Background: The Ascension Team represents a privately owned manufacturer of packaged meat and frozen food products. Our team was hired to structure and execute a sale leaseback of the company’s existing owned real estate portfolio – four cold storage and food manufacturing facilities across the United States.
Client Objective: The company was focused on hiring the right advisor, one who would provide a holistic assessment of the company’s real estate holdings, and who understood the nuances of cold-storage and food-related facilities. Their goal was to use these proceeds to recapitalize its balance sheet, putting the business in a better financial position to take advantage of several strategic growth opportunities.
Solution: Our team ran a competitive process, bringing in offers from a variety of investor types including public REITs, family offices, private funds, and asset managers. The initial sale leaseback transaction closed at a price of $34.2 million. Months later, the company hired our team again, this time to generate a financing solution for a new development project, a state-of-the-art cold storage facility in the Boston metro area. Our team ran an aggressive investor outreach process, ultimately securing $43 million in forward take-out financing for the company’s new facility from one of the world's largest real estate managers.