Alexander Haagen Properties: This was a real estate investment company that acquired retail malls and offices. They would manage them, lease them or mortgage them to create a steady income stream. This company specialized in open air centers, but would invest and develop any retail space that would add value to the portfolio of the company. It was a family run company that started out as a private corporation.
The real estate developer went public in 1993 and the company was worth aprox $640 million in total assets at the time. And then in 1997 Alexander Haagen Properties became partners with the retail developer Lazard Freres, the partnership made them the strongest real estate buyers in the West, Hoping to do billions of dollars worth of real estate investing over the next five years.
But in November of 1997 Alexander Haagen Sr quit as chairman of the board, at the same time that Alexander Haagen III quit as vice chairman of the board while Charlotte Haagen, wife of Alexander Haagen Sr left the company as well. There was little notice and very little uproar about it. The company paid the family a total of $ 2.5 million dollars and bought out their shares in the company at market value, which was $17.00 per common stock at the time.
Alexander Haagen Properties continued to run as a real estate development company without the Haagen family, while Lazard Freres took control off all the companies assets, later Alexander Haagen Properties was renamed Center Trust INC.
Alexander Haagen Properties founder Alexander Haagen, now 80 (as of 2000) had started up another real estate development company, in which the whole family works in. This is a private company, which the family says they prefer over a public one, it is named Haagen CO. and owns many real estate properties within the state of California. Because they took the money they made from the sale of Alexander Haagen Properties and put it into this new business, the family is said to be in a position to acquire many real estate properties, but will always stay a privately run real estate company.
Alexander Haagen Properties renamed Center Trust INC, operated until 2002 when it was bought by Pan Pacific retail properties for $7.50 per common share; the total paid out in the purchase of Center Trust INC was $600 million dollars.
Pan Pacific then operated until 2006 when it was merged with Kimco Realty Corp, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange as KIM.
Alexander Haagen Properties was the start of a very lucrative and long lasting set of retail real estate assets that have been bought and sold multiple times, nearly all of Alexander Haagen Properties are now owned by Kimco Realty Corp.
