NEW YORK, October 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Kushner (together with its subsidiaries, “Kushner”), a veteran real estate owner and operator and one of Veris Residential’s largest shareholders AER (“Veris”), today sent the following letter to the Board of Directors of Veris:
Kushner-Letter-to-Veris-Residential-Board-of-Directors-10.20.22.pdf
The full text of the letter follows:
October 20, 2022
The board of directors
Veris Residential, Inc.
210 Hudson Stsuite 400
Jersey City, NJ 07311
Dear board members,
This letter is an open response to the letters we have received from Tammy JonesCEO of Veris, am October 4, 2022 and October 16, 2022. We are writing that despite the serious ongoing operational issues at Veris Residential, Inc., our efforts to work fruitfully with the board and management have been effectively ignored over the past several months.
After reviewing publicly reported investor holdings, Kushner is one of Veris’ top six shareholders. Kushner is a long-term, multigenerational real estate investor, not a short-term hedge fund or activist. We have acquired a 4.5 million share stake in Veris over the past five months in the belief that Veris owns a quality real estate portfolio with significant long-term potential that is unfortunately mismanaged.
As we presented to the board in Sep 2022, we believe the intrinsic value of Veris’ real estate portfolio has suffered significant damage over the past few years – amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value. Despite being a relatively small, geographically concentrated, regional REIT, Veris’ management team has risen $57 million of G&A costs in 2021, which is 10 times the average G&A per unit of Veris’ peer group. The CEO of this small residential REIT lives in the UK. His previous experience, along with that of COO, was overseeing an investment vehicle for European office buildings. The management of Veris…
