Finance

In early October, Buchanan Street Partners announced plans to accelerate its principal platform. Buchanan Street’s president & CEO, Robert Brunswick (pictured), recently discussed this new initiative, and about the state of the commercial real estate market and capital markets overall.CPN: Please discuss the main reasons you are going to be more focused on principal investments?Brunswick: When we started the company, and we are now in the 10th year, our goal was to be a pure real estate investment management firm. It has taken some stops to get there. The market excelled our business plan, and a good part of our…

Going against the tide of the currently stalled credit markets, German-based DekaBank has provided financing totaling $241.5 million for the acquisition of office properties in Los Angeles and Montreal over the last few weeks. DekaBank Deutsche Girozentrale closed a $175 million financing to Hines U.S. Office Value Added Fund II L.P. for the acquisition of Citigroup Center, a 48-story landmark office property in Downtown Los Angeles, which CPN reported on Sept. 19. The seven-year loan is fully underwritten and funced by DekaBank, A spokesman for Estate Lending North America at DekaBank said the Hines deal is a good example of…

In the wake of the final presidential debate last night at Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y., both candidates have developed and presented economic plans aimed at addressing key concerns for many Main Street voters and calming their fears over the financial crisis. Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain both made distressed mortgages part of their rescue packages, but with different twists. One of Obama’s new proposals calls for a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures for homeowners that are acting in “good faith” to pay their mortgages. Banks and financial institutions that have benefited from the federal $700 billion rescue…

ProLogis Japan Properties Fund II has acquired a $65 million portfolio near Tokyo, it has reported. The deal includes three buildings totaling 300,000 square feet, all fully leased to three separate Japanese companies, located in Akishima City, a logistics hub approximately 50 kilometers from Tokyo’s central business district. Akishima City provides a base to support a vast distribution area encompassing Tokyo’s city center, northern Kanagawa and southern Saitama, according to Masato Miki, co-president of Japan for ProLogis.The property, to be called ProLogis Park Akishima, offers exceptional access to Route 16, Chuo Expressway and Ken-Oh Expressway, as well as the Akishima…

As CPN reported exclusively in our Daily News REport Morning Edition(subscribe here), with a shoutout to Bette Davis, it’s been a bumpy weekend. First off, is it just us, or does recapitalizing every bank in the world sound a bit like global socialism?No matter, after a Saturday of President Bush and G-7 platitudes, as reported by CPN, world leaders got busy with specific action plans. On the heels of Britain’s and the United States’ pay-for-equity bank-bailout plans, Germany and France announced Sunday respective pledges to take equity stakes in distressed banks and to guarantee bank lending for periods up to…

Early this year, when CPN last spoke with Randy Blankstein, president of Northbrook, Ill.-based Boulder Group and Boulder Group Net Lease Funds, the credit crunch was clearly affecting deal volume in the net lease world, but not quite as much as it would later in the year. Now, in the midst of financial turmoil unheard of since the 1930s, the outlook for net lease is even less promising. Blankstein foresees a recovery period of a year or more, with possible reverberations affecting net lease property valuations well into the 2010s. CPN: How much is net lease deal volume off now?…

Even as nonstop efforts continue around the globe to contain the worldwide financial-credit crisis, there’s a sense of anticipation as the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank heads meet in Washington starting today.In a press conference as talks began in D.C., IMF chief Dominic Strauss-Kahn called for a temporary guarantee of all interbank deposits. “This means not only retail bank deposits, but probably also interbank and money market deposits, so that activity may restart in these key markets.”Even so, hopes were not high that the G-7 would truly unify their efforts. The finance ministers of France and Germany…

ProLogis European Properties Fund II has acquired four, fully leased distribution centers comprising more than 1.1 million square feet at locations in France, Italy and the United Kingdom for approximately $106 million, it has reported. Calling the acquisitions “strategic,” Simon Nelson, senior vice president of European fund management and acquisitions, noted that they would further expand the Prologis platform in Europe.The fund has acquired the following facilities: — A 327,000-square-foot distribution center at ProLogis Park Coventry in the United Kingdom. This facility was developed by ProLogis and later sold to a third-party by ProLogis European Properties in 2003; it is…

With a ceasefire in place, Wachovia, Citigroup and Wells Fargo stopped the litigation carousel–but only till noon Wednesday–after the Federal Reserve stepped in to the fracas to help mediate a solution. As CPN reported Monday, Citi claims in court filings that on Sept. 29, Citi and Wachovia had an agreement-in-principle for Citi to acquire all of the banking subsidiaries of Wachovia. On Friday, Wells Fargo and Wachovia announced a deal for Wells Fargo to acquire all of Wachovia’s banking operations in a whole company transaction requiring no financial assistance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) or any other governmental…

About three weeks after being seized by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and put in conservatorship, beleaguered housing mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae revealed that they have been notified of new investigations that are underway. Late last week, the two entities received federal grand jury subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and they were put on notice by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Staff of the Enforcement Division that it would be conducting its own inquest. The government appears to be bound and determined to discover the intricacies of…