Category Archives: Publisher’s Desk

American Tower Becomes a REIT

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As a REIT investor, I’m excited about REITs that focus on specific real estate types. For example, Entertainment Properties Trust is exciting. Entertainment is becoming more diversified, but their core competency is owning movie theaters that are operated by movie exhibitors.

Needless to say I was happy to read the press release on January 3, 2012 that American Tower Corporation had reorganized as a REIT. American Tower is a company that owns an extensive cellular tower network. This corporate conversion provides REIT investors with a very unique and exciting asset class that will consistently share the wealth through dividend payments. In addition, AMT stock is up just over 2% since their conversion. Yep, investors like REITs, and they are going to love having unique options to invest with speciality choices like American Tower.

What does the future hold for speciality REITs? How about Airport REITs or even Air and sub-terrain REITs? Eventually we will have such options.

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Ventas to Acquire Cogdell

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I guess I’m not too surprised that Ventas announced their intentions to acquire Cogdell Spencer today. Cogdell has been struggling since they bought Marshal Erdman back in January of 2008. Investors invest in REITs because they want to own an interest in real estate not design firms. Despite this fact, the Cogdell Spencer leadership, lead at the time by Frank Spencer, moved forward with their purchase of Erdman.

My guess is that investors never really understood Erdman. The Erdman purchase decision was magnified by many quarters of negative EPS. Eventually Mr. Spencer was replaced and the story apparently ends with Ventas as the owner of Cogdell’s real estate and the future of Erdman up in the air.

If you’ve read previous blog posts on the old REIT Media, you know that I’m a fan of southern REITs. So this acquisition is sad to me. It marks another southern REIT based in Charlotte, NC winding down executive leadership from the South.  From Ventas’ perspective it only makes sense to manage the Cogdell assets from their corporate HQ in Chicago.

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Relaunching REIT media

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REIT media has been serving the REIT community since 2006. It’s time to freshen up the experience. Just like an empty regional mall, we decided to “go nuclear” and start over.

We had been on a very old blogging platform and our directory was all custom code. To continue our regional mall analogy, we are transitioning to something more akin to an open air mall. The new REIT media will be running WordPress which is used all over the place to quickly craft content, and we believe you are here for our unique REIT content more than anything else.

One popular feature we wont ignore is our REIT Directory that allowed you to search for REITs in your state. Since many investors enjoy owning local REITs, the directory will be back for sure.

We are also committing to Google+ for engaging and discussing publicly-traded REITs with our audience. So come join us on Google+.