Hedge fund manager William Ackman has come up with a plan to save troubled discount retailer Target: form a trust with the land the Minneapolis-based store chain owns, spin off 20 percent of that into a $5 billion IPO, then use that money to lower Target’s debt and in the process maintain its credit rating. Ackman’s hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management owns 10 percent of Target.

The plan, a revised version of an earlier real estate plan by Ackman, might sound like a good idea on paper. But commercial REITS are down 57 percent so far this year, according to the FTSE NAREIT US Real Estate Index (industrial and office REITs are down even more, 62 percent).

And the IPO market is all but dead. The last IPO to launch goes all the way back to early August, and 87 companies have pulled their IPO plans so far this year . (One IPO is scheduled to price Wednesday night, however.)

Certainly Target shareholders looked unimpressed by Ackman’s latest plan, bidding the retailer’s stock down 10 percent to a new 5 1/2-year low.

Still, credit Ackman for thinking big. A $5 billion deal would rank as by far the largest among REITs of any kind this decade, according to Thomson Reuters data.

So far the largest REIT IPOs of the decade are Douglas Emmett, which went public in October 2006 with a $1.6 billion stock flotation and is down 45.6 percent over its offer price, and KKR Financial Corp, which launched a $900 million IPO in June 2005 but whose parent KKR Financial Holdings in March agreed to sell it after it failed to live up to expectations.

But if management and other shareholders go along with Ackman’s plan, time may be on his side. Launching an IPO takes time and given enough of it, the commercial real estate and IPO markets could rebound. One day.