AREP on the Move
We mean that headline literally—this picture of founders Brian Katz and Doug Fleit was taken just moments ago at Hains Point where they were fresh off Olympic potato sack races and hula hoop contests with their 80 employees from six states for American Real Estate Partners' annual team-building retreat. (True to Brian and Doug's background as top Cushman brokers prior to starting AREP 11 years ago, the day caps off with TopGolf. As for those cool sunglasses, that's because they're on the owner side now.) The other respect in which they're on the move is that their firm today has accumulated a remarkable 6.5M SF and $1.2B worth of assets.
AREP's latest announcement came today: the formal closing on 540k SF Canal Center in Alexandria, at $325 a foot, acquired from Tishman Speyer. They bought it through a partnership of their strategic office fund (institutional capital that they closed in Q2, including a university endowment) and NY private equity firm Investcorp that trades on the Bahrain stock exchange. The fund's target is value-add, core-plus in the Mid-Atlantic, especially suburban markets that have urban characteristics. They'll reposition Canal Center with $10M for deferred maintenance and cosmetic improvements and recruit retail to reposition it as mixed-use (it even has trails along the water), or what Brian describes to us as a "Washington Harbor" across the river.
