There was an article published on Business Times on Monday ‘The REIT Myth Busted’ by Teh Hooi Ling. I read the article with great interest as I have significant holdings of REITs. Basically, the article is saying that if you held most of the S REITs from day 1, you would have paid more for the rights issue than what you received from the dividends from the REIT.
It uses CapitaMall Trust in a hypothetical situation where the unit holder holds a unit of the REIT since IPO and subscribes to all the rights regardless of the subscription price and the reason for the rights issue. By the end of Nov 2011, the unit holder would have received $1,264 in dividends and paid $1,549 for rights subscription, a net cash outflow of $284 per lot. Now, there is nothing factually wrong with this analysis, however, there are some assumptions…...