NEW YORK CITY AND TORONTO — Affiliates of Blackstone (NYSE: BX) have entered into an agreement to acquire Tricon Residential (NYSE: TCN) for $3.5 billion in a deal that will take the Canadian owner-operator private. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter.
One of the acquiring entities, Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT), already has an 11 percent ownership stake in Tricon Residential following a $240 million equity purchase in 2020.
Under the terms of the deal, the New York City-based global asset manager will acquire all outstanding shares of Tricon’s common stock for $11.25 per share in cash. The per-share price represents a 30 percent premium over Tricon’s closing stock price on Thursday, Jan. 18 and a 42 percent premium over the weighted average share prices of the last 90 days.
Blackstone intends to maintain and leverage the Tricon platform as it undertakes $1 billion of single-family residential development in the United States and $2.5 billion of traditional multifamily development in Canada. Tricon’s U.S. platform encompasses roughly 2,500 single-family residences in various stages of development, as well as numerous land holdings that can support an additional 21,000 homes.
Tricon’s apartment development pipeline in Canada consists of about 5,500 market-rate and affordable housing units. As of February 2021, the Toronto-based firm owned about 31,000 single-family and multifamily rental units across the United States and Canada. The company went public in 2010 and is also traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. (TCN.TO)
Tricon’s stock price closed at $11.07 per share on Friday, Jan. 19, the first full day of trading after the agreement was announced. The stock price is up about 31 percent from a year ago, when it closed at $8.44 per share on Jan. 23. Blackstone’s stock price closed at $119.08 per share on Friday, Jan. 19, up from $87.83 per share a year ago.
— Taylor Williams