Several things stand out as really important in this quarters release:

1 - Taxable earnings jumped back to the levels one would have expected from RAS before the Taberna acquisition. 69 cents a share is blow out. It is much better than I expected. I had previously posted I'd be happy with anything above 20 cents a share. A 3.5x jump is very good news, especially as one projects into the long term. Its to early to say that RAS could be paying a 60 cent plus dividend 2-3 years from now, but this is an extremely promising number. I'd been thinking RAS would do well to pay a 30 cent dividend in that time frame, but if it can pay 60, share values in the range of $28 a share may well be possible down the line.

2 - As expected, interest margin is up substantially. This reflects the jettison of the residential portfolio, which had very low margins. Interest income is a little over half, but interest expense is down by more than half. RAS is keeping about 38 cents of every dollar of interest it collects on its loan portfolios.

3 - RAS appears to have extinguished as much debt this quarter as it did last quarter. Another $47M of debt disappeared at what appears to be a substantial discount.

4 - Assets under management remain in excess of $10M. Given the sale of the residential portfolios, that makes a lot of sense. What is surprising is that the decline wasn't larger.

5 - RAS added four more properties to its equity portfolio, raising the fair value of its owned assets to $645M. RAS has roughly $10M under management now, so that brings the equity portion of RAS portfolio up to roughly 7% of its overall portfolio. Lon

6 - Both rental income and fee income grew, and should grow more.

There is obviously a lot more to say. The reporting in this press release deviates substantially from RAS' normal press release. I think this reflects that substantial changes in RAS portfolio in the wake of RAS sale of residential and its Taberna deconsolidations. The bashers will focus on the overall loss for the quarter, but that appears to reflect nothing but one time contingencies. Of more concern is the decline in book value. I thought there might be some decline in book value based on the sale of residential. This quarters decline was larger than I expected. More later.