NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CapLease, Inc. (NYSE: LSE) announced today that it has closed the previously announced sale of its March 2005 collateralized debt obligation transaction. The CDO sale, which generated total cash proceeds excluding accrued interest of approximately $30.2 million, primarily included the transfer of the assets and liabilities comprising the CDO transaction to an affiliate of NorthStar Realty Finance Corp. It also included the prepayment of three cross-collateralized first mortgage loans by the borrower. The Company retained an aggregate of $5.9 million face amount of Class A and Class B notes in the CDO transaction which will continue to receive principal and interest in accordance with the CDO waterfall and which the Company may look to sell in the future.
Paul McDowell, CapLease’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, stated, “We are exceptionally pleased to report today the closing of the sale of the assets and associated liabilities in our CDO. The sale demonstrated the creativity of our team in what was a complex transaction to complete. By selling the CDO, we have significantly simplified the CapLease story, demonstrated the value of those assets, materially de-risked the CapLease portfolio, lowered leverage, increased book value and freed up equity capital. With this sale, we now have more than $90 million of cash to redeploy into our core business of owning net lease properties. Since the beginning of the year, we have reduced absolute debt by nearly $234 million and brought overall leverage down from 72% to 65%. Also since the beginning of the year, we have shrunk our debt investment portfolio by $259 million, or 73%, while over roughly the same time period, we have purchased or committed to purchase $120 million in new high quality net lease property assets.”
About the Company:
CapLease, Inc. is a real estate investment trust, or REIT, that invests primarily in single tenant commercial real estate assets subject to long-term leases to high credit quality tenants.