Editors’ Weekly News Roundup, September 18 – September 22
A loan sale, a spin-off, a Texas-sized project, a portfolio deal and a holding pattern comprised the five most-read stories on Connect CRE for the week ending Sept. 23. Leading the way was Kayne Anderson’s big acquisition of loans concentrated in one of the most vital sectors of commercial real estate: healthcare.
Kayne Anderson Acquires $1.3B MOB Loan Portfolio from Synovus reported on the acquisition of 106 floating rate mortgages secured by 308 medical office building properties. The properties span 33 states, with blue-chip institutional MOB investors serving as the sponsors.
Moving from taking on a portfolio to spinning one off, net lease REIT W. P. Carey announced this past week that it was exiting the office sector. W. P. Carey to Spin Off 59 Office Properties, widely read in New York as well as nationally, conveyed the first phase of WPC’s divestiture in its headline and the second phase in its opening paragraph.
Spinning off 59 of the REIT’s office assets into a new, standalone REIT is expected to be completed by Nov. 1. Concurrently with the spin-off, WPC will sell off the 87 office properties that aren’t contained in the newly created Net Lease Office Properties. It’s not clear what kind of pricing WPC will achieve in the current environment.
Coming in third was a story about a sector that, like medical office, once was confined to the perimeter of most real estate investors’ radar: production studios. This particular studio project is not based in Southern California, Chicago or the New York metro area, but the suburbs of San Antonio.
In Hill Country Studios Secures Entitlements, Connect CRE readers both in Texas and nationally learned that an 820,000-square-foot development in San Marcos, TX, had secured approvals from the city and was poised to break ground later this year. It will bring a total of 12 purpose-built sound stages to an area not known for having them. Although it didn’t quite make the top five this past week, we reported that another studio development, this one in the more familiar environs of Burbank, CA, had obtained $480 million in financing.
Industrial real estate is nobody’s idea of a niche sector these days, and one of the most active investors in warehouses has done it again. Investcorp Adds 31-Property Industrial Portfolio for $216M was our fourth most-read story of the past week.
For its $216 million, the global investment manager acquired 31 industrial properties totaling approximately 1.6 million square feet across five major U.S. markets. The deal increases the size of Investcorp’s U.S. industrial portfolio to 42 million square feet and its dollar value to approximately $4.8 billion.
The past week’s fifth most-read story originated on Connect CRE’s sister website, Connect Money. A breaking news mailing headlined FOMC Leaves Rates Unchanged, Signals One More Hike reported that the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee had done what pretty much everyone expected. You’ll be able to read some further thoughts on the FOMC’s decision, and the near-term implications, in the Monday National Topper tomorrow morning.