Urban Edge Properties (NYSE:UE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Floris Van Dijkum: Great. Thanks, Mark.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Samir Khanal with Evercore ISI.

Samir Khanal: Good morning, everybody. I guess, Mark, how, when I look at your guidance, I mean, how do you get to the low end of guidance here, the 110? Because when I listen to your commentary, to get – you’re baking in quite a bit of fallout to sort of get to the midpoint as it relates to Bed Bath, Party City, and then other sort of potential fallouts. So, maybe just walk us through how you get to the low end at this point.

Mark Langer: Yes, it’s really a function of several things. So, it’s basically taking, from an NOI perspective, a full fallout on a more accelerated basis, as well as getting less collections from the prior recoveries, and then having interest expense hit the high end. And so, really, it’s mostly driven by fallout above and beyond. While I’ve isolated some tenants, Samir, there are several others that we have kind of on a watch list that could get incorporated into the year. So, some of it is for losses that I just didn’t highlight.

Samir Khanal: Okay, got it. And Jeff, in your opening comments, you mentioned about 800,000 square feet of negotiations that are underway. Can you expand on that a little bit more? What does the leasing economics look like for that bucket, given sort of the micro concerns out there?

Jeff Olson: Yes, I mean, it’s very robust. I’m going to let Scott Auster, who’s our head of leasing, who’s joined – who’s with us this morning, talk about that pipeline because he’s on the frontline. But we are very excited about the prospects. And importantly, as we bring on tenants like Target and T.J. Maxx into our centers, I mean, what I’m seeing in the pipeline is just better credit because they’re following these anchor positions that had – that were previously occupied by tenants that were not doing very well. But Scott?

ScottAuster: Yes. Hey, Samir. It’s really running the gamut. I remember talking about this on our last call of all the different categories that are out there expanding. It’s anchors. It’s shops. There’s definitely – the QSRs are definitely very active right now. That’s a big category for us. Fitness is another one that’s really busy with us right now, both in the boutique sizes and the full line gym guys out there. The medical category is the other one that’s really active for us right now. So, it’s really all across the board, shops, anchors, the general merchandise retailers. The discount retailers out there right now are still very active as well. So, we’re really happy with both the activity and the level of NOI growth that we’re going to see coming out of the other side of this.

Jeff Olson: And Samir, I think what excites me the most is the fact that – and I said in my comments that vacancy rates throughout the shopping center industry are at all-time lows relative to – I think the last data point was 2007, where vacancy rates were at this level. So, now is the time for us to really push rents, which we could not do when we were at 91%, 92%, 93%. But we are confident that we will ultimately stabilize backup to that 96% to 98% occupancy level that we were at before. And at that point, we will push rents a lot harder than we have in the past.

Samir Khanal: And last one for me if I may. On – this has come up with some investors as sort of the Sunrise Mall. I mean, what is the current thinking or strategy behind that property? Thanks.