The inimitable Peter Hessler & Morsi the cat
“Something about Zamalek’s geography, and its old-money residents, seemed to draw out an Egyptian flair for eccentricity. The island is situated in the heart of the city, but the river creates a powerful sense of separation. Even on days of major demonstrations, it was easy to forget that Tahrir was only a mile and a half away. I often saw Zamalek residents watching the revolution on television, as if the images had been beamed in from some distant land.”
Carlyle gets REally interested
“As of the end of September the second fund had a negative internal rate of return and the third fund had an IRR of just 5%. While some investments Carlyle made were sold at a profit in the past couple of years, like the student accommodation portfolio Pure Student and several trophy London office buildings, many of the investments it made were highly leveraged at the wrong point in the cycle. For some time it looked like both of these funds might not give any equity at all back to investors.”
Apollo also gets REally interested
“New York-based Apollo’s newest U.S. real estate fund aims to deliver gross returns, or returns before fees, of 18 percent by investing in industrial, senior housing, hotels, manufactured housing and grocery-anchored retail properties and companies, the people said. An Apollo spokesman declined to comment.
The fundraising coincides with a relatively slow period for institutional investors in real estate. Globally, $24 billion was raised by 53 funds in the three months ended Sept. 30, the lowest quarterly total in the past five years, according to data compiled by Preqin."
Why property managers should Mynd their Ps and Qs
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Give me Liberty Investor Day or give me death
“His commentary on Global is interesting as well; I’ll probably have more to say on it at some point in the future. But in both this interview and in the Barron’s interview, Malone says something along the line of “Global is cheap if their current deal closes.” That’s really interesting, as it’s in direct contract to the line their CEO has been pitching for the past several years (something along the line of “our stock is way too cheap and trades below private market value”) and the capital allocation strategy Global has been pursuing (selling assets to buyback shares at a furious clip). Malone is the chairman of Global, and the company has been saying / pursuing that strategy for the past several years (i.e. at higher stock prices and before the current VOD deal was announced), so it almost seems like he’s talking in opposition to his company / strategy here.”