Stray units. (Wall Street West).

Low profile Everest Properties LLC of Pasadena, with about $200 million under management, has been quietly buying real estate investment partnership units for the last five years, exploiting a somewhat inefficient market for equity stakes in many of the real estate syndications of the 1970s and 1980s.

"We are a mini-tender company," said Christopher Davis, Everest general counsel and vice president, last week. "We make tender offers for real estate partnerships, mostly those organized in the 1970s and 1980s."

Despite the advent of the Internet, there is still only a scanty, illiquid market for the trading of units in many of the aging partnerships, billions of dollars worth of which were sold on Wall Street in the real estate syndication heydays. 'To my knowledge, there is still no Web site out there listing partnerships units for sale," said Davis. Everest makes about 100 tender offers a year; only a few brokers across the country are said to specialize in real estate syndication units.

Last week, Davis was overseeing the purchase, for $30 a unit, of a Los Angeles entity named Housing Programs Ltd., which was originally sold to investors at $5,000 a unit in 1984. Some property has been sold by the partnership since 1984, and proceeds kicked back to investors, so it was not clear last week how original investors have fared over the years.

"We do not know how original investors did. We do know it is worth $30 a unit to us," Davis said.

Contributing columnist Benjamin Mark Cole writes about the local investment community for the Los Angeles Business Journal. He can be reached at [e-mail].