NEW YORK CITY-American Realty Capital Trust, Inc. has closed a $1.5-billion fund comprised of freestanding, single-tenant properties in its national portfolio, the company unveiled on Monday morning. The non-traded REIT--which focuses on net-leasing pharmacies, banks, restaurants and convenience stores in high-traffic locations to high credit quality tenants--expects to deploy all of its recently raised equity capital by the end of the third quarter, ARCT’s chairman and CEO Nicholas S. Schorsch tells GlobeSt.com.

“We are deploying our capital on a continuous basis,” says Schorsch, who explains ARCT has approximately 368 properties across the US, including 20 in New York State. “We’ve deployed and we’ve bought $742 million of assets this year already and our pipeline is very robust.”

As part of this transaction, the ARCT board of directions has retained Goldman Sachs as its financial advisor to explore liquidity options for the portfolio. “Their responsibility will be to help us and our board build a strategic alternative,” Schorsch says. “As a non-traded REIT, you are always looking for a liquidity event of some kind, whether that is a public listing or a sale of a company, or whether that is to grow the company for another year or two. Our focus is start the next steps in our strategic process.”