W.P. Carey: Buy, Sell, or Hold?
For the most part, investors prefer for real estate investment trusts (REITs) to operate steadily and predictably. The most popular REITs have been plugging away with business strategies that have remained more or less unchanged for years, even decades.
That's not the case with storied REIT W.P. Carey (NYSE: WPC), which is nearing the end of a major transition. The uncertainty created by that shift contributed to the stock's decline. It has lost almost 10% of its value year to date, a result that compares unfavorably to many of its peers and the broader stock market indices. Yet this drop has pushed W.P. Carey's dividend yield higher.
W.P. Carey's shift in focus is a sensible one. It has exited the office market by enacting both a spin-off -- it bundled the meat of those assets into a new REIT, Net Lease Office Properties -- and a sale of the remaining office properties in its own portfolio.
Source Fool.com
