Accidental hero

In his time at Blackstone, Louis-Simon Ferland found great success with his work on Logicor, something that laid the foundations for the launch of his own company. While never having set out to work in logistics, he tells CRE Media Europe why Boreal is uniquely placed to take advantage of the sector’s undoubted tailwinds

This article was published in our June 2025 magazine

Louis-Simon Ferland, founder and CEO of Boreal IM

Louis-Simon Ferland, the founder and CEO of Boreal IM, didn’t plan on becoming one of the biggest names in European logistics. In 2013, three years into his career at Blackstone, Ken Caplan, now global co-chief investment officer at the industry behemoth, called him into his office and charged him with setting up a European logistics portfolio.

“I’d love to tell you I saw how the sector would evolve, but no, not at all,” says Ferland. “I walked into Ken’s office and he explained a little bit what he wanted me to do. It was not a glamorous asset class, certainly not at the time. I wasn’t the happiest camper coming out of his office with my new assignment.”

In fact, that meeting in Caplan’s office was the making of Ferland. That then non-existant European logistics portfolio went on to become Logicor, which was sold for €12bn to CIC in 2017. Ferland oversaw its development from inception to sale. “Obviously, it’s been tremendous for me,” he says.

Now with his own logistics business - he founded Boreal in 2022 - Ferland remains wedded to the sector he once regarded as so unglamorous. So, what is the strategy for Boreal? And how does Ferland see it developing in the future?

A French Canadian, Ferland was born and raised just outside Montreal, where he went on to study law at McGill University. He practiced law for three years in New York before undertaking an MBA at Columbia, moving to Europe and starting his career in real estate at Merrill Lynch. “I did equity - a bunch of different things, mostly Eastern European focused,” he recalls. “It was interesting. It was probably a very good place to learn at the time, learning the downsides of emerging markets.”

In 2010, Ferland moved to Blackstone, which was then a very different beast. “It was definitely not what it is now,” he says. “There were around 20 people when I joined, so you did everything. I did debt, equity, all asset classes, all markets, all sectors, which was obviously a great learning ground for what I’m doing now.”

Fateful day

Then came that meeting with Caplan. While it’s safe to say that Ferland wasn’t all that enthusiastic on day one, he soon got his teeth into his new assignment. “At the time, Blackstone had only done a few deals in France and a few deals in the UK, so everything else was a bit of an unknown in the industrial space, which is tough to believe now that they’re the biggest owner in Europe by a large margin,” he says.

“I had to go to every market and figure it out. It was amazing. It was quite entrepreneurial. I had a licence to go out there, figure it, buy and build Logicor. When I started the platform, we had two employees. Over time I was there, we did 51 transactions and I was responsible for 41. By the time we sold it, Logicor had grown to 200 employees in 17 markets and was managing assets across across Europe.”

During that period, Ferland was working 80-90 hour weeks. He doesn’t regret a minute of it, but admits that he didn’t see a great deal of his friends and family. “It was an amazing opportunity, but it came at a cost,” he says. “I had my first child in 2014 and had twins in 2016, so it does take a toll on you. But look, I had a very supportive partner who had gone to business school and understood what I wanted to do. She probably was not on board for the next 20 years of her life, but she was okay with it for a time.”

A spell at TPG as one of three partners in charge of pan-European investment across multiple sectors followed but it wasn’t long before he struck upon the idea for what would become Boreal. “It was only when I came out [of Blackstone] that I realised that I knew a lot about [logistics] and not so many other people do,” Ferland says. “There was also a lot of appetite to do pan-European industrial, but probably not a lot of talent or businesses that could do it at scale to institutional standards.”

In early 2021, Ferland left TPG and spent roughly a year preparing to launch Boreal with the support of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP). That backing was obviously critically important. “They had left Europe after the global financial crisis (GFC) but then they were coming back,” he says. “They had three main asset classes they wanted to invest into: life sciences, offices and logistics. I think they trusted us on the back of what I had done at Blackstone.”

French Canadian connection

Logicor is obviously quite a calling card for Ferland, but did his Canadian roots help as well? “I’m sure it does help,” he replies. “I am Canadian, after all, so I understand [the country] and it makes the conversations easier. I know a lot of their peers in Canada. I’m aware of the political situation there. So I think it’s more about a cultural fit, if you will.”

It also has to be said that Ferland’s vision was compelling. “I saw the fundamental tailwinds behind that asset class and I could compare it to retail, offices, even hotels - everything else that I had to look at when I was a TPG,” he says.

“I thought ‘wow, the tailwinds are still extremely strong’. I’d been investing in the asset class for 10 years, but it was still very un-institutional in many ways. It was tough to do in a pan-European fashion because each country in Europe was still a bit in its own isolated bubble. That’s become less and less so over the years, but it’s still quite true.”

Ferland, of course, had that pan-European, institutional experience, but he also wanted Boreal to be virtually integrated - able to do everything in house - so he went about hiring people with a diverse range of talents. “We had to have something different and what we can do differently is create the value in house,” he says.

“Our team doesn’t only have investment guys, we have asset managers, development people anda dedicated ESG person. We have accounting and financing people. When we go to the investment committee, we get everyone around the table. That’s something I felt was not really there in these large platforms anymore because they outsource it.”

As a start-up, hiring the right people with the right experience could have been a challenge. After all, Ferland was looking to bring people in from some of the biggest and most highly regarded companies in the industry. A lot of the early hires, however, were people he had already worked with, be it directly or indirectly. “I think that would have been tough to attract them if we didn’t know them,” Ferland says.

“But they knew us. It was also just after the Covid-19 pandemic, so I think people were looking for something new, for something interesting. And frankly, the OTPP backing helped a lot. When it came to building the team, the fact that the platform was backed by a top 20 global institution gave them a lot of comfort.”

Diversity

For a real estate business, let alone one focused on logistics, at 40% Boreal’s team has a remarkably high proportion of women. “It is definitely conscious,” says Ferland. “We had the benefit of being able to build a business from the ground up, but that’s something that we were quite mindful of at the beginning.”

He adds: “I would say it’s not only diversity in terms of gender; it’s also about social background, skill sets and also culture. We are also very much mindful that we’re a pan-European business, so we need people who are Italian, who are German, who are from Holland and so on. We try to operate in a super-collegial way where we get input from everyone. I guess it is probably becomes a bit of a virtuous circle.”

It goes without saying that Boreal has seen strong growth in the last three years, but it’s also abundently clear that Ferland believes that it has the potential to be a much bigger beast. “We still have a lot of capital to invest with OTPP,” he says. “That’s obviously the focus for now. We really like the investment opportunity right now, so that’s where the whole team is focused. But over time we will need to diversify our our capital base and that’s something we’re discussing with OTPP.”

One of Boreal’s assets in Germany

What might that diversification look like? “I see us continuing to be an industrial and logistics player for the foreseeable future,” Ferland replies. “But I can see ourselves diversifying in adjacencies to logistics, so self storage, cold storage, open storage and so on - things that are in the same neighbourhoods that we already operate in. We’ll have to make sure, if and when we diversify, that we’re adding value. What are we doing here that we think we can do better than others?”

Active management

For now, one of the things that Ferland believes Boreal can do better than others is asset management. “There are still a lot of quite passive managers out there that are not specialists, which means they don’t necessarily push rents,” he says. “Having an asset manager who is 100% focused on it, who knows what they are doing, who is pushing for the right rents, that sets you apart.”

As an example, Ferland cites an acquisition Boreal made in the Port of Rotterdam. “The asset was owned by a bank that had repossessed it after the GFC,” he says. “They leased it three months before they sold it to us for 10 years. I guess that they just wanted the duration of income. After we acquired the asset, we leased it for 50% more on a three year lease. We have an asset manager on the ground, so we can actually churn these leases. It’s worked out really well.”

So, Ferland may have had to put in the hard yards at Blackstone and doubtless missed out on a lot of time with his three children when they were infants. But the experience not only taught him a lot; it established him as one of the leading players in the European logistics market. There are certainly plenty of people who are following Boreal’s progress with great interest.