Institutional Investors Paying Increased Attention to Public Real Estate Platforms

In the latest edition of Nareit’s REIT Report podcast, Gil Menna, co-chair of the REITs and real estate M&A practice at law firm Goodwin, discussed the climate surrounding mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and initial public offering (IPO) activity.M&A activity has been light in 2019 compared to previous years, in large part due to an “anemic” REIT market performance last year, Menna said.“Certain sectors in the REIT market have been off. Normally that would result in privatization transactions of public companies that are trading at discounts to net asset value (NAV), but we haven’t seen a significant amount of activity there as well because there has been an abundance of private opportunities available for capital that’s attracted to the real estate asset class,” Menna explained.