Finance

ING Real Estate is the latest firm to introduce a new set of sustainability guidelines for acquisitions, development projects and asset management of its real estate investments, designed to encourage more green transactions and practices as part of ING Group’s worldwide commitment to reduce its carbon footprint.The company’s initiatives are based in part on the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design system, so the firm is requiring that, in most instances, ground-up development will be certified under LEED New Construction, LEED Core & Shell or LEED Neighborhood Development standards, with a targeted Silver or higher certification….

Chicago-based Harrison Street Real Capital has closed on a new private equity fund after raising about $430 million. Harrison Street Real Estate Partners II L.P., as the fund is known, began raising capital in March, and according to Christopher Merrill (pictured), co-founder and managing principle of Harrison Street, a good number of investors were keen on getting in on the fund.”Certain investors are very interested in the focus of the fund,” Merrill told CPN. “We’ve structured it — and this has been our strategy since founding the first fund — to invest in properties that will do relatively well in…

The net lease market has entered a period of lower sales and lower expectations, according to the latest report by Northbrook, Ill.-based Boulder Net Lease Funds L.L.C. During the second quarter of 2008, the report notes, 6,240 net lease assets nationwide were sold, a substantial decrease from the first quarter’s total of 9,292 properties — which itself was historically low. “A comparison to the Q1 statistics shows a skewed reality, and a decrease of legitimate supply currently existing in the market,” Boulder says. Moreover, “the high ratio of older properties on the market illustrates lagging demand, low percentage of completed…

CPN NetLease recently had a talk with Meredith Oppenheim, senior vice president of Savillis, the New York branch of London-based global real estate firm Savills Plc, about how net lease as it applies to seniors housing. Oppenheim, a specialist in seniors housing, assembles capital-operator-developer teams to launch new projects or turn around existing properties. She’s also an advisor to investors in the seniors housing space. CPN: How is the net lease structure used in seniors housing? Oppenheim: Net lease as it applies to seniors housing shares basic similarities with other property types, but there are differences. In seniors housing as…

From the point of view of private-equity investment, times aren’t that bad in the net lease business. That’s the thinking of Jeffrey Hoppen, chief investment officer of Princeton, N.J.-based Sovereign Investment Co., a private principal equity investment firm specializing in net lease portfolio transactions. Hoppen further posits an increase of community and regional banks looking to sale-leaseback transactions as a route to diversification of funding sources. Sale-leaseback transactions, he says, are no longer viewed as a move by struggling companies in need of cash. Instead, they have become financial management tools used by stable companies to rearrange their capital structure,…

When CPN NetLease last spoke with George Pandaleon, president of Inland Institutional Capital Partners, last fall, the subprime meltdown was still fresh news and still a harbinger of uncertainty more than anything else. Since then, the reverberations of the crisis have become all too well known, and a new – and much tougher – borrowing and lending paradigm has established itself. But has the crisis been particularly calamitous on the net lease industry? Pandaleon says no. Certainly lending conditions haven’t adversely affected the $1.1 billion joint venture that Inland American and Lexington Realty Trust formed in 2007, Lease Strategic Assets…

Can a specialist in the net lease business survive and even prosper in an ill-starred real estate market? Jonathan Hipp, president & CEO of Reston, Va.-based Calkain Cos. Inc., has no doubt of it. In fact, he says, he’s looking forward to the rest of the year, as opportunities occurring in a down market tend to reveal themselves. Also, Calkain recently buttressed its platform by making a strategic alliance with McLean, Va.-based Fraser Forbes Co. L.L.C. to improve the services they each offer. Fraser Forbes focuses entirely on raw land deals, while Calkain focuses on income-producing properties stabilized by a…

The first quarter 2008 Net Lease Market Report by Northbrook, Ill.-based Boulder Net Lease Funds L.L.C. characterizes the current state of the market in the following unusual terms: “The market,” it asserts in the first paragraph, “is difficult to make sense of at the moment.” On one hand, the economy is either in a recession or about to go there; oil prices are setting record highs seemingly every week; demand for real estate is flat or down; and debt financing is hard to get. On the other hand, “asking cap rates appear to be shifting towards a level where deals…

Since the beginning of the subprime meltdown, various proposals have been made at various levels to ameliorate the crisis, and by extension, the sorry state of the residential market. Interestingly, one idea involves borrowing a page from the tenant-in-common market, and the idea is so new that it doesn’t really have an agreed upon name. Instead of foreclosing on a residential property – anything from single-family to owner-occupied multifamily properties – a lender becomes fractional owners in the property with a borrower who can afford a reduced mortgage payment. The lender receives a piece of equity and the borrower still…

The impact of the credit crunch on every corner of the commercial real estate market is now well established, but the question remains: how much longer will financial markets be in a funk? And will a generalized slowdown in the economy slow the business down even more? Robert Miller, president and founder of Chicago-based Millco Investments, cautions that the net lease side of the business, while not in a state of collapse, is going to have to get used to the slowdown at least until after the presidential elections, and probably longer. Both buyers and sellers will have no reason…