GlobeSt.com UPDATE: $193M Deal Blazes Trail for New REIT

FORT WORTH-After seven years of wading through hard times and bucking advice to sell, Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. and Vornado Realty Trust will debut AmeriCold Realty Trust as a REIT in the coming weeks. There’s no word just yet if the newly merged and streamlined operation will go public.

John C. Goff, vice chairman and CEO for the Fort Worth-based Crescent, says the AmeriCold REIT plan quietly got underway in late 2003 and will wrap up by Nov. 18, the deadline for folding a separate logistics company into the real estate end of the operation and simultaneously closing a $145-million sale for 20.7% of the emerging company to Yucaipa Cos., an 18-year-old private equity fund with an aggregate $14.6-billion transactions history.

Goff says Yucaipa brought the buy-in opportunity to the JV. The upcoming merger and REIT structuring “enabled us to get a deal done with them…at more than what ‘the Street’ ascribed to this investment,” Goff tells GlobeSt.com. “We now have more value than our investment.” The Fort Worth-based Crescent, the 40% stakeholder in the JV, will have recaptured more than half of its $300-million initial investment in AmeriCold when the deal closes, according to Goff. The 60%-owner Vornado, headquartered in Paramus, NJ, is sitting with a comparable return.