W. P. Carey President to Retire

W. P. Carey has announced that John Park is stepping down from his role as president of the company. The retirement will come into effect at the end of September this year.

Park will serve as senior advisor to the net lease REIT through February 2025. The separate role of president will be eliminated and the title will be assumed by the company’s current CEO, Jason Fox.

Park was appointed president of the company in 2018. Prior to that position, he has served as director of Strategy and Capital Markets.

Park joined W. P. Carey as an investment analyst in 1987. Since then, he has led many significant deals for the company, including the consolidation and NYSE listing of CPA:1–9 as Carey Diversified LLC in 1998; its merger with W. P. Carey & Co. Inc. in 2000; W. P. Carey’s merger with CPA:15 and REIT conversion in 2012, as well as the company’s subsequent mergers with CPA:16, CPA:17 – Global and CPA:18 – Global, the last of which has made the company a top 25 REIT in market capitalization.

W. P. Carey’s operations

W.P. Carey’s portfolio includes 1,282 net lease properties covering some 168 million square feet and a portfolio of 89 self storage assets. The company continues to focus most of its operations on industrial and retail properties across the U.S. and Europe.

Earlier this spring, W. P. Carey paid $94.1 million for a 1.2 million-square-foot speculative industrial building in Commercial Point, Ohio. The company has also inked a 1.6 million-square-foot industrial lease at 701 Central Ave. in a Chicago suburb. The deal was then considered the market’s largest transaction of its kind year-to-date.

In September 2023, W. P. Carey announced that it will exit its position in office properties by spinning off part of its portfolio into a separate entity and selling the rest. The company had owned roughly 14.7 million square feet of office assets globally.