The Unnecessary Job

It is a question I ponder repeatedly. Property seminars routinely pop up on my facebook feed with catching captions like - "how to turn 1 property into 4 on a median income salary." I tend to take investment advice from property agents with a (huge) pinch of salt. As AK loves to say, Never ask a barber whether you need a haircut. Property agents will always tell you that the "only way the market moves is up". "The developer will never reduce price."  If the development they are selling is large, they will say how the large number of future transactions will prop up your property price. If the development is small, they will wax lyrical about the ease to rent or sell due to no competition. For would-be property investors/prospective home owners, I suggest you disregard all the noise and judge for yourself the merits of any property currently on the market. Here are a number of questions I find helpful when looking at property: i. Are any ad...

Used about half my proceeds from the Ascendas Htrust sale and added 100 lots of AIMS to my portfolio when it went XD @ 1.44. In hindsight, could have waited a bit longer. The next day, it went as low as 1.41/1.42. Then again, thousand gold cannot buy early know. I continue to be quite optimistic on AIMS. Compared to ESR REIT, AIMS is arguably a safer play due to its comparatively lower gearing (33% vs 39% of ESR REIT).  Furthermore, there is a lot of untapped GFA for AIMS properties.  One DBS Treasures report puts it as 600,000 square feet of untapped gross floor area.  This coupled with its substantial debt headroom makes AIMS attractive since it would have some flexibility to use debt to finance AEI or repurpose some of its assets to improve its NPI. The other thing going for AIMS is that it is a relatively small cap player, with market cap of slightly less than 1B.  For perspective, Ascendas REIT market cap is 9.5B, Mapletree Ind is 4.5B and ESR is 1.7B....

Feeling a bit like Moses every morning when I log into my trading account and review my watchlist. Huge sea of red. Only difference being, I cannot part a road through it with a wave of my staff. Ascendas HTrust I sold all of my ascendas htrust on 25 July @ 1.05.  Happy to take the money off the table basically. And certainly, did not think that Ascott BT REIT is worth the 1.30 issue price. I was up about 53k on capital gains alone, not including dividends received since 2017. So I am rather pleased with the outcome. As a result, I am looking at the red sea with a tiny bit of cheer. Well at least I may not have a problem finding a new home for the recycled capital. Eagle HTrust Just days before my sale of AHT, I also initiated a small position in Eagle Htrust. Just so I still retain some hospitality-related REIT in my portfolio. Being a new REIT with no track record, I am careful to size my position appropriately.  Bought about 21 lots at USD 0.685. So far so goo...