Filinvest REIT [FILRT 3.09, down 4.3%] [link] put out a press release to accompany the dividend that it declared on Monday, and I found a few things interesting when I compared this PR to the one they released last year around the same time [link]. The first is that FILRT’s FY23 performance was worse than FY22 across every major metric that we track for REITs; net income was down 2.2% to P1.28 billion; total revenues were down 7.4% to P3.0 billion; occupancy was down from 89% in FY22 to 83% in FY23; tenant retention was down from 96% in FY22 to 77% in FY23; and WALE was flat at 6.9 years, despite cheesing the figure with the inclusion of the Boracay lot with the 40-year lease. The second thing that I noticed was that FILRT’s press release didn’t mention that any of the statistics I just listed were lower than the previous year. The only time FILRT even refers to FY22 is in the discussion about the amount of GLA covered by new leases; FILRT signed 5,087 sqm of new leases in FY22, but 20,139 sqm of new leases in FY23, which FILRT describes as “almost a fourfold improvement from [FY22].” The third thing odd to me was that FILRT referred to its WALE as “improved significantly” and that including the Crimson Boracay lease “pushed the WALE to 6.91 years.” Unfortunately, upon checking FILRT’s FY22 Annual Report, I found FILRT saying on page 47 that it had a “[WALE] of 6.9 years as of end-2022.”