If you’re reading this, then you probably already know Sears Holdings (SHLD) shares jumped big-time recently; SHLD was up 30% or so Friday after retailer announced it’s considering the creation of a REIT using 200 to 300 of its existing Sears stores. By so doing, SHLD would put some much-needed cash into its pocket headed into the busy holiday shopping season.

On the surface, it all makes for Sears Holdings. The creation of a REIT at the very least facilitates the mass sale of some of the company’s best assets — its real estate — without sacrificing control of that real estate; it would be a sale-leaseback deal for SHLD stock.

And who knows? This unspecified cash injection may well be the one that buys the retailer enough time to turn the sinking ship around. Based on that premise alone, Sears stock may actually be worth 30% more today than it was a few days ago.

There’s just one little flaw to the logic, however — investors seem to have forgotten that there’s no such thing as a free lunch on Wall Street.

If Eddie Lampert is orchestrating a fund-raiser, he’s not getting something for nothing. The question all SHLD shareholders should be asking here (particularly when Eddie Lampert is behind the deal) is, what’s the catch?

Were it Any REIT Other Than a Sears REIT

Truth be told, SHLD converting part of its real estate into a REIT isn’t a particularly unusual maneuver for a retailer. Canadian grocery chain Loblaw has done it successfully, and with a structure that’s sustainable. Ditto for Dillard’s (DDS).  So, it’s not the idea itself that should alarm anyone holding SHLD stock.

Rather, it’s the smell of desperation the Sears REIT idea brings with it that should be concerning.

It’s not a big secret that Sears Holdings is in financial dire straits. The company has lost money in nine straight quarters, and revenue has been declining steadily since 2007 despite the “transformation” sermon Eddie Lampert has been preaching the whole time.

How has the company survived? Credit has been part of the answer, but mostly it’s been the sale of company assets keeping Sears afloat.

In 2012, for instance, the company spun off Sears Hometown and Outlet (SHOS), pocketing $446 million. Earlier this year Sears spun off Land’s End (LE), collecting $500 million for the brand name. Just last month owners of Sears stock learned the organization would be shedding most of its stake Sears Canada, (hopefully) to the tune of $380 million.

Oh, and along the way SHLD has shed dozens of its U.S. stores — some of them its top-performing units — in order to collect what’s likely to be a total measuring in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

And that’s just the asset sales. Never even mind the short-term loans and rights offering that have been tendered in the meantime, with the past two such offers made within the past few weeks totaling more than $1 billion.

The big questions the market needs to be asking: Why a REIT, and why now? What happened to the rest of the money raised since 2012?  Sears was only sitting on cash of $839 million as of the end of July, which would almost seem like a workable figure had the company not lost $1.87 billion over the past twelve months, with no end in sight.

What’s the guarantee that the proceeds generated by the creation of a Sears REIT won’t vanish too?

Indeed, the company in its current condition can’t pay all the bills it already has without cutting off pieces of itself. How is adding new rent payments to that list of ongoing liabilities actually going to help bring the operation –and the bottom line –– back to life?

The (admittedly speculative) answer: The Sears REIT would be nothing more an extension of the misery suffered en route to the company’s demise.

Reality Check for Fans and Owners of SHLD

It’s been said before but it bears repeating now — Sears Holdings doesn’t have a liquidity problem. It doesn’t have a balance sheet problem. Yes, those are the buzz words often associated with the struggling retailer, but they’re just symptoms of the actual problem at SHLD stock.

More than anything else, Sears has a retailing problem.

That problem is, it can’t sell enough merchandise at a high enough price to remain solvent.

In some ways, that’s much tougher to solve than just a liquidity crunch. Then again, that’s a CEOs job. Rather than solve that problem though, Eddie Lampert has opted to sale pieces of the company itself in order to buy more time to figure out what he thinks the problem is and then solve it.

Sales have been falling since 2007 though, and Sears has been faithfully losing money for more than two years, and the losses continue to widen.

At some point owners of Sears stock are going to have to recognize Eddie Lampert has been at the helm for nearly a decade and not once have things ever actually gotten better. Is it realistic to think a little more money/time now is going to yield that “a-ha!” moment?

Not likely.

If anything, a Sears REIT would simply further complicate the corporate structure, burden the income statement, and simultaneously take away a huge piece (and arguably the best piece) of the “asset” total on the balance sheet. It would just be another short-term patch on a much bigger long-term problem, which is not growing money, but just moving assets from one place to another.

Thing is, these short-term patches from Lampert seem increasingly desperate.

As of this writing, James Brumley did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.