Our view of REITs
The sector has taken a beating but there are some opportunities.
Alex Prineas: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's generally been about as expected. We're in this period for the REITs, it's probably going to last another year or two, maybe three, where you've got the rising interest rates is pushing up their cost of debt, and with a lot of REITs carrying a fair bit of debt, interest costs are typically their biggest expense line. So, on average, you're seeing rising interest costs typically offsetting most or all of the revenue growth. So, things are generally about flat with some REITs slightly up if their revenues maybe are growing a bit stronger. So, the stronger revenue growth we're seeing in sectors like industrial, retail to an extent, whether they're getting good rental growth on new leases signed, weaker rental growth in places like office, and then in sectors like storage, it's around about flat.
Probably it's not over, particularly for some of the more overly indebted names. So, we think the worst is over in terms of what is priced into markets, but there could be a wide range of outcomes for some of the handful of stocks that have too much debt. Property values in commercial property have generally been coming down. We've probably got a little bit more of that to go. But in terms of what's priced into the market, into the listed market, we think a lot of the bad news is priced in now and actually many names in the sector look undervalued. But we are recommending generally that people watch out for balance sheet strength because even the name that looks undervalued, if it does have to go out and do an equity raise or sell assets at a discount, then you can have quite a wide array of outcomes.
Dexus presented some interesting information around the vacancies that we're seeing in the office space. So, vacancies are in the mid-teens in terms of offices around Australia cities, but it's very concentrated. Dexus showed some data that around two-thirds of all the vacancy across CBDs is in just 10% of the buildings. So, there is really a bifurcation in terms of—most of the big office REITs, their occupancy is north of 90% and some of them, more like 95% occupancy. So that's interesting from a perspective in terms of outlook for the office market. I think for the bigger REITs with the quality portfolios in the core parts of the CBDs, so names like Dexus, GPT, Mirvac, I think the rents are around about at the lows there and maybe initially slow growth, but eventually we should see some rental growth there for the office names.
Yeah. I mean, we like the big well-established office players. As I mentioned, Mirvac, Dexus, GPT, they've all got office occupancy north of 90%. Another standout is probably Charter Hall, the fund manager. It's on a P/E of roughly 16 times. So, 16 times on potentially trough earnings seems like a good price to earnings ratio for a company that we see as having a lot of growth still ahead of it and as being one of the best managed funds management companies of any type of fund manager in Australia. Mirvac in particular also has a residential development business which has a lot of potential given that we've got a pretty significant undersupply of housing. They're actually still able to bring some supply to the market because of the strength of their balance sheet and with the strong population growth that we've still got. Even though that has come off a bit, it's still well above historical averages. We see them as having among the best-quality office portfolios and being a good-quality residential developer as well.