Bert Crouch to succeed Jess Lipsey as CEO of Apollo's $123 billion nontraded REIT

Jess Lipsey intends to resign at the end of September as chief executive, president and director of Apollo Realty Income Solutions, the nontraded REIT holding $123 billion in real estate debt and assets, and Bert Crouch, who joined Apollo in 2025 to head its real estate equity platform, will take all three roles, Bisnow reported Wednesday. The handover puts the ownership side of the business into a chair that also carries a board seat, over a portfolio that was half equity assets and 43 percent credit holdings as of June 30, with the rest in securities, according to the REIT's website.

Apollo is also parting with Spencer Propper, who has resigned as portfolio manager of the $3.3 billion Apollo Diversified Real Estate Fund and will stay through March 31 to assist with the transition, AltsWire reported first. Jonathan Stachel, a principal in Apollo's real estate group, was promoted to associate portfolio manager and joins Stuart Rothstein, the group's chief operating officer, as manager of the fund portfolio.

Both exits land roughly three months after Apollo said it would shut down its publicly traded mortgage REIT, Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance. In June the firm announced plans to liquidate the diversified debt REIT trading under the ticker ARI, six months after reaching a $9 billion deal to sell most of that REIT's loan portfolio to Athene Holding, an insurance company and an Apollo subsidiary. Because Athene sits inside the group, the sale moves the loans from a listed vehicle onto an insurance balance sheet rather than out of the firm. Bisnow frames the staffing changes as following that June announcement, without tying them to a single cause.

The nontraded REIT itself is the larger and more hybrid portfolio. It targets stabilized assets across the United States, with a focus on income-generating real estate and select mortgage origination from Apollo's real estate credit platform, and it ended June with 64 percent of its portfolio in industrial and residential assets, 15 percent in data centers and the balance spread across other property types. A 15 percent data center position is a sizable tilt inside a portfolio built for stabilized income, and the composition makes plain that the vehicle taking a new chief executive pairs loan origination with owned real estate.

That dual mandate is why the appointment matters: Crouch's hands are on both halves of the book.

The interval fund has a different redemption structure. Apollo Diversified Real Estate Fund is a closed-end interval fund that buys back shares at a set rate each quarter, weighted 67 percent toward private equity investments with the rest in debt, and it held $3.3 billion in assets under management at the end of July. A fixed repurchase rate means the pace of investor exits is set by formula rather than daily demand, and the firm has set a long handover for the portfolio manager's seat: Propper stays until March 31 while Stachel works alongside Rothstein. Neither report says why the transition stretches that far.

Blackstone is rotating senior real estate leadership at the same time. Nadeem Meghji, its global head of real estate, is leaving after nearly two decades, and the role passes to David Levine, co-head of Blackstone's real estate group in the Americas, and Giovanni Cutaia, president of the real estate business.

Apollo's credit platform, meanwhile, has kept originating through the leadership changes, writing a $277 million portfolio loan on 37 industrial outdoor storage sites and funding a $74.5 million acquisition-and-redevelopment loan, arranged by Walker & Dunlop, for a Stamford office-to-condo conversion. Origination of that kind is what the nontraded REIT's mandate names as a source of product, which ties the staffing questions at both funds to the pipeline that feeds them.

Beneath the personnel changes, Apollo is deciding where its real estate risk should sit. This publication has argued that structured and insurance capital has become the lender of record in places where listed vehicles pull back, and Apollo's June wind-down and this week's departures are two halves of one decision: the loans go to an affiliated insurer, and the private funds get a new set of names at the top. Whether that is a retreat from real estate or a reallocation within it depends on what Apollo does with the capacity the liquidation frees, and neither report answers that.

Two dates frame what comes next. Lipsey's resignation takes effect at the end of September, and Propper's transition runs to March 31, with Stachel and Rothstein managing the interval fund's portfolio until then. Bisnow reported that Apollo did not respond to a request for comment on the staffing changes Wednesday morning, and the reports do not say whether Apollo Realty Income Solutions stays at $123 billion under Crouch or whether the interval fund's private equity weighting changes when the handover closes.