First Real Estate Investment Trust of New Jersey heads into late April with its share price pinned near levels last seen during the pandemic, while a tightly-held ownership structure and a filing event three weeks ago keep the stock quietly in focus.
The price picture is strikingly flat. Shares closed Wednesday at $14.00, unchanged on both the week and the month, with only a fractional 0.7% dip on the final session of April. That flatness belies a broader context: $14 is close to where the chairman was buying shares back in 2018, and only marginally above where an unnamed director added stock in September 2020. The stock has never been a momentum name, but when a REIT trades at levels that attracted insider buying nearly eight years ago, it invites the question of what has kept buyers away since.
The ownership structure is the most interesting feature here. Institutional data from March 2026 shows a roster of just nine registered holders, with the three largest — Ronald Artinian, David Hekemian, and Robert Hekemian — collectively holding close to 18.5% of shares. The Hekemian family name has been synonymous with this trust for decades, reflecting the close-held, almost private-company character of a $14 REIT with no publicly available market cap. There were small, uniform additions of 1,584 shares across several holders in the most recent reporting period, suggesting routine compensation or reinvestment rather than any conviction buy. The one departure in the data is David McBride, an independent director, whose count fell by 839 shares.
Positioning in the lending market tells a quiet story. The most recent short interest estimates date from November 2025 — now nearly six months stale — and showed roughly 1,752 shares short, down more than 30% from mid-October levels. Given the thinness of the float and the micro-cap character of the name, those share counts are small enough to be functionally irrelevant. More telling is the utilization data: availability for borrowing has been completely unconstrained since at least late November, with utilization at zero across every reading through mid-April 2026. A 52-week peak of 76.9% in utilization earlier in the year is a reminder the borrow market can tighten on names like this, but right now it is wide open. Cost to borrow, last recorded at 13.1% in November 2025, had eased from a peak above 15% in the spring of that year — but given the stale read, that figure should be treated as indicative at best.
On factor scores, the short-score rank of 52 and sector score of 50 place FREV.S squarely in the middle of the pack — neither a stand-out squeeze candidate nor a structurally clean name. The dividend score of 39 reflects the history accurately: the trust last declared a dividend in April 2022 at $0.10 per quarter, having cut the payout from $0.20 previously. There has been no declared dividend since. For a REIT, that gap is notable, and it is likely a drag on the name's institutional appeal. The most recent event in the filing calendar was an 8-K filed on April 10, disclosing other events — content unspecified in available data — which warrants monitoring.
Recent earnings prints have been mixed without a clear directional pattern. The March 2026 announcement produced a modest 1.1% one-day move that held through the week. The January 2026 print brought a 5.4% one-day drop that extended further over five sessions. The September 2025 event sparked a 5.7% rally. That alternating rhythm offers no reliable guide to reaction size or direction — each print appears to trade on its own merit rather than against a consistent market expectation.
What to watch: the April 10 Form 8-K disclosure and any follow-on corporate action it signals will be the next material data point for a name where news flow is sparse and insider activity remains the primary lens through which positioning can be read.
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