The Citicore Energy REIT [CREIT 2.55 pre-IPO] was supposed to have gone ahead on February 17th, but was delayed until February 22nd (at the latest) to give some behind-the-scenes process between the receiving agent, underwriter, and the Philippine Depository & Trust Corp (PDTC), more time to complete.
It’s not clear what has caused the delay, but given that this has now happened three times, and each has been with a REIT IPO, perhaps the issue has something to do with the “Name-on-Central-Depository” (NoCD) account that must be set-up for each REIT investor.
This NoCD account requirement is the only technical thing that I can think of that would differentiate a REIT IPO from a regular IPO.
MB BOTTOM-LINE
Regardless of the specific cause of the issue, the fact that it’s happened now three times is kind of a red flag that says the template timeline for a REIT IPO needs to be adjusted by the PSE to give more buffer between the end of the offer period and the listing date, to allow all the parties involved to elegantly and silently sort these issues out before they’re allowed to bubble up and become sources of uncertainty and doubt for retail investors.
It kind of made sense when this happened with DDMP [DDMPR 1.79]; Injap Sia's aura as a stock market wizard, thanks to the incredible performance of MerryMart [MM 2.10 1.41%], had caused many investors to jump on his REIT IPO in search of similar returns, and there was a feeling of the IPO being “crowded” by retail investors such that the announcement of the IPO delay didn’t necessarily feel out of place.
It was weirder when it happened again, with Megaworld REIT [MREIT 20.30 0.74%], since the retail clamor around that stock was just not at that same level.
While retail has been excited about CREIT, this situation of having like an on-call IPO doesn’t feel like a reasonable result.
This is our sixth REIT and we’ve seen this problem multiple times before, so why does it feel like the process is getting worse? I just want to eat popcorn while watching this IPO!
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