With the sunset gone, every QOF term sheet reads like an open-ended hold
Three offering documents in front of me, all restated since last summer when the incentive was made permanent under P.L. 119-21. In all three, the language about winding up got looser than the versions I read in 2023. Two of them now say the manager may extend the term for successive two-year periods with no cap and no investor vote. The third caps extensions at four years but lets the manager satisfy a redemption request in kind, which for a passive holder of an interest in a single development LLC means almost nothing.
The logic is not hard to follow. When the program had a cliff, sponsors had a reason to line up a sale or a refi around the ten-year mark. Now there's no external clock forcing the conversation, and a permanent regime plus a stabilized asset is exactly the thing a sponsor wants to keep managing and collecting fees on. The ten-year hold is what gets you the treatment on the new appreciation, and how that applies to your specific gain is a question for your own tax advisor, but the ten years running does not by itself put cash in your hand. Somebody has to sell, refinance, or buy you out.
The counterargument I keep getting from sponsors is real too. A hard liquidation deadline written into the operating agreement forces a sale into whatever market shows up in year eleven, and in a high construction cost environment where lease-up ran slow, a forced sale date is how a decent asset gets dumped. Appraisal-based redemption sounds fair on paper and then you find out who picks the appraiser and what the discount for lack of marketability does to your number.
So where do you land. I'd rather argue about this than keep marking up the same clause alone.
In a passive QOF position, what exit provision would you actually insist on?
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