Get Me Rewrite!

On Wednesday, I witnessed corporate history. As part of my duties as a real estate writer, I went downtown via train to attend a shareholder's meeting of Equity Office Properties Trust (EOP), the largest office landlord in the country. It's an oversized operation indeed, owning more than 100 million square feet of office space nationwide. Or rather, I should now say, it was oversized.

What I witnessed was the last shareholders meeting of that particular REIT, because it was the subject of what's been called the largest leveraged buyout in history, at least until the next one comes along. I haven't verified that "largest" part, but I work for myself, and don't have time for that. If the Wall Street Journal says largest, I can say "reportedly" or "thought to be" and let it go at that. Anyway, the price was $23.2 billion, plus assumed EOP debt, making a total of about $39 billion. That is, $39,000,000,000.00, just to give the zeroes their due. At the meeting, the shareholders voted to accept the LBO and sell the company in toto to a New York LBO leader that will, surely, sell that unimaginably large portfolio off in pieces.

The meeting was held in the Civic Opera Building's auditorium -- not where the Lyric Opera performs (damn), but a much smaller and more utilitarian space within the office building itself, which also happens to be an Equity Office property. I'd been in that space before. When I had my office in that building, I went to a couple of presentations there, most memorably one by an assistant fire marshall who reminded us not to stay at our desks during fire drills. Because we would DIE if it were the real McCoy.

The shareholders and (mostly, I expect) their proxies filled up most of the place, but the back few rows were for media -- besides me, I noted representatives of the AP, Reuters, the Tribune, Sun-Times and Crain's Chicago Business, and some other publications, two of which I used to work for. I knew some of the media types and have run across most of the rest at one time or another. Alas, there was no moment, right after the meeting was over, when we all rushed to a bank of phone booths to call our stories in.