Continuing a trend among airlines and real estate investment trusts that began last fall, Omega Healthcare Investors, Inc., has just completed plans to raise up to $100 million over the next two years via an at-the-market stock offering.

At-the-market or ATM offerings, also known as continuous offerings, controlled equity or equity shelf programs, allow a company, via a specific type of registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, to make incremental stock offerings rather than launching a single large sale of shares.

The SEC filings allow the company to have necessary paperwork “on the shelf,” so to speak, which, if consistently updated, may be used repeatedly for each new incremental filing.

The primary advantages of this method, according to Eliot Robinson, the Bryan Cave Powell Goldstein partner who represented Omega, a Hunt Valley, Md.-based long-term care REIT, is that ATMs allow the company to make offerings when market conditions are most favorable. Also, unlike a single large offering, ATMs don’t flood the market and are less likely to push down share value.

“These deals have become a lot more prevalent since last fall, particularly in certain industries, and these include REITS,” said Robinson, who worked on the deal with Bryan Cave associates Terry Childers and Jody Arogeti. “It’s also been common with airlines—you saw this with Delta last winter.”

Omega entered into separate equity distribution agreements with three banks: UBS Securities LLC, Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. and Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., each as sales agents or principals. The banks are represented by Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom partner David J. Goldschmidt.

Robinson said his client has good relationships with all three banks. “The banks follow the trading and generally have a good idea when there are institutions that are looking to accumulate a block [of shares], and this provides an opportunity for the company to place the block directly with a buyer,” he said. “It … may be harder for the buyer to accumulate these shares in bits and pieces, and from the buyer’s perspective, these trades don’t move the market up.”

Robinson said that Omega, which, as of the close of the first quarter of 2009 owned or held mortgages on 255 skilled nursing and assisted living facilities in 28 states, planned to use the net proceeds of the sales for working capital and general corporate purposes.