KEY POINTS:
Industrial real estate specialist Goodman Group has been the best-performing listed property entity in the past two years, according to international information service DataStream.
The performance of eight listed property stocks was analysed using dividends and unit/share price rises.
Goodman, developing the $1 billion Highbrook business park at East Tamaki in conjunction with its ASX-listed associate, topped the list with a 17.5 per cent return since December 2006.
Paul Glass of Brook Asset Management in Auckland said his firm used the Datastream material as one of a number of tools for assessing the historic performance of management teams in the listed property sector.
But others in the property sector took issue with the data. Mark Francis of Kermadec Property Fund which scored the lowest, questioned the data.
"Those figures are based on a Kermadec share price of 75 cents. Our stock is 80 cents today. That will alter our return quite considerably," Francis said.
Helen Mexted of St Laurence, which manages National Property Trust, said her firm could not confirm the figures without knowing the full methodology used for the calculations.
"Certainly we have seen that the market has heavily discounted the unit price of all listed property trusts over the past 17 months," she said, citing a decline of between 20 per cent and 50 per cent in some cases since December 2006.
"This will have impacted on overall returns in many cases based on the methodology," she said.
Angus McNaughton, Kiwi Income Property Trust's manager, did not dispute the numbers for the trust, but said: "Kiwi's unit price has been impacted by our exit from the MSCI Global Investable Market Indices and Kiwi was the only property stock in New Zealand on the index due to our scale. I think 12 New Zealand companies in total were on this index, but only five will remain," McNaughton said.
Kiwi Income was now on the MSCI small cap index, he said. The first stage of the transfer to the smaller index was in November and the final stage is next week, McNaughton said.
"This transfer, together with the global credit crisis and its impact upon global property and equity stocks, has had an adverse impact upon the trust's unit price during the year as index- based investors have reweighted their portfolios accordingly," McNaughton said. Peter Mence, general manager of ING Property Trust Management, calculated a -8.8 per cent compound return from the trust between December 2006 and this month.
The trust had been hurt by publicity about failed apartment specialist Blue Chip and by the freezing of returns from other ING funds, Mence said.
Some analysts had also criticised the trust's buildings as being lower quality than others in the sector and this had also hurt the trust, he said. Yet the trust was paying dividends higher than the sector's average, Mence said.
John Dakin of Goodman said he was not surprised at the trust's good showing in the results.
"The reasons are a clear strategy - strong customer focus and ability to create own assets through development," Dakin said.
Last week, Goodman said it had made $99.3 million after-tax in the year to March 31, up more than 7 per cent on last year.
The trust has real estate assets valued at $1.6 billion. Kermadec, with $145 million of property, made $6.18 million net after-tax profit. Kiwi, with $2.1 billion of property, made $123 million net after-tax profit.
* TOTAL RETURNS
DataStream's assessment of New Zealand listed real estate vehicles from December 2006 to May 15, 2008
Goodman Property Trust 17.5%
AMP NZ Office Trust 17.4%
ING Medical Properties Trust 2.0%
Property For Industry 0.1%
Kiwi Income Property Trust -3.2%
ING Property Trust -9.8%
National Property Trust -16%
Kermadec Property Fund -19.9%
