Cogent Communications CEO and D.C.-area commercial real estate investor Dave Schaeffer has had to give up the vast majority of his stake in his tech company to support his office portfolio.
Two office towers at 7799 Leesburg Pike that Dave Schaeffer purchased in 2022.
Schaeffer, who owns 42 office buildings in the Greater D.C. area, told Bloomberg that his portfolio has lost more than half of its value since 2022, dipping from $1.1B to $500M.
To cover his debt, Schaeffer has offloaded 84% of his shares in Cogent this year, he told Bloomberg, saying the sales were made “under duress” and most were “completely involuntary.”
Two of his lenders, JPMorgan Chase and Royal Bank of Canada, earlier this month seized a combined $82M of shares that Schaeffer had pledged as collateral, Bloomberg reported. He told Bloomberg he’s “in a particularly tough real estate position” because his lenders can access his Cogent holdings.
Meanwhile, that company’s stock price has been plummeting, falling more than 50% year-to-date, per Bloomberg’s analysis.
For over a decade, Schaeffer has primarily taken his compensation at Cogent in the form of shares rather than a salary and has used that stake as collateral on his loans, Bloomberg reported.
Cogent declined to comment on Bloomberg’s reporting.
Schaeffer’s portfolio includes a West End office building formerly occupied by the Association of American Medical Colleges and a Tenleytown office and retail building.
Schaeffer purchased two D.C.-area office properties from Lerner Enterprises in the summer of 2022 — a two-tower Tysons property and one in downtown D.C. — for $100M. He paid nearly $103M for two Rosslyn office buildings at the end of 2018 that total 281K SF.
He told Bloomberg his office portfolio’s vacancy rate has risen from 10% before the pandemic to 35% today, and it is largely made up of Class-B buildings. CBRE’s second-quarter report found the Class-B segment had the highest vacancy in D.C. at 26%, while the overall market was at 22.6%.
“I had a stable portfolio that was consistently appreciating. And then when Covid hit, the portfolio began to depreciate,” Schaeffer told Bloomberg. “The DOGE overhang and the additional pressure that put on the entire market turned the D.C. market from one of the best into one of the worst markets nationally.”