Robinsons Land pumps up REIT arm with 9 more malls

Robinsons Land Corp. (RLC) is transferring nine more malls to its real estate investment trust (REIT) arm in exchange for P30.67-billion worth of common shares.

In a disclosure on Thursday, RL Commercial REIT Inc. (RCR) said its board of directors had approved the property-for-share swap involving 324,107.75 square meters of mall properties.

These are Robinsons Dasmariñas, Robinsons Starmills, Robinsons General Trias, Robinsons Cybergate Cebu, Robinsons Tacloban, Robinsons Malolos, Robinsons Santiago, Robinsons Magnolia and Robinsons Tuguegarao.

The Gokongwei-led real estate company, in return, will subscribe to 3.84 billion primary common shares of the REIT arm for P8 each.

The transaction is still subject to the approval of regulators.

As of end-March, RCR has a gross leasable area (GLA) of 828,000 sq m spread across 17 office and 12 mall assets. These comprise 539,000 sq m of office spaces and 289,000 sq m of mall spaces.

Last year, RLC infused P33.9 billion worth of assets into RCR. This was done via a property-for-share swap involving 11 malls and two office buildings spanning a total of 347,329 sq m.

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RLC has over 1.3 million sq m of mall GLA, over 250,000 sqm of office space, nearly 300,000 sq m of logistics GLA and 4,000 hotel room keys that it can put into RCR.

According to RCR, occupancy rate stood at 96 percent in the first quarter. Its vacancy rate of 4 percent is below the average rate of 19.7 percent in Metro Manila.

The REIT company saw its net income grow by 58 percent to P2.25 billion during the period due to the strong performance of its portfolio. Its assets are valued at P114.06 billion.