Commercial Observer | By Mark Hallum

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) proved to be as good as gold, or perhaps better, in the stock market’s recent period of instability.

Where many investors found even safe-haven commodities like gold to be extremely volatile as President Donald Trump’s tariff war with the world played out dramatically in the first days of April, many REITs ended up holding steady, keeping shareholder value well above water. 

Commercial Observer | By Brian Pascus

A top U.S. health care real estate investment trust (REIT) is advancing into the United Kingdom after it acquired another REIT specializing in senior housing and care complexes.

Los Angeles-based CareTrust REIT purchased U.K.-based Care REIT on Tuesday in a $817 million acquisition. The deal values Care REIT’s stock at $577 million — a 33 percent premium on the $25.81 share price Care REIT closed at on Monday afternoon — and includes a debt assumption of $240 million.

Commercial Observer | By Brian Pascus

At the start of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s 1941 cinematic masterpiece, the opening shot pans up through a mix of fog and shadow to highlight Xanadu, an immense private estate that we’re told during a newsreel voiceover “is the costliest monument a man has built to himself … since the pyramids.” 

Boasting “the loot of the world,” “the biggest private zoo since Noah,” and “a collection of everything so big it can never be cataloged or appraised,” Xanadu is undoubtedly a fictional creation. That is until you visit East Rutherford, N.J. 

Commercial Observer | By Brian Pascus and Mark Hallum

Micro- and macroeconomic trends collided at Commercial Observer’s annual Capital Markets and Opportunistic Strategies Forum on Nov. 28 at 22 Vanderbilt, a newly renovated mixed-use office property on the site of the old Biltmore Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan. 

After a few words from the building’s host, Damon Lopez-O’Dwyer from Milstein Properties (and there were also a few words from Adrienne Coyle of Starwood Solutions, one of the event’s sponsors), the morning opened with Ryan Severino, chief economist and head of research at investment firm BGO, holding court with Sam Chandan, founding director and professor at the C.H. Chen Institute for Global Real Estate Finance at the New York University Stern School of Business.