MassLive.com - October 18, 2007
Friendly Ice Cream Corp. has sold its headquarters campus on Boston Road and 160 of its restaurants to subsidiaries of Realty Income Corp., a California-based company that specializes in buying retail properties and leasing them back to the original chains under long-term lease agreements. Most of the leases are repotedly for 40 years.
"This is not something that's uncommon," said James D. Sullivan, vice president for franchising and development at Friendly, yesterday. "This is really familiar in the restaurant industry. If you look at all the restaurant transactions recently, across a broad range of concepts, this is the norm. We had a number of properties encumbered with mortgages, and this was a way to eliminate some of that debt, through a sale-lease-back." The process is "part of the overall restructuring of the balance sheet for the company. It is more about securing our future for the long term," Sullivan said.
Friendly was acquired on Aug. 31 by an affiliate of Sun Capital Partners, a private equity firm based in Boca Raton, Fla., for $337.2 million. Systemwide, the company has completed sale-lease-back transactions on 160 restaurants since Sun Capital bought the company on Aug. 31. The company has 316 company restaurants and 196 franchised restaurants.
Most of the sales involve company-operated stores, Sullivan said, though a few franchise restaurants are on Friendly-owned property and a few were sold and leased back to the company.
Sphere: Related Content
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment