Following a painful master lease restructuring, First REIT is expecting its portfolio valuation to fall and its gearing level to rise sharply. This is forcing the trust to make a large rights issue to reduce leverage. The trust effectively plans to almost double the number of issued shares with 791,063,000 new units to be issued against the current 807,206,351 units, in order to raise S$158.2 million.

Both the lease restructuring and right issue will need to be approved by unit holders at a EGM. Pro-forma based on the first half of 2020, both operations would shrink NAV per unit from S$0.97 to S$0.346 and massively reduce dividend yield from an annualized 5.2% in to 3.6%