Real estate deals brought Lehman down

Several commercial deals contributed to Lehman Brothers’ demise. In one deal, Lehman teamed up with a publicly-traded logistics company, Prologis, to buy a national portfolio of warehouses in 2007 for $1.85 billion from Dermody Properties and the California State Teachers Retirement System. Lehman supplied the debt financing and 80 percent of the equity, and then couldn’t sell the mortgages to investors or find buyers for its equity position.