Apple Hospitality REIT (APLE)
Executive Chairman adds 5,000 shares.
Glade Knight, Executive Chairman of Apple Hospitality REIT (APLE), added another 5,000 shares to his holdings, shelling out just over $81,000. The latest buy leaves him with over 10,407,000 shares. This adds to other buying from directors earlier in the year.
Insider data for the past three years shows numerous insider buys at the company, with zero sales. Insiders own over 6 percent of the company.
The real estate trust, which operates 235 high-end hotels with over 30,000 rooms under the Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt brand, has seen shares barely budge in the past year, despite a massive 7 percent dividend yield.
The company also trades just above its book value, a conservative measure of the value of all the properties in the REIT at the time they were bought, and may under-represent any properties that have appreciated substantially.
Action to take: Shares are a buy up to $17.00, where they trade just under 20 times forward earnings. The sizeable insider ownership, and low institutional holding in the shares indicates some great long-term potential ahead, and a 7 percent yield in the hotel industry is a fantastic “buy and hold” play here, along with other names in the hotel space.
While there are some options to trade, high-yielding REIT shares are unlikely to give options traders the speedy moves they need to really profit from a trade. Options traders can look elsewhere in the real estate space.