From the August issue: Four months after New York REIT started liquidating its holdings, its first-quarter earnings call turned hostile. The company — which had been dogged by shareholder disputes, lackluster returns and scandals for the better part of three years — finally had a plan to recoup cash by selling off its trophy assets, but some investors and analysts expressed alarm about how it was all playing out.
The real estate investment trust’s newly minted CEO, Wendy Silverstein, estimated that the sale of the company’s assets would render $9.25 per share — $1.75 less than predicted shortly before she came on board. And some analysts on the call questioned whether NYRT’s pending sale of One Worldwide Plaza, a 1.8-million-square-foot trophy Manhattan office tower, would fall short.