cost-effective way to produce electricity, with limited to no carbon today? It's renewables. Renewables such as hydro, wind, and solar are the most actionable, impactful, and scalable way to decarbonize our economy, and it's increasingly so and more true because of electrification. And Brookfield has been an owner, an operator, a developer, and acquirer of those types of assets for multiple decades already. And it's that combination of experience and track record that really differentiate us, because that allows us to drive value in our investments.
When we couple that with very attractive entry points on valuation, we can expect great returns in our transition strategy. Maybe the one more thing I'll just quickly squeeze in there is, we certainly found, our size and global reach as an institution played a differentiator role in our conversations with corporates who are looking to decarbonize. Finding the right decarbonization partner is very critical because these are the people that will be intimately involved in their business in delivering on a very important objective. And so having the reputation and, as well as the capabilities and skill of Brookfield, certainly helped us, make a difference. And maybe I'll just quickly spend one more minute on an example.
Oh, you're keeping them from lunch.
And I think, you know, nothing does better than the actual transaction that we've done, and I'm kind of alluding to a example earlier that we have said is on Origin Energy. You know, first and foremost, it's a $13 billion transaction, and we did that on a purely bilateral basis. And this is, you know, that's the case, even though it was a very publicized and well-covered take private. And this is also the leading producer, supplier of electricity in Australia, that's highly cash flow generative and has one of the largest customer bases and great growth prospects as well.
That's great. And if anybody's on. It's an exciting transaction, and maybe over drinks, if anybody's interested, we could get into it more.
For sure.
I think we're running out of time. Maybe I'll give you, each of you 30 seconds. What's resonating on real estate opportunistic, and any last thoughts on private equity?
Yeah. So, we're in the market right now for the next fund in our global opportunistic real estate strategy. I think we're seeing a real bifurcation between experienced managers, people who invested through cycles on behalf of their clients. And I think part of this bifurcation is less experienced managers, we expect to probably run into some speed bumps along the way, and that's creating what we view as arguably the best real estate transaction environment we've seen since the global financial crisis. When we talk to clients, they tell us they recognize this opportunity, they're excited about this vintage and the prospective returns that'll be available with less competition. And they're really focused on people who delivered with good track records.
And we're very proud of our track record of achieving 20%, more than 20% returns on behalf of our clients opportunistically since we started investing their money. They recognize that track record, and they also see the differentiation between large corporate transactions, in-house operating teams, and a, and a real value focus. I think those are real differentiating factors, and they're really appealing in this moment.
Okay. He ate up on your time. You got 10 seconds.
So look, in a rising cost environment and supply chain disruption, the operating strategy is a really good opportunity set for us relative to our peers, who tend to rely on multiple expansion and increased leverage. And so, you know, we're quite excited about the opportunity for us.
It's great. Thank you all very much, and thank you everyone for listening to our panel. I'll now hand it over to Connor to take on Q&A.
Great. Recognizing that we're sitting between everyone and lunch, maybe before we jump to Q&A, first and foremost, we'd like to thank everyone. We hope the presentations today were both interesting and informative. And maybe before we jump to Q&A, we'll just leave everyone with five takeaways. First and foremost, the Brookfield ecosystem is a significant competitive advantage that is going to continue to be a differentiator for us going forward. Secondly, as you just heard from the investment panel, the teams around the world are using our capabilities to deploy our capital at very attractive risk-adjusted returns in the current market environment. The fundraising panel, we have a huge fundraising opportunity in front of us, and we're well positioned to capture it, having built out our capabilities and focusing on a partnership model. Milwood, he did a great job.
There's no question that private credit is a massive opportunity for growth going forward. And between Brookfield, Oaktree, and our insurance business, we are certainly in the pole position to capture that. And then lastly, as Bahir mentioned, we have a very strong five-year organic growth plan that has significant upside through M&A and other value levers. So recognizing we are relatively short on time here, we will take just a couple questions from the audience. Please do wait until you get a microphone, so everyone can hear you. Maybe Alex, we'll start with you.
Thanks. Appreciate it. Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. So along the lines of the session and lunch, I do wanna ask two questions. So apologize for i don't know if I'm breaking rules of one. I guess first on credit, and obviously, we spent a lot of time in the last couple of months talking about all the tailwinds in the space. You talked about significant opportunities to invest. For many folks in this room who know Oaktree, it's predominantly been a distressed manager, and I know you've been adding capabilities there. So maybe help us just kind of mark to market where Oaktree's capabilities are today, with respect to direct lending and with respect to asset-backed finance.
So the areas that are likely to grow faster, over the next, over the next couple of months, or couple, couple of years, I guess. And then my second question, totally unrelated, and that's gonna be, for Bahir. Appreciate the comments around FRE margins, and you, you kinda highlighted north of 60% as part of your plan. Maybe the roadmap and some of the more near-term targets there would be helpful. So kinda how should we think about 2024 and 2025 FRE margins on your way to 60+? Thanks.
Certainly. So no different than Brookfield, Oaktree's been doing the exact same thing over time in terms of expanding its product offering. Because the capabilities that have made it the best distressed investor in the world, a position it continues to hold today, often are very easy to leverage to other forms of credit. And that is why they have expanded into new done across the organization. I think there's about 500 people or so that we added. And so all that's gonna happen heading into next year, now that our investment teams are built out. We've been building out our capabilities, especially on the direct lending fund, on the transition fund. Some of those newer strategies entailed a lot of hiring in advance of the fundraising.
So now that that majority of that is in place, the private wealth channel has gotten off to a pretty significant level as well from a people perspective. The fundraising organization is in place. We just think that that is gonna just slow down heading into the next couple of years. You are gonna see our margins expand by quite a bit, and that in addition with a lot of the profitable strategies that I noted that are gonna be closing. That's gonna drive the margin upside, and it's gonna start in 2024.
Perfect.
Cherilyn?
Thank you. It's Cherily n Radbourne with TD Cowen. I wanted to dig in a little bit on transition investing. You mentioned on the last conference call that, you know, that has now gained more credibility as a strategy for clients, and they increasingly have allocations towards it. So maybe you could speak a little bit to where those allocations stand and where you think they could go. And then alongside that, how would you envision the product family growing into, you know, a core and debt, as we've seen in the other flagship families?
Sure. So, in a word, where are those allocations going? They're growing, and, and they're growing very rapidly. But I'd perhaps make two points about what's driving that. One is very simply economics. There are very, very attractive risk-adjusted returns to be generated in transition investing, with zero return discount as a result of focusing on decarbonization. So part of that allocation decision is simply economic. And then secondly, there's an increased pragmatism around the world in transition investing, that it's not about being black or white, but simply helping all sectors of the global economy become more sustainable than they are today. And that pragmatism is opening up a much larger opportunity set, a much bigger investable universe, which is therefore exciting people about allocating capital to this space.
To your comment around the product suite, around transition investing, whenever we launch a new product, there's always three criteria. One, it needs to be a large investable opportunity set. Two, we need to think that as Brookfield and Oaktree, we can be a global leader. And three, it can't conflict with anything that we're already doing in the business. When we think about the transition opportunity set, there's certainly components of the white space there that would tick all three boxes, whether it be increasingly on the lending side or more special situations type investing, particularly for some of the new decarbonization solutions that need that scaling capital to get off the ground. Our focus right now is obviously the second vintage of our flagship fund.
Hopefully, another record fundraise, but no doubt we'll be looking to expand the product offering within transition as well.
I had a question over here. Over Connor, over on this side. On your left. Perfect. Geoff Kwan, RBC. I had one question, then just more of a clarification, I think, over here on slide 102. But I wanted to talk on the co-investing side. You guys have talked about LP investors wanting to do more co-invest. Co-investing can sometimes be done with no fees for our clients. I just wanted to understand the size of the opportunity and also how to think about what those economics are, as it contrasts to, like, your typical LP fund fees. And then the other question I had on was slide 102.
The insurance side, you showed, I think it was $223 billion of FBC growth coming from insurance, but then there's a lot of stuff that's going to go into the long-term private strategies. Just want to understand how that classification is done there.
Certainly. So on co-invest, you heard a lot about co-invest, in particular, in our fundraising panel. And I think what's important to recognize, in co-invest is a very important two-way street. By being aligned with great LP partners around the world that can co-invest in our deals, we are able to do the larger, more attractive transactions with less risk, or with less competition. And therefore, we're able to generate more attractive returns and deploy more capital in our funds. Similarly, it's a two-way street because our LP partners, one, get the discretion of will they participate in a specific co-invest transaction, and two, absolutely, the fee rates on co-invest do typically tend to be lower than they would on a fund commitment. But we are always excited to deliver co-invest to our clients.
We're not concerned if it is at a slightly lower rate, because it is two-way beneficial, and the fact that we can generate co-invest across all four of our flagship platforms is, I think, something that really continues to differentiate us.
Thanks, Geoff. I don't have the slide in front of me, but I think it's the five operating groups and how they contribute to the fee-bearing capital numbers. So the $225 billion growth that we expect to see in our Insurance Solutions business goes through that last line item that's called Credit Insurance Solutions . Stepping back a bit, we deploy 35, approximately, over time, 35%-40% of those insurance assets into private credit strategies. So when we look at our fee-bearing capital numbers, all the insurance assets go through the Insurance Solutions line item, and the various other private credit, or, or private fund strategies only include third-party fundraising that we're doing, in addition to the capital that we manage, for Brookfield, on behalf of Brookfield Corporation.
In our fee-bearing, or fee-related earnings and distributable earnings numbers, we obviously pick up the income streams associated with those funds that we'll be allocating those insurance capital towards. So, that's the difference between, I think, how we show our fee-bearing capital numbers versus how we show our FRE and distributable earnings numbers going forward.
We're very sorry. We recognize there's still a lot of questions in the crowd. We have run a little bit over. We would like to stop there. Thank you, everyone, for participating, and thank you for your interest and support of Brookfield Asset Management. The Brookfield Corporation presentation comes after lunch. Have a great day!
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Brookfield Corporation's 2023 Investor Day. My name is Angela Yulo, and I oversee investor relations for Brookfield Corporation. Thank you for joining us today, both in person and online, as well as attending Brookfield Asset Management's presentation earlier. We appreciate your interest and support of Brookfield. Today, we have a great lineup, starting with an introduction by our CEO, Bruce Flatt. Then Nick Goodman, our President, will provide the overview and financial outlook of the corporation. Next, Brian Kingston, CEO of Real Estate, will share an update on our real estate business, and Sachin Shah, CEO of Insurance Solutions, will further discuss our Insurance Solutions strategy. Finally, we'll take questions at the end of the day. For those in the room, we will have a mic roaming around.
We do request that you wait until you receive the mic before you ask your question in order to make sure those online can hear. For those joining virtually, you may fill in the question in a box on your screen. As always, we'd like to remind you that in responding to questions and in talking about new initiatives and in our financial and operating performance for the Brookfield companies presenting today, we may make forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. law. These statements reflect predictions of future trends and events and do not relate to historic events. They are subject to known and unknown risks, and future events may differ materially from such statements.
For additional information on these risks and their potential impacts on our companies, please see our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and in the U.S., which are available on our website. With that, I'll hand it over to Bruce.
So thank you for staying here or for being here for this presentation. To summarize, I'm gonna make a few points. The first one is Brookfield Corporation is a premier growth wealth manager for institutions and individuals. And how we do that is we invest capital for our investors through the public market affiliates we have, for our shareholders, for global sovereigns, for institutions, for private individuals, through our asset management, our wealth management, and through insurance channels that are growing, and we're gonna describe that to you today. We believe we're uniquely positioned for all of those constituencies to invest capital into the backbone of the global economy. The moat we have is significantly widening as we increase the access to capital that we have.
Our permanent capital base of $140 billion today backs one of the largest discretionary pools of capital in the world. This enables us to differentiate our capital, which is extremely important because capital in itself or being big in itself does not matter, but differentiating your capital does. There's $74 of asset value per share in the business today, which should compound at 17% to $163 by 2028. That allows a very large margin of safety for investors. So let me get into some of those points. In the last 12 months, we successfully listed the manager, we grew the insurance to $100 billion, we raised nearly $75 billion of capital, we delivered strong financial results, and we enhanced the deployable capital we have to $120 billion.
We started at $74 a share of NAV. We ended at $74, but everyone got $9 a share in distributions. So we generated a 13% total return during the year. Over the next five years, more importantly, we should be able to deliver a total annualized return on capital of 17%, growing to $163. We continue to position ourselves as a premier global wealth manager. Our goal for all of these constituents, institutions, pension plans, countries, individuals, families, whoever we invest capital for, is to compound wealth for each one of them, dependent upon the strategy that we deploy for them with the risk that they want to take, but generally take moderate risk to earn good returns. Most importantly, today we have $140 billion of capital at the top.
That backs $100 billion of float in the insurance business, which Sachin is going to tell you about, that's growing fast. An $850 billion diversified global manager, which I hope you agree with me from earlier, is an excellent business to be invested in. The current environment favors many of the strategies of ours. The global secular trends of deglobalization, digitalization, decarbonization favor us. Scarcity of capital, while many worry about it, actually favors us, and the investment backdrop favors us. We're very excited about the environment that we're in across the board. Now more than ever, the competitive advantages are differentiating the franchise. Our global footprint, our large and flexible capital, the deep operating expertise, and the reputation as a superior partner.
All the transactions that we do depend on the next and the last transaction we did, because people call the others and find out that we're a good party to transact with. That's extremely important to us. That enables us to transact on, on a vast array of transactions around the world. Three of them are on these slides, that we're in the midst of closing, American Equity, Origin, and Triton. On their own, each of these businesses has a strong foundation for growth. But when the parts work together, what we can achieve is significantly bigger. And allocating cash flows and recycling capital should significantly enhance the returns in this business, and we'll talk about it in a minute. The corporation is at the heart of this.
Between Insurance Solutions , asset management, and our operating businesses, we participate in all of them. The $140 billion of capital generates $5 billion of cash to be reinvested for strategic in strategic growth, building our next global champion or repurchasing securities as we see fit. Following the successful listing of our manager last year, the spotlight now has shifted to our privately held businesses. The components of our business are pretty simple. Insurance is $100 billion of assets and growing. We have a very high-quality portfolio of real estate, which Brian's going to talk about, and our carried interest, which we retain, generates significant cash flow and is a hidden jewel that lies in plain sight.
We have never been in better positioned to grow this business, but our goal continues to be delivering 15% returns on a compound basis over the longer term. Our asset management business is diverse and growing fast. It has an investment track record that is excellent. It's well-positioned with global secular tailwinds behind many of its businesses. It has resilient, best-in-class, long-term, and annuity-like revenues. This is an incredible business. Our goal is to grow from $440 billion to $1 trillion. Our Insurance Solution s business is growing rapidly. Our goal is to deliver strong growth, but take moderate risk. We limit insurance risk and enhance the returns through investment performance. That's what we bring to the table. Our deep industry relationships and investment expertise position this business as a partner of choice for regulated insurance companies.
Synergies with the broad platform that we have and access to our investment skills enables us to achieve very attractive returns on capital. The flexibility of capital and the reputation we have should enhance this business for a long period of time. Our goal, as Sachin will take you through, is to grow the business from $100 billion of assets today to $500 billion of float. Our operating businesses are best in class. We deploy capital across our global champions that generate inflation-protected, stable, predictable, growing cash flows. These strategies generally compound at 15%+. We have a proven track record over decades, and each business is self-funding and has access to the capital markets on its own. As in most businesses, cash reinvestment is the secret to long-term returns.
Our business is no different than that. Over the next five years, we generate $45 billion of cash. We have no restrictions on where to deploy that. We focus on allocating those cash flows to optimize our businesses, to earn return, and we will continue to recycle what we have in our balance sheet to optimize everything we have. In addition to that $45 billion, we have $60 billion of listed securities that can be turned to cash if we so desire. But this capital will be opportunistically allocated towards investing to support the current businesses, selectively building new ones, being ready for strategic transactions, and doing share buybacks of our BN securities or other securities of ours as opportunities present themselves.
Most importantly, what's happening in the world is that the global wealth of individuals, and I would say, reflecting back from 25 years ago, at that time, we saw the global wealth of institutions was growing rapidly, and it was going to be deployed within real assets and alternatives. What's happening today is the global wealth of individuals is really the next frontier to add capital to our overall business. We're pushing wealth distribution through our Brookfield Oaktree Wealth Solutions business. For those of you that were here this morning, David Levi talked about it. We're delivering solutions to the middle market in America today, eventually globally, with our insurance products.
And soon, we'll launch our super high-net-worth and high-net-worth global channel to manage wealth for individuals on a private basis, seeking increased exposure to these type of assets. Bringing it all together, the corporation value is the existing businesses we have and the reinvestment of all of the cash that comes out of these businesses. Most people forget, most business, 15 years later, is about the cash flow that you reinvest in the future. We are well positioned to compound returns at 20% a year for the next five years, and grow our moat significantly from the current $74 a share, or $140 billion of capital, to $163 a share, which Nick will take you through.
Thank you. Thanks, Bruce, and good afternoon. I'm going to start by providing a review of our recent financial performance, taking a look back over the last one and five years. I'm then gonna spend the bulk of the rest of the day taking a closer look at the value composition and the value proposition of the corporation. And I'll then finish off my slides by wrapping it up, bringing it all together, and taking a look at an update of our five-year plan. Before getting into the meat of the topics, I just wanna go through the summary, the key points that you'll hear us reiterate throughout the day and are really the key takeaways.
As you've heard repeatedly from Bruce and others, capital has become increasingly scarce over the last twelve months, and having capital is a key differentiator and are really at the heart of our success. Over the last twelve months, we've grown our capital base at the corporation to $140 billion, $120 billion of that being equity. Against that $120 billion of equity, we're generating $5 billion of cash flow a year. That's $5 billion of cash flow that's available to us to reinvest back into the business, to drive further growth in earnings and value, to accelerate growth, or to be opportunistically returned to shareholders. If you think of that illustration that Bruce put up, BN is really at the heart of everything that we're doing at Brookfield.
We're capturing all of the synergies, all of the growth of the businesses, and then we're able to allocate capital to drive further earnings. And when we put that together, we feel that the growth profile has never been more clear to us, and we are very well positioned to continue to deliver strong earnings growth at 20%+ over the next five years. And our goal is the same, is to deliver 15%+ total returns over the next five years. But if you take a step back and think about the last 15, 20 years, Brookfield was defined as being one of the world's leading global alternative asset managers. In December, we spun that asset management business out and listed it separately.
The focus has since shifted to our private businesses, and we're excited to be able to spend more time on them today. The question has also repeatedly come up, w hat is BN now? What is the definition and narrative of BN? And as Bruce laid out, our goal is for BN to be the premier global wealth manager of choice. If you think about the success, the foundation of everything that Brookfield has been able to achieve over the years, it's our ability to deploy capital to generate excellent returns and compound wealth and we plan to be able to deliver that to our key constituents globally.
If you think about the growth profile and the potential that the business has, the scale that we've built, the current trading price in our minds represents a significant discount to the intrinsic value of the business, and therefore, it offers a very large margin of safety to an investor and significant potential upside. Last but not least on this slide, ESG is very, very important to us, and it's very important to all of our stakeholders, and we'll provide an update on our progress in this regard. Starting with a review of the past. In the last twelve months, we've grown our DE before realizations, we think of this as our more stabilized cash earnings, by 22% per share. That's 22% per share growth over the last twelve months.
That's been driven by really strong performance and growth in our asset management business. Our Insurance Solutions business, which three years ago generated 0, last twelve months at June 30, $634 million of earnings, and as Sachin will touch on, from just the secure growth, is poised to double and can significantly grow from there. Our operating businesses have continued to generate really stable cash flow. In infrastructure and renewable, through our operating expertise and inflation escalation, FFO continues to grow. Our private equity business continues to grow EBITDA, and our real estate business, as you'll hear us talk about, and maybe despite the narrative, the highest quality assets continue to capture revenue growth and strong demand from tenants, and that's driven to strong earnings.
There's 21% growth in total DE, but when you factor in the reduction of share count repurchases, is 22% per share growth. Now, our total DE factors in monetizations, which can be more volatile. But if we think about a market backdrop where there's been reduced transaction activity, we've almost doubled our realized carried interest in the last 12 months. That talks to the nature of the assets that we own and the stability of our ability to sell assets through the cycle, and we'll touch on that when I go deeper into carried interest. We own some assets on balance sheet that we opportunistically look to recycle. We did less of that in the last 12 months, hence, the disposition gains from principal investments were lower.
But when you add it all up on a per share basis, we have grown our distributable earnings by 15% over the last 12 months. And in that period, we returned almost $15 billion of capital to our shareholders. $700 million in regular dividends, $13 billion to the special distribution of Brookfield Asset Management. When we see a disconnect between value and price, where we're trading versus our view of intrinsic value, we're opportunistically looking to allocate capital to share buybacks. In the last 12 months, we repurchased almost $700 million of shares. Where we have the excess cash and we see those opportunities, we will continue to do so. Underpinning all of this in the last 12 months, for the last 100 years and going forward, has been our commitment to a conservatively capitalized balance sheet.
We continue to be rated A- across four rating agencies, with significant capacity within our ratings bands. We have high levels of liquidity. That allows our businesses to focus on executing their operating plans and not to be distracted by short-term fluctuations in capital availability. We have maintained excellent access to capital. Again, in a more challenging market backdrop, time and time again, over the last 12 months, we've been able to access the capital markets or leverage our global banking relationships to finance and refinance existing businesses and to fund some very large growth opportunities.
I do want to take a quick look back at what we said to you five years ago and what we've actually achieved, 'cause I believe looking back five years and see how we performed against those projections adds context and credibility to the forward-looking pla n that we're about to set out for you. Five years ago, we projected that we would cumulatively deliver $17.8 billion of distributable earnings. We've surpassed that, going to $18.3 billion. We delivered a 15% compound annual growth over the last five years in our earnings. Core to the organization is our commitment to ESG. We're committed to aligning with industry-leading ESG frameworks and standards.
We're committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace, and owning one of the world's largest pure-play renewable power platforms allows us to be at the forefront of decarbonizing the global economy. In the last 12 months, we published our inaugural TCFD disclosure. As you know, we raised $15 billion for our first Global Transition Fund . We've been able to invest that capital into accelerate new technologies that are going to accelerate the decarbonization, and we've made some significant investments into existing businesses to facilitate their decarbonization goals. We've made progress on gender diversity, ethnic diversity, and across the business, our portfolio companies are making commitments to decarbonization. The business as a whole is committed to net zero by 2050 or sooner.
Now turning to the valuation, and if you look up on the screen, on the left-hand side is the traditional way that we would present our valuation. It takes the component parts of the business, our asset management business being our ownership of BAM, our direct investments into the asset manager and our carried interest, our Insurance Solutions business, and our operating businesses, which are underpinned by some of the highest quality assets and cash flows globally. If you add that up and net off the debt, we get to a total plan value today of $120 billion, or $74 a share. But if we think about that as a multiple of DE, think about BN as a business that generates earnings and is going to deliver, in our plans, 25% compound annual growth in earnings over the next five years.
Against today's DE of $5 billion, that's a 24x multiple for plan value. But if we look at that on a forward basis and look at our five-year average projected DE, not the DE at the end of the fifth year, the average over the five years, that's a 15x multiple on today's plan value. Bruce touched on this slide and, touched on this in his slides. We delivered a 13% total return over the last 12 months. Plan value hasn't changed, but we have delivered $9 of distributions to investors. And the intrinsic value over the last five years has surpassed our long-term target of 15% o h sorry, 14%. It was $39 a share five years ago. It's $74 a share today.
Here you can see the growth coming from our carried interest and asset management, operating businesses, and the very early stages of the Insurance Solutions business start to contribute to the growth. And as we've said many times, that's going to be a significant growth engine for earnings and value moving forward. If you take the 14% growth in plan value and add on the average dividend yield and the benefit of spin-offs over that period, we've achieved a return of 18%, a total return of 18%, which surpasses the target of 15%. And if we look back over 20 years, and obviously public markets do behave differently to value, but if we look back at the total annualized return that we've delivered over the past 20 years, that's a 19% annualized return.
I may be stating the obvious, but were the share price to be trading closer to our view of intrinsic value, that total return goes up to 23%. Now, if we take that share price and think about what that means in terms of the relation to value, that price represents a 55% discount to our view of intrinsic value. That's offering investors a very large margin of safety and the potential for substantial upside. But if we look at this a different way, on the right-hand side of the page, and look at it on a multiple basis, that share price today represents an 11x multiple on our last 12 months earnings. 11x multiple. But if we think about that against our five-year forward projections, see 7x multiple.
A 7x multiple on a business that's generating, or we believe can generate, 25% compound annual growth over the next five years. So in that context, now we want to spend a deep, some time digging into our business. You've seen this slide many times. It takes our capital, splits it by the 3 businesses: asset management, Insurance Solutions , and our operating businesses, which is generating over $5 billion of annual cash flow today. But if we slice it differently, and we look at it in terms of those businesses that are public and those that are private, you can see the 120 split between $60 billion of public holdings and $78 billion of private holdings. And if we look at those each in turn, the public holdings are fairly straightforward to apply a price to, and they're incredibly transparent.
They have a deep investor following on their own. They produce quarterly financial statements. But it's $60 billion of liquid securities that we own, listed on the NYSE and the TSX, and that equates to about $37 a share of price or value to the corporation. They're all listed. Our private holdings are $78 billion in total. Asset management split between the direct investments that we have into our private funds, managed by our asset manager, the carried interest being our share of the profits that we earn for clients. Our real estate business, which, as Brian will touch on, is one of the highest quality portfolios of real estate globally, and our Insurance Solutions business. $78 billion of value or $48 per share. And it's these three areas that we want to spend more time on today.
I will start with the asset management business. If you think about asset management, the success and the value creation that comes from our direct investments and our carried interest, they are inextricably linked to the success of BAM, or our asset manager. The foundation of the asset manager's success is the ability to deliver target or above target returns to clients and continue to scale the size of the funds in the franchise. Well, we're invested into those same funds alongside the clients, and as we deliver those returns, we participate in a share of the profits, and I will spend more time on this. The real estate business, and I think it's important at this point to just take a step back and think about the real estate business.
We have a real estate business within private funds, but on balance sheet, our real estate business is quite different. It's backed by a perpetual pool of capital. We're invested into these assets with a view to compounding our capital on an inflation-protected basis over the long term. What happens to the price of these assets from day to day or month to month, for some even year to year, is not necessarily our focus. We are focused on the best assets, making sure they're positioned in the best assets and positioned to capture tenant demand. That's exactly what is happening to tenants today and to our business today when you think about the NOI growth we've been able to deliver here.
The Insurance Solutions business, from a standing start, is going to be at $100 billion pro forma growth, and Sachin will touch on this. But we've been able to scale assets, and we now have a proven platform that can compound growth organically. We've proven we can deliver market-leading investment returns, and by managing risk, we've created a very high quality stream of earnings. We think over the next five years, this is positioned to be a significant contributor to our growth. Starting with asset management, and first looking at the direct investments, the capital that we have invested into our private funds and alongside clients, it's $14 billion in total. If we break this down for you, here you can see it's invested across real estate funds, Oaktree funds, and starting to make investments into our private equity investments as well.
If you just look at some of these in turn, our first real estate fund, we invested $1.6 billion. To date, we've returned $2.8 billion, and we still have $300 million invested. The second fund has returned all of its capital to us. All the capital is being returned, and we still have $2.2 billion working for us, compounding at 20% returns. These are excellent investments, and the track record is proven time and time again. We have capital invested into Oaktree's opportunistic flagship fund, which again, over many vintages, has delivered excellent returns, and the same with our private equity business. We believe that this is an excellent place for us to deploy capital and should deliver excellent returns over the long term. Second, I want to touch on carried interest.
Now, carried interest is a topic that comes up year after year, and the reason we constantly want to focus on it is because it is so significant. It will be material in cash, and it will drive significant growth in earnings over time. Given the nature of accounting, it kind of compounds in the background. It's not highly visible, but it has started to be a lot more material to our earnings over the last couple of years, and we expect that to, to increase significantly. And when we think of carried interest, we really think of it, not if it's going to turn up, when it's going to turn up, and we'll lay that out for you in these slides.
On a very basic, simple level, carried interest is just our share of the profits that we earn for our clients. It's that simple. Here, we've put up a simple illustration, and I might refer back to this as I walk through the slides. But if we have a fund that's $20 billion in size, target return of 20%, if you back out the management fee rate, that's a net return of 18.5%. The carried interest rate, the share of profits that we earn, is 20%, and we have a margin of 70%, i.e., the corporation retains 70, 30% is paid to employees as compensation. That means that fund of $20 billion is targeting to generate carried interest of $520 million a year. It's compounding away at $520 million a year in the background.
A nd when we sell assets, surpass preferred returns, that becomes cash and comes into earnings. So in this illustration, what are the key constituents to getting to that carried interest? It's the size of your carry eligible capital. How much capital are you managing and investing that's entitled to receive that share of the profits? It's your investment performance. Are you able to achieve your target returns in each of your funds? And lastly, it's that carried interest rate and the retention margin that you have on those profits. So let's look first at carry eligible capital. Again, the growth of carry eligible capital is inextricably linked to the growth of our asset management franchise. Over the last five years, we've grown carry eligible capital from $47 billion to $220 billion today.
That growth profile matches the growth profile of our fee-bearing capital in the asset manager. As we think about the plans that we've laid out for you for the growth in the asset management business, we see this carry eligible capital continuing to scale. Note today, we have $220 billion already that is carry eligible and working for us. How are our funds performing? I touched on this when I looked at our direct investments, but across fund history, across strategy, across risk profile, and across vintage, we have continued to meet or exceed our target returns. We have high conviction in our ability to deliver these returns to our clients. That has, what has been crucial to us being able to continually scale the size of our vintages.
Lastly, we expect the carried interest rate to stay consistent at 20%. In the illustration, we use 70%. The blended carry margin that we have in our carry across Brookfield and Oaktree would be around 60% today. So I feel like the bars on the left, the carry eligible capital and the annual generation, really deal with the if. They deal with the if, because we have $220 billion of carry eligible capital already secured today, and we think about the growth of the manager, that scales to $527 billion over the next five years, a 19% CAGR.
If we achieve our returns, again, which we have proven historically we can do time and time again, that annual generation amount, the amount that we are compounding in the background, pre-monetization, will grow to $7 billion gross a year or $3 billion net to the corporation. So the question is when? When does that carry turn from compounding in the background to cash and earnings for the corporation? As we started, we did the one-year review. Last 12 months, we realized $1 billion of carry gross. five years from now, we think that number grows to $6 billion or $3 billion net. If we dig deeper into the when, because the when is really driven by monetization activity.
Monetization activity across the organization has ramped up significantly over the years as the scale of our funds has grown and as we've become more accustomed to selling assets. In 2018, we sold $10 billion of assets. In the last 12 months, and I would argue, if we didn't have a more capital-constrained environment with reduced transaction activity, this number could have been larger, but we still monetized $30 billion of assets over the last 12 months. Again, that talks to the type of assets that we own and our ability to transact through cycles. With the growth of the business, the growth of realized carry has far surpassed our plans that we laid out five years ago.
Again, I think this is important to put into context the plans that we have for the next five, 10 years. But five years ago, we projected to realize cumulative carry of $3.1 billion. We've reached almost $5 billion in that period of time. And talking about diversity, if you look at the risk profile and the strategy that we have, it is very diverse, and in our opinion, this reduces the volatility of the realization of carry. We own a significant amount of real estate infrastructure, renewable power, and transition, again, with excellent track records. But what's important is that most of these assets are transacted in the private markets to some of the largest institutions globally, i.e., they are not reliant on liquid capital markets for exits.
And as we've evidenced in the last 12 months, that allows us to continue to execute, to continue to transact on sales, and continue to monetize and move closer to that carry realization. This slide is a very important slide that I want to add extra emphasis to. What it shows is that over the next 10 years, over the next 10 years, our plan is to realize $26 billion of carried interest. It's $26 billion of cash net to the corporation over the next 10 years. It's about $15 billion over the next five. What's important is the dark blue, 'cause we talk about the if. The dark blue is already secured. That's the carry-eligible capital that we already have raised and working for us today.
What we have to do is achieve our investment returns, which, again, we have proven time and time again, and that will lead to $20 billion of cash over the next five years from what we have already raised. So how do we value carried interest? If you think back to the initial illustration I put up on the screen, if you gross that up for the $220 billion that we have secured and working for us today, times the target returns and the carry rates of those funds, we take that target carried interest, the target annualized number that is compounding against that capital, and we put a multiple on it. We put a multiple on it because this is a franchise that is growing.
Again, if you think back to the growth profile the asset manager has, this is not a static business. This is a business that's continuing to scale. And then we add to it the carry that's been already accumulated, but as yet unrealized. That gives us a valuation of $32 billion. It's 10 times the $2.6 billion annualized number, plus the $6 billion that's as yet unrealized is $32 billion. And again, none of this is recorded in our accounts. It's not, not hit the P&L, it's not hit the balance sheet. And as Bruce said, it is our hidden jewel, but it's hiding in plain sight. But if we think about how do we add some context around that $32 billion, because it's a large number, and it's a number that people sometimes struggle to rationalize.
We've tried to carve it a different way here. If you think back to the $26 billion that we plan to realize over the next 10 years, shrink that back to, to $20, that is going to be realized on just the funds we have working for us today, just the carry-eligible capital that's already secured, and we NPV that back, that's about $14 billion of value right there. $14 billion of value in just the funds we've already raised. So you could think about the balance to the $32 billion as being an NPV of the future, the franchise value or the growth premium or the growth value against which we apply to it. But I think when we break it down this way, hopefully, it makes it a bit more tangible and adds more context to the valuation.
So what are the key takeaways on carried interest? I think the first point is the most important one. Carry is very, very meaningful to this organization. It's real, and it's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when it turns to cash. We value it at $32 billion today, and it should provide us with $26 billion of cash flow over the next 10 years. I'll say it for the third time, and we won't say it again, but this is our hidden jewel, and it's hiding in plain sight. Brian and Sachin will come up and talk about the rest of that plan value composition, real estate, and insurance. But what the plan value doesn't capture, and what Bruce touched on, is our ability to drive additional earnings growth across the business.
We capture the earnings growth of our operating businesses, of our asset manager, and of the existing insurance business, but what it does not capture is our ability to take that cash flow we earn every year and reinvest it to further enhance the earnings profile of the organization. I won't dwell on this for too long, but in just the last three years, we have stood up an insurance business that is now generating $1.2 billion of pro forma DE. $1.2 billion of pro forma DE, a 20% return on equity. And it's not even just about the 20% return on equity. This is a business that has provided significant strategic value to the rest of the franchise and will be a growth engine moving forward.
We have stood up a business that poised to be another one of our global champions, and I'm—I don't think when people think about valuing Brookfield, we always get credit for our ability to continuously execute on this kind of investment. So to avoid me going up and down, I'm just gonna bring it together and update you on the five-year plan, and then I will hand over to Brian. So looking forward. Looking forward, our global champions are gonna continue to provide stable and growing cash flow. They've done it for years, and we expect that to continue into the future. But what I want to emphasize on the five-year plan is, what are the key drivers of growth of this business from an earnings perspective over the next five years?
It's asset management, it's Insurance Solution s, and it's cash reinvestment. This is where we think people should be spending their most time on trying to understand the value proposition of our organization. Our operating businesses continue to generate strong cash flow, but they are operating businesses. They retain cash, and they reinvest it to generate their growth, and we will be recycling capital out of those businesses along the way. When we think about the deconsolidated cash earnings of the corporation, it's about asset management, Insurance Solution s, and our cash reinvestment execution. On top of that, carried interest will be meaningful and provide us with significant earnings and recurring cash flow. If we execute on the plan, our plan value is expected to be $163 billion five years from now, which generates a 17% total return plan to plan.
Plan to plan. But if you think about where we're trading right now, that offers the potential for further significant upside. We've talked a lot about the franchise, the diversity and the scale, and in our mind, our business today, our business is stronger, and its value proposition is better than it's ever been. Over the next five years, we plan to grow our DE per share by 25% on a compound annual growth basis. 25% compound annual growth over the next five years. We plan to increase plan value per share by 17% and deliver total returns of 17%. You've heard a lot about our asset management business, but we believe we can deliver 18% growth, no multiple expansion, purely a growth in the DE of 18%, from $2.2 billion today to $5 billion five years from now.
Our Insurance Solutions business is poised to experience significant growth, DE growing by a 40% CAGR. Now, when we laid out the plans for you for our insurance growth two years ago, even one year ago, we set ourselves fairly lofty expectations. We have conviction we could achieve them, but as we sit here today, we actually have a really visible plan to get there, the bulk of it from organic growth. We increase assets, we continue to deliver our strong investment performance, and we manage risk, and we end up with a really, really high-quality stream of earnings that is going to grow significantly. Our operating businesses will continue to do what they've done for a very long time. They've delivered 15% returns over the past 35 years.
They're generating $1.5 billion of cash flow, and we expect them to compound value at $5 billion over the next five years, and we will continue to grow earnings and recycle capital out of this asset base. Over the next five years, our projected free cash flow from DE, from our operating businesses, asset management, Insurance Solutions , and carry, this is before capital recycling, is projected to be almost $45 billion, $43 billion, to be precise. Less our regular dividends, that gives us a significant amount of cash flow to either reinvest back into the business, to drive further earnings and value growth, or to stand up new businesses, or to be returned opportunistically to shareholders. The reinvestment of our excess cash should add about $3 billion to our DE by the fifth year.
Our DE before realizations is planned to grow at 22% over the next five years. 22% growth in our stabilized earnings. When we add in carried interest, that takes our DE projection five years from now to north of $13.5 billion, a 25% CAGR over the next five years. This is the key point we want to make. When people want to dig into our earnings growth and how are we going to get there over the next five years? The key constituents of the growth in DE, as I said up front, is asset management, which is the growth from BAM, the growth in our carried interest and the return on our direct investments. Again, their performance is all inextricably linked to each other.
It's the stand-up and growth of our Insurance Solutions business, and it's our cash reinvestment and the excess return that that can generate to the business. And we're gonna continue to operate with a conservatively capitalized balance sheet. We think that's one of the key foundations to our success, and we don't see that changing as we move forward. So bringing it all together, you've seen the numbers, but just to put them on one page, and on a per-share basis, DE before realizations going to $6.34 a share over the next five years, the 22% compound annual growth, and total DE getting up to $8.41 a share, 25% compound annual growth. On a returns basis, that delivers a 17% total return, plan to plan.
In this bridge, you can see the contribution from asset management, Insurance Solutions, and cash reinvestment. Our operating businesses are making a significant contribution, but at the same time, we're recycling capital and investing elsewhere. The total return from the share price to plan value is obviously significantly higher, and it represents, again, a high margin of safety or significant potential upside that we can deliver to shareholders over the next five years. So what are the concluding remarks? Our franchise is stronger, and our investment proposition is better than it has ever been. BN, sitting at the center of everything that we do at Brookfield, captures all the earnings that we generate across the franchise, and we drive additional growth. We make sure that we're optimizing, maximizing synergies, and allocating capital to accelerate growth.
Again, it's where you capture all of that value creation. We are well positioned to grow our earnings at 20%+ per annum over the next five years. All of this continues to be underpinned by our conservative balance sheet, strong liquidity, and differentiated access to capital, and we're set up to continue to deliver 15%+ returns over the long term. And with that, I'm going to hand over to Brian.
It's okay. Maybe, maybe not.
It's an action video.
All right. Thanks, Nick, and good afternoon, everyone. Earlier today, if you were at the Brookfield Asset Management session, you heard about our real estate asset management franchise. This afternoon, I'm going to focus on the real estate that we own directly on Brookfield Corporation's balance sheet. And then really, the difference between the strategy with these assets versus our funds, is the funds, mostly exist within closed-end fund strategies, where we have a defined period of time to invest that capital, put it to work, and then return it to our shareholders. What's unique about our balance sheet is this is forever capital, and as Bruce mentioned earlier, our plan is to hold these assets over very long periods of time and continue to focus on improving them, keeping them full, and making them resilient for the future.
The beauty of that is, we don't need to focus overly on prices on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Prices are only relevant when we're ready to realize on some of these assets. So as a result, a lot of my focus today is going to be on fundamentals and what's happening, because the press loves to simplify things, and the simple story today focuses on a broad swath of real estate. But what we're seeing on the ground and within our operations is the widest divergence we have ever seen between the performance of high-quality real estate and the rest of the market. So as we sit today, our portfolio, which is comprised primarily of very high quality, in fact, we think the premier portfolio of core real estate that's ever been assembled, is meaningfully outperforming the market.
I'm going to walk through what that means and give you a few examples of why we think that's happening. Within the portfolio, we have a number of opportunities to put new capital to work at very attractive rates of return. And because of the size and strength of our balance sheet and the liquidity from all of our other businesses, we've been able to withstand what we think is the most volatile debt capital markets that we've seen in some time. So as a result, with interest rate increases largely behind us, we think going forward, we will be continuing to deliver on strong cash returns as we have for the past 35 years. In summary, our real estate investments today, Nick touched on this earlier, is about $24 billion.
About 60% of that is invested in our premier core portfolio. These are the best of the best. The balance, the remaining 40%, are invested in shorter duration, development, and redevelopment assets. Our premier core portfolio is just a handful of assets, and so we're going to spend a little bit of time understanding what is in that $14 billion of value and what, what really underpins it, because it's easy to do. It's just a few assets, 29 of them, in fact. The performance of these 29 assets has been exceptional over the last 12 months in the face of a challenging real estate market. Despite what you've read about, net operating income in this portfolio is up 6% year-over-year. The portfolio is virtually full, and it's leased on a long-term basis, and we're conservatively financed.
And this is a really important part of our investment strategy with real estate, is this is a cyclical business. These are illiquid assets. We need to be able to hold them through good times and bad. And so what that means is our financing strategy on each of these assets is asset-level, non-recourse financing on each individual property. It's extremely labor intensive. It's a lot of work putting together and managing a debt book like that. It's a little bit more expensive than doing everything on a consolidated basis, but when we go through periods of time like we're experiencing right now, that's when the insurance pays for itself. So how did we grow NOI by 6% in such a challenging market? It's really a combination of three things. Number one has been strong occupancy gains.
As the portfolio emerged from the COVID lockdowns, we've seen occupancy within our assets return to more normal levels, which has provided quite a boost. Additionally, even though they're leased on a long-term basis, our leases include contractual rent escalators. Sometimes they're fixed annual uplifts, oftentimes they're tied to their, our tenant sales, which have been skyrocketing over the past couple of years. In addition, on average, our leases are about 12% below market, and so there's a natural mark to market as leases renew on an annual basis. As I mentioned earlier, our debt maturity profile is a well-laddered portfolio. We have about 15% of our debt coming due in any given year, and so what that means is there's no wall of maturities. So when we do go through periods of time where liquidity is more constrained, it's, it's manageable.
More than 50% of our debt doesn't even come due for the next five years. Half of our core portfolio is invested in our core office and mixed-use developments. These are ten iconic assets in five cities around the world, fully occupied on a long-term basis. You've been to probably most of these assets, so within the portfolio, a significant portion of the capital is invested in office. And what's happening in office markets today is, as I mentioned earlier, a wide divergence between high quality, unique, fit-for-purpose office and older commodity office space. And so you can see from this page, this portfolio is fully occupied. All of our tenants are paying their rent, and we have a long-term lease in place.
Importantly, though, along with the office that's in this portfolio, is the ancillary retail and residential that sits alongside of it. And this is really the differentiator for this type of office product and where we're seeing tenant demand today. So a great example of where these three things all work together is the building that we're in today, Brookfield Place, here in Lower Manhattan. Over the last, if you go back 20 years ago, this was primarily a financial services office complex. On Friday at 5:00 P.M., we locked the doors, and we reopened things on first thing on Monday morning. Over the last 20 years, as the residential population has boomed in Lower Manhattan, we've gone through a huge transformation of the complex and really reimagined what it could be.
Changing the type of retail tenants that were down and turning this really into a seven-day-a-week tourist destination with some of the highest productivity retail in all of New York City. As we sit today, our tenant sales for our luxury retails, retailers are up over 30%, but more importantly, the office is at the highest occupancy that it has ever been at. Over the last 18 months, we have completed 1.1 million sq ft of leasing here in the complex at the highest rents we've ever achieved. In-place rents at Brookfield Place are 20% above the surrounding market.
There is a huge difference between office product like this that is fit for purpose, that's desirable, that companies want to locate in, and the traditional commodity office space that is becoming functionally obsolete, and that we're reading so much about in the press. Another great example of this is Canary Wharf in the City of London. Just like Brookfield Place, when it was originally conceived of about 30 years ago, it was focused on financial services tenants. At the time, it was a pioneering location, east of on the east side of London, with limited transportation.
Over the past 30 years, though, that has changed with the development of the Jubilee line, first in 1999, and then most recently, the completion of the Elizabeth line, which now provides direct connectivity to Heathrow Airport on a single train in 40 minutes, as well as London City Airport in just 15 minutes to the east. This is now the most transportation-linked office complex in the City of London and has had a dramatic change on the area, not only within the Canary Wharf complex, but in the immediate surrounding area, where literally tens of thousands of new apartments and residences have been built over the last 20 years. So going back through the evolution of Canary Wharf, when it was originally conceived of, about 60% of the value was in financial services office tenants.
There was some retail that was really there to support the office, the office users, but the precinct itself was largely a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five destination. Over the last 15 years, though, we've introduced, residential apartments as well as hospitality offerings and fundamentally transformed the type of office tenants that are located there, even, even within the office buildings. And so today, less than half of the value of the estate is actually with financial services office tenants. And our plans for the future will be even more dramatic, as we now have established Canary Wharf as a life sciences and tech and innovation hub, within the City of London. And so our plans there, in addition to the existing assets, is a significant build-out, continuing on residential as well as lab space.
Now, obviously, all of you walked through Canary, through Brookfield Place before you got here this morning, and you can see the level of activity here. You've probably read something about Canary Wharf over the last couple of years, but many of you may not have been there for some time. So we took the liberty of putting together a little video just to update you on what's been happening there and in talking a little bit about the future. So we're gonna turn to that video now.
It's not like anywhere else that I've seen in London. The new transport links make it really accessible. There's a cluster around here, exactly the kinds of organizations that we need to collaborate with. To be in a location that is both a tech hub and also Canary Wharf being the a life sciences hub as well makes perfect sense. It definitely goes beyond just an environment that I want to work with. It's actually very family-friendly as well. Canary Wharf's got an amazing history. When Canary Wharf started, there was really no Class A office space in the City of London. Canary Wharf were pioneers and had mostly all 100% financial firms who came here to take advantage of this amazing estate and infrastructure.
I like to say that we're on Canary Wharf 3.0. 1.0 started when the estate was created with the initial transportation links. 2.0 actually started 8 years ago, when Canary Wharf Group acquired Wood Wharf, the east portion of the estate, and then they started developing residential, and that's the first time that you could actually live on the estate. Three years ago, we started on Canary Wharf 3.0, with places where you can live, work, and play. It's got a host of amenities from open water swimming to playing on padel, to go-karts, to GoBoats, and now we've created a great partnership with the Eden Project to bring biodiversity to the estate. We have 1 million sq ft of retail, less than 3% vacancy.
Now, in the last two years, with the opening of the Elizabeth line, we really have become a true destination. We've got a growing residential population, over 3,500 residents, and we expect that to double in the next few years. As Canary Wharf Group did in creating a cluster in the financial services industry, we're doing the same in the health life sciences industry. We've just recently added 40,000 sq ft, London's largest wet lab space. Last year, we had over 54 million people visiting Canary Wharf, and that goes to the vitality area because we've got office workers here, we've got residents here, and now we've got people that come here as a destination.
It's also affected not only in our traffic, which is the highest ever, but in our sales, where we're now exceeding 2019 levels on a same-store basis. What excites me about Canary Wharf is that we were pioneers 35 years ago in building this great estate, but we're now pioneers again in creating that true mixed-use neighborhood. A lot of people talk about a 15-minute city. It exists here now, and the beauty of Canary Wharf Group is that we manage this entire estate, and so we've got the ability to curate this over time and continue to add to make it a vibrant neighborhood.
So the other half of our core portfolio is comprised of 19 best-in-class shopping centers here in the United States. And for the past couple of investor days, I've spent most of my time answering your questions about this portfolio. As we sit today, this is the second most important topic of the day. But a lot of the things that we've been talking about over the last decade with retail and the changes that are happening in that industry have now come to fruition. The sector's gone through a pretty remarkable change, where older, more obsolete product has become functionally obsolete and has been taken offline. But as always happens with consolidations, is the survivors emerge from that stronger than ever.
One of the things that all of our retailers realized in coming through the pandemic was the importance of bricks-and-mortar retail. It allows them to interact with their customers and serves as a, really, as a marketing hub where they can drive higher margins. So, since emerging from COVID, we've seen a dramatic turnaround in the demand for this very high-quality shopping space. As we sit today, net operating income this year is up 10% year-over-year, which rivals most other and most of the highest performing real estate sectors. The portfolio is conservatively financed, but importantly, we're full. It's 97% occupied, and most of these centers have waiting lists of tenants waiting to get in. In 2022, for the first time in 10 years, there were more new store openings in the United States than there were closings.
And many of those openings are from digitally native brands, so brands that were conceived of online, but then are now opening bricks-and-mortar stores in order to have a closer connectivity with their tenants. The 19 assets, like our office portfolio, is very easy to understand. These are all very large-scale assets, you know, many of them in excess of $1 billion, and are some of the highest productivity retail centers anywhere in the world, with average tenant sales over $1,100 a sq ft. Those sales are up about 20% from pre-pandemic. So, to bring some of that to life, though, and talk a little bit about more specifically what is happening or what we are seeing on the ground.
Tysons Galleria in McLean, Virginia, is the highest productivity shopping center in the D.C. metro area. Sales there are over $2,000 a sq ft and are up 76% from 2019. That's not a typo. They're up 76% because we've recently completed a redevelopment of a low productivity Macy's store. So prior to our redevelopment, the Macy's store did about $30 million a year in annual sales. We bought it back for a modest amount and redeveloped it into a luxury mall within the mall, and the tenants that now occupy that space do over $110 million of sales on an annual basis. More importantly, though, sales in the overall mall are up 45% since that redevelopment was completed, and our rents are up 5%.
When you own great real estate like this, just because the Macy's store is low productivity, doesn't mean you're out of options. There's always opportunities to put capital to work at very high rates of return and continue to make these resilient. Not an easy project to execute, both from a delivery and from a, you know, time and budgeting. But more importantly, when we go to our tenants with an imagination of something like this, it's important that we understand their business and that they trust Brookfield, and they know who we're working with. Similarly, when we develop a project like Manhattan West, we have tenants who are signing up to 20-year leases with us on buildings that don't even exist yet today.
And so the closeness of that relationship and the scale of our platform and the depth of those tenant relationships are really one of the things that sets our platform apart. And we have a video coming up now where some of our tenants talk about the importance of that relationship and what they've seen. So we'll go to the video now.
Overall shopping that is done in the United States, e-commerce is only about 15% of the total annual revenue, so that leaves 85% that happens still in stores. This is the window to the soul of the brands. There is no better connection point than the physical stores. When you get the consumer through your doors to interact with your staff, see your product, have a brand experience within the stores, we found that to be the key piece to loyalty. People really like that face-to-face connection and that face-to-face relationship. That's what retail stores bring to them. Doing business with Brookfield feels like the old days of handshake deals. They look you in the eye, and they tell you what's going to happen and how it's going to work, and they follow through with their word.
They care about their tenant, and they want to know the tenant more, which leads to a success for both parties. We know that when we enter into a lease agreement with Brookfield, that they're going to reinvest in their centers, that they're going to continue to evolve the consumer experience. The activations, fashion shows, concert, their ability to capture that consumer and evolve what the consumer needs is key. We believe strongly that the primary place of work is in the office. Having a state-of-the-art office building is a recruitment and retention tool, plus a whole lot more than that. Within a hybrid world, our workplaces have an increased responsibility to support diverse work needs and to purposely drive those moments that matter.
Even before the pandemic, most of our colleagues were not in the office 100% of the time, but now it certainly becomes much more critical to have spaces that make it really productive when you do come into the office. It's critical to have a modern office building that addresses what today's users are after: health and wellness, sustainability, hospitality, the ability to connect and collaborate. Those things are so important today. We chose Manhattan West because it really met all of our criteria. It provided us a state-of-the-art building. It reduces the commute for most of our colleagues. It gives us access to transportation very easily. The landlord and their operational strategy is just as important as the physical site itself.
I found the team at Brookfield to be focused on finding mutually beneficial solutions that will result in a great workplace for our staff and a really activated building. We seek out really reputable and professional landlords, especially when we have long-term relationships like we do with this 20-year lease. Brookfield is one of the most respected landlords, not only in the country, but really globally, and we're excited to have that partnership.
Our development business has about half the equity that our core portfolio does, but nearly 10 times the number of assets. The assets in this portfolio tend to be smaller and shorter duration in their business plan execution, which allows us to manage a whole range of risks, from leasing to development risk and even construction risk in some cases. A recently completed project within this portfolio is One The Esplanade in Perth, Australia. This is a brand-new state-of-the-art office building, 100% leased to one of the largest energy companies in the world. We acquired the site about five years ago for a very modest amount of capital, took it through a design and planning phase, signed a long-term lease, and sold a 75% interest in the building before we even put the first shovel in the ground.
And so where we sit today, we've already made over 5x our original investment in the project, and we continue to own 25% of this best-in-class office building for free. There are also port assets within the portfolio, and we've talked about it, the importance in the past of redeveloping underproducing retail into other forms of real estate, income-producing real estate. A great example of that is Alderwood in Washington State, where we redeveloped a vacant Sears box into 328 market rate apartments and 80,000 sq ft of inline shopping space. Not only are the apartments and that new retail space completely occupied, but rents in the rest of the mall are now up 20% as a result of this redevelopment. And we're not done yet.
We think there are additional opportunities to continue to put more capital to work and build out a second phase of residential density on the site. For a long time now, we've owned a residential development business as part of our broader commercial one. In fact, we've been in this business for about 30 years. It generates very steady cash flow on an annual basis, about a 15% return on our equity. You know, it's really focused here in the U.S. and in Canada. This year, with interest rates, housing has clearly been in focus, but with a relatively full employment picture and a resilient underlying economy, sales have been stronger than normal, and so we're generating higher than average cash flows in this business.
So to bring all that together, as I mentioned, we have about $24 billion of capital invested. Our plan is to hold that core portfolio and a significant investment in it for a very long period of time as those returns compound. From time to time, when we see opportunities to monetize at higher prices, we will look to bring in partners. But five years from now, when we're meeting here, we will still have a significant investment in that core portfolio of assets. Our transitional and development business is naturally liquidating as we pursue a buy, fix, and sell strategy. And the plan going forward is to dedicate capital for those types of new investments in the future through our asset management franchise.
And so over time, the capital that we have invested directly on the balance sheet in these types of opportunities will diminish. And within the residential business, we see an opportunity to leverage our asset management franchise to develop this into a more asset-light business strategy as well. And so all told, five years from now, we expect to have a modestly lower amount of capital, earning a higher rate of return invested in real estate. So in conclusion, and to bring all that together, despite what you may be reading in the papers today, the fundamentals and tenant demand for high quality real estate with a proven manager like ourselves continue to be in high demand. We have high occupancy within these assets and tenants waiting to come in.
No question, short-term interest rates and changes in short-term interest rates over the last 12 months have had an impact on short-term cash flows, but the long-term value of these assets is unaffected. We have a well-laddered debt maturity profile and a bulletproof balance sheet. That means we can continue to withstand any kind of market volatility that we may see. With rate increases now largely behind us, we see the opportunity to continue to generate compelling returns on our real estate for Brookfield. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Sachin to talk about the insurance business. But before we do that, we have a short video for you to watch.
Insurance is the business of making promises and keeping promises, which is perfectly aligned with the Brookfield culture and the Brookfield approach to investing. There's a $7 trillion deficit today in retirement accounts in the U.S. alone. The demand, in particular in life and annuities, for both protection and income as populations age, is greater than it's ever been, and it's expected to continue to grow. Given the large structural retirement deficit that sits in front of us, we think there is no better time than today to scale this business. Brookfield has a decades-long history of investing for insurance companies. We have over 200 companies that invest directly into Brookfield funds and investment opportunities.
With our investment capabilities, our access to capital, our risk management, and long history of being a prudent operator of businesses, we're really well positioned to help deliver compelling retirement products. We have access to a wide breadth of alternative investments. The long-dated nature of insurance policies are well aligned with the long-dated investments that Brookfield is able to make in private credit, real estate, and infrastructure. There's a significant opportunity in the US retirement space, and particularly, for the middle-income, consumer, who are trying to prepare and save for retirement. And we see this as a really compelling market where we're able to issue, policies through our operating companies like American National. At American National, we have four primary businesses.
The first one is our life insurance business. The second is our annuity business. Our third business is our property and casualty. And then fourth is our newest business, and that's the pension risk transfer business. We knew it was important to build a platform across the U.S. American National fit that bill. Very strong culture, 100-year operating history, 4,000 people, and a really long track record of providing great service to policyholders, but also prudently growing return on equity. The Brookfield acquisition is a new beginning, and we have the unique opportunity to leverage not only the asset management strengths, but we also have some highly capable, highly competent, highly committed, and strategic partners now.
With our recent acquisitions, we have built out the operational capabilities that we need in order to propel the business forward over the next two-three decades. To date, we've invested almost $10 billion into this insurance initiative, underpinning the $100 billion of assets that we have. The business today generates an 18%-20% return on equity, and we will continue to expand our capabilities here in the U.S., but also internationally into the U.K., Europe, and the Asian markets. We have a very credible and clear path to over $2 billion of distributable earnings being generated for Brookfield out of the insurance business. We think the prospects for this business are better today than they've ever been.
Okay, thank you, everyone. I'm gonna spend the next 20 minutes or so on the Insurance Solutions business at Brookfield that a number of folks have alluded to. I'm gonna first summarize three things. I'd say one is what have we achieved to date? Because we've talked about this for several years, and the business that we have today is substantial in its own right, highly cash generative, and is set up really well for the future. So I'm gonna spend a little bit of time on what we have today, how we've built it, and what we prioritize.
I'm gonna spend another part of this presentation on how we think we can grow that business and really scale it up from what is substantial today, and ultimately, why we think this could deliver tremendous value to Brookfield over a very long period of time. And for those of you who've been with us for decades, you know that we are capital compounders at our core, with a focus on value investing and operational expertise, and this business brings all of those features together. First, what is it that makes this business compelling, in particular, in the area we focus? We focus largely on annuities . These are simple, long-dated liabilities to help individuals, families, mid-market Americans save for retirement.
These are retirement products in the form of fixed annuities. And what is it about that environment, or that cohort of the population, that makes this business so compelling? It starts with the macro. There is, as I alluded to in the video, a very large structural deficit for the U.S. population. For the category of people that today are between 45 and, I'd say, 60 years old, that group is under-saved, under-invested, and most importantly, it is getting older, it's living longer, and therefore, there is a large structural deficit. And the last few years of rising rates and an inflationary backdrop has only made the problem worse. Inflation has eaten away at people's savings. And that's really the problem that we are focused on solving.
And what does it take to solve that problem? It takes strong allocation of capital and investment expertise, a focus on risk management, and being able to deliver very long-term returns. And all of those are features of Brookfield today. As I said, the business is highly cash generative. It's a yield plus growth business, which looks a lot and feels a lot like many of our businesses. We get very strong near-term yields, and I'll talk about distributable earnings. We call distributable earnings as a proxy for free cash flow, and it generates a lot of capital year-over-year. Before I get into the details, let's start with what we have today. So you've seen me up here the last few years, and really, we had large numbers and really concepts that we were talking about.
But today, the business has $100 billion of assets that we have working for us, underpinning the liability obligations we have. And the growth in the business has largely been through acquisitions. We've acquired a few platforms where we could issue annuities out of, and it's really a US-dominated business for the most part. We have a small Canadian business. Most importantly, when we started this a few years ago, we very quickly understood that what we were trying to build was a business that was simple, simple annuities that had very straightforward liability profile and a very predictable obligation stream. We wanted something that was repeatable so that we could grow it, and we could control our own growth.
And if we could get simple liabilities and invest well, we could build a repeatable business. We could create something that was highly valuable for Brookfield. Simple, repeatable, highly valuable. Those are the three things that we set out to achieve. I'm going to start with the liabilities. I just explained their simplicity, but in at their basic form, families, folks who are in that sort of 45-60-year range, come to us and say, "You know, I have $100,000. This is my savings that I want to protect for retirement. Can you give me an income stream for a period of time?" That's what a fixed annuity is. If you're from Canada, you would know it as a GIC-type product.
In the US, they're called multi-year guarantee products. We take those, and we ultimately provide a promise to pay out over a long period of time, on average, 10 years. Our average cost of payment today is just under 4%, and the average account size is under $100,000, and that's on $100 billion. So if you think about it, we have many, many policyholders providing small amounts of money to us, and we're giving them a stable, fixed income stream with a cost, say, of about 4%. Our business is underpinned by a very low-risk approach to both investing and also capital management. We run a BBB+ investment portfolio. Our operating businesses are rated A or A-. American National has an A rating. American Equity has an A- rating.
Both are excellent ratings, and both give us a license to operate in all the communities that we serve as customers. And we sit on $30 billion of liquidity. That's cash and short-dated securities, that we can use in the event that we need to come up with liquidity for both opportunistic reasons, but also to manage risk. And all of this is a strong benefit to our policyholders. On the asset side, our mantra for the last three years has been stay short and stay liquid. You know, when we started this out, whether it was myself or Bruce or Nick, one of us had talked about the fact that why did we go into insurance at that point in time?
It was because rates were at an all-time low, and we felt that there was an asymmetric potential return profile, that we could use our investment expertise to invest and earn a spread, but as rates rose, we could pick up value. In doing so, we also made sure that tactically, we kept our asset portfolio very short and very liquid. As I explained, the liability side, simple liabilities with a long duration and very sticky, the asset side is the exact opposite. We're running a very short asset book, four-year average duration. What does that mean in practice? We have these 4% liabilities that are very sticky. You can't pull them out. This is not a bank where you have depositors who can walk away with the money.
And our assets are turning over very quickly and capturing rising rates. It means that the business that we have right now will pick up over the next several years, meaningful value accretion and cash flow generation, capturing just the current rate environment. We're not betting on rates going up from here. We're actually just picking up the current rate environment on assets that are maturing, largely credit-type investment opportunities that are maturing, and then reinvesting into the current rate environment. So we've set the business up, I'd say, thankfully, at the perfect time. And like all things in life, some of this is execution, and some of this is luck.
We happened to pick the right time to get into this sector, we were smart about positioning the portfolio short, and we've picked a liability set that is simple, repeatable, and can create a lot of value for us. What makes the current environment very compelling? First, rates have normalized today. The 10-year treasury is at 4.30, which, you know, if you've been doing this a long time, 2% GDP, 2% inflation, a small term premium, it kind of all hangs together. It's no longer an environment that doesn't make sense. Credit has become a very, very important asset class. Connor and Bahir, and Milwood touched on credit today as an important asset class in the asset manager space, and we have unparalleled credit capabilities across Brookfield and Oaktree.
And of course, banks have really pulled back from direct lending, in part because of their own capital management issues. And what that means is, for a franchise like ourselves, where we have long-dated infrastructure investments, long-dated real estate investments, and a large-scale credit franchise, we have access to proprietary deal flow that allows us to take that $100 billion of assets that's rolling over over the next four years and ultimately invest in a much more compelling rate environment to drive outsized returns. I've said this for the last few years, and this number probably is understated to some degree, but we are seeing over $50 billion of proprietary credit opportunities inside Brookfield coming to our insurance business every year.
The vast majority of those, we don't invest in, but it gives us an incredible amount of deal flow to look at that just comes to us and allows us a tremendous advantage in building out outsized returns, as we build this business out. We've also been growing our credit franchise in partnership with Oaktree, in partnership with all of our funds across Brookfield, and having the ability to have a large pool of float or insurance assets that can ultimately be flexible, long-dated, can be structured to provide either lower risk and lower returns or higher risk and higher returns. All of that allows us to get very nuanced in how we build out credit and allows us to move into various different credit asset classes.
You can see that from even from five years ago, where we maybe were involved in less things, our credit capabilities as an organization have really grown meaningfully. And so what all of this means is that the business we have today, at $100 billion, with 4% liabilities and a target of about 6% returns, which is not a heroic assumption on the investment side, will generate $2 billion of distributable earnings. Simple liabilities, very repeatable business, because we own the operating platform, and I'm gonna get into that in the next section. And ultimately, an investment franchise in Brookfield Asset Management that is a global leader and gives us very strong confidence that we can deliver the investment returns we need to and $2 billion of distributable earnings.
So I'll pause there, and I'll move to the next section in terms of what is it that we are focused on in terms of growth. All of this, by the way, has been achieved today, and now we're gonna talk about the growth plan. I'll start with the operating platform. As I alluded to, when we set out to build a business a few years ago, it was obvious to us that if we were just gonna focus on reinsurance or pensions, our business would be episodic, highly competitive, and we would be forced to live with the products that insurance companies created and didn't want. When insurance companies come to the market and do reinsurance, they're often getting rid of things that maybe they don't want anymore.
We didn't want to live and die by that sort of episodic nature. What we wanted was to be able to write our own annuities, so we knew exactly what we were signing up for, very simple liabilities. We wanted to build a utility-like business, where you had predictable liabilities, a target spread that you can count on because you had the investment capabilities, and therefore, you could have very stable earnings profile and a perpetual business. To do that, we need an operating platform. We acquired American National, had a 100-year history, or has a 100-year history as a prudent operator. American Equity, one of the leaders in the fixed annuity space in the United States.
We have 1,000 distribution agents in-house that work for us, that sell our products to markets across the United States, best-in-class distribution capabilities, technology, client service. All of these things will set us up to write our own annuities and to ultimately distribute products into the US. And this is not theoretical. This is actually happening today. When we acquired American National, the largest single year of annuity writing they had ever completed in their history was close to $1 billion. I think it was $1 billion, $1 billion and 1. This year, in our first year of ownership, we will write $5 billion of annuities out of American National. And very simple, seven- and 10-year products with a fixed interest rate.
That's in year one, and we'll do $5 billion. American Equity, and we don't own American Equity yet, we should close hopefully by the end of the year, we'll do $6-$7 billion this year. Those two businesses combined sell a very similar product in different markets that don't compete with each other and that are highly complementary in terms of how you service them. And those two businesses combined today do $10-$12 billion of annuity writing per year. With the technology backbone that we have at American Equity, the sales force we have at American National, the capital we bring as Brookfield, and our investment capabilities, we think we can take that $10 billion-$12 billion and grow it to $20 billion per year.
$20 billion per year puts us into the top three in the United States, with the likes of Apollo and a few of the other large insurers in the US. It puts us in a scale and a category where we can grow this business very meaningfully from here. From the $100 billion that we have today, if we're doing $20 billion a year, you can very quickly see the math adds up to doubling this franchise again over a short period of time. Just a little bit of math around issuing $20 billion a year because it sounds like a very large number. If you're writing $20 billion of annuities per year, you typically have to put up $2 billion of capital.
Most interesting for us is that not only the operating platform can deliver $20 billion per year with what we have in our two existing platforms, but the $2 billion a year is equivalent to the distributable operating earnings I just talked about. $100 billion of assets earning a 2% spread generate $2 billion. We could put that $2 billion back in and write $20 billion of policies. The reason this is important, and maybe the takeaway from this, is it allows us to grow on a fully self-funded basis. We have now positioned the business, after three years, to further scale up, to further double, but to do so on a self-funded basis, and that really allows us to have control of significant levers.
We can ramp up and ramp down the business. We can write more or less annuities. We don't have to do $20 billion. We might decide to do $15 billion or $10 billion, but ultimately, we've kept the levers in our control, and most importantly, we write the annuities ourselves, so we can have, we can establish the rates we wanna give out, we can establish the duration that we wanna provide, and we can keep the business simple and predictable. Of course, we're still in the pension business. We're still in the large block reinsurance business. Those are more opportunistic in nature. The pension business is quite exciting.
There is circa $1 trillion of pension, defined benefit pension plans sitting on corporate balance sheets in the United States and Europe still today, in spite of a very large pension reinsurance market that exists. That $1 trillion, ours and many experts in the field of view, is over the next 15 years, is gonna migrate to the reinsurance market, and we're building a business to capture a lion's share of that. So pensions will be an important area of growth, very similar to annuities, where you have fixed payments out to pensioners. Then large block reinsurance is episodic, and ultimately will be more of an opportunistic area of focus for us.
So as you can see from the business we have today, the operating platform, our ability to write annuities, we think there is a very compelling path to, one, really growing the value of the business we have today from, what is about $1.2 billion of pro forma distributable earnings once we close on AEL, just to, just to put the numbers back to some of the things that Nick had, to $2 billion, and that's really about ramping that asset portfolio. So if you look at that first chart, short assets, highly liquid, we're gonna rotate that over. That should add about, that should add to the $1.2 billion and get us to $2 billion of distributable earnings. And we think we'll get there through the next three years. Step two, we're gonna continue to write annuities.
We're doing about $10 billion-$12 billion today, pro forma. We're gonna take our distributable earnings and continue to write and grow it to about $20 billion a year, which will get us, by the end of the decade, to about $400 billion in assets and four billion in DE per year. And obviously, reinsurance, pensions, all of that's additive and opportunistic. And as we grow into those markets, we think there's a very credible path to having $200 billion-$250 billion of assets working for us and $4 billion-$5 billion of distributable earnings by the end of the decade. And if we get there, with a simple underlying product, a pan-U.S. operation, we will plan to grow into the U.K., Europe, maybe Asia, but we will see how we can execute that strategy.
If we can do all of that, this becomes a very meaningful business for Brookfield. We know today we can deliver $2 billion. From $2 billion-$5 billion, require execution and growth of the platform. And what it means is this business will have utility-like cash flows for the top of the house. It will provide a very long-term, stable stream of earnings and a compounding of capital, and we think there is tremendous value in that. How do we think about value? Let's start with what are some of the things that people look for when they're ascribing value to a business. Stable, utility-like, recurring streams of investment income. Why should we win in that space? Because we've got a great investment franchise in Brookfield Asset Management.
Our credit capabilities, our real estate and infrastructure capabilities, give us tremendous proprietary deal flow coming in and should allow us to earn an excess return over our competitors and peers. Very predictable, stable, long duration, and sticky, low-cost liabilities. It's really important. This is a very mature market. We're not making this up, and we're gonna be one of the leaders in this market of fixed annuities in the U.S. Perpetual capital. We've put all of our own dollars into this. It's Brookfield capital that's gone in to build this initiative, and we've set the business up to be self-funding. So we're not reliant on raising capital. We're not reliant on having to return capital to limited partners or other investors, and obviously, self-funded growth.
Th ese features make this business highly valuable, and we think support a very meaningful value to the business. Prior to announcing the AEL and the Argo deals, we had about $8 billion in our public books ascribed to this business. I'd say today, if you just take the business we have that generates about $600 million-$700 million per year, I think it was 634 that Nick referenced in the last twelve months, plus what American Equity and Argo earn, our run rate earnings are about $1.2 billion without us having touched the investment portfolio. So that's not including us ramping up the investment side of the house. $1.2 billion at a 15x multiple, we think the going in valuation grows to about $18 billion.
As I said, the asset duration pro forma is about four years. We will turn that over very quickly. We'll capture the current rate environment, and our investment capabilities will allow us to outearn our peers. We think that the business can ramp up to about $2 billion of distributable earnings in the near term. If you applied that same multiple to the $2 billion of earnings, this is a $30 billion business for Brookfield Corporation. Obviously, if you think that we've been able to execute for the last three years, building a platform, being able to write policies and growing the franchise, and that we have a chance to win in this space because of the things I just laid out, our investment capabilities, our prudent risk management, our operating platform.
We think there's a credible path to growing DE to that $5 billion range. At the end, if you apply that 12 times multiple, because you start to have a very mature business at that point, this is a $60 billion business. So I know the numbers are large, and we're showing you simple math, but this is the earnings power of this business and the capital compounding of this business can really set up Brookfield to the essence of what Bruce talked about at the outset. What are we at the end of the day? We're a wealth manager. We have investment people around the world.
We look after institutional capital, we look after retail capital, we look after sovereign capital, and ultimately, we're in the business of creating wealth and compounding capital over a very long period of time for all constituencies, and this business just fits into that very nicely. So maybe to summarize, it has been only a few years, but we've got a business today that has $100 billion of assets and a clear path to $2 billion of distributable earnings that are stable, utility-like, ongoing streams of cash flow. Tactically, we've been smart about setting up the asset portfolio to be very short and to focus on very sticky, long-duration liabilities that have an embedded cost advantage of less than 4% today.
We have an operating platform, and the platform is very valuable. As I said, 1,000 agents, 4,000 people, a strong technology backbone, and a business that, without any help from us, can do $10 billion-$12 billion of annuity writing per year, and with a little bit of work and effort and some capital, can get up to $20 billion per year. We think with all of that, this business should drive significant cash flows for the corporation, meaningful growth for the next decade, and ultimately could create a lot of value for Brookfield shareholders. With that, we'll open it up for questions for Bruce, Nick, myself, Brian, for anyone.
I know I'm excited. It's late in the day. You've been here a long time. If you've been here the whole day, thank you for enduring. I'm tired. But we'll take a few questions if there are any from the crowd here. There's one over there. If we get a mic, and then we'll break for drinks, which I think are downstairs.
Okay, Andrew Kuske, Credit Suisse. I'll keep it brief because the drinks are on their way. Maybe if you just reconcile the whole notion of a wide divergence of returns in real estate, which usually means there's opportunity, and you're contrarian investors on top of that. With the AUM in that business growing, but the amount of balance sheet capital you have at the top of the house actually declining, but you're high grading it. I know there's a bunch of concepts, but it ties into some of the comments that Brian made earlier, and then also your bullishness on the Q2 call around real estate.
Yeah, look, I would just say the following. We have two pools of capital for real estate investing. Pool number one is our balance sheet, and that's what Brian talked about here. Pool number two is we have a vast investment franchise business in our asset manager, and that's the money we're putting to work. So the opportunity is not that we're not interested in real estate opportunities. This is gonna be an excellent vintage for this, but our money from the balance sheet will go through the funds.
And really, everything we're doing today with our assets over time , we ended up with those assets on the balance sheet, and we will keep some of those amazing assets, as Brian talked about, because we have these incredible things you should never let go, and you should compound with them forever, and many we have been. We've had them for 15, 20, 30, 35 years. But most of our investing will go through the funds, and that's this vintage fund that we're out raising right now will be an excellent vintage, just with the opportunity set, as you mentioned. Are there any other questions? There's a question over there.
Hi, it's Cherily n Radbourne from TD Cowen again. I think at one point in time, the company was contemplating possibly spinning off the insurance business, you know, kind of as a standalone entity and bringing in some third-party capital. Does that still make sense? And is that something that you can do while still preserving the strategic benefits to the overall franchise?
So, just for everyone's benefit, the reinsurance business is in a separate company today, but it's a paired share with Brookfield Corporation. So the shares are linked together, and both of them should trade the same, and they're one is switchable into the other. So, that just for background for everyone on that. The question really relates to, would we ever separate that business out entirely? And look, it's possible someday that we do. We have no intention of doing it today because firstly, we have lots of capital. If I believe Sachin's numbers, it is an awesome business to put money into, so, we're very happy to have our capital in there and keep growing it.
The point when we might do it, which will complicate things, 'cause today we can use our franchise, and there's no conflicts with our, with our money, 'cause it's 100%-- the insurance capital is 100% our money, so there are no conflicts. If we bring clients in, then we're having to adjudicate conflicts every day with, things we're putting into that insurance pool. So it's not that we can't do it, it's just it would either be someday when the business is so big that we, that we don't want to have it, dwarfing, Brookfield Corporation, or that, we need capital to be able to do it, of what we're accomplishing. We'll have to figure out at that time.
Mike Cyprys, of Morgan Stanley. Just a question on capital allocation. I think you mentioned about $40 billion of cash flow generation over the next five years that you, you might be able to generate. Just curious how you're thinking about allocating that capital, that $40 billion, over the next five years between funds, direct investments, but also M&A, and where you think M&A could be most additive to Brookfield Corporation today.
Look, I think the point I made in my slides and were made a couple other times, the future of a business is about the reinvestment of the cash flows that you spit out of the company. And if you make poor allocations of capital, often businesses deteriorate. And if you make good allocations of capital, they do well. The good news is, we have no real major uses of cash at Brookfield Corporation. Therefore, enormous amounts of cash comes in. We're freely able to use it. We have very little obligations to take care of. We have very little debt in the corporation, which gives us enormous amounts of flexibility. And I would just say, every day, we think about where do we allocate that cash flow to the best use of our shareholders.
Sometimes it's buying back shares, as Nick noted in his slides. I think we bought $250 million of shares earlier this year, $700 million in the last twelve months. That's a one-time hit, and it's really good, and we should try to buy back as much stock as we possibly can. Although we always like to keep excess cash around because creating businesses, like creating the insurance business Sachin just showed you, or like creating the transition franchise that we did two years ago or two and a half years ago, these are businesses today that are worth $10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion, $40 billion. And if we wouldn't have had capital around to be able to have the confidence to start them, we wouldn't have those values today.
So I'd just say we have no defined the real answer is, we have no defined uses of cash. We will put it where we best think prudent. If I had to guess, it's across all those things. We're, we try to diversify our cash, and some will go in to support our listed affiliates, some will go in to assist investments in the funds that our Brookfield Asset Management is launching. Some will go into new strategic business, some will get, will repurchase securities of BN and, and, and our other affiliates. So I think I got one more question there, and then I'm gonna cut it, and we're gonna go for drinks, and anyone online can go have a drink themselves.
Sorry about that. Can you talk about ALM at a corporate level, with rates up, interest expenses up on the balance sheet? But one thing that's interesting is the insurance business has, you know, the opposite of the real estate business in terms of long-dated liabilities and shorter assets. So I wonder if you think how you think of that, as offsets to each other or, independently? Thanks.
Thanks for the question. Nick can add to this if I mess it up. But I'm gonna say the following: When we got into the insurance business, we got into it for two reasons. Sachin mentioned one, and his—what he said was, which was right, we got into insurance because rates were low, and it was asymmetric risk. There was limited downside to rates going lower, and there was significant upside to going, going higher, and therefore, that would be good to be in insurance and having fixed liabilities. The second one was, at that point in time, we could fix interest rates, which we did as much as we possibly could, anywhere we possibly could. But in addition, by buying an insurance company, we took the we were basically fixing interest rates because we basically shorted Treasury bills.
We didn't actually short Treasury bills, we bought liabilities. And that was the second reason we got into it. Therefore, yes, we've lost some cash flows as some of our floating rate financing on our real estate portfolio went up. Therefore, you've seen some of the cash flows deteriorate on the real estate side. Remember, it stops now. Anything that was floating rate, it's already going through the books now. That doesn't go up anymore. But we've gained it all back, plus, plus, plus on the insurance side. And, and that was the trade. That was the second component of building the insurance business three years ago. So thank you for asking that question because it's, it's very relevant to the overall business.
And with that, I'm just gonna end by saying, thank you for enduring the day, if you've stayed with us. Thank you for your support of Brookfield. We appreciate it a lot. And if there's anything that we weren't clear on today, please speak to any of us this evening or anytime by phone or email. We'd be thrilled to talk to you about it. And, thank you for being with us.