Article Excerpt:
TWST: Can you give us a brief history and overview of American Financial Realty Trust?Mr. Schorsch: American Financial Realty Trust is a company that is positioned to meet the real estate needs of financial institutions and banks and we are focused exclusively on this market. We acquire a full range of asset classes such as office buildings, bank branches and operations centers, which would include call centers and check processing facilities. Many of these are multi-story buildings. We offer very flexible acquisition structures, so we acquire all types of assets primarily in non-auction, privately negotiated transactions. The lease structure that we offer to financial institutions is an important part of our strategy and allows our customers the flexibility to move occupancy between properties and even substitute assets into or out of our portfolio as their needs change. For example, if a tenant needed to upsize in Atlanta and downsize in Chicago, we structure a lease that would allow them to do that, as long as we are made whole economically, taking into consideration market differential. When AFR owns a large portfolio of assets leased to a particular bank, it gives them a tremendous amount of flexibility, actually more so than if the bank owned its own properties. We have positioned ourselves as the preferred landlord to major banks, which generates significant acquisition opportunities because of all the repeat business. We view our long-term customers as 'tenants for life' and can work with them in a non- adversarial relationship for open book transactions. American Financial Realty Trust has a customer-centric model ' not a geographically or zip- code centric business. We focus on wherever the banks want to be, so we may be the only commercial property REIT in America that's in so many markets. We are in over 120 markets in 34 states plus the District of Columbia, and we go wherever the financial institutions go, so where you see Bank of America or Wachovia, BB&T or Citigroup, you will also see AFR. We have built a high credit quality, geographically diverse principally net lease real estate portfolio. We have high credit quality due to the nature of our tenants, with great diversity because of the many markets we cover. Ultimately, our largest tenants are banks. What that gets us is a secure rental stream and long-term partnerships with some of the nation's premier financial institutions. Just to bring you up to speed with where we are, when America Financial Realty Trust came out as a public company in June 2003, we were the largest domestic IPO of the year, at $804 million. We were the second-largest REIT IPO in American history. Before the IPO, we had about $700 million in assets and roughly 6 million square feet of space. Today, less than two years later, we own 33 million square feet of real estate. We have assets of $4 billion, so we've grown the portfolio by about 600%. We've grown our adjusted funds from operations at the same time, so we've been able to maintain earnings growth despite the rapid expansion of our portfolio. We're very pleased that the business has grown and diversified.
Tickers included in this excerpt: AFR
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