Blackstone Real Estate has officially gone to market with shares for its newly launched and first-ever non-traded REIT — Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust Inc.

The PE giant is looking to raise up to $5 billion for the REIT and a minimum of $150 million with plans to invest the proceeds in stabilized, income-oriented commercial real estate properties and securities.

According to its offering papers, Blackstone REIT has not yet entered into any arrangements to acquire any properties or real estate-related securities.

As CoStar News previously reported, Blackstone is hoping to upend the high-fee structure normally associated with non-traded REITs by capping fees at less than 7%. It also will offer potential investors four different classes of shares, each with variations on its fee structure and different distributions.

In addition, Blackstone REIT’s offering sets a return ‘hurdle amount,’ which is a minimum internal rate of return of 5% that has to be achieved before the advisor is entitled to any performance allocation.

Such a structure is more typical in the institutional world in which Blackstone Group operates but is new to the non-exchange traded REIT industry.

Blackstone’s surprising entry into the much-maligned non-traded REIT sector comes amid calls on non-traded REIT sponsors to lower the upfront commissions on non-traded REITs and other direct participation programs.

In April 2016, industry watchdog the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) issued new rules governing direct participation program statement valuations (Regulatory Notice 15-02.) The new FINRA rule was designed to make such sales charges more transparent to investors.

But according to Michael Pagano, executive vice president of compliance, legal and risk assessment for Houston-based 1st Global, many non-traded REIT sponsors sought to circumvent the new disclosure rules by creating so-called Class T shares, which allocate sales charges over time to make them appear smaller instead of triggering them when the purchase is made.