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

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George Johnstone: Sure. Yes, I’d be glad to. Yes, this was a 65,000 square foot tenant at our Martin Skyway project out in the Southwest Corridor. We had a kind of ongoing dispute with them over the course of 2022. They were one of our fully reserved tenants — so weren’t really having a negative impact on the ’22 business plan due to the reserve. But — we just got to the point where we got to a stalemate and proceeded with the next course of action, which was default in eviction and we’ve now got the space back on the market. And as I said, we’ve got a little bit of a pipeline forming and do have one lease for about 12,000 square feet that we’re negotiating.

Michael Griffin: And I guess, are there any other tenants that you might be concerned could default in the –.

George Johnstone: Yes, really, not at this time. I mean we — not really at this time, Michael. Tom and his team, along with our asset management folks kind of go through the accounts receivable on a monthly basis, and we’re kind of always assessing who’s utilizing space versus not utilizing space. And we think that at this time, we really don’t have any other risk from that perspective.

Tom Wirth: Yes, Michael, this is Tom jumping in for a second. We did — as you go back even at the start of the pandemic and where people were getting help and who needed it and where we were seeing credit issues. For the most part, we were fairly lucky in terms of not having a lot of defaults. And most of those where we did give relief are more in the retail area than the office area. So we’ve been fairly good on monitoring that, and we do monitor the tenant’s credit as we go through the year, that our team does a really good job of that. So it’s nothing different than what we saw in the first pandemic so we really don’t have a lot. This tenant has been on our list is by far the largest one that we’ve been following. So we really don’t see any storm clouds right now that will lead us to think there’s going to be any change in our current collection rate and tenant collections.

Operator: And our next question comes from Tayo Okusanya from Credit Suisse.

Tayo Okusanya : Hi, good morning, everyone. I wanted to talk a little bit about just about the dividend. Given the guidance you guys are forecasting a dividend coverage on an FID basis of anywhere between 95 to 105, so you get really tight. Just kind of curious how you kind of think about it going forward, again, especially given your kind of source of the uses of capital in 2023?

Jerry Sweeney: Yes. I guess, let me address that, and Tom certainly feel free to weigh in. Look, it was — we acknowledge that the payout ratio for ’23 will be tight and certainly, it’s higher than we’ve had in the last several years. So as we’re thinking about the dividend, we took a hard look and we think we’ve established a strong but conservative baseline cash flow as a foundational point in our ’23 business plan. We’ll obviously monitor that closely during the year. But as an example, we started off ’22 with a range of 95% to 84%, and we wound up right at 84%. So we become very good at controlling our forward capital cost to making sure that we manage revenue and capital expenditure. So we feel that baseline gave us a good springboard to grow from.

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