NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Blackstone Group LP, manager of the world's biggest leveraged buy-out fund, raised a record $10.9 billion to invest in property as the US housing slump pushes global real-estate prices lower. The fund, the New York-based firm's ninth property pool, brings to $25.7 billion the capital it has gathered since 1992 to buy real estate, Blackstone said in a statement yesterday. The company is starting a separate fund of more than $1 billion for Western Europe.

Blackstone and other so-called opportunity funds aim to take advantage of a drop in asset prices following the collapse of the US sub-prime-mortgage market. These funds, seeking returns of about 20 percent or more, started in the early 1990s after the US savings-and-loan crisis. The failure of more than 1,000 thrifts that speculated on real estate in the 1980s forced the federal government to sell defaulted mortgages at discounts.

"There are a lot of parallels between now and the early '90s," said Nori Gerardo Lietz, chief strategist for private real estate at Switzerland's Partners Group, which manages about $24 billion. "There was abundant lending and a lack of discipline on the credit side so the values of buildings went to stratospheric heights."