Armada Hoffler Properties, Inc. (NYSE:AHH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Peter Abramowitz: Got it. And then you’ve talked about potentially monetizing the T. Rowe headquarters. Just wondering if you’ve seen any relevant transaction comps in any of your markets for that type of office product and kind of how it impacts your thinking in terms of potentially doing a deal there?

Louis Haddad: Again, thanks for the question. It’s interesting. There aren’t any transactions of trophy quality building that we see out there. I’d say there aren’t any. Maybe there’s 1 or 2 somewhere. But largely, anybody with the kind of assets that those represent is not trying to transact right now. It’s absolutely the worst time. So for us, the — obviously, the fond hope is that 18 months from now, things have normalized a bit to where you can get real value out of that type of asset. In alternative, I don’t discount the idea that should our cost of capital go in the right direction and the equity price go in the right direction, we may well bring those things on balance sheet. But right now, we wanted to make sure everybody understood, if push comes to shove, that’s a great assets to bring cash back on the balance sheet.

Peter Abramowitz: Got it. And then last one for me. You’ve had some elevated growth on the real estate tax side, particularly multifamily, a little bit on office as well this year. Are you contesting any of those that could potentially be a tailwind for expenses in future quarters? And just kind of how should we think about growth in real estate taxes generally?

Shawn Tibbetts: I think the industry should be thinking about that generally. But yes, we are contesting nearly all of them. I mean it is our practice to assess them one by one and try to make sense of where we should apply our efforts. We have a good third-party vendor that assist us in that regard, and we’ve had a lot of success there. So obviously, municipalities are different up and down the Mideast, Mid-Atlantic coast, down throughout the Southeast. But yes, we push back on those often and early and have seen relatively good success there. So we plan to continue to do that. Obviously, we can’t control the macro environment and we — it’s something to watch for, it’s something we’re focused on.

Operator: Our next question comes from Wes Golladay from Baird.

Wesley Golladay: Can you talk about the leasing environment in multifamily. A lot of the peers had some tough quarters and tough outlooks, whether it’s supply pressure or fraud. Are you seeing any of that?

Louis Haddad: I’m going to let Shawn answer that specifically. But we are seeing things normalize. People got used to double-digit growth quarter-over-quarter for a while there. We’re seeing it normalize back into the mid-single digits. Shawn, are you can be specifics on that?

Shawn Tibbetts: Yes. I think Lou hit the nail on the head. We’ve been saying for multiple quarters now. We think things go back to the mid-single digits, which they are and that’s what we forecast and that’s where we sit. Our trade-outs in quarter 3 were around 4% across the board, which is good. It’s about where we thought we would be. And I think for us, our view is let’s maintain high-quality trophy assets, let’s be in the best locations, as you know, that’s part of our formula, and there’s a flight-to-quality happening, especially when the pressure turns on. I think, generally speaking, we see strength continued, again, maybe not double-digit growth, but we’re feeling good about our location, we’re feeling good about our product, and our team is doing a heck of a job managing set of products. So we’re comfortable with what we’ve underwritten.

Wesley Golladay: Yes, I think a lot of people would take growth at this point. Turning to the 11 tenants that are on the watch list, is there any way to quantify that as a percentage of ABR?