"We hired a leader — a great leader who's done one of the most amazing turnarounds in the retail industry, which is GGP," WeWork chairman Marcelo Claure said in a CNBC interview on Monday. "He took it from bankruptcy and sold it for tens of billions of dollars to Brookfield. That was a transformational leader, and the company has a great culture. They had to do a lot of innovation in order to transform that retail business. It is a very similar play here.
Metz and Nolan's plan was to split up GGP, keeping the better malls and spinning out non-core assets, both before and after Mathrani joined. Those assets became companies like Howard Hughes, a publicly traded developer of master-planned communities. He brought a wide network to GGP and made even more contacts in all corners of real estate and investing during his nine-year tenure. On a GGP roadshow, he met billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; one executive recalls Mathrani speaking with billionaire mall owner David Simon on the phone "multiple times a week."
But WeWork wasn't Mathrani's planned first move post-Brookfield; instead, he had set up a consulting firm. One of his clients was Starwood Capital Group's retail arm, which owns Class B malls, three sources said. The private-equity firm had emailed investors in the first week of January to announce the retail expert's appointment as a consultant.Instead of Starwood, Mathrani is heading to an even bigger real estate turnaround play: WeWork.
"I remember thinking two weeks in, 'I'm 50 years old and I'm still getting yelled at," said one executive who worked with him for years at GGP. "He's not personally mad at you, he's just emoting." That source said he expects Mathrani to do well shoring up WeWork's revenues and negotiating liabilities with landlords. As of June 30, the company had $47 billion in long-term lease obligations. And the source said Mathrani will not, like Neumann,
United States United States Latest News, United States United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: BusinessInsider - 🏆 729. / 51 Read more »
Source: BusinessInsider - 🏆 729. / 51 Read more »
Source: BusinessInsider - 🏆 729. / 51 Read more »
Source: BusinessInsider - 🏆 729. / 51 Read more »
Source: BusinessInsider - 🏆 729. / 51 Read more »