Formed in 1999, the Alliance I fund was comprised of 16 institutional investors as stockholders, including pension funds, foundations and endowments who along with AMB stoked it with $400 million of equity. Four of those investors were the Citigroup Pension Plan, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Bush Foundation and the University of Chicago.

For its 21% interest, AMB received cash and a distribution of an on-tarmac property, AMB DFW Air Cargo Center I. AMB chairman Hamid Moghadam says the "opportunistic early sale" of the fund's properties allowed AMB to take advantage of favorable market conditions.

The result was "an internal rate of return for our private capital investors in excess of 20%, as compared to an original target return in the low teens," he says. "Additionally, the sale produced a meaningful profit for our stockholders in the form of a disposition gain on our 21% ownership interest in the fund and associated incentive distributions."