First Industrial Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE:FR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jojo Yap: Yes. So for me, kind of bottom line is like in 2019, businesses are focusing more on growth. And their focus on where the expansion is because of new business coming in. Today, they’re more securing their current commitment and making — wanting to make sure they’ve got good enough space to run their business and let’s focus on growth. In ’19, there was a little bit more of a fear of missing up in space because they’re being gobbled up quickly. Today, tenants have a little bit more choices, so they’re more deliberate and they’re shopping around a little bit more.

Ki Bin Kim: So how does that impact your strategy in terms of leasing up your development space or I guess any space? Is cutting rents a practical solution? Or if the pool of new — the pool of customers is the smaller, maybe cutting rent doesn’t do the trick. Maybe increasing leasing commissions. I guess, how are you trying to handle that?

Peter Baccile: Right now, concessions are not increasing meaningfully. And I say — use the word meaningfully because here and there, we are seeing some sponsor owners increased free rent a little bit. We typically offer, call it, half a month of free rent per lease year. And we’re seeing that in some cases at a month. But again, not — other than that, that’s about it. TIs or standard packages, etcetera. The other thing that I would point out is that we have developed properties that are incredibly competitive relative to the set of primarily merchant build that’s out there. So from a functionality standpoint, we are superior and — when we talk about having more competition, that’s not — we don’t mean there are 6 or 8 other opportunities. There might be 2 or 3. So it’s not that the market isn’t flooded. So right now, the market is holding pretty steady. Occasionally, you’ll see somebody get a little extra free rent. But right now, it’s holding steady.

Peter Schultz: Ki Bin, the other thing I’d add is over the last several years, we’ve seen a lot of our developments leased to single tenants. As you know, we take a lot of time in the design, making sure these are functional, can be divided for multiple tenants. We’re seeing, as I said a few minutes ago, better demand from smaller midsize and the buildings are ready and prepared to be demised from multiple tenants office — multiple office pods, stock packages, in some case in demising. So we have the flexibility given the quality point that Peter made to accommodate that. So you might see us do more multiple tenants than what we’ve done in the last several years which has really just been a function of the market.

Operator: The next question comes from Nicholas Yulico with Scotiabank.

Nicholas Yulico: First, I just wanted to ask about the development projects that, I guess, already delivered this quarter and still will come in the next couple of quarters in Inland Empire. If you could just talk a little bit more about what sort of competitive level of supply you’re dealing with there relative to those projects, we do see just stats in your commentary that Inland Empire East is where there is more of that supply impact but just wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

Peter Baccile: Jojo, do you want to…

Jojo Yap: Sure. I’ll touch on the Inland Empire. Overall, the Inland Empire still has a historically a very low vacancy at 3.5%. We do expect long term that we will still have positive rent growth. In terms of our developments, we have 5 in VIE 2 [ph] we just completed in 300 [ph] construction. They’re all of different size ranges in different submarkets, mainly Montana, 250 in corridor and then Redlands. So we’re not overinvested or overbuilt or any market. If you look at each of these properties, there are no more than 2 competing properties in terms of quality on locations with these properties and there are even 2 properties where we couldn’t find really a comparable property. We feel really good about these projects. Roughly, they’re about $200 million.

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