Lendlease REIT Preferential Offering

Screenshot of PLQ Mall from Lendlease REIT Website

Lendlease Global Commercial REIT (Lendlease REIT) has announced a preferential offering to raise around SGD 196.6 million to acquire the remaining 30% stake of PLQ Mall situated next to Paya Lebar MRT station, as well as to pare down existing debts and to pay off equity raising and debt financing costs. Existing unitholders will get 119 non-renounceable units for every 1,000 units held, priced at SGD 0.558 each.

Accordingly, with the acquisition, the distribution per unit (DPU) is expected to be accretive at +2.1%, with gearing maintaining at around 38%, which is not far off from the 38.4% announced during the REIT’s 1H FY2026 results announced almost a month ago.

Existing Lendlease REIT unitholders can exercise their offer from now till 18 Mar 2026.

The Bedokian’s Take

It was expected that Lendlease REIT would be getting 100% of PLQ Mall as spelt out in their 1H FY2026 financial results presentation on 13 Feb 2026, just that we did not expect them to carry it out so soon since their 70% stake was obtained only a few months ago in Nov 2025.

From a geographical perspective, PLQ Mall, together with its neighbouring Paya Lebar Square and Singpost Centre, is located at the heart of a 2-km radius that contains a diverse mix of residential, commercial, and industrial properties. This creates a central hub for both residents and workers in the area. Further south beyond the 2-km range is another commercial property in which Lendlease REIT has a minority stake: Parkway Parade. Notwithstanding the minor ownership, these two malls could complement each other in the Paya Lebar/Marine Parade region.

As a Lendlease REIT holder, in a longer term sense, and also to prevent dilution (at 11.9% based on 119/1000), it is prudent to lap up the preferential offer. Zooming out, one must not forget that Lendlease REIT still has a couple of prime retail assets in the form of Jem and 313 Somerset.

An issue, though circumstantial, is on the offer price of SGD 0.558; the price as of 11 Mar 2026 stood at SGD 0.555, which means if this price level persist till 18 Mar 2026, it might be worthwhile to obtain the units from the open market, especially if discount brokerages are used to transact.

Disclosure

The Bedokian is vested in Lendlease REIT.

Disclaimer

References

Preferential Offering to Raise Approximately S$196.6 Million –  https://www.lendleaseglobalcommercialreit.com/information/

1H FY2026 Financial Results. 13 February 2026 – https://www.lendleaseglobalcommercialreit.com/siteassets/investor-centre/financial-results/2026/1h-fy2026-results-presentation.pdf

 

UI Boustead REIT IPO

Screenshot from UI Boustead REIT Prospectus cover

It is finally here: the initial public offering (IPO) for UI Boustead REIT (which I had mentioned here before). Below are some of the key highlights from the prospectus:

IPO Application Highlights

• Offer price of SGD 0.88 per unit.

• Total offering size of around 677.2 million units, of which 33.9 million are offered to the public, with the rest in the placement tranche.

• Offer period from 5 Mar 2026 till 10 Mar 2026 at 12 noon.

Asset and Lease Highlights

• 23 properties in the REIT: 21 in Singapore (representing 71.2% of agreed property value) and two in Japan (representing 28.8% of agreed property value), focusing on logistics, industrial and business spaces.

• Portfolio weighted average lease expiry (WALE) of 5.8 years.

• Committed occupancy of 89.4%.

Financial Highlights

• Net Asset Value (NAV) of SGD 0.85.

• Forecasted yield is projected for 7.4% for 2026 and 7.8% for 2027.

• Aggregated leverage (gearing) of 37.9%, with interest coverage ratio of 4.7 times.

Selected Analysis

It is noted that most of the figures shown above such as the NAV and occupancy rate were as of 30 Sep 2025, which was almost six months ago. 

The first number that got my attention was the relatively low occupancy rate of 89.4%, likely attributed to the Japanese properties (one in Kansai with a committed occupancy rate of 76.7%, and another near Tokyo with 76.5%). However, the prospectus had mentioned the occupancy would reach 99.4% for the Kansai property by 2027, and the one in Tokyo had reached 100% as of 20 Feb 2026. This information at least gave some assurance on the occupancy issue.

For an overall comparison of their yields, gearing and WALE, I would use two REITs that are similar in terms of property type and with assets in Singapore and overseas (Figure 1):

REIT	Yield (%)	Gearing (%)	WALE (years)
UI Boustead REIT	7.4  (projected 2026)	37.9	5.8
AIMS APAC REIT	6.79	36.6	4.1
Frasers Logistics & Commercial Trust	6.13	34.8	4.9

 

Fig.1: Yield, Gearing and WALE figures for UI Boustead REIT, AIMS APAC REIT and Frasers Logistics & Commercial Trust. Data for AIMS APAC REIT and Frasers Logistics & Commercial Trust obtained from Yahoo Finance and their respective recent financial presentations. 

UI Boustead’s projected yield, gearing and WALE are on the higher side when compared with its peers.

The tenant mix of UI Boustead REIT’s properties are diversified in terms of lease, tenant profile (single or multi tenanted) and sector/industry, with the highest net property income contributor (a leading aircraft manufacturing company) at 8.6%, thus reducing tenant concentration risk.

The Bedokian’s Take

UI Boustead REIT is another industrial, logistics and business space to consider on top of the two which I had used for the comparison in Figure 1. At SGD 0.88, the IPO price is slightly above the NAV of SGD 0.85 (+3.5%), but I find this premium acceptable. For those who did not have such REITs in their portfolios and wished to venture into these property types, this may be a good start. Personally, however, I may give this a skip as we have AIMS APAC REIT and Frasers Logistics & Commercial Trust in our portfolio.

Take note that the public tranche is relatively small (only around 5% of the entire offer), and being a REIT there would be many bidders for it, so one may need to go to the open market should one could not get their desired allocation. 

Disclosure

The Bedokian is vested in AIMS APAC REIT and Frasers Logistics & Commercial Trust.

Disclaimer

References

UI Boustead REIT Prospectus - https://links.sgx.com/FileOpen/UI_Boustead_REIT_Prospectus_(5_March_2026).ashx?App=IPO&FileID=6738

 

Hard Carrying

“Hard carry” is a terminology used by gamers that refers to a player or game character dominating an entire game or a game mission, resulting in the player’s/character’s team victory, even though the rest of the teammates are either performing poorly and/or did not do anything much. Putting it in a general context, a person is seen hard carrying a group when he/she was the one pulling everyone through with his/her skills and/or knowledge.

Picture generated by Meta AI.

On the investment front, there could be a few securities or counters doing the hard carrying of gains, such as those that provided the most capital gains, or those that gave the most dividends, or a fair mix of both.

It would be an interesting exercise to see what counters are the “hard carries” in one’s own portfolio, and although it may be comforting to see which were the resulting counters, an analytical and objective view must also be adopted on what to do with them.

Sustainability

Sustainability is often one of the key considerations of investors when conducting a portfolio review. Questions such as whether a counter would continue to give the same growth rate and/or provide the same yield throughout. Even if it cannot sustain the required increment, does it able to maintain within the desired threshold, or perhaps it could still provide some alpha over market returns or inflation rate? These two questions could only be guesstimated by fundamental analysis, i.e., reading up on the company’s forward trajectories and plans, and foreseeing how things unfold in the markets or anything that has a direct or strong indirect effect on the company/sector/industry concerned. 

Sizing

Hard carries in the growth category may run into the risk of being too dominating in terms of sizing in the portfolio. Unless one’s conviction and confidence on a company is strong, it pays to be diversified to avoid a wipeout should anything happen. Different people have different sizing guidelines, which for our Bedokian Portfolio the limit is 12% (for individual company counters).

Selling

On a related note to manage sizing, selling part of the hard carrying holdings is one way, which on a wider scale it is called rebalancing. As part of diversification, rebalancing allows the investor to move the capital from one oversized asset class or counter to an undersized asset class or counter, thus avoiding the potential larger loss should the abovementioned wipeout occurs. A big challenge in carrying out rebalancing is the mental hurdle of not letting a winning position go, thinking that it still has the potential to go higher (and earning more). For this it may be necessary to sacrifice a little bit of the hard carriers for the sake of the portfolio, for I had mentioned before, no security/counter is bigger than the portfolio itself.

CPF’s New Investment Scheme

During Budget 2026, there was an announcement of CPF to introduce a new investment scheme in the first half of 2028, offering simplified, low-cost and diversified commercial investment products.

 

Picture generated by Meta AI

 

According to the CPF website, the key features include:

Automatic age-based rebalancing of investment portfolio mix, with phased liquidation

Investors’ portfolio mix will automatically rebalance along a glidepath from higher-risk assets, such as equities, to lower-risk assets, such as bonds, as they age, before being liquidated in phases by the target date. For example, if the target date is the Payout Eligibility Age (PEA) of 65, the investor's portfolio could be liquidated in phases a few years before PEA.

This calibrates the amount of investment risk to which investors are exposed to at different stages of life and mitigates the risk of a market downturn during exit.

Upon phased liquidation, the investment sale proceeds will be transferred to the investor’s Retirement Account (RA), up to the Full Retirement Sum (FRS). Any remaining proceeds will be transferred to the Ordinary Account (OA). The funds in the RA can then be used to join CPF LIFE when the member decides to start his monthly payouts anytime from age 65, and help boost his monthly payouts.

Simplified choice

 

To simplify decision-making for investors, we are looking to select two to three reputable product providers to offer a small number of options.

Low fees

 

All-in fees will be capped to minimise costs and allow investors to retain and benefit from more of their investment returns.

The Bedokian’s Take

To summarise, this new CPF investment scheme is designed for people who want to take on more risk in beating the prevailing CPF interest rates, yet have a hands-free approach to investing via the automatic rebalancing and liquidation attributes. In other words, I would define it as a “robo-investing plus”, with the plus part being providing the service of divestment.

While I would wait for further details on the new investment scheme, such as the make-up and duration of the portfolios available, at first look it is a pretty good idea for CPF to implement this. However, due to the potential long-term nature of the portfolios, it may be more suitable for individuals who still have a long runway (at least 20 years according to the CPF’s example) than those whose retirement age is coming soon.

References

https://www.cpf.gov.sg/member/infohub/news/news-releases/cpfb-to-introduce-new-investment-scheme-in-2028

 

Disclaimer

“How To Generate $XX Per Month From Your Portfolio”

Occasionally there will be blogposts and social media videos teaching how to generate an amount of income per month (or year) from one’s portfolio, which I find it a good thing as they give expectations on the approximate sizing of portfolio and yield required.

Picture generated by ChatGPT

While it is a relatively simple theoretical exercise involving percentage mathematics, it works when everything else is static, i.e., on a ceteris paribus basis (assume all other things are equal). However, executing it would be slightly difficult as market conditions do not really listen to what the theory was supposed to espouse. For instance, the yield or yields from the various asset classes and securities do not remain at that fixed number throughout, and so does the portfolio size that the yield(s) is based on.

Admittedly we do come out with such calculations for retirement/step-down planning for our portfolios, but we would also take in variables that may boost or hinder this model of determining monthly income. Of course, the first thing to do would be to derive the overall annual yield across the asset classes using the asset class allocations and their average yields, which goes something like this as an example (Figure 1):

 

Asset Class	Allocation (%)	Average Annual Yield (%)	Weighted Yield (Allocation x Average Yield)  (%)
Equities	35	5	1.75
Real Estate Investment Trusts	35	6.5	2.275
Bonds	20	2.5	0.5
Commodities	5	0	0
Cash	5	1	0.05
Overall Annual Yield			4.575

 

Fig.1: Overall annual yield of the balanced Bedokian Portfolio using assumed average yield per asset class.

The average yield could be obtained from a few sources, like from one’s own portfolio numbers, figures from finance sites showing the current yield, etc. Do note that the term "average" is used; yield figures have been sourced from multiple references and consolidated to present a mean value. The advantages of using the average are two-fold: the result gives a benchmark value if the actual portfolio is below it, or a buffer if the actual portfolio is above it.

If one is still not comfortable with the average number, a margin of safety can be introduced, corresponding to an imagined portfolio value drop; if one is prepared for a 30% drop of capital, he/she could adjust the expected yield number by 30% to 3.2%, and then plan the spend on the reduced income amount. This conservative approach would have the psychological effect of viewing amounts above the yield to be “windfall” and thus using them as savings and/or further capital to invest (and grow more yield).

AI Eats Software’s Lunch (Or Is It?)

It was coming; the feared disruption of artificial intelligence (AI) into the domain of software, which was already hanging around like the Sword of Damocles, came crashing down onto the markets the past week, accelerated by the introduction of Anthropic’s Claude large language model (LLM) legal tool. 

 

 Picture generated by Meta AI

 

Share prices of software companies such as Microsoft and Salesforce took a beating, down by 9% and 11% respectively the past 5 trading days. On the sector front using the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV), it dropped close to 14% during the same timeframe.

 

Delving deeper on the situation, the number of inroads, potential or real, that AI made has been tremendous, and we are seeing a lot of these in the past few years. Though most leisure users utilise AI for generating pictures and summarizing homework, it is getting real with job-replacing tasks and applications being introduced for business purposes (e.g. Databricks, Base44, etc.). A serious threat to software, indeed.

 

However, if an investor steps back and relook at the whole picture, he/she may notice that there is another narrative being bandied about just recently, and that is about the threat of an AI bubble bursting. Logically the investor would be asking, “if AI eats software’s lunch, then how is it that AI is having this bubble?”. This paradox is a legitimate question.

 

However, amidst the bloodbath happening in the markets, a rational investor would see this as a good buying opportunity. With lowered share prices across the software and technology sector (the latter was a result of a spillover effect from the former), the next thing would be to look for companies that have strong moats and the strategic and financial ability of coming back (think Alphabet).

 

Think not of panicking but view it as a (probable) sale worth waiting for is now on.

 

Disclosure

The Bedokian is vested in Alphabet, Microsoft and Salesforce.

 

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Possibilities And Probabilities

Although these two words may be similar to each other, both are different in meanings. Possibilities are occurrences that can happen, whereas probabilities are the likelihood of the occurrences happening. Using a lottery as an example, it is possible to win the top million-dollar prize, but the probability would be very small given the odds of winning it (literally at least a one-in-a-million chance).

Picture generated by Meta AI

The reason that I brought up these two things was from my encounters with other investors over the years, particularly on the issue of risk. While I had met some who totally disregard risks (so-called the “boom or bust” or “all-in and hope for the best” investors and traders), there were many others who did consider the different aspects of risks in their investments, to whom I give my praises to. Among the latter group, however, were some individuals who treated all possibilities with equal concerns; in other words, all potential risk happenings were given the same probable treatment by the person(s).

This is akin to an investor viewing the possibility of a company’s share price going down to zero and that of a brokerage firm absconding with his/her securities with the same probability lens. Hence, a typical interaction with this group would be peppered with many “what ifs”, like “if I buy overseas securities, what if the custodian ran away with my money?” or “what if A invaded B, resulting in the share price of the company located in B going down to zero?”, and so on.

For investors with this line of thought, a little bit of self-critique is necessary to slightly wean off from the equal-probability bias. After acknowledging a risk possibility, the first question to ask oneself would be how often it happened. If it was many times, assign a higher probability to it; if not, treat it as an event that one may not see again in his/her lifetime, and then go on and assess the next risk happening. After going through the possible risks, a probability scale of sorts is formed. Though in strict sense, probabilities are quantifiable and calculations are required to give them a number (e.g. percentage or odds), but having a simple probability scale should suffice for one to have a clear picture.

In an ironic twist that even myself adhere to, it is good to have a contingency plan for even the lowest probability risk event, and most are surprisingly easy to implement. Afraid of a custodian brokerage running away? Open an account on another one (what are the chances of two custodian brokerages going rogue at the same time? Very remote). Scared of a company’s share price going to zilch? Diversify one’s holdings. Most of these can be mitigated, but there are several events where one (or almost everyone) cannot prevent, like a total global market collapse, or an asteroid 10 kilometres in size hurtling towards Earth at 60,000 kilometres per hour. For this, should it really happens, it has been nice knowing everyone.