Shelby Pruett is Managing Partner at Equity Capital Management - a self administered real estate company focused on investing in institutional quality, single-tenant office, industrial, and retail properties that are net leased to investment grade and other high credit quality tenants on a long-term basis.
HIPP: What is driving your sale of up to $625 million in net lease assets?
PRUETT: ECM’s primary objective has always been to provide its investors with attractive risk adjusted returns through multiple time periods and economic conditions. We are a private equity real estate firm and in 2010 filed to take part of our platform public through ECM Realty Trust.
During the IPO process we were approached by a number of private and public companies, including public REITS, interested in entering into joint ventures, merging, and or acquiring our assets. Through conversations with these companies, we came to a global solution that met all of the constituents needs. As a fiduciary to our investor we made the decision to enter into contracts to sell our assets to some of these parties, one of which was a public REIT.
HIPP: What are your thoughts on the IPO market as it relates to your business?
PRUETT: We still believe public platforms and markets hold merit. We had positive feedback from the public markets as one of the only large scale investors aggregating institutional quality net lease and sale leaseback assets. These net leases were backed by investment grade credit tenants, at significant discounts to the assets underlying values. The platform, team, strategy, board, and structure were well received in the market.
We carefully studied the reception other firms received in the IPO market and believe that while public markets in general are attractive, a company’s timing of entry is critical. At the time we made the decision to sell, we had not launched our road show. The global solution that materialized through the sale provided certainty and was beneficial to all parties. With that said, we believe the sale supported the viability of the platform ECM was bringing to the public market and we are continuing to review an execution in this area with alternative assets.
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Jonathan Hipp
Jonathan Hipp began his career in real estate over 25 years ago. In his early years as a broker, he ventured into the net lease industry and quickly began leading the US net lease market, closing over $3 billion in transactions. In 2005, Jon founded Calkain Companies, a company focused solely on net lease investment services. As President and CEO, he has been instrumental in building the firm into one of the leading Net Lease real estate companies, transacting over $12 billion of net lease deal volume over the past 13 years. He has expanded Calkain’s services to include brokerage, advisory, asset management, capital markets, and industry research. He has become a well-known resource, panelist, and speaker at various Net Lease and Industry conferences and is a regular contributor to GlobeSt.com on real estate trends. In June 2015, Jon’s passion for the real estate business was again recognized as he was nominated for the Top Real Estate Player in the DC area by SmartCEO magazine.
