W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE: WPC), the New York City-based net lease real estate investment trust, announced that it will begin to jettison the office assets within its portfolio.
The company is exiting the office space in a two-pronged approach. The first strategy involves spinning-off 59 office properties into a new REIT called Net Lease Office Properties (NLOP), which will become publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “NLOP.” This new entity’s portfolio will consist of 59 high-quality office properties, totaling approximately 9.2 million leasable square feet primarily leased to corporate tenants on a single-tenant net lease basis; most of the properties are located in the U.S., with the balance in Europe.
The second strategy involves an asset sale program to dispose of 87 office properties. The spin-off is expected to close on or around Nov. 1, and the sales of the remaining properties is expected to be completed by January.
“While we’ve meaningfully reduced our office exposure in recent years, the plan we’ve announced this morning vastly accelerates our exit from office – enhancing the overall quality of our portfolio, improving the quality and stability of our earnings, and incrementally benefiting our credit profile,” said Jason Fox, W. P. Carey’s CEO. “Ultimately, with a clear path to monetizing our legacy office assets, we believe we will achieve a lower cost of capital and be better positioned for long-term value creation for our shareholders.”
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