Читать книгу The Value Equation - Christopher H. Volk - Страница 15

I have found that most investors and entrepreneurs spend far more time focusing on the left side of the balance sheet than the right. In the case of STORE Capital, the most recent company where I served as founding chief executive officer, the left side of the balance sheet was loaded with profit-center real estate assets the company owned and leased on a long-term basis to service, retail, and manufacturing companies across the country. Most of the questions I fielded from investors and analysts stemmed from these investments.

When it comes to evaluating the right side of real estate company balance sheets, many corporate observers are simply inexperienced. For one thing, most public real estate companies have similar sorts of borrowing, with the resultant interpretation that the right side of a balance sheet is less important. However, this is far from so.

In 2005, at a predecessor public company, we conceived of a novel way to use serially issued secured debt. About three years after we embarked on this process, we sold the company to an investor group that was able to fully assume the highly flexible debt we had created. The result was that our shareholders were able to realize a compound annual rate of return approximating 19%, which would not have been possible without the flexible, assumable nature of our debt obligations. Had we simply followed the well-worn path of traditional financing options employed by most other industry participants, we and our shareholders would have missed out on this opportunity.

Borrowing sources can be instrumental in elevating shareholder rates of return, improving corporate flexibility, and even protecting shareholders in the event of severe economic turbulence.