SITC is an interesting REIT liquidation event

A potential healthy gap between market value and liquidation value

SITC, which just closed at $4.26/share as of this writing, is a REIT which is undergoing a liquidation. It is a bit of an odd situation, where the executives spun out a new company, Curbline (now public as CURB), focused on convenience strip assets, and left everything else in SITC with a plan to wind it down.

The wind down has been a slow process, but it may be coming to a conclusion soon. We believe it is most likely that SITC will complete its wind down in October of 2027, which is when the shared services agreement between SITC and Curb expires¹.

This resolution timing combined with the current share price against what we estimate are remaining assets and obligations creates quite a potentially quite strong return in 1 year if the liquidation proceeds according to our estimates. In a downside case we think the hold period could drag out to 2 years, and the returns would still look interesting. Read on for more information. But first please read our disclaimer here.

Barry’s at The Blocks in Portland, one of SITC’s remaining wholly owned assets.

Background

Since the October 2023 spin-off announcement, SITC has sold off over ~$3.5 billion of assets, representing dozens of retail properties, and has paid more than $350 million of special distributions.

In 2025, SITC sold 14 properties for $752.5 million, paid off all consolidated mortgage debt, and moved the remaining wholly owned portfolio into the sale process. In 1Q26, the company sold two properties for $74.5 million and sold its Deer Park Town Center joint venture interest for $20.8 million. Subsequent sales included Meadowmont Crossing in Chapel Hill for $11.1 million and The Pike Outlets in Long Beach for $50.0 million, with The Pike sale also supporting a $1.00 per share special distribution.
After these sales, SITC’s remaining value is concentrated in a small number of wholly owned properties, its interest in the Dividend Trust Portfolio joint venture, and cash. The company held $193.5 million of unrestricted cash at March 31, 2026 (rising to ~$249mm after the recent asset sales, a whopping ~$4.7/share, above the current share price!) and stated that it expects to keep a higher cash balance while it resolves the DTP joint venture (a JV in which SITC is the GP, with a large third party LP investor).

We believe the recent selloff may have been related to the market misreading the Meadowmont and Pike Outlets sales, both of which were for fairly high implied cap rates. However on closer inspection we can see that this concern would be misplaced, as Meadowmont was an office asset (the remainder of the portfolio is retail except for the HQ building which is company owned), and Pike was under a ground lease, both of which warrant much higher cap rates than pure retail assets.

Timing

The reason we believe that SITC will wait another year to finish liquidation is two fold. First, is that while technically speaking SITC has an independent board which supposedly is making decision on when to complete the liquidation, the reality is that the company is still run by its old CEO, who is also the CEO of Curbline. And Curb’s CFO said “So we have assumed the status quo and guidance with no changes to the shared service agreement in 2026. Now as you know, though, if it's terminated by SITE on the 2-year anniversary, which will be October 1, 2026, there would be a pretty significant fee paid by SITE to Curb, which would more than offset, in our view, any expenses associated with the transition.” in the Q4 earnings call in answer to an analyst question about SITE winding down in 2026. So it sure sounds like the management of the company expects the winddown not to occur in 2026, thus we wouldn’t plan on it either.

The second reason relates to the DTP JV, which is a large portion of remaining assets. This portfolio is secured by a loan which expires in January of 2029, and which has prepayment/yield maintenance requirements in addition to a buy/sell agreement with their LP partner. To sell the portfolio now would incur a decent sized yield maintenance penalty (although not terrible when weighed against the ongoing G&A burden), while waiting a year brings that figure down quite a bit. Worst case we could see this dragging out 2 years if the company wanted to zero out the yield maintenance, but we believe this would be a poor decision from a shareholder return perspective as the large G&A costs more than offset any small yield maintenance savings from waiting.

The DTP portfolio buy/sell agreement is also why the company is holding such a large cash balance - they are holding more than enough to buy out the DTP LPs if necessary it looks like, which would be required if SITE had to force a sale if the LPs would not agree to one. The improves Site’s negotiating position, and worst case if SITE had to actually exercise the buy/sell we don’t think this would negatively affect the liquidation too much as the costs associated with this should be relatively small since they are buying assets for cash they already essentially own and have all the data. The risk would be SITE offers too high a price and turns around and has to sell the portfolio at a loss.

Valuation and Returns

The two big questions for Site are, what are the remaining liquidation liabilities, and then what are the remaining assets worth. We address both below, starting with the liquidation costs.