Today, a giant private equity firm, Blackstone, won a bidding war for Equity Office Properties (EOP), the biggest office landlord in the country. Blackstone is paying $23 billion and assuming $16 billion in debt. Blackstone is flipping at least $7 billion of the New York City office buildings starting tomorrow.

Late to the EOP acquisition game was a company called Vornado, who initiated a bidding war. By the end, Blackstone's break-up fee (an amount that EOP agreed to pay to Blackstone if Vornado did the deal) was $720 million. The fee started at $200 million, and Blackstone kept demanding (and getting) a higher break-up fee with each higher bid.

So Blackstone was truly in a win-win in the end: either do the deal and get rich on deal fees and potentially on profits, or don't do the deal and get rich on the break-up fee. Blackstone may have overpaid, but we won't know that for a few years.

Meantime, I shake my head in wonder at Jonathan Gray, Blackstone's head of real estate who led the deal...Gray has done $82 billion of real estate deals over the past few years at Blackstone. And sadly for me, Gray is 37 years old, an age I will be in a few weeks. In the past couple years, I have sold a couple office buildings on behalf of our fund totaling about $70 million. Whoopty-doo. I know how to do an office building deal (buy or sell), but it is just not rocket science or anything like it.

While Gray has been doing his multi-billion dollar deals, I have been cranking away for the past several weeks creating a 90-page document that underwrites our firm's $18 million commitment to an affordable housing joint venture with a local Mexican developer. I am presenting it to our Investment Group on Friday. Do you realize how much low-income housing you could build in Mexico with $82 billion? You can build each unit for about $15K (all-in, including land) and sell it for about $18K. So you could build about 5.5 million units...at 4 people per unit, that's housing for 22 million of Mexico's 105 million population, and would completely solve Mexico's housing crisis. And you could make a profit of about $16.5 billion as well. See how easy that was?

So...it's one thing when a 20-something crates a gazillion dollar dotcom...I can't be too jealous of Larry and Sergei because I never in a million years could create the Google search engine that they did. But when a real estate guy who basically does what I do (buy and sell real estate on behalf of institutional investors) but with a lot more zeros, (and has a lot more zeros in his compensation package than me) it's time to fly the jealously flag.

No sympathy necessary; it's just amazing to see someone at my age excel so far beyond his peers. Perhaps if I spent less time on my blog and more time with my nose to the grindstone...