Far East Hospitality Trust Latest DPU up 3.1%

Far East Hospitality Trust should not be new to readers here as I've blogged about this stock on several occasions. I first wrote about investing in the hospitality industry back in April 2017 in this post. I went on to invest in CDL Htrust and Far East Htrust thereafter. Both have been performing well since then and providing good and stable dividends for the past few years.

Let's focus on Far East Htrust. This company has done well in its latest results which prompted CIMB, OCBC and DBS to write and cover the stock the past few days. Net property income went up 13.9% Q on Q with DPU up 3.1%. With this good set of DPU, dividend yield is now about 6.5% for this stock.

For hospitality stocks, it is important to look at the RevPAR which is the revenue per available room. For Far East Htrust hotels segment, this has gone up 7.5% due to an uptick in overall market demand, the positive impact from the addition of Oasia Hotel Downtown to the portfolio and the recent renovation of Orchard Rendezvous Hotel (formerly known as Orchard Parade Hotel). Average occupancy has also increased from 85.4% to 86.2%.

For its serviced residences segment which has not been performing that well previously, there are also signs of improvements where Revenue Per Available Unit (RevPAU) also increased 7.5% and average occupancy increased from 78.2% to 84.3%. This increase was driven by online bookings from the leisure segment.

Far East Htrust has enjoyed 4 quarters of consecutive DPU growth. It is trading at 0.8x price to book value which represents a discount of 20% to book value. I've invested additional 7000 shares in this hospitality trust at $0.61 back in December 2018. Besides the newly acquired Oasia Hotel Downtown, they also just newly opened Outpost hotel at Sentosa which will further strengthen the DPU growth in the future.

Newly opened outpost hotel Sentosa

I believe Far East Htrust will continue to do well moving forward. In fact, this is just the beginning of its growth story which I've waited 2 years for it to materialise. This stock is now the 2nd largest in my portfolio which is paying good dividends with potential for growth in the near term. Singapore Tourism board also recently released its tourism statistics which shows that visitor arrivals to Singapore has hit an all time high due to the Trump Kim Summit and the release of Hollywood movie, Crazy Rich Asians which was filmed in Singapore. This has put Singapore in a good light and attracted many tourists to come to Singapore for holidays.

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