Sam Zell’s Equity Residential said Monday that it would sell 27 properties to a joint venture including Goldman Sachs and Greystar Real Estate Partners, in a $1.5 billion deal, The News-Gazette of East Central Illinois reported. The two-part deal is set to close in this quarter.
The deal includes roughly 8,000 apartment units, although none of the properties in the deal are in New York City. Under the agreement, the buyer has the option of excluding up to 8 percent of the value of the assets from the transaction, meaning it would only need to buy $1.38 billion of the assets.
Equity said that the sale would help the Chicago-based real estate investment trust divest its assets in markets it is trying to exit. Proceeds from the sale will help fund Equity’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Archstone’s apartment building portfolio from Lehman Brothers. In order to help repay some of its debts, Lehman had been looking to unload the property since August 2012. [News-Gazette] – Hiten Samtani