REIT Privatization Activity Heats Up
(Istock illustration by Kevin Rebong) Alex Sapir, whose family famously sold 11 Madison Avenue in New York for a record $2.6 billion, recently went shopping for real estate. But instead of buying a trophy asset or two, he decided to buy a whole company’s worth of them. In March, Sapir and an investment team he helped pull together made an offer to buy the publicly traded office REIT Columbia Property Trust for $2.4 billion with plans to take the company private. Columbia Property’s portfolio of high-quality office buildings in cities like New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Bost...