ART – BT

ART’s ATM offering of 8m units fully subscribed

ASCOTT Residence Trust (ART), which is selling 105.3 million new units to raise $199 million, yesterday said that the ATM offering of 8 million units at $1.90 per unit was fully subscribed by retail investors yesterday.

The news follows Monday’s announcement that the 47.3 million new units offered to institutional and other investors on that day were more than 15 times subscribed. Another 49.9 million units are being offered to existing stockholders at $1.88 apiece. The stock offered to existing stakeholders is based on one new share for every 10 they own, ART said. ART is raising the $199 million to finance the acquisition of five properties in Australia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam.

‘We are pleased that the ATM offering of 8 million new units was fully taken up, as this demonstrates that retail investors have endorsed our latest acquisitions and equity fund raising exercise,’ said Chong Kee Hiong, chief executive of the trust’s management team. ‘ART will continue to pursue its proven acquisition strategy of acquiring yield-accretive assets in the pan-Asian region to achieve our target portfolio value of about $2 billion by end-2008.’

ART owns some of the properties managed by The Ascott Group, which is the biggest operator of serviced residences in Asia and Europe. Ascott is also expanding to increase the number of apartment units to 25,000 by 2010, from more than 19,000 at present.

Once the acquisitions and the fund raising are complete, unitholders of ART can expect a higher annualised distribution per unit (DPU) of 7.28 cents in 2007. This is an 11.5 per cent increase over the annualised forecast DPU of 6.53 cents in 2007 for the 14 properties in ART’s portfolio before the acquisition.

ART’s shares closed 8 cents down at $2.00 yesterday. The new units are expected to begin trading on March 26.