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Technology Stocks : Media Industries: Newspapers, TV, Radio, Movies, Online -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (610)	4/15/2009 9:15:18 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8535

Zell Says Commercial Real Estate Values Down 30%; Tribune Was a ‘Mistake’ By Greg Miles and Hui-yong Yu April 15 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire investor Sam Zell said commercial real estate values are down about 30 percent and that his purchase of Tribune Co. was a mistake. “You’re going to see a lot of change of ownership in commercial real estate” as a result of the once optimistic forecasts, Zell said in a Bloomberg Television interview today. Zell said he was “more than willing” to admit he made a mistake in buying Tribune, owner of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. The company’s bankruptcy filing helped stop the “bleeding,” he said. Zell, 67, exited the U.S. office market at the peak in February 2007 by selling Equity Office Properties Trust to Blackstone Group LP for $39 billion including debt in the biggest leveraged buyout at the time. The sale earned Zell about $900 million. In December 2007, Zell and investors took private Tribune in a deal that gave the company $13 billion in debt. The Blackstone transaction capped a tumultuous period for Zell after his 2001 purchase of Spieker Properties, then the biggest commercial landlord on the U.S. West Coast. He paid $7.2 billion just as California’s technology boom fizzled and cut Silicon Valley rents, causing Equity Office shares to lag behind other real estate investment trusts for the next four years. Property Crisis Hailed as a “genius” of real estate by Boston Properties Chairman Mortimer Zuckerman, Zell didn’t heed his own warnings that debt markets were dangerously awash in capital and moved ahead with a new takeover in a struggling industry. Two years after the Blackstone deal, declining property values are again confronting landlords. Debt-laden developers are being forced to sell buildings and vacancy rates at U.S. offices, apartment buildings and retail centers have risen to their highest levels in at least four years. The Bloomberg Real Estate Investment Trust Index is down 57 percent during the past year. “It’s more likely the banks will either foreclose or come up with some kind of restructurings that will ultimately allow the properties to trade,” said Zell. Zell said defaults on commercial real estate loans aren’t a problem because most debtors are current on payments. “The problem is maturities, not carrying the real estate,” Zell said. No Tribune Rescue Zell said a merger of Tribune is unlikely in the current environment. “That’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus,” Zell said. “There’s not a long list of people who want to buy newspaper companies today.” “The definition if you bought something and it’s now worth a great deal less, you made a mistake,” Zell said. “And I’m more than willing to say that I made a mistake. I was too optimistic in terms of the newspaper’s ability to preserve its position.” The economic stimulus package adopted by the Obama administration is helping restore confidence, Zell said. The president and his team may be trying to do too much too soon, he said. Zell, chairman of Chicago-based apartment REIT Equity Residential, said there are signs the housing market may start to recover. The single-family housing market is starting to “bottom out” and “this summer we’ll see equilibrium,” he said. To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Miles in New York at gmiles1@bloomberg.net; Hui-yong Yu in Seattle at hyu@bloomberg.net Last Updated: April 15, 2009 08:36 EDT

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (610)	6/11/2009 8:36:57 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Respond to of 8535

AOL has purchased Patch Media Corp. and Going Inc., two hyperlocal news sites. Patch is partially owned by Tim Armstrong, AOL's CEO. AOL Acquires Two Local Web Start-Ups By Tim Arango New York Times June 11, 2009, 5:13 pm From the Media Decoder blog. We recently wrote about Patch in a story on local news sites, which are drawing a lot of attention from publishers and advertisers. America Online, the soon-to-be jettisoned unit of Time Warner, bought two small Web sites Thursday — one of which was owned partially by Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive. AOL said it purchased two sites that specialize in local content: Patch Media Corp. and Going Inc. Each deal was valued at less than $10 million. Mr. Armstrong, the former Google executive who was appointed C.E.O. of AOL in March, had invested less than $5 million in Patch. But in a memorandum to AOL employees Thursday Mr. Armstrong said he will not earn a profit. “At the Time Warner negotiated acquisition price, I was in a position to earn a return on my investment in Patch,” he wrote. “However, I have decided to forgo any profit from my seed investment in Patch…” Instead, Mr. Armstrong will receive stock that equals the value of his initial investment, once AOL becomes a separate public company, which is expected to happen by the end of the year. bits.blogs.nytimes.com