More S-11's

There was a rush to file S-11's on last friday; in front of the federal National Plagiarism Awareness holiday on January 18th.

• S-11/A Chatham Lodging Trust. Chatham trust is run by Jeffrey H Fisher who was CEO of Innkeepers USA Trust (KPA) a New York Stock Exchange-listed hotel real estate investment trust, or REIT, from its inception in 1994 through its sale in June 2007 to Apollo Investment Corporation (AINV). Seven of the eight members of the board of trustees of Innkeepers at the time of its sale in June 2007 have agreed to serve as trustees of our Chatham Lodging Trust.
  
  More or less Chatham will be Innkeepers 2.0. The new trust is wisely going after upscale extended stay hotels, since these are less sensitive to tourist traffic and more to the mobility of the business classes. To help the trust get its start, Fisher has assembled an initial portfolio of hotels for the REIT to purchase.
• S-11 Colony Financial. Colony is filing for a secondary offering. The best part of the S-11 is the discussion of events subsequent to the filing of CLNY's last 10-Q. The joint venture with the FDIC is data point, from which you can draw many ideas about the future direction of the company. I remain very optimistic about this company's ability to obtain high IRR's for external shareholders even with the burden of the incentive fee (20% xs of 8%).
• S-11/A Pyramid Hotels & Resorts, Inc. Pyramid is a weird kind of beast. It's an internally managed REIT which is designed to gradually absorb the resources of Pyramid Hotel Group. The S-11 contains a very frightening risk disclosure section, which can be interpreted as management having a good grasp of the risks involved (a good thing), or it is perhaps scary enough to scare anyone from investing in Hotel REITs (a bad thing).
• S-11/A Terreno Realty Corp. More updates from the ex-AMB folks. The current market has shown little love for the existing industrial equity REITs, and that makes it hard to see what is compelling about this IPO at the conceptual level. Terreno is a bet that fresh money will be in better shape over existing players who are grappling with de-leveraging.

In the interests of full disclosure: I own some shares of Colony Capital (CLNY)