Starwood Property Trust Inc., a real estate investment trust helmed by property mogul Barry Sternlicht, had an inauspicious start to its life as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of the Greenwich, Connecticut, company dropped around 2.6 percent in composite trading of its initial public offering of 40.5 million shares worth $810 million, the firm said in a statement. Starwood is one of a number of fledgling REITs started by

hedge funds or private equity firms in recent weeks, as previously reported by DS News. Like the others — PennyMac, Invesco, Apollo Management — Starwood plans to use proceeds from public share offerings to invest in commercial real estate debt and residential mortgages, many of which can be obtained cheaply as values continue to fall, borrowers have trouble refinancing, and lenders look to unload underperforming assets. But the firms are fighting a soft market for IPOs this year: So far, such offerings have raised only about 12 percent of the capital that they generated in 2008. Sternlicht — who built the Starwood hotel empire — is no stranger to the distressed-property markets. His investment firm, Starwood Capital Group LLC, started out by buying 7,000 units in distress sales by the Resolution Trust Corp., the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other lenders during the savings-and-loan crisis in the late ’80s and early ’90s, according to Bloomberg. “You got some people, like Barry, smart people who are trying to get ahead of the market,” Dennis Yeskey, managing director at AlixPartners LLP, told Bloomberg. “I think he’s ahead of his time.”