Rental housing remains a major investment theme for us given the structural shortage in this space. US is building roughly the same number of homes today as in 1960 despite having almost twice the population. We are also quite focused on European real estate where we’ve now raised $7.6 billion for our new flagship vehicle as of quarter end. In private equity, we closed the acquisition of Rover in the first quarter, a leading digital marketplace in the pet space, along with an online payments business in Japan and a healthcare platform in India. The economy in India, which I visited two weeks ago, remains incredibly strong. We’re fortunate to have what we believe is the largest private equity and real estate platform in that country. Back home, our dedicated life science business announced a $750 million collaboration with Moderna to support the development of mRNA vaccines for influenza.
And our growth equity fund invested in 7 Brew, an innovative quick service coffee franchisor. As Steve highlighted, we are planting the seeds of future realizations. Turning to the second key development, our expansion in private equity credit. There is powerful innovation underway in the traditional model of providing credit to borrowers. Our corporate, insurance and real estate debt businesses comprise over 60% of the firm’s total inflows in the first quarter and nearly 60% of deployment. We continue to see strong interest in non-investment grade strategies, such as opportunistic, direct lending and high yield real estate lending. We’re also now seeing a dramatic increase in demand from our clients for all forms of investment grade private credit, including infrastructure, particularly in energy transition and digital infrastructure, residential real estate, commercial and consumer finance, fund finance and other types of asset based credit.
In our investment grade focused business, we believe there is a massive opportunity to deliver higher returns to clients with lower risk by moving a portion of their liquid IG portfolios to private markets. Alternatives have taken meaningful share of public equity portfolios over the past 30 years but little on the fixed income side. In the insurance channel, this migration has been underway and we’ve created a capital light, open architecture model that can serve a multitude of limited partners. Worth noting we crossed the $200 billion AUM milestone in insurance this quarter, up 20% year-over-year. In addition to our four largest clients, we now have FMA relationships with 14 insurers, which continue to grow in number and size. We placed or originated $14 billion of A-rated credits on average for them in the first quarter, up 71% year-over-year and nearly $50 billion since the start of 2023.
These credits generated approximately 200 basis points of excess spread over comparably rated liquid credits. In addition to insurance clients, pension funds and other LPs see the value we’re creating in private credit, and there’s been a strong response to our product offerings. With nearly $420 billion in BXCI and real estate credit, we’re extremely well positioned to directly originate high quality assets on behalf of a much larger universe of investors. We’ve also established numerous origination relationships as well as bank partnerships, most recently with Barclays and KeyBank in areas like consumer credit card receivables, fund finance, home improvement and infrastructure credit, and we plan to add more. These arrangements are a win-win.
They create more flow for our investors who want to hold these investments, these assets long term, and they help our partners better serve their customers. We expect our credit and insurance platforms to grow significantly from here. Moving to the third key development, the reaccelerating trends in our private wealth business. In January, we noted our momentum building as market volatility receded. And with the launch of BXPE, we now offer three large scale perpetual vehicles, providing individual investors access to even more of the scale and breadth of Blackstone. Our sales in the wealth channel were a robust $8 billion in the first quarter, including $6.6 billion for the perpetual strategies, as Steve noted. Subscriptions for the perpetuals increased 83% from Q4 and marked the best quarter of fundraising from individuals in nearly two years.
BCRED led the way, raising $2.9 billion. BXPE has received very strong investor reception, raising $2.7 billion in its debut quarter, and we plan to expand to more distributors over the coming months. Over 90% of advisers that have transacted with BXPE have previously done so with BREIT or BCRED, illustrating the affinity for our products and the power of the Blackstone brand in this channel. At the same time, BREIT has successfully navigated a challenging two year period for real estate markets. Its semi-liquid structure has worked as designed by providing liquidity while protecting performance. BREIT has delivered double the return of the public REIT index since inception over seven years. This outperformance continued with strong results in Q1, underpinned by outstanding portfolio positioning that includes growth in its data center exposure.
Repurchase requests in BREIT have fallen 85% from the peak to the lowest level in nearly two years and the vehicle is no longer in proration. We’re now seeing encouraging signs in terms of new sales while repurchase requests are continuing their decline in April as well. We are confident in the recovery of BREIT flows over time given performance. When looking at the $80 trillion private wealth landscape overall, allocations remain extremely low, and we expect a long runway of growth ahead. In closing, the firm is exceptionally well positioned, supported by both cyclical and secular tailwinds, that’s why we believe the future is very bright for Blackstone. With that, I’ll turn things over to Michael Chae.
Michael Chae: Thanks, Jon, and good morning, everyone. Firm delivered strong results in the first quarter, highlighted by the reacceleration of fee related earnings. I’ll first review financial results and will then discuss investment performance and the forward outlook. Starting with results. Fee related earnings increased 12% year-over-year to $1.2 billion or $0.95 per share, the highest level in six quarters and the third best quarter in firm history, powered by double digit growth in fee revenues, coupled with the firm’s robust margin position. With respect to revenues, the firm’s expansive breadth of strategies lifted management fees to a record $1.7 billion. Notably, Q1 reflected the 57th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth of base management fees at Blackstone.
