Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Philadelphia real estate investors separate - Philly.com (blog)

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Two Philadelphia-based, New York Stock Exchange-traded real estate companies founded by members of the Cohen and Zubrow clan have made plans to separate.



RAIT Financial Trust, a real estate financing and investment company, said in a statement today that it will sell Independence Realty Advisors LLC, which picks apartment investments for its client Independence Realty Trust, plus some assets from RAIT's development arm, Jupiter Communities/RAIT Residential, to Independence, for $43 million. 


RAIT also plans to sell Independence 7.3 million shares of Independence stock, worth another $77 million at recent prices. The whole set of transactions are contingent on Independence selling an additional $83 million of its stock in a new offering.



Once the deal is done, RAIT CEO and Chairman Scott Schaeffer will move to Independence and serve there as CEO and Chairman -- while RAIT President Scott Davidson, a 6-year veteran of the company, will be promoted to CEO of RAIT, and also serve on its board. RAIT will elect "a new independent Chairman" at that time.


The deal "allows us to internally generate capital to support our leading real estate lending platform, accelerates our opportunistic divestment of real estate ownership positions, helps us simplify our corporate strategy and monetizes the value RAIT created through the formation of IRT," Davidson said in a statement.


The Cohens, including parents Edward E Cohen and Betsy Zubrow Cohen and sons Jonathan and Daniel, have over the past 40 years founded, taken public and sold a string of financial, commercial banking, energy and property companies, including the Atlas pipeline and oil and gas exporation companies, the Resource real estate, and Jefferson and The Bancorp banks, among others.







The elder Cohens, formerly based on Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, have in the past two years withdrawn from a series of day-to-day management positions. The Bancorp, which formerly employed around 600 at its Wilmington headquarters, last month said it was cutting costs by up to 25 percent in an attempt to reposition its lending and deposit portfolio under new managers.













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