Elme Communities (NYSE:ELME) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Steven Freishtat: Yes, Alan, our line is actually at 6.25% right now. And we’re certainly evaluating options and could look to term out a portion of our line of credit balance with the secured or unsecured debt. And we’ll see what the Fed does in the coming couple of months. But we do see the secured and unsecured debt market out there as far as loans being made, but the pricing is challenging. So for now, we’re certainly comfortable keeping the balance on the line, and we still have ample capacity on our line to do anything additional if we wanted to. But we’ll continue to monitor the markets and look to do something longer term if we were to make sense.

Alan Peterson: Maybe one last one for me in terms of forward external growth plans. I understand the comments on recycling out of higher CapEx assets into geographic expansion. Across the best use of funds today, would it be to continue to scale the platform into geographic expansion or potentially look at buyback opportunities considering where the stock is trading at?

Steven Freishtat: Yes, Alan. So obviously, we do consider stock buybacks and look at that. But we remain focused on a couple of things. One is we’ve built out a platform that is scalable and looking at growth to scale the company. But we also look at maintaining the strength of our balance sheet. So when we think about additional things that we can do, obviously, where we said that we’re trending to a mid-5s by the end of the year. So we’re very comfortable with where we’re trending from a leverage perspective. Additional diversification, we could certainly recycle assets. We’ve got some assets maybe in the D.C. area that might be lower growth, have higher long-term CapEx needs that we could recycle into higher-growth assets in the Sunbelt.

In addition to that, we’ve kind of mentioned all of these, but we also have the operational upside, the $4.25 million to $4.75 million that we’re focused on executing on. With the acquisition of Elme Druid Hills, now we have our renovation pipeline of 3,300 units. The smart home technology, which we started rolling out this year, we’re going to continue that and doing Phase II, which allow us to do self-guided tours. So we think that we’ve got a lot of growth drivers embedded in our portfolio that we’re looking to execute on and anticipate that, that will allow us to earn a lower implied cap rate over time. And then we’ll look to grow with our cost of capital when it makes sense. Obviously, it doesn’t pencil that right now, but if it makes sense in the future, we’ll certainly look to do that as well.

Operator: Thank you. And if there are no further questions, I’d like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing comments.

Paul McDermott: Thank you. Again, we’d like to thank everyone for your time and interest today, and we look forward to speaking with you and seeing you in person over the next few weeks. Thank you, everyone.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.

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