Basically, the company had to pay for its own buyout when private equity firms KKL, Vornado, and Bain bought the company for $6.6 billion, mostly with loans.
Because the company then had to pay off those extreme loans, they were forced to sell off their assets and property, which they leased back from the very private equity firms that now owned them.
The same thing happened more recently with Red Lobster and JoAnn Fabrics.
Not defending PE, but there are situations where this type of thing would make sense. If the rates were low enough a company could cash out it’s property value using something like this and use the cash for an expansion, to make a moonshot investment, or maybe as a last ditch to survive in a downturn.
That’s not what’s happening here, but turning real assets to cash through debt to then invest in the business is a decent tactic.
Wouldn’t using those assets as collateral for a loan achieve the exact same thing though? Conceptually it’s the same principle except you retain your ownership if you don’t default.
I guess selling the asset would bring in slightly more immediate revenue than loaning (at the expense of extreme volatility in long term costs). But I don’t think this justification really makes sense for a company not trying to cook the books. If this kind of move ever becomes a true necessity, entering a bankruptcy procedure is probably a better option for everyone involved lol
I see your point, though I don’t know of an example (they’re doing it with Hospitals now too).
Still if you have so many locations that you have enough capital in their land, it seems like closing the locations that you’d sell would make a moonshot more likely to succeed.
Yeah, since I wrote that I’ve been trying to think of a real world example and haven’t come up with one. Perhaps my ramblings are purely hypothetical or maybe pulled directly from my ass.
McLaren did this with their campus location to allow them to restructure (survive)
McLaren Sale and Leaseback
the government rarely wants to incentivise direct job loss