Copperline Partners Raises Another $25M on Israeli Bond Market
By Rey Mashayekhi January 23, 2018 5:58 pm
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New York- and Florida-based residential and hotel developer Copperline Partners has dipped back into the Israeli bond market, raising roughly $25 million last week through a debt offering on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Copperline issued around 86 million shekels in bonds last Thursday at a 4.25 percent coupon, according to sources with knowledge of the transaction. The deal is an expansion on the firm’s Series B bond offering last February, which saw Copperline raise $75 million at an interest rate of 5.1 percent, as Commercial Observer reported at the time.
Including a previous $105 million Series A bond offering, Copperline has now issued more than $200 million in debt on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange—which has emerged in recent years as a viable avenue for American real estate firms to raise capital at relatively low borrowing costs.
Copperline’s latest bond offering “shows the demand and appetite of the [Israeli] market” for securities backed by U.S. real estate assets, according to Yossi Levi of InFin, the Tel Aviv-based financial consultancy which advised Copperline in the transaction.
It also indicates the market’s confidence in Copperline, Levi said, as the deal was met with robust demand from Israeli investors that would have been capable of supporting an issuance of more 200 million shekels, or nearly $60 million.
Copperline, a private firm owned by the Schlesinger family, operates roughly 40 multifamily and hotel properties in New York, Florida and Connecticut. The company’s Israeli bonds are backed by a portfolio comprised of 27 of those assets, including its Mayfair Hotel and Spa in Miami and Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla.
The $25 million raise came through a “public tender” open to a wide array of Israeli bond investors—a different structure than most Tel Aviv Stock Exchange debt issuances, which usually first comprise an “institutional tender,” open to a select pool of Israeli institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals, before opening to the wider public.
Levi said the structure allowed Copperline to expedite the bond offering and most easily raise the relatively modest sum it sought, which will be used to assist upcoming payments on the firm’s Series A bonds, which are due to mature in 2020. The firm’s Series B bonds are due to mature in 2025.
Copperline could not immediately be reached for comment.
Copperline wasn’t the only U.S. real estate company to successfully issue debt on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange last week; The Moinian Group raised nearly $170 million through its own bond offering, as CO reported last Thursday, taking the Joseph Moinian-led firm’s total haul on the Israeli debt market to north of $530 million.
