Ascendas Reit opens preferential offering; completes US office acquisition

ASCENDAS Real Estate Investment Trust's (Ascendas Reit) preferential offering to unitholders has launched at 9am on Monday and will close at 5pm on Dec 1.

The manager on Monday said it expects the trading of the new preferential offering units to start on Dec 9.

Two weeks ago, it announced that the preferential offering's issue price had been fixed at S$2.96 per new unit. That represented a 7.8 per cent discount to the volume-weighted average price (VWAP) of S$3.2096 for trades done on Nov 9 up to the time the underwriting agreement was signed on Nov 10.

The preferential offering will be done on the basis of 37 new units for every 1,000 existing units held at Nov 18 at 5pm.

It is expected to raise gross proceeds of about S$396.5 million, and is part of a S$1.2 billion equity fundraising to partially finance potential and proposed acquisitions of office buildings and data centres in the US, Europe, Australia.

The total purchase price for these acquisitions is estimated at S$2 billion, the manager said earlier this month.

Among the acquisitions is the US$560.2 million purchase of two office buildings in San Francisco. The Reit manager on Saturday announced that it has completed this deal.

The two US properties - a seven-storey building at 510 Townsend Street and a six-storey building at 505 Brannan Street - are fully leased to payments giant Stripe and image-sharing platform Pinterest.

Following the completion of the US acquisition, Ascendas Reit now owns 96 properties in Singapore, 36 in Australia, 38 in the UK and 30 in the US.

Units of Ascendas Reit were trading at S$3.02 as at 9am on Monday, up S$0.02 or 0.7 per cent.