Howard Lorber and Steve Witkoff (Getty, iStock)
Frequent business partners Howard Lorber and Steve Witkoff have a new project, but it’s not a condo or hotel. It’s a SPAC.
The developers’ Ocean Drive Acquisition Corp. is looking to raise $250 million from investors to take a proptech startup public, according to a regulatory filing. In addition to Lorber and Witkoff, asset manager Monroe Capital is sponsoring the blank-check company.
“Technology has become a strategic imperative as [real estate] owners seek ways to increase the efficiency of their assets,” the filing said. “Our management team has specific experience and knowledge regarding the real estate industry and companies that provide technological solutions and innovation.”
Beyond its bricks-and-mortar holdings, RXR has been one of several real estate players to invest in proptech in recent years.
According to regulatory filings, RXR Digital has backed 10 proptech companies, including smart-lock maker Latch, which plans to go public via Tishman Speyer’s SPAC. It also invested in Metropolis, a parking startup; VTS, a lease management platform; Kitchen United, a ghost kitchen startup; and Eden, an office management firm which purchased Managed by Q from WeWork.
Not all investments have panned out, though. RXR invested in Lyric, a short-term rental startup backed by Airbnb, that folded over the summer when Covid decimated the travel industry. (Tishman Speyer, Fifth Wall Ventures and Barry Sternlicht were also investors.)
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From left: Lionheart’s Ophir Sternberg, Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace, Chamath Palihapitiya, Supernova Partners’ Spencer Rascoff and Proptech Acquisition II’s Tom Hennessy (Getty, LinkedIn, iStock)
It’s a good time to be a startup aspiring to go public.
Investors plowed more than $83 billion into blank-check companies last year and 11 days into 2021, they’ve invested $7.2 billion more.
More than a half-dozen of those entities, also known as special-purpose acquisition companies, are targeting proptech startups. The VC firm Fifth Wall Ventures was the latest to jump into the fray, and other big firms including CBRE and SoftBank have recently hopped on the SPAC bandwagon.