Was actually thinking of doing a thread on this but I think it conflates a few things:

1) availability bias
2) large lp returns vs building a big business
3) macro vs micro opportunity sets https://twitter.com/sweatystartup/status/1318901007934496768

The investors everyone is most familiar with are closer to asset gatherers, building large scalable businesses. These groups have no choice but to invest based on larger macro themes given the demand of capital they have to put out. Some of these themes are related to:

-demographic shifts in cities leading to rent growth/cap rate compression
-institutionalization of an asset class (see mobile home parks, medical office, self storage) of this recently
-major tailwinds (healthcare, industrial via ecommerce, data centers) etc

Building a great

platform at scale like the above gives solid broad based exposure to an asset class and certain information asymmetries (blackstone), cheaper capital, and economies of scale.

Contrast that with a lot of the sponsor/developer groups you've never heard of are largely posting

stronger overall returns. This is the classic "less money more opportunity" narrative all the best investors have talked about since early Buffet. They are taking micro bets & a smaller scale that the earlier group mentioned can't take and a lot of times they're buying cheap.

I've found a lot of people mix these two and neither is right nor wrong, they are just different businesses.