Archstone-Smith Trust shareholders Tuesday approved a $22.2 billion buyout of the company by Tishman Speyer Properties and Lehman Brothers Holdings.
The deal is expected to close Oct. 5.
The bidders will pay $60.75 a share for the Arapahoe County-based company, which owns apartment complexes across the country. The company’s shares closed up $1.62 at $58.83 Tuesday.
The deal will take one of the state’s largest public companies private. Archstone-Smith is the state’s second-largest real-estate investment trust, after ProLogis. It’s the nation’s second-largest REIT specializing in multifamily housing.
Archstone-Smith is among a growing number of REITs that are being acquired, said Ron Kuykendall, vice president of communications for the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts.
From 2004 to 2007, nearly $209 billion in REIT acquisitions have been announced. Of those, 61 percent have been taken private.
This year alone, nearly $97 billion in merger-and-acquisition activity has been announced in the REIT sector, with 90 percent of the companies going private. At $22.2 billion, the Archstone-Smith deal is the second-largest transaction, topped by the $39 billion acquisition of Equity Office Properties by Blackstone Group.
“This is very much paralleling M&A activity in other industries,” Kuykendall said. “There is the availability of cheap money to finance the deals.”
Some 98.9 percent of Archstone-Smith’s common shares present at the special meeting Tuesday voted in favor of the proposed merger. That represented about 78 percent of the total number of common shares entitled to vote at the special meeting.
Archstone-Smith owns more than 86,000 apartments in 344 communities concentrated primarily in densely populated areas such as Washington, D.C; New York City; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Seattle; and Boston. The company employs more than 2,600 people nationally, including about 300 in Colorado. The company’s only Colorado apartment community is the 480-unit Champion Park in Thornton.
New York-based Tishman Speyer manages a $40 billion real-estate portfolio that includes Rockefeller Center and Chrysler Center in New York. It also has about 14,000 residential units.
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
