Ithaca, NY, August 12, 2010 – Watermark Capital Partners, LLC, has become an Industry Fellow of the Center for Real Estate Finance (CREF) at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. As one of two charter Industry Fellows, Watermark has provided seed funding for the center and has been instrumental in informing CREF’s initial development. Watermark is a private investment and management firm that specializes in real estate private equity transactions and also invests in select non-real estate related opportunities. Watermark’s activities are focused on complex assets that benefit from demographic shifts, strategic marketing, and value-creation and repositioning initiatives, including hotels and resorts, golf and recreation, resort residential, fractional and club programs, and new-urbanism and mixed-use projects. “The breadth of experience that Watermark Capital Partners brings to the Industry Fellows program is tremendous,” said Jan deRoos, HVS Professor of Hotel Finance and Real Estate and executive director of CREF. “Our students, faculty, and other industry partners will benefit greatly from our affiliation with Watermark.” Michael Medzigian, chairman and managing partner of Watermark, will represent the firm at meetings of the CREF Industry Fellows. During his career, Medzigian has successfully overseen over $13 billion of real estate investments and has delivered superior risk adjusted returns to his investors. Prior to the formation of Watermark, he was president and chief executive officer of Lazard Freres Real Estate Investors and a managing director of Lazard. While there, Medzigian chaired the investment committees for each of the Lazard Real Estate Funds. “The School of Hotel Administration has long been an incubator for future leaders in real estate and real estate finance,” said Medzigian. “We look forward to working with CREF to help extend the school’s leadership position in this discipline.” The CREF Industry Fellows program is the cornerstone of the center’s outreach efforts. The program helps fund the annual Cornell Real Estate Case Competition, seminars on current industry topics, student travel to real estate investment conferences, as well as faculty research. The most recent meeting of the Industry Fellows was held in June in conjunction with the NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference in New York City.
About the Center for Real Estate Finance
Established in 2009, the Center for Real Estate Finance provides a platform for educating students, creating new knowledge through research activities, and exchanging information about real estate with a broad set of audiences. CREF is at the forefront of research in all areas of commercial real estate, from the study of the behavior of real estate assets in investment portfolios to an understanding of real estate capital markets to the science of hedging real estate risk. To learn more about CREF, visit www.cref.cornell.edu or contact the center at 607.255.6025 or atcref@sha.cornell.edu.
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