NEW YORK CITY-Publicly-traded retail REIT Kimco Realty Corp., a nationwide owner/operator of approximately 1,000 neighborhood and community shopping centers, is pulling back on $1.2 billion worth of non-retail ventures, the company confirms to GlobeSt.com. The Wall Journal reported that the REIT has sold six of the 26 properties out of the pool, which are located throughout major urban cores such as New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia.

David Bujnicki, senior director of investor relations at Kimco, tells GlobeSt.com that the company started to invest in other asset classes outside suburban shopping centers like hotels and mixed-use properties in 2006, but when the market began to change at the end of 2008 and into 2009, the REIT created a pool of $1.2 billion that was termed as non-retail investment, or anything that did not classify as a grocery or big-box anchored center. “They weren’t all urban properties,” Bujnicki says. “They were a combination of marketable securities, some preferred equity investments, investments and joint ventures such as the InTown Suites Hotel Portfolio,” he adds.

The pool of urban properties, Bujnicki says, is a “small piece” of the company’s retail portfolio and the REIT decided to re-focus on its core strategy. “We decided to change course on back in 2010 with our investor day we were going back to basics, strictly focusing on neighborhood and community shopping centers,” he says. “We’ve communicated to the market that we are actively selling these. When we first started this process back in 2009, the pool of investments is $1.2 billion. This is not something we just started.”