Читать книгу The Value Equation - Christopher H. Volk - Страница 21

1 1. In 1996, we created the first US real estate master trust. The idea was to borrow against a pool of real estate by issuing bonds. Then, later, we would grow the vehicle by adding pools of real estate in subsequent years. In this way, unlike traditional real estate bond issuance, where the bond holders are secured by the specific pool they invested in, master trust bondholders would be secured by the collective the real estate held in past and future pools. For investors, the disadvantage was that they would invest in a pool of notes secured by real estate, but without fully knowing what their ultimate collateral would look like, since we could add to and occasionally substitute the collateral. However, the clear advantage for investors was that the pool could grow larger and become far more diverse over time, with a resultant likelihood that it would perform consistently. By contrast, traditional individual pool borrowings could be expected to have a higher level of performance variability. For us, the master trust delivered secured vehicle where we could service and control our own assets, giving us the ability to sell, improve, or substitute real estate to maximize the value of the pooled assets. Alignments of interest are always important, especially since commercial real estate note issuances are done without recourse to the issuers. In our case, we had an equity commitment amounting to 30% of the real estate investment amount.

2 2. A present value is computed by discounting back future lease payments to be made at a company's estimated cost of borrowings to arrive at a theoretical borrowing equivalent. While the borrowing equivalent may be a reasonable approximation, the discounted value will not tend to equal the amount of OPM used, which is key in evaluating comparative corporate capital stacks. The present value of lease streams is also somewhat irrelevant, since companies nearly always extend leases or replace them with other leases. In that sense, computing the present value of a lease stream does not treat companies like going concerns. Financial statement analysts are most interested in the annual lease payment obligations and generally assume these to be ongoing or increasing, assuming the company is to remain the same size or grow.