William J. McMorrow
Analyst · CJS Securities
Thanks Christina. Good morning everybody and before I start the body of the call, we're closing in now on our third year anniversary of going public. It was November 13th of 2009 and since I won't be talking to anybody during that period of time. I wanted to take a chance to thank everybody for their support. I think as you will see as we talk about not only the quarter but the context of the last 3 years that it's been a great period of time for the company.
So thank you for that and with that, I'm going to start the call. As you can see from the earnings release, our EBITDA for the third quarter was $17.5 million a 94% increase from $9 million in the same period of 2011. For the 9 months ending September 30, 2012 our EBITDA was $55.5 million; which is a 33% increase from $41.6 million during the same period of time of 2011. As it relates to our investment account it closed the quarter at $658 million which is an increase from $582.8 million at the end of December 2011.
But what I want to point out is there is always a lot of ins and outs in that investment account and I believe I said earlier in the year that we thought that distributions out of that account would be somewhere between $75 million to $100 million this year. So, what's actually happened during the year is that the change was comprised of $239 million of new investments but we had distributions out of that account of $164 million including little over $47 million worth of distributions in the third quarter. So, while we have been actively investing during the year, we've also been actively taking distributions and harvesting out of that account.
One of the new metrics that we are going to include in our press releases going forward is the next one which shows our square footage that we own. So, on a rentable basis, not a gross basis, we own 14.6 million rentable square feet of real estate which includes almost 14,000 apartment units, 24 commercials -- and 24 commercial properties on top of that we own about $2 billion of loans secured by real estate and as we talk about here in a little bit we've had a reduction and that account for good reason because we've had very great collections and resolutions of our UK loan portfolio that we bought in October of 2011.
The other thing and then I'll talk a little bit more about it and subsequent events here but when you look at what we were closing here in the fourth quarter that's square footage numbers going to increase from 14.6 million square feet to roughly 16.5 million square feet.
Our Apartment business, we have about 1,000 units that we are closing on the acquisition filed here in the fourth quarter of which we've already close one that we did last week which is this project called Lake Meritt in Oakland so our apartment unit count is going end up the year right around 15,000 units. Included in that, and I can talk about this because it's been in the press in Ireland, tomorrow we are closing a 50-50 joint venture with Fairfax, the acquisition of AEP, one of the really fine apartment projects in Dublin called Sandford Lodge. So that will be the second multi-family asset that we've acquired in Ireland.
So, to continue back on the press release here, I think the breakdown of the EBITDA is self-explanatory. From January 2010 through the end of the third quarter, we've acquired $6.7 billion of real estate investments including what we already have under contract to close here in the fourth quarter, with that about another $400 million that we are closing here in the fourth quarter. We are going to end this 3 year period of time at about $7.1 billion of acquisitions compared to when we did this first call in the first quarter of 2010. I indicated to everybody that our goal, even though I said we would not buy anything that didn't make sense, our goal was to try and buy around $6 billion worth of assets during this 3 year period of time. And so we are going to exceed that by a pretty good margin.
For the first 9 months of the year we acquired $1.5 billion of real estate related investments including $659 million that we closed in the third quarter. We invested on our side roughly $176 million of our equity in all of those activities, including almost $69 million that we invested in the third quarter.
So, when I break down the composition of the $1.5 billion, during the first 9 months along with our equity partners we acquired $969 million of real estate investments including a $180 million in the third quarter.
When you look at the geographic locations, 68% in terms of our equity were in the United States, 32% in Ireland. It included 7 multi-family properties of almost 2,000 units and 11 commercial properties totaling 2 million square feet.
During the 9 months, we along with our equity partners acquired $563.6 million of loans including $478.6 million during the third quarter at an average discount of 20% to their principal balances. In addition, KW and our equity partners originated a loan of $8.6 million at a 10.8% interest rate.
These loans are all secured by 108 underlying properties located primarily in the Western U.S. and Ireland. We invested approximately $95.2 million of our equity in the loans, including $41 million in the third quarter.
During the first 9 months of 2012, our equity partners and KW sold 4 multifamily properties located in the Western U.S. for a total of $243 million, which resulted in total gains at the 100% level for almost $33 million and our share was almost $8 million.
Addition to that, we returned $17.5 million of our equity to KW. We sold our interest -- in the third quarter, we sold our interest in a 324 unit apartment building in San Jose, which resulted in a gain of $2.2 million.
At the property level, we've been very active on the financing side. For the first 9 months, we completed $476 million of property financings and refinancings at an average rate of 3.3% and a weighted average maturity of 6.6 years. For the 9 months we completed $829 million of property financings or refinancings for an average rate of 3.6%. This is 2011 and so the point that we are trying to make there is that we -- and I have said numerous times, what we are doing this year is extending out the maturity dates on the underlying debt on our ownership. We are not only extending out the maturity dates but we've also been able to lower the average interest rates.
One of the many great success stories of what's happened during the last year has been the resolution of our loan portfolio that we bought in October of 2011, just a year ago. The unpaid principle balance of that portfolio of loans that were basically fully performing was $2.1 billion. And as of September 30th, 2012 the unpaid principle balance has been reduced to $1.3 billion. We've had resolutions of almost $757 million representing 36% of the portfolio and as you are going to see here and just to second we, since the end the quarter, we've resolved about $100 million, almost $200 million of additional loans in that portfolio.
You might also recall that Kennedy-Wilson and Fairfax purchased 25% of that original portfolio and against our 25% we had a loan that totaled roughly $350 million -- $325 million. That debt now including the resolutions that we had post end of the third quarter has been paid down to right around the $100 million, so we paid back $250 million of that debt during this period of time.
We also announced the formation of 2 platforms in Europe during the year. At March 13th we announce the ?215 million or $325 million capital commitment from Fairfax. We've, as I mentioned, we are closing the Sandford Lodge transaction tomorrow. We closed the Alliance Apartment Building transaction inside that venture and we close the Brooklawn office building in Dublin inside that venture.
In addition to that we announced a platform with a major European financial institution that in dollar terms totaled $2.5 billion, and inside that platform we acquired from a British bank a group of Irish loans that had an unpaid principle balance of $449 million. In that transaction we invested roughly $7.5 million of our equity.
In Japan, as well as our multifamily business here in the United States, it continues to perform at a very high level. In the U.S. our average occupancy is running roughly 95%. In Japan it's running 97%. And in both cases and now it's also true in Ireland, we are doing meaningful cash distributions out of that entire portfolio on a monthly basis. If you look at just Japan by itself since September of 2010, we have distributed $51.5 million of cash out of that platform of which our share was $24 million.
As our investment platform and our third party business grows, obviously the income in our service business continues to grow. So our management and leasing fees increased by 12% to $12.5 million for the 3 months ending September 30th from a $11.1 million for the same period in 2011. And during the 3 months ending September 30th, our service business achieved an EBITDA of $4.8 million which was a 50% increase over the same period of 2011.
Our management and leasing fees increased by 35% to $35.5 million from $26 million and during the 9 months, our service business EBITDA and increased to $11.2 million, which was a 72% increase over the same period of 2011.
On the financing side as you all know, in July, we issued 8.6 million additional common shares which resulted in gross proceeds of $112 million of which $40 million was used to pay off our $100 million line of credit.
And then as I alluded to, we've had subsequent events that are meaningful. Subsequent to September 30th, we have acquired or entered into contracts to acquire $391.8 million of real estate related investments, which as I said earlier, were going to represent 1.8 million rentable square feet comprising almost a 1,000 apartment units and 6 commercial properties.
All of those transactions will close here in the first quarter ? or the fourth quarter and so as I've said earlier, that will take -- assuming we don't do any other transactions, that will take our 3 year total to $7.1 billion of acquisitions. And then as I also said earlier subsequent to the end of the third quarter, we've resolved an additional $190 million in our U.K. loan pool which will go to -- not only will those distributions will go to all of our partners but it will increase our debt secured by our piece of that venture by another $35.5 million. So the good news on the U.K. loan portfolio is we are running not only ahead of the timeframe that we had laid out in our business plan, with the resolutions in terms of the total dollar resolutions are running ahead of our original forecast.
So, with that overview I'd like to open it up to any questions that everybody has.