Keppel Reit’s curious S$100 million anniversary distribution

KEPPEL Real Estate Investment Trust (K-Reit) last Friday (Jan 27) declared a distribution per unit (DPU) of S$0.0295 for the second half of financial year 2022, up from S$0.0288 in the year-ago period.

Stripping out the anniversary distribution of S$0.0027, the DPU for H2 FY2022 would have been S$0.0268. That is 5.3 per cent lower than FY2021’s DPU of S$0.0283 after stripping out the padding of a capital gains distribution of S$0.0005 a unit or S$2 million.

The capital gains distribution for 2021 arose from past divestments of assets. K-Reit, which is the only pure-play office Reit in Singapore, has made such distributions of varying amounts in the past. It paid out an additional S$10 million in 2020 and S$3 million in 2018, for instance.