What Happened to Griffin Capital? Every Vehicle It Sponsored and What a Share Became

The roll call: every public Griffin vehicle and what a share became

Searching EDGAR for “Griffin Capital” returns dozens of filers, most of them single-property LLCs and DSTs sold privately. Eight vehicles, including a BDC that was later folded into one of them, were sold to the public through brokers and filed 10-Ks or N-CSRs. This is what each one's own filings say happened.

Two patterns stand out. The healthcare REIT that sold early (GAHR II, in 2014) is the only REIT whose holders got more than the offering price back at the exit: $7.75 in cash plus NorthStar stock that the merger formula pegged at $3.75 (our arithmetic: $11.50 against $10.00 or $10.22 paid). The net-lease REITs, which carried a large office book into 2022, returned about a quarter of the offering price at the end. Distributions paid along the way are not in this table; GCEAR I, for example, was paying $0.001901096 a share a day in late 2018, about $0.69 a year (our arithmetic), and said 94% of its distributions since inception had come from operating cash flow and 6% from offering proceeds.

How Griffin Capital sold itself, step by step

The question behind most “what happened to Griffin Capital” searches is who owns the business now. The filings show four transactions in three steps and with three buyers, two of them the investors' own vehicles.

Before the Apollo deal closed, the interval fund's proxy described who was selling: the adviser was “indirectly controlled by Griffin Capital Company, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, which is controlled by Kevin Shields because he controls more than 25% of the voting interests of Griffin Capital Company, LLC.” Apollo told its own investors in January 2022 that the deal brought it two retail interval funds with about $5 billion of assets under management and wider reach into independent broker-dealers and wirehouses. Not everything was cut off: in March 2022 Griffin Realty Trust signed a sublease of its El Segundo headquarters from Griffin Capital Company at an initial $45,227 a month.

The price of the 2018 internalization, as the REIT later booked it

When a non-traded REIT buys its own sponsor's management company, its shareholders pay the sponsor for the stream of fees they had been paying. Here the payment was 20,438,684 OP units; at GCEAR I's last estimated value of $10.05 a share, that is about $205.4 million (our arithmetic; the units were later converted at the 1.04807 merger ratio). The purchase left $229,948 thousand of goodwill on the balance sheet, still the same at December 31, 2021, and the REIT's NAV statements carried the business as a separate line, “Goodwill (Management Company Value)”, at $230,000 thousand in June 2021 and again in June 2022.

The listed company's 10-K is plain about where the goodwill came from: “We recorded goodwill as a result of the transaction that resulted in the internalization of PKST management in December 2018”. It then wrote $135.3 million of it off in 2022 and $16.0 million in 2023, leaving $78.6 million at December 31, 2023. Together, about 66% of the goodwill created by buying Griffin's management business was impaired within five years (our arithmetic). The same 10-K says Griffin Capital, LLC, “an entity controlled by our former Executive Chairman, Kevin A. Shields”, had assigned about half of the units it received to participants in its long-term incentive plan, which included Peakstone's chief executive and chief financial officer.

The net-lease REIT chain, from $10 shares to Brookfield cash

The June 2022 NAV of $7.42 is $66.78 on the post-split share count (our arithmetic). Our Peakstone review covers how the listed company sold its office book before the Brookfield deal, and our listing discount ladder puts its listing next to other non-traded REITs that went public.

Healthcare: the Griffin-American REITs

Griffin Capital co-sponsored three healthcare REITs with American Healthcare Investors (AHI). GAHR II raised $1,233.3 million in its initial offering and $1,605.0 million in its follow-on, then sold itself to NorthStar Realty Finance, which closed on December 3, 2014 with 295 properties: each share received $7.75 in cash and 0.2071 NorthStar shares. GAHR III raised $1,842.6 million at $10.00 a share and merged into GAHR IV on October 1, 2021 at 0.9266 shares; the combined company, renamed American Healthcare REIT, did a 1-for-4 reverse split on November 15, 2022 and began trading on the NYSE as AHR on February 7, 2024, raising $772.8 million at $12.00 a share (our arithmetic: 64,400,000 shares). On the same day as the 2021 merger, Griffin and AHI contributed their adviser interests to the REIT for 15,117,529 units worth about $131.7 million. The per-share trail for GAHR III and IV holders, including what AHR stock has done since the listing, is on our Griffin-American Healthcare REIT page.

The interval funds and the BDC that became one of them

Griffin Institutional Access Real Estate Fund started on June 30, 2014 and was Griffin's largest product by the end: $5,985,462,930 of net assets at September 30, 2022, five months after Apollo took over the adviser and renamed it Apollo Diversified Real Estate Fund (effective May 2, 2022). Its load-waived Class A shares had a cumulative return of 77.78% from inception to that date, 7.22% a year, per the fund's annual report. Since then net assets fell to $3,688,660,744 at September 30, 2025 and the Class A NAV from $28.93 to $24.44, about 16% lower (our arithmetic). Our Apollo Diversified Real Estate Fund review tracks its pro-rated quarterly repurchases.

The credit fund has a less-known history. Griffin-Benefit Street Partners BDC Corp., a non-traded business development company, sold 4,563,196 shares for about $44.8 million, a total that did not change after March 15, 2016. In September 2017 its holders voted to fold it into the Griffin Institutional Access Credit Fund, which issued them Class F shares “with the same aggregate net asset value” as their BDC shares. That fund became Apollo Diversified Credit Fund on May 2, 2022 and had $1,639,773,787 of net assets at December 31, 2025, up from $559,633,864 three years earlier.

What Griffin Capital does now: opportunity zone funds, DSTs and development funds

Griffin Capital no longer advises any SEC-reporting vehicle, but it files Forms D for private offerings to accredited investors; each of the 13 below lists Kevin Shields among its related persons and an El Segundo address. The latest filing for each shows where the money goes now:

These 13 filings add up to $2.37 billion sold, $1.97 billion of it in the four opportunity zone funds (our arithmetic). A Form D amount is self-reported and is not a performance figure; there are no audited NAVs or redemption figures in the public record for these funds. The opportunity zone fund Form D survey shows where Griffin's QOZ funds rank against other sponsors.

What a holder or a buyer can do with this

• If you held GCEAR I, GCEAR II or Griffin Realty Trust until May 2026: your shares were converted into $21.00 per post-split share in cash on May 6, 2026. A cash merger is generally a taxable sale; your basis starts from what you paid for the original shares (less any return of capital reported over the years), so a holder who paid $10.00 to $10.28 is likely to show a large capital loss for 2026. Check that your broker's 1099-B carried the cost basis correctly through the 2019 merger and the 2023 reverse split.
• If you held GAHR II: you became a NorthStar Realty Finance shareholder in December 2014; follow that company's own later mergers rather than Griffin's. GAHR III or IV: you hold American Healthcare REIT (NYSE: AHR) shares, a listed stock you can sell any trading day.
• If you hold the interval funds: your shares are the same; only the manager and name changed. Liquidity is the fund's quarterly repurchase offer, which has been pro-rated; there is no exit through Griffin Capital.
• If you held the BDC: your Class F shares are in Apollo Diversified Credit Fund.
• If you are offered a Griffin Capital DST or opportunity zone fund now: these are private Regulation D offerings for accredited investors, sold through brokers. The filings above show how much each raised, not what it is worth; ask the broker for the private placement memorandum, the fees (our DST fee analysis shows what the Forms D disclose) and the sponsor's track record on exits, which, for its public vehicles, is the table at the top of this page.

This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.

FAQ

Sources, read on October 6, 2026: Griffin Capital Essential Asset REIT (CIK 1456016) Forms 10-K for 2014 (0001456016-15-000013) and 2018 (0001456016-19-000029) and 8-Ks of December 20, 2018 (0001456016-18-000045) and May 1, 2019 (0001456016-19-000058); Griffin Capital Essential Asset REIT II / Griffin Realty Trust / Peakstone Realty Trust (CIK 1600626) Forms 10-K for 2014, 2016, 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023, Form 10-Q for the first quarter of 2023 and 8-Ks of June 13, 2019, March 1, 2021, July 6 and July 16, 2021, March 31 and August 5, 2022, January 20, March 10 and April 17, 2023, February 2, 2026 (0001140361-26-003102) and May 6, 2026 (0001140361-26-019333); Griffin-American Healthcare REIT II's 2013 10-K and August 5, 2014 8-K and NorthStar Realty Finance's December 9, 2014 8-K (0001273801-14-000145); Griffin-American Healthcare REIT III's 10-Ks for 2014 and 2020 and October 1, 2021 8-K (0001566912-21-000075); American Healthcare REIT's November 16, 2022 8-K and 2023 10-K; Griffin Institutional Access / Apollo Diversified Real Estate Fund's January 2022 proxy and N-CSRs for fiscal 2022 and 2025; Apollo Diversified Credit Fund's N-CSRs for 2022 and 2025 and its 2017 N-14 8C/A; Griffin-Benefit Street Partners BDC's 2016 10-K and September 18, 2017 8-K; Apollo Global Management's 8-K of January 27, 2022 and 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2022 (0001858681-22-000045); and the latest Form D of the 13 Griffin Capital offerings listed above. Per-share values of exits, sums and percentages are our arithmetic and exclude distributions. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.