Bayfield growing with retail in better secondary markets
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Bayfield REIT has a nice ring to it – except that it never happened. Last year, Toronto’s Bayfield Realty Advisors Inc. looked at turning itself into a REIT and ultimately decided against the move.
“I didn’t feel good about the market, so we didn’t,” Harold Spring, Bayfield’s president and CEO, said in a phone interview. “We thought the market just might not be as good when we came to market and we didn’t want to take the risk.”
As it turns out, it was a good move. The REITs have lost about 30 per cent in their value over the course of the year.
It’s the sort of prescient management that has helped turned the acquisition, asset management and development firm into a player in the retail market in the last eight years.