Shares of senior living and care real estate investment trust Strawberry Fields REIT will begin trading once a few clerical issues are resolved early this week, CEO and Chairman Moishe Gubin told the McKnight’s Business Daily.
The action comes after the company filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March and became public last week.
The REIT will trade under the ticker symbol “STRW,” and between 1.5 million and two million shares will be available for sale, Gubin said.
The South Bend, IN-based firm’s healthcare portfolio includes 74 stand-alone skilled nursing facilities, four dual-purpose facilities used as both SNFs and long-term acute care hospitals, and three assisted living communities across a total of nine states: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.
“This is literally the culmination of probably 15 years’ worth of work. This is a long-term game for me,” Gubin. “We’re finally at the finish line. …Now we’re just waiting to start trading.”
Gubin said he and co-founder Michael Blisko bought their first skilled nursing property in 2003 through a predecessor company. That company eventually became the Strawberry Fields REIT in 2015, he said. Both men come from a background of working in skilled nursing.
The firm got its name from a company-wide contest, Gubin said. Strawberry Fields won because of the association with the Beatles song of the same name. With a client base made up of baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964, currently aged 57 to 76 — it seemed fitting to tie the REIT’s name to a band that the oldest members especially would identify with, he said. (The youngest boomers were five years old when the Beatles broke up.)
“The people we take care of are best symbolized by a generation of Beatles fans,” Gubin said.
As a publicly traded company, Gubin said, Strawberry Fields “will continue to grow as before” as a “living, breathing entity that we can pass on to our children.”
