Gil Menna, partner and co-chair of the REITs and real estate M&A practice at Goodwin, participated in a video interview in conjunction with REITwise 2021: Nareit’s Law, Accounting & Finance Conference.
Menna noted that REIT M&A activity is starting to pick up for the first time since the start of the pandemic, with non-disclosure agreements and confidentiality agreements now being signed.
“There hasn’t been a whole lot of activity in the public REIT sector, but we are starting to see some momentum there; there’s no doubt about that,” Menna said.
Menna also said that there might be some need for rationalization and M&A in some sectors that were adversely impacted by the pandemic. Private equity could also be attracted to those areas to bring a different leverage profile to those assets, he added.
Meanwhile, Menna said global institutional capital is attracted to “storied REITs with very sophisticated management because it’s hard to duplicate that in the private sector.”
Menna also noted that there is a renewed focus on “deploying capital with programmatic and sophisticated joint ventures with public REITs.” Public REITs, meanwhile, are attracted to that capital because the public markets are still depressed. “Attracting that private capital to deploy into their platform while the public markets come back to a better level is exactly what REITs should be doing,” he said.
More videos from REITwise 2021: Nareit’s Law, Accounting & Finance Conference: