Patrick Harden

Newcastle, RAIT Financial: The Long Case for REITs

I'm also a RAIT shareholder, and I was very encouraged by the conference call. RAIT is continuing to grow its portfolio through European deals and the operating earnings are more than covering the dividend. I think it will be another year before RAIT raises the dividend because they elected to treat the last dividend of 2007 as belonging to 2008 for tax purposes. Thus RAIT will need sufficient taxable income to cover effectively five dividend payments for 2008, which I can't really envision at this point.