response from gpt

I sent GPT a query about why investors should have confidence in the compnay, also enquiring if they had shared information with institutions or any areas of the market that had not been made public - and could they explain the erosion of value in light of their results.

Response received within 4 hours - I think its a fair summation and balances with my understanding and assumptions.

/begin response

I refer to your enquiry received via GPT's website.

Firstly let me assure you that there is no information that we have provided to the larger institutions that has not been made available generally via our website. Like you we are unsure as to the reason for the sharp downward pressure on the price, given that the result met forecasts and was in line with our disclosures leading up to the result.

We have articulated clearly our strategy for the business in our results presentation and previously, a strategy which revolves around returning the focus of the business over time to the domestic real estate which currently forms 80% of GPT's real estate investments, contributed 79% of the Group's realised operating income for the 2008 calendar year, is of very high quality and is performing well (with comparable income growth for the year of 5.5% on average across the Australian retail, office and industrial portfolios). This strategy has been well received by the market. Executing this strategy does involve the sale of non core investments both domestically and offshore, and this process is proving to be slow as a lack of funding and uncertainty around the future of asset values is making transactions for GPT (and the market generally) much more difficult to achieve. We do however continue to focus on this process. We also demonstrated with our results that GPT has substantial headroom against our headline gearing covenant (approximately $1.9 billion) and good liquidity (with no material debt refinancing due until October 2010). In this market however, it is fair to say that investors continue to look at worse case scenarios for asset values and refinancing. Although we have good coverage on these measures and a long lead time of over 18 months till the October 2010 debt expiry we are of course continuing to seek to improve this position.

While GPT has fared worse than the sector overall, we are of course operating in a very challenging market and one in which the LPT sector generally is experiencing dramatic falls in value and a loss of investor confidence.

We will of course continue to keep the market informed of progress in relation to asset sales, and to focus on delivering on the strategy which we have articulated.

Regards

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