The chairman and chief executive officer of Dream Office REIT says real estate investment trusts can access cheap money to maintain their distributions if they want to.

“Money’s free. So if money’s free, you can make your distributions – if you’ve got lots of access to capital, you can make distributions,” Michael Cooper told BNN Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman Wednesday. “So people can make distributions as long as they have a business that has a potential for the future.”

“Our preference is to have a low distrbution to give us a lot more flexibility,” Cooper added. “But I think there will be companies that are going to make more than they distribute, there’s companies that are going distribute what they’ve always distributed, and there will be companies that will cut their distributions because it’s the best way to manage the long-term.”

Dream Office REIT, which has a monthly distribution of 8.3 cents per unit, holds $1.9 billion in assets in downtown Toronto. Downtown Toronto office space makes up 83 per cent of the REIT’s portfolio.  

Cooper’s comments on distributions come a day after the CEO of RioCan REIT assured investors in a BNN Bloomberg television interview that his company’s distributions are safe.