Gramercy (GPT) Sells 4 Assets, 2016 Asset Sales Total $1.3B

Gramercy Property Trust (NYSE:GPT) revealed closing the sale of four properties, reaping gross proceeds of $206.7 million. The move comes as part of the company’s earlier revealed plan of disposing select non-core assets, subsequent to the merger with Chambers Street Properties.

Notably, the four properties disposed this time, include three single-tenant office buildings in Princeton, NJ, Burlington, MA and Bloomington, MN and one single-tenant industrial facility in Phoenix, AZ.

These dispositions bring the company’s year-to-date single and multi-tenant assets sold in the United States and Europe tally to around $1.3 billion. Further, presently, the company has around $158.6 million in dispositions under contract and approximately $117.8 million of assets in the market for sale.

Gramercy Property Trust targets acquiring and managing single-tenant, net-leased industrial and office properties in key markets in the U.S. and Europe. Recently, it announced completion of two separate deals to obtain single tenant industrial properties in the Boston MSA and the Memphis MSA, totaling $67.8 million.

Moreover, earlier this month, the company came up with second-quarter core funds from operations (FFO) per share of 21 cents, exceeding the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 23.5%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2016 FFO per share is currently pegged at 74 cents, reflecting a year-over-year growth of 36.7%, which is encouraging.

Gramercy Property Trust currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Investors interested in the REIT industry may consider stocks like Arbor Realty Trust Inc. (NYSE:ABR) , DuPont (NYSE:DD) Fabros Technology, Inc. (NYSE:DFT) and Washington Real Estate Investment Trust (NYSE:WRE) . Each of these stocks holds the same rank as Gramercy Property.

Note: FFO, a widely used metric to gauge the performance of REITs, is obtained after adding depreciation and amortization and other non-cash expenses to net income.

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