Madison International opens London office

The New York-based firm has appointed Sean Kelly Rand, formerly of boutique Bell Capital Partners and Lehman Brothers, as director to help lead its activities from the UK capital.

Madison International Realty has opened a London office and hired former Bell Capital Partners and Lehman Brothers executive Sean Kelly-Rand as director.

Kelly-Rand was formerly vice president of the financing boutique Bell Capital, arranging subordinated capital for European real estate transactions. Prior to that, he worked at Lehman Brothers underwriting and structuring equity, bridge equity, mezzanine and senior debt transactions.

Madison founder Ronald Dickerman said the firm was seeing a growing number of deals, where JV investors were looking to exit deals without selling the underlying property.

Earlier this month, the secondaries investor increased its stake in New York’s Chrysler East Building to almost 50 percent, after acquiring an additional $10 million of LP equity interests. The firm told PERE it had purchased the partnership interests – equivalent to an additional 10.4 percent stake in the 32-storey office – from German investors in a Commerzbank closed-ended fund. Madison now owns a 48.9 percent interest in the 42nd Street property, which sits to the east of the Chrysler Building, after investing roughly $55 million of capital.

The firm has previously acquired a 17.5 percent interest in the 10-storey Devonshire House office property, near Green Park, London, investing around $38.6 million.

Madison, which also has offices in Frankfurt, is eyeing LP equity interests in core joint venture projects and has another three to six similar deals already in the pipeline.

In a statement, Dickerman said the firm would also target opportunities to “amortise maturing debt with equity, restructure or recapitalise, or [acquire] a minority ownership position so [LPs] can monetise some of the embedded equity”.