Q&A: Are Businesses Leaving Big Cities?

New York, NY – Cushman & Wakefield announced today that the real estate services firm served as the exclusive advisor to Epum Holdings in the procurement of $50,000,000 in programmatic joint venture equity for the Epum Marina Partners Fund, a platform targeting marina acquisition and development opportunities across the Northeast, Great Lakes and the Mid-Atlantic.

A Cushman & Wakefield Equity, Debt & Structured Finance team of Steve Michels, Jared Kelso, Dan O’Brien and Lauren Greenberg represented Epum Holdings.

“The marina industry presents significant, lucrative investment opportunities that drive high returns,” said Michels. “Given the attractive market dynamics and robust acquisition pipeline Epum has procured, we were able to attract significant institutional equity interest in what has historically been a niche real estate asset class.”

The sponsor’s expansion, targeting value-add marina properties across the Northeast, Great Lakes and the Mid-Atlantic, is fueled by a joint venture partnership with an institutional private investment management firm.

“After reviewing REIT-eligible product types that exist outside of traditional real estate asset classes with the potential to provide outsized returns, we identified the marina business as an opportunistic space in 2020” said Spencer Stieff, a Partner at Epum Holdings. “Epum will deploy this capital to target marinas with more than 100 slips in high-rate markets with legacy boating cultures and EBITDA optimization opportunities.”

The Epum marina platform currently consists of four owned properties, with four properties under contract and over 15 additional properties in the pipeline, throughout their target regions.

The industry has experienced exponential growth in demand from both consumers and institutional capital providers, a trend which has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic. In 2020, boat sales achieved a thirteen-year high, representing a 12% increase year-over-year. Following the record year of 2020, new powerboat sales exceeded 300,000 units in 2021 for only the second time in 15 years.

About Epum Holdings
Epum Holdings is a private investment and development platform that employs over 100 years of combined commercial real estate and construction expertise. The Epum Holdings team has collectively acquired more than 5 million square feet of real estate and has a proven track record with institutional capital sources. For more information, please visit www.epumholdings.com.