KPREIT looking to bolster US investments

CEO of real estate investment company, Kingston Properties (KPREIT), Kevin Richards says the company has been eyeing opportunities regionally and in the United States to expand its footprint.

KPREIT currently has properties in Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and the United States.

Richards was speaking on Taking Stock with Kalilah Reynolds about the company’s additional public offer, which opened on April 19.

KPREIT is seeking to raise up to $2.25 billion by offering up to 300 million new ordinary shares, if the offer is upsized. The APO is scheduled to close on May 10.

According to Richards, the company has been looking for investment properties in the Dominican Republic and Guyana, however, they have yet to make any moves in those territories.

He said that while the company is always looking for regional opportunities, it is concentrating on the markets it’s already in.

“We still think the US is the largest and most important economy in the world and will remain that way for the foreseeable future, so we want to be in that market and deepen our presence,” he explained.

According to Richards, as at the end of December 2021, 51 percent of the company’s portfolio assets were in Jamaica, 38 percent in the Cayman Islands and the remainder in the US.

“We haven’t really tapped the surface of the US market. We’ve largely just been in south-east Florida and there are other areas of Florida that we need to explore, other areas of the US that we need to explore,” he added.

He said that the company’s Cayman island assets have been very lucrative and the company wants to expand further in that country.

“One of the things that we saw is that economies that were growing at a fairly high pace pre-pandemic, we anticipated that they would continue to grow at very fast pace post-pandemic. Cayman is a population that has grown tremendously in the last 10 years and once you have population growth and GDP growth, those are the kinds of economies we want to be in,” he explained.

Richards said that the company is very familiar with the Jamaican market and feel confident maintaining and acquiring assets here.

KPREIT APO

To that extent Richards said the company hopes to use proceeds raised from its APO to acquire more assets.

He said that part of the proceeds raised from the offer will be used to repay a $700 million bridge loan that was used last year to purchase several assets. He added the funds will also go towards developing the two latest properties it acquired.

In addition to raising capital, the CEO said that KPREIT wants to give more people the opportunity to hold real estate assets.

“This is about our fourth issue since inception… and we found that a lot of people want to buy KP shares out of those issues and even with a stock split, people weren’t able to buy shares,” he said.

The CEO noted that the company has roughly 700 shareholders, of which roughly 90 percent are institutions.

“This (the APO) is a way of getting small investors to participate in a very resilient asset class,” he added.

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Sashell Williams2024-09-03T21:40:31-05:00