Younan—founded by chairman, CEO and president Zaya Younan—owns and operates primarily class A office properties in Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix. As of Dec. 31, the company's portfolio was 71.9% leased under 943 leases with a weighted-average remaining lease term of approximately 4.2 years and an average lease size of 8,122 square feet, according to the registration statement.

Younan, which exited the Los Angeles office market in 2006 and then returned last year with the acquisition of a 62,000-square-foot building called WarnerView Corporate Center at 5959 Topanga Canyon Blvd., earlier this year hired former Arden Realty COO Rob Peddicord as its COO. Peddicord was a part of the management team that guided Arden from private to a publicly held REIT before Arden sold out to GE in May 2006 for $4.8 billion to become private again.

Other former Arden execs looking to get back into publicly traded REITs include founders Richard Ziman and Victor Coleman, who served as Arden's president and COO, as well as former Arden chief investment officer Howard Stern. Ziman and Mark A. Albertson, formerly a Morgan Stanley & Co. managing director and president of Morgan Stanley's Prime Property Fund, have filed a registration statement for a REIT called Halvern Realty Inc. that would own and manage a portfolio of office properties in Southern California. Halvern proposes to raise $400 million, according to its initial registration statement.

Coleman and Stern have filed to raise $265 million in an offering for a REIT called Hudson Pacific Properties Inc. that is the successor to Los Angeles-based Hudson Capital LLC, which was founded by Coleman and Stern and focused on "owning, operating and acquiring high-quality office properties in select growth markets primarily in Northern and Southern California," according to its SEC filings. Hudson, upon completion of the offering, will own an initial portfolio of eight properties totaling two million square feet in six California submarkets, according to its filings.