While FRE was a ballast to earnings throughout the year, the shape of the year was driven by our sales activity. Net realizations were muted in the first three quarters as we remained highly selective amid the volatile backdrop for broader markets and asset values. In the fourth quarter, we took advantage of more favorable conditions to execute the sales of public stock across multiple holdings, along with a number of other realizations. In addition, BAAM crystallized its incentive fees for most of its open ended strategies annually in Q4, and the segment’s performance revenues increased 43% year-over-year, commensurate with its strong overall 2023 investment performance. In total, net realizations for the firm were $425 million in the fourth quarter, up 16% year-over-year and up 64% sequentially from Q3.
The growth in net realizations lifted total distributable earnings to $1.4 billion in the fourth quarter, the highest level in six quarters, as Steve highlighted, or $1.11 per common share. Moving to the outlook, the firm is moving forward with a strong underlying momentum across multiple drivers of growth. First, in our drawdown fund business, we’ve raised over 80% of our $150 billion target for the most recent vintage or flagships, but less than half was earning management fees as of year-end. We expect this to increase to the substantial majority earning management fees by the latter part of 2024. We recently launched the investment period for our European real estate vehicle. And over the coming quarters, we expect to activate our flagships in corporate private equity, PE energy transition, growth equity, infrastructure secondaries, and by early next year, GP stakes in life sciences.
These funds will earn fees following the respective fee holidays. We expect to activate our corporate private equity flagship in the near term, which has raised $18 billion to date toward a target of at least $20 billion, followed by a four-month fee holiday. At the same time, we’re moving toward the next vintage of fundraising for multiple strategies, including the near term launch of fundraising for our fifth private credit opportunistic strategy targeting $10 billion. Second, our perpetual capital platform has continued to expand, today comprising 44% of the firm’s fee earnings AUM. Key drivers of recent growth include BCRED and our infrastructure platform, which grew fee earning AUM by 26% and 21% in 2023, respectively. The commingled BIP infrastructure vehicle has achieved 15% net returns annually since inception, and its next scheduled crystallization of fee related performance revenues will occur in the fourth quarter of this year, with respect to three years of gains.
Third, in the insurance channel, AUM has reached $192 billion, up 20% year-over-year, as Jon noted, driven principally by our four major clients, and we anticipate substantial inflows from them going forward, underpinning strong growth in fee revenues and FRE in this channel. Finally, with respect to realizations, we are positioned for an eventual acceleration in realizations in the context of more supportive markets, although it will take time to build the pipeline. Performance revenue eligible AUM in the ground is $505 billion, up 12% over the past two years despite volatile markets and up over 70% in three years. We hold a large scale high quality portfolio, which is well diversified across asset classes, regions and vintages, and net accrued performance revenue on the balance sheet stands at $5.8 billion.
The firm’s embedded performance-related earnings power is significant. As always, our long term capital affords us the patience to optimize our exits over time as markets heal in order to maximize value for our investors. In closing, history has shown that Blackstone has always emerged from cycles even stronger. Our business has been built on this throughout nearly four decades. We are now in the process of emerging from a significant cycle. And we are confident that history will repeat itself again because of the power of our brand, our platform, our people and our culture. With that, we thank you for joining the call and would like to open it up now for questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions]. We’ll go first to Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America.
Craig Siegenthaler: My question is on investing. Steve, I think I first heard your bullish commentary at Davos last week. But Jon really supported it today in the prepared comments with the CMBS market reopening, cost of capital falling, spreads are tighter. So the backdrop does seem to be a lot better than when you last hosted a call with us in October. And also, your deployment to new commitments were up nicely too. So what does your outlook for deployments broadly entail for 2024 versus the $74 billion last year? It sounds like it could be a double.
Stephen Schwarzman: Craig, love the question. I would say putting numbers on this is very hard, given the nature of the business. What we can say is lots of good things are coming into place. Right? We’ve got the Fed moving from tightening to lowering rates. You’ve got debt market spreads starting to come down a bit. You’ve got an equity market that has rallied. I think we’re going to see you know the IPO market pick up. And then, M&A volume is picking up as well. There are lots of companies out there who would like to sell things, private equity firms in particular. There are folks in real estate who’ve been frozen here for a couple of years. So, putting numbers on it is hard, but we would expect deal activity to pick up. It sometimes, of course, takes time to do these things.
