Brandywine Realty Trust (NYSE:BDN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jerry Sweeney: Sure, happy to, and look, take a look at the Schuylkill Yards development, Steve, which is really the 3025 which companies coming online later this year, then 3151, which is about a year behind. As I touched on the pipeline is up quarter-over-quarter. The majority of the prospects are significant growth of in market companies. We have several who are new to the Philadelphia region. But the larger square footage tenants are consolidations from other areas around the city but also coupled with some significant expansion capabilities. So that seems to be the major driver in the life science tenant base that we’re talking to Schuylkill Yards. From an office standpoint, they’re all kind of in region companies. Not all in city but in region companies looking to kind of move up to higher quality, more amenitized projects.

And just to touch on that for just one second, before I jump to Austin. And we continue to be very pleased. I know there’s a lot of dissonance of what’s happened in the office sector, we do continue to be very pleased with the level of new prospect activity that we’re seeing across the board of tenants love to move from older into call it better, higher quality, better managed better run buildings. That’s a trend line that we’ve seen, really for the last two years. And we’re an interesting position because we have a very good high quality existing portfolio, and then very good new developments. And it’s actually been quite pleasantly surprised to see the velocity of new deals coming into our pipeline from a market company but are looking to really upgrade their stock.

And at this point, even with economic uncertainty, those tenants still seem to be willing to pay the higher quality, the higher rents to get into those higher quality building. So we monitor that dynamic very closely through our CRM software tools, our outreach programs and actually tracking the pipeline on a weekly basis. Relative to Austin, we’d really been focused thus far, Steve on trying to find a substantial full building user. And we had a number of those in the marketplace that were doing a lot of tours with us and a lot of discussions and trading in paper. As I mentioned in my comments, a couple of those got really put on hold not dead but put on hold. So we are shifting our strategy. They’re really from trying to find one large tenant who would take the vast majority of the building to a couple of a midsize prospects we have and then think about a multi-tenant approach.

We think that will be successful. Certainly Austin’s been a bit, a little bit slower to return to the workplace than some other markets. We see that trend improving a bit, but it’s certainly behind the other markets. But even then, we’re seeing a big push towards the quality components with Block A presents. Did I answer your question?

Operator: Our next question comes from Michael Lewis with Truist.

Michael Lewis: Thank you. So you mentioned the JV that maturing this year, including Commerce Square. And it sounds like there’s a lot of interested lenders even though we’ve obviously heard that financing can be difficult to obtain for office properties in general. So maybe can you speak to the financing environment? And if you’re able to share anything regarding what you might be expecting for proceeds or pricing on those loans?

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