[harryh]

The "smart money" wants them to sell their real estate and return the cash to shareholders who can then, if they so choose, invest in real estate directly rather than through a convoluted corporate holding company that was never designed to be a real estate company.

[kuschku]

Much like what happened with lots of German companies, which had to sell off their real estate, then rent it back at higher costs, and then went bankrupt – while the investors had already sold off everything worth from the company.

This concept of US-Investors is known as "Cricket Plague Investor" (Heuschreckeninvestor) in Germany.

[harryh]

If those companies couldn't survive renting real estate at market rates, they deserved to die as they weren't using their capital as well as other businesses.

[kuschku]

The new investors used the real estate only to sue the first company to get money – after the first company went bankrupt, no one rented the real estate again, it’s empty now.

It wasn’t "at market rates", it was far above that, and just intended to bleed out every piece of property from the company and transfer it as profit to the investors.

[Grishnakh]

A company should do what it can to make a return for its shareholders. If it finds that its original mission is failing, what's wrong with switching to something else that they've found, maybe by accident, is highly profitable?

If the shareholders don't like it, they can sell their shares and try investing in another crappy internet portal that burns money. Shareholders have no right to complain about their companies' actions AFAIC; if you don't like the way the company is run, sell your shares. You're not the owner of the company when you own 1-millionth or whatever of it. The only people who have a right to push for a change in the corporate direction are the members of the board of directors. Everyone else is nothing more than in investor, basically just a gambler.

[pbreit]

"Shareholders have no right to complain about their companies' actions"

Uh...it's the complete opposite. First, anyone has the right to complain about anything. But shareholders (i.e., owners) are practically obligated to weigh in on the actions of things they own.

[Grishnakh]

>First, anyone has the right to complain about anything.

Maybe, but the rest of us have the right to make fun of those people for tilting at windmills.

[swyman]

> You're not the owner of the company when you own 1-millionth or whatever of it.

There is no single "owner" of a public company. Everyone who holds voting shares holds a share of ownership. Anyone is free to try to convince anyone else to vote their shares a certain way. Ultimately the board serves at the pleasure of the shareholders collectively, and that is exactly how activist investors like Starboard work.

[Grishnakh]

No, there's no single owner, however in most companies there's a small class of people who own a lot of the stock and have a huge amount of power, while most shareholders have very little stock (esp. if it's owned as part of a mutual fund) and no real power.

So yeah, if you have enough shares that the board really wants to listen to you, complain away. For most people though, that's a waste of time. Just sell your shares and move on. The board doesn't give a rat's ass about some people who just own shares through their retirement funds, only what really large investors want, as those people have the power to affect their position on the board.

[harryh]

> if you don't like the way the company is run, sell your shares.

The activist investors in question believe that changing strategies will return more capital back to them than they can get by selling their shares today.

> when you own 1-millionth or whatever of it

Starboard owns closer to 1/100th than 1/1,000,000th of Yahoo.

[effie]

Shareholders may value influence on their company more than the money the can get for their shares.

[erichurkman]

Much like Sears spinning off their significant real estate holdings from an unprofitable/dying business before the real estate gets dragged down, too.