COLUMBIA, MD—Corporate Office Properties Trust has announced that it has sold 18 acres of non-strategic land in the White Marsh submarket and 217 acres of non-strategic land in Charles County. It realized gross proceeds of $28 million from the transactions and for the third quarter will recognize a GAAP gain on sale of approximately $5.5 million.
The dispositions represented 37% of COPT's non-strategic land holdings by acreage, the remaining 394 acres of which have a book value of $58 million.
COPT has been on a mission to divest itself of non-strategic assets for several years in order to realign its portfolio. While it has made a number of sales along these lines, the REIT still has "some fixing to do in [its] existing portfolio, CEO Roger Waesche said in the company's most recent earnings call this summer.
"We need to get our occupancy up from around 90% to 93% which we think is a structural, stabilized number. We need to lease our data center up to stabilization. We need to sell non-strategic land. We've got $80 million so we need to sell that."
© Touchpoint Markets, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to asset-and-logo-licensing@alm.com. For more inforrmation visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
