Eastdil Eyes New Suitors

After a banner year in which it clinched the crowns for office & hotel dealmaking and punched well above its weight in the overall brokerage rankings (#3), Eastdil Secured is looking to score a bigger war chest. The firm has tapped BDT & MSD Partners to find it potential suitors – not for an outright sale though – continuing a 5-decade tradition of buying & selling pieces of itself in response to the appetites of global investors.

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Eastdil (Cont.)

Eastdil’s looking to prime itself “for an environment of accelerating transactions,” it told Bloomberg, and said its current backers – Singapore’s Temasek, Guggenheim & Wells Fargo – are cool w/ the plan. When Temasek & Guggenheim came on board in ‘19 to fund a management-led (Roy March, Mike VK) buyout of most of Wells’ piece, Eastdil was valued at just north of $400M; top brass now believe it’s worth 4-5x that. Per Green Street’s annual brokerage ranking, Eastdil did $36B in deals last year on properties $25M+, up 43% YoY and behind just CBRE & JLL.

It’s seeking capital to fuel an Asia-heavy expansion, it said, and has been establishing a foothold in the still-nascent but potentially monstrous field of digital infrastructure (see Marc to Market item below 👇️ ). The firm’s been offering financial 🥕 to retain top rainmakers, per TRD, though I have doubts on the specifics of those so leaving them out.

If execs don’t want to spend half their lives doing earnings calls and balance-sheet babysitting ™️, then rejigging the corporate capstack is often the go-to move to fuel expansion. Talent & media behemoth Endeavor is a good outside example, and within CRE Eastdil’s been at it nearly since inception: founder Ben Lambert (my obit of him here) bought the firm out of Eastman Dillion in ‘70, sold it 5Y later, bought it back again in ‘80, sold half to Japanese firm Nomura in ‘86, bought the stake back again in ‘94 😅 – Wells came in in ‘99. Eastdil’s 3 biggest rivals are all public, so this should be fun.

Fortress to Cohen: No More Talk, Pay Up

When discussing this mega UCC foreclosure case involving a NY real estate scion last year, we used the headline “Fortress cracks billionaire skulls.” If we were to write the story today, we’d prob need to Q that billionaire descriptor. Charles Cohen has exhausted his legal avenues to fend off the lender, and is now asking the court to hold off on a judgment so he can settle w/ Fortress. The problem is, Fortress is done talking and is going full Paulie.

At stake is a scarcely believable $187M PG Cohen signed on the $534M loan, backed by a portfolio of properties and assets that Fortress has already seized. Court filings indicate Cohen might have been able to avoid that fate if only he had played ball early on in the default process; he was not forthcoming about providing add’l financials when Fortress pressed him to do so, and when asked for fresh collateral offered up other shaky assets. Then, w/ the threat of PG collection looming, he allegedly shielded other assets, incl. a Greenwich mansion. Fortress is going transcontinental in its bid to get paid - per TRD, it pushed French courts to seize assets from Cohen’s château. Un sou est un sou. 🥖 

Marc to Market

Marc Rowan’s side hustle is terrorizing NIMBY Hamptonites. His day job as head of Apollo, however, is putting massive gobs of capital in play, an increasing share of it into CRE – see the bets on lifecos here & investment managers here. Now, Apollo is in talks to fund 1 of the biggest bets yet on data-center development, being made by one of the world’s premier hyperscalers. Zuck’s Meta is seeking a $35B financing package to develop US data centers, per Bloomberg, w/ Apollo in early discussions to be the anchor lender. Apollo’s recent shtick on jumbo financing deals has been to syndicate out the bulk of the funding to other investors, w/ the firm saying that “investment-grade capital solutions are the next frontier of private credit.”

Meta wants to bring a GW of compute online this year, and has already announced a $10B project in Louisiana. The field has rapidly gotten crowded: Microsoft, BlackRock, Blackstone, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi are all intent on dominating it. It deserves a deeper dive soon, but for now, I recommend you check out our look at Blackstone-QTS here, and Odd Lots’ excellent conversation w/ a Coreweave exec on what it really takes to build these things. 🦞   

Dadbod Chronicles: Joy & Inadequacy

For the past year – ten31 turned 1 this month – I can safely say that putting this thing together was the most important mission in my life. Our ambition is to build one of the most interesting media properties of this generation, and The Promote is the soul of the whole enterprise. It needed love, care, sweat, grit, and a ridiculous amount of time, and I was grateful to be in a position to give them. Eight days ago, however, came my son, Jahan. Time, and my relationship to it, has been altered. So readers, in these next few weeks & months, please forgive me the inevitable new-dad lapses: the typos (already happening), the occasional missed edition, a respite from the electric pace that has defined us. I want you to understand how much I care about consistently delivering max insight & max delight to you in these pages. But I also want you to understand that I now care about something else more.

A brief dad dispatch of Week 1: There are two equally potent forces playing out at once: joy, of a primal kind that I’ve never known before 🦧 and can sense is only just beginning; and inadequacy, a feeling that even though I tried to apply myself w/ my entire being to this awesome responsibility, there were things I just could not do this past week: I could not do a passable swaddle, I could not feed him with the same panache his mother seemed able to, and I sure as hell could not give him the oxygen he needed for 2 nights in the NICU. Every shortcoming of mine, from my maladroitness to my impatience with standing, is coming into sharp focus, and everything I’m good at seems to be far less consequential in these early days. Well, that’s not entirely true: I did give Jahan a pretty rousing read of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, though for some reason I made the aunts Jamaican. 🍑 

Quickies

• 🎥 Wreck-It-Ralph: What’s the deal w/ Meridian’s NYCB corporate loan?

• Lender grabs Nightingale’s Miami building at 💗 of crowdfunding fraud

• Benefit St. emerges as front- 🏃 in NewPoint race (more on Meridian-NewPoint here)

• Supply, meet demand: Austin multi rents fall 22% from peak 📉 

• Woebegone Atlanta office landlords cash in on paid parking 🅿️ 

• National Urban League throws heft behind Fannie/Freddie privatization push

• Not lekker: Diamond trader turned developer Yitzchak Tessler begs judge to unfreeze his bank accts 💎 (More on Tessler here)

• Critic’s journal: JLL’s Riguardi compares JPM’s 270 Park to an airport 🙃 

• Our new website – v much in beta – is live, check it out

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