City’s Big Publicly Traded Landlords Bid Good Riddance to ’07

It’s been some tough times for REIT’s.

As 2007 closed out, Wall Street left the city’s biggest real estate investment trusts and other publicly held real estate firms to wallow in their sorrows, as the rough market left almost all with 52-week lows in the last half of December.

Since the high point of mid-February, the drops in share price have been considerable: SL Green, the city’s largest REIT, saw its stock drop 38 percent by Dec. 31; Vornado Realty Trust’s stock fell 34 percent; and Boston Properties was down 27 percent.

It’s tough to say what the future will bring, but perhaps the recent moves by analysts offer some views. In the past three weeks, analysts downgraded two major real estate companies: On Dec. 14, a Goldman Sachs analyst dropped Forest City Enterprise’s rating; and on Dec. 19, an analyst with KeyBanc Capital Markets dropped SL Green’s rating from “buy” to “hold.”