The Wall Street Journal: The largest private real-estate transaction ever is a big bet on the continued explosion of e-commerce. The Blackstone Group LP is buying a network of the roughly 180-million-square-foot portfolio of U.S. industrial warehouses from Singapore-based GLP for $18.7 billion. According to people familiar with the transaction, the deal price includes about $8 billion of debt, which Blackstone plans to refinance. The portfolio includes 1,300 properties across the country, many of them near population centers. Alan Yang, GLP’s firm’s chief investment officer, said he is looking forward to expanding in the U.S., where warehouse ownership remains fragmented. Nadeem Meghji, who runs Blackstone’s U.S. real-estate investing activities, said GLP fit with the firm’s focus on “large scale, high conviction, thematic investing.” The deal will make Blackstone one of the largest owners of U.S. logistics properties, expanding its holdings by more than one-third to about 750 million square feet. Blackstone said it would divvy up the assets, putting about two-thirds into its opportunistic real-estate strategy and the remainder into its private real-estate investment trust.