The Starrett-Lehigh Building
From the October issue: In December 2007, less than a year before the fall of Lehman Brothers and as the vise of the credit crunch was tightening, SL Green Realty closed on one of the biggest deals of the decade: $1.575 billion for 388 and 390 Greenwich Street, the 2.6 million-square-foot office complex then occupied largely by Citigroup.
But SL Green, New York’s biggest commercial landlord, did not act alone in the $598-a-square-foot purchase. It had a little help from some loonies, or Canadian dollars. The REIT’s minority partner on the deal, taking a 49.4 percent stake, was SITQ, the real estate investment wing of Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, a Montreal-based pension fund. (SITQ has since merged with Caisse’s other real estate subsidiary, and now goes by the name Ivanhoe Cambridge.)
Other Canadian firms have followed suit. Indeed, buoyed by a strong Canadian dollar (it’s been stronger than the U.S. dollar, at or near parity with it, since 2006) and drawn to steady returns in raucous economic times, these REITs and pension funds have become the biggest, busiest foreign investor pool in New York commercial real estate — beating out British, Middle Eastern, East Asian and other international commercial investors handily. [more]
