Grit Real Estate Income Group is taking steps to manage down its loan-to-value (LTV), which rose in the year ended June, said the potential sale of AnfaPlace Mall in Casablanca, Morocco would contribute to this end. Grit is a pan-African real estate company that invests in and manages a portfolio of assets in carefully selected African countries. The company, which delisted from the JSE this year, but remains listed in Mauritius and in London, said its distributable earnings per share plummeted 37.7 percent to $5.97 (R91.42) cents per share from $9.58 cents per share the prior year. Group LTV increased to 53.1 percent from 50.2 percent in 2020 predominantly as a result of the decrease in the value of the group’s property portfolio, it said, adding that it had successfully extended its lowest applied LTV debt covenants to 55 percent to April 2023 and secured additional liquidity facilities.
Part of the asset recycling was to reduce retail and put the cash back into the system and putting it into assets that had shown resilience. The portfolio was independently valued at June 30, with total income producing assets valued at $801.9m, lower than $823.5m the prior year with like-for-like property valuations decreasing 7.8 percent in the reporting period. The loss for the year before taxation was $60.9m down 13 percent from the prior year, while property portfolio net operating income was $55.3m, up 3.5 percent.