A total of 24 private equity real estate funds recorded final closings during the first quarter 2015, according to Institutional Real Estate FundTracker. The quarterly volume of $31.6 billion ranks as the highest first quarter total since FundTracker began collecting data in 2007, and it’s the highest amount raised since third quarter 2008 ($36.6 billion). The funds have an average fund size of $1.32 billion. When looking at previous totals throughout the past few years, this total was more than one-third of last year’s total ($91.7 billion), 40 percent of the total fundraising volume for 2013 ($79.2 billion) and more than half of the fundraising volume for 2012 ($60.7 billion).

One of the main reasons for this spike in fundraising was the closing of The Blackstone Group’s Blackstone Real Estate Partners VIII. The opportunistic fund raised a total of $15.8 billion and the closing (in March 2015) put BREP VIII into the record books as the largest