TPG to Buy ProLogis Assets

Dec. 21, 2010 3:29 p.m. ET

Warehouse company ProLogis said it is selling a portfolio of retail and mixed-use assets to private-equity firm TPG for $505 million, the latest in a series of sales by ProLogis as the company seeks to pay down debt and get in position for future growth.
Publicly traded ProLogis bought the properties being sold as part of its $3.6 billion acquisition of Catellus Development Corp. in 2005. The portfolio includes four shopping centers, two office buildings, 11 mixed-use projects, and Los Angeles Union Station. ProLogis said the sales price isn't comparable to the Catellus acquisition price because other assets from the Catellus portfolio have been sold in recent years.
ProLogis, which went on a debt-fueled expansion binge during the boom years, faced a cash crunch in 2008. It has been repairing its balance sheet, selling stock and property. In October, it announced the sale of 180 industrial properties, a minority interest in a hotel, and stakes in three investment funds to private-equity firm Blackstone Group LP for $1.02 billion.
"The Catellus assets are high quality with good long-term prospects, but they are not in keeping with our strategy to concentrate our investment in core industrial properties in the world's major logistics corridors," ProLogis Chief Executive Walter C. Rakowich said in a statement.

—Anton Troianovski

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Mortgage-backed securities -Leveraging Wiki

This is a starting point for my personal explanation of Mortgage-backed Securities. 


My career history was brief but intensive, the company has folded, sold off and eaten alive by Wall Street with scraps fed to the Feds for their last supper.  If

Mortgage-backed security

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Securities
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A mortgage-backed security (MBS) is a type of asset-backed security that is secured by a mortgage or collection of mortgages. The mortgages are sold to a group of individuals (a government agency or investment bank) that securitizes, or packages, the loans together into a security that investors can buy. The mortgages of an MBS may be residential or commercial, depending on whether it is an Agency MBS or a Non-Agency MBS; in the United States they may be issued by structures set up by government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or they can be "private-label", issued by structures set up by investment banks. The structure of the MBS may be known as "pass-through", where the interest and principal payments from the borrower or homebuyer pass through it to the MBS holder, or it may be more complex, made up of a pool of other MBSs. Other types of MBS include collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs, often structured as real estate mortgage investment conduits) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).^[1]
The shares of subprime MBSs issued by various structures, such as CMOs, are not identical but rather issued as tranches (French for "slices"), each with a different level of priority in the debt repayment stream, giving them different levels of risk and reward. Tranches—especially the lower-priority, higher-interest tranches—of an MBS are/were often further repackaged and resold as collaterized debt obligations.^[2] These subprime MBSs issued by investment banks were a major issue in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2006–8.
The total face value of an MBS decreases over time, because like mortgages, and unlike bonds, and most other fixed-income securities, the principal in an MBS is not paid back as a single payment to the bond holder at maturity but rather is paid along with the interest in each periodic payment (monthly, quarterly, etc.). This decrease in face value is measured by the MBS's "factor", the percentage of the original "face" that remains to be repaid.

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