Hi all - I am the author of the SA post about Resource Capital that sparked such, shall we say spirited, commentary on this board. I appreciate the valid points that were made and ignored most of the snide comments made (except the CYS screw-up that I made - that was a mistake but CYS was basically the last amREIT standing to declare a dividend, so you had a biennial event).

However, I thought there was some pretty good wisdom on the board and I had a few questions for some of you:

1) Is it economically sound for a REIT to distribute more than 100% of its taxable income in a given year? What are the benefits of such a practice? Does the dividend appear to be keeping a floor on the stock price?

2) What are the advantages of returning capital to shareholders versus retaining the capital to pursue high ROE opportunities such as debt repurchase (which incidentally, creates deferred taxable income) or common share repurchase? RSO's common share price still trails, GAAP book value, so a share repurchase continues to make economic sense as a means of growing book value.

3) Why are so few of RSO's competitors following a similar strategy? RSO's dividend yield is quite high compared to competitors like NRF,PCC, and RWT, yet the market is not rewarding it with a premium valuation. Why might that be?

As a side note, I do not have nor have ever had a short position in RSO. I simply wanted to raise the question of why a REIT would choose to pay a return of capital (i.e. liquidating) dividend instead of conserving cash for higher ROE activities. I have raised the same question for Realty Income (O) in other SA threads.