RL Commercial REIT declares first full-quarter dividend
RL Commercial REIT [RCR 8.14 0.73%] declared a cash dividend of P0.092/share out of Q4/21’s distributable income.
In absolute terms, that’s much larger than RCR’s Q3/21 dividend of P0.062/share, but remember that RCR’s Q3 dividend was declared after its September IPO and represented only 2 months of operating income, or P0.031/share per month of operations.
If we assume that RCR would have at least earned income at the same rate had it been able to include the third month that quarter, we can simply multiply the per-month dividend by 3 to arrive at a “quarterized” Q3/21 dividend of P0.093/share.
So, while RCR’s Q4/21 dividend is indeed a larger number, RCR’s Q4/21 dividend is actually 1% lower than that quartered Q3/21 dividend when we actually try to compare apples to apples.
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That may seem like a small variation, but REITs are a game of inches. Every small adjustment, whether to improve income or optimize expenses, pushes the distributable income that much higher.
That said, I don’t want to lean too heavily on a "quartered" estimation of RCR”s Q3, and I definitely don’t want to use such estimation as a jumping-off point for some kind of larger “what happened?” type of investigation.
RCR investors will be satisfied with the dividend, as it maintains the REIT’s performance relative to its REIT peers, though investors will always be looking for more.
RCR is the first of our REITs to declare a dividend out of Q4 distributable income, so we don’t have any direct comparisons using the same time periods, but Filinvest REIT [FILRT 7.51 0.13%]’s first two dividends were similarly flat (P0.112/share in Q2/21 and Q3/21).
In contrast, AREIT [AREIT 51.00]’s quarterly dividend grew over its first five quarters but was also like FILRT in Q2/21 and Q3/21 in that its dividend remained flat at P0.44/share.
At the end of the day, though, all these REITs are really just measuring each executive team’s ability to monetize roughly the same bundle of assets (commercial leases for office space); sure, each tower is technically different, and each situation comes with its own differentiating qualities (location, client mix, occupancy, WALE, etc), but at a high level all of our current REITs will be pushed and pulled by the same market forces.
That’s why I’m so excited for there to be other additions to the REITscape, like the planned CentralHub REIT between Jollibee [JFC 237.60 1.11%] and DoubleDragon [DD 8.06 8.48%] in the industrial logistics space, and the upcoming Citicore Energy REIT [CREIT 2.55 pre-IPO] IPO that focuses on leases to renewable energy companies, with profit-sharing.
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Merkado Barkada's opinions are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any particular stock. These daily articles are not updated with new information, so each investor must do his or her own due diligence before trading, as the facts and figures in each particular article may have changed.
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