Winning teams

Last June, L&L Holding Co. and Beacon Capital Partners teamed up to buy 222 Broadway. They paid $230 million for the 27-story office tower and then poured millions of dollars into refurbishing the 50-year-old property.

Tellingly, both companies are seen as big-league real estate investors and operators in their own right. Nonetheless, both saw the benefit of working together.

"Beacon provided us with two things: equity and skill," said David Levinson, L&L's chief executive.

Five years after the real estate market collapsed, many investors are getting back into action mode in a strengthening real estate market, and partnerships like that of L&L and Beacon are very much in vogue as a means to double up on financial and managerial firepower for a specific transaction or for a series of deals.

A case in point is the Milford Plaza Hotel just west of Times Square. Earlier this year, when the time came for Crown Acquisitions to sell the 1,331-room behemoth it had purchased in 2010 with two partners, it tried something different.

The property was sold off in three pieces: its retail space, the hotel itself and the land underneath it all.

The strategy paid off spectacularly in March when the partners, including Highgate Holdings and Rockpoint Group, announced they had reached a deal to sell the land alone for $325 million - 63% more than they had paid for the entire property. Now the group is in the process of selling the retail and hotel space.

"It was Highgate's idea to divide the property," said Haim Chera, one of Crown's principals. "It's been our approach that we'd rather have half of a deal and be able to learn...