After Teh Hooi Ling wrote her article on the  The REIT Myth Busted, there was a lot of debate on online forums both supporting and criticizing her views.

So she came out with another article The Pros and Cons of REITs that calculates the internal rate of return of the various REITs. My guess is that she might have gotten a fair share of hate mail from her original article which was very negative on REITs.

Separately, regular columnist Goh Eng Yeow wrote an article this week warning about credit crunch facing REITs.

Back in 2008, many REITs had to do emergency fund raising from their unit holders as they were unable to refinance their short-term debt. It is a dangerous game that many REITs were playing back then. Having a large proportion of short-term debt and using it to finance a long-term investment.

The Business Times carried an article asking questions about corporate governance of REITs.

This was also something that was bought up in a research paper done by CFA institute which talked about poor governance in Asia-Pacific REITs. You can read about their findings and recommendations in the link below:

Asia-Pacific REITs – Building Trust through Better REIT Governance

Section four of the report provides some interesting case studies.

REITs has always been a popular topic of discussion among Singapore investors who want to invest into an instrument that can give them good dividend yields.

I wrote this article Are Singapore REITs a Good Investment? last year to take a closer look at why REITs had failed to deliver on its promise of steady dividend income.

Teh Hooi Ling, Senior Correspondent at SPH, had recently done some analysis on the same topic:

The REIT Myth Busted

In the article, she wrote about how most of the REITs had taken back all the dividends they had paid out by doing rights issues.

The actual article that was published in last Saturday’s Business Times comes with a table that gave the breakdown of all the dividends that were paid out by Singapore REITs, as well as the capital that they “clawed” back from unit-holders by doing rights issue.

However, it is not an doom and gloom story for Singapore REITs investors.

While the dividend income had indeed failed for most of them, investors who had invested into more than half of the Singapore REITs from IPO and dutifully deployed capital into them to take up their rights entitlement would still have made money.

And for those who are clueless about rights issue, they would have lost a lot of money.

Perennial China Retail Trust (PCRT), which deals in retail space in China, will be raising S$776.2 million in an IPO with units priced at S$0.70 each. Out of the 563,570,000 units on offer, 52,128,000 will be for the public.

The trust has an initial S$1.1 billion property portfolio comprises five properties in Shenyang, Foshan and Chengdu.

Based on the offer price of $0.70, PCRT expects to provide an annualised distribution yield of 5.30% for forecast year 2011 and 5.51% for projected year 2012.

This IPO closes on 7th June at 10am. The prospectus of the Perennial China Retail Trust can be found here:

Perennial Reit Prospectus