REIT Vornado Bidding for Loan Servicer CW Financial
Bloomberg reports: According to reports, REIT Vornado Realty Trust submitted a bid to buy CW Financial Services, the parent of the second-largest manager of delinquent U.S. commercial property loans.
A winner for New York-based CW Financial may be chosen in the next week, said a person familiar with the offer who asked not to be named. Buyout firms Apollo Global Management and Centerbridge Capital Partners had made competing bids, but are no longer seeking to buy the company, according to two people familiar with the auction.
CWCapital Asset Management, a unit of CW Financial, is the special servicer of $144 billion of securitized real estate loans, including more than $18 billion that are delinquent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It has access to valuable pricing and payment information, according to Ben Thypin, an analyst at global commercial real estate firm Real Capital Analytics.
“The competitive landscape for special servicing is being reset and CW is one of the last large platforms available,” said Mohsin Meghji, a principal at New York-based restructuring firm Loughlin Meghji & Co. and chief restructuring officer of Capmark Financial Group Inc. “This would be a very strategic move by Vornado.”
“Owning a firm like CW gives access to information on a lot of troubled loans as well as an established platform for originating new ones,” Thypin said. “That puts the owner in the driver’s seat and in control of distressed real estate that they may want for themselves.”
View the full article on Bloomberg: REIT Vornado Bidding for Loan Servicer CW Financial
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Posted by: Matthew Stone