March 19, 2008

Virtú Investments Founder Quoted by CoStar Group Magazine Article

San Francisco CA — Virtú Investments, LLC, co-founder Michael Green was recently featured as an expert news source by nationally recognized commercial real estate information company, the CoStar Group.

In the article titled "Financial Storm Pounding Real Estate Sentiment" author Mark Heschmeyer explores the current fears and lack of financing in the commercial credit industry. On the subject of falling values, he quotes Michael Green:

"We have further to go in the downside of commercial real estate. It never got as overheated as residential, and there are underlying fundamentals to its value, in contrast to where the single-family market raced, however, there is no question that the relative availability and price of capital drove values in commercial as well," said Michael Green, principal of Virtu Investments in Carlsbad, CA. "With the recent pullback, we have and will continue to see a decline in values. It is close to 10% today already and has at least that far to travel again before this is over."

"Prevailing wisdom is that it will be less in those stronger, core assets and locations, and more in B and C assets in the tertiary markets, as a correlation to access to capital," Green continued. "However, there will be large players with core assets that made inappropriate leverage decisions (Macklowe) akin to Bear Stearns and Carlyle [Capital Corp.] in the financial sector that will get caught and forced to re-price which will have a sobering affect on all our values for the next few years. Real estate has returned to its roots, cash flow, long-term appreciation and tax benefits. The fun of trading it like stocks has come to an end."

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Michael Green and Scott McWhorter formed Virtú Investments in 1997. Since then, the company has acquired over forty five properties throughout the country. The company's current portfolio is valued at approximately $450 million and Virtú has approximately $140 million of private equity under management. Virtú performs its own property management and has primary offices in San Francisco and Carlsbad, CA, and satellite offices in Seattle, WA and Scottsdale, AZ.

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