About Cohen Equities

Cohen Equities is one of the most proven private investors and operators of real estate in the United States. Throughout a variety of asset classes, submarkets, investment structures, cycles and deal sizes Meir Cohen and his team have successfully identified and realized value, through all points of the cycle.

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$2B+
Deals Executed
25+
States
100+
Acquisitions To Date
10M+
Square Feet Invested In

Through the portfolios of Cohen Equities and C&K Properties, our founding Principal has acquired, improved, and sold over 10 million square feet and $2 billion of real estate in over 200 transactions since 1997. Fully realized investments range from: gut renovations, to vacant building lease ups, to “core” investments in 1+ million square feet of Class A buildings.

A Vertically Integrated Platform

The Cohen Equities team has experience spanning multiple real estate cycles and has worked together successfully for an extended period of time. We have an in-place, vertically integrated platform that includes fully operational teams in acquisitions, investor relations, asset management, leasing, accounting & controls, refinancing and dispositions. We also have well developed relationships throughout the industry, including a broad network of lenders, tenants, sellers, servicers, brokers, consultants, and vendors.

Our Acquisitions team combs a landscape of thousands of investment opportunities throughout the United States to curate a careful selection of investment opportunities that offer intrinsic value. A well-oiled machine built and hardened specifically for our investment strategies. We believe that our Acquisitions team are among the finest in the industry, and we’ve been told that very same thing by many industry peers.

We have full in-house Asset Management & Leasing teams dedicated by asset type. Our teams work closely with third party local leasing brokers and property managers under a ‘hub and spoke’ model that maximizes local efforts while providing a day-to-day quarterback function that integrates those local efforts with the portfolio objectives of investors. Using our proprietary, institutional-grade resources and protocol, our Asset Management & Leasing teams serve as aggressive and professional executors of our business plans.

Our Dispositions & Refinancing team is the crucial gatekeeper of value realization. Rather than being the last stage of the investment lifecycle, our Dispositions & Refinancing team is actively involved in each asset from the closing date of each acquisition. Often accomplishing partial dispositions and immediate partial refinancing, our Dispositions & Refinancing team is actively involved at many points in the lifecycle to extract value and provide cash distributions to investors before harvesting assets and bringing business plans to a successful conclusion.

We have formalized a Fund Management & Investor Relations function that provides daily attention to the needs and desires of our investors. Like a top-tier hotel, our fund management team provides anticipatory, rather than reactionary, customer service to our investors and ensures that all of Cohen Equities’ departments are collectively providing a level of performance that honors the trust and investment that our investors have made in us and our assets.

Our Accounting & Controls team oversees day-to-day accounting and financial reporting for a national portfolio of assets. They also oversee our audit activities and tax reporting and coordinate a wide range of external consultants and financial professionals in ensuring that institutional-grade reports and accounting procedures are provided. Managing a wide range of asset types in multiple geographies, our team ensures that all assets are diligently managed and that investor capital is protected.

Our Executive Management team personally manages every aspect of our business with our underlying departments. Far from being passive managers, senior personnel are involved in every major issue that contributes to value or poses obstacles for our assets, often personally managing matters such as lease negotiations. Our executive management prides itself in actively developing young talent and being player-coaches throughout all of our firm’s activities. Investors can count on our senior personnel to exercise a granular degree of care that's rare and difference making.

We are constantly integrating cutting edge technologies to efficiently optimize our processes. For acquisitions, we have built a proprietary property database that helps our acquisition team track historical and current investment offerings and property level data. For investor relations, we have integrated Juniper Square to offer our investors visibility of their investments as well as access to tax documents and property reports. For property management and accounting, we use Yardi. Other tools we use help us with leasing, marketing, and data synthesis.

By the mid-2000s Meir and his team have acquired over 5 million square feet of office and retail space, representing over $1B in transactions. These include Pier 40 and 1710 Broadway in Manhattan, which both established Meir as an investor with a unique ability to identify and enhance underutilized assets.
Meir forms Cohen Equities as a vehicle to pursue distressed debt and real estate investments nationally. On December 31, 2011 Cohen Equities makes its first distressed asset acquisition.
In addition to its New York City investment activities, Cohen Equities has acquired over 50 assets across the United States in over 25 states.
Cohen Equities places a renewed emphasis on New York City investments, while continuing to seek opportunities throughout the United States.
Meir Cohen moves to the United States in 1984 and within months of his arrival and with less than $5,000 in capital, begins acquiring commercial properties. Over the next 5 years he buys and sells over 40 buildings in Manhattan.
In the early 1990’s Meir and his partner form C&K Properties, which was initially focused on parking lot assets. In 1997 Meir and his team shift their focus to other asset types and begin acquiring and improving office and retail properties in New York City.
2000's
2011
2015
2017
1980's
1990's
Meir Cohen
Meir Cohen
Principal

With over 35 years of experience as a real estate investor across multiple asset classes and investment strategies, Meir has a well earned reputation as one of the most entrepreneurial private real estate investors in the United States. Starting with only a few thousand dollars in 1984, Meir has successfully acquired and enhanced the value of over 10 million square feet of real estate nationally through his various investment platforms. Whether through location (he was early to Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront and Penn Station submarkets), asset class (he aggressively acquired and exited large scale Class-A office buildings between 2003 and 2005) or property interest (he made astute investments in CMBS securities in 2009), Meir has proven himself to be a unique identifier of opportunistic investments that focus on unrealized potential.

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