Healthpeak Properties, Inc. (NYSE:PEAK) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Thomas M. Klaritch: Sorry, this is Tom again. Just to clarify, the numbers I was quoting is our monthly numbers. So for the quarter, it’s between $8 million and $9 million.

Michael Mueller: Got it, okay, thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from John Pawlowski from Green Street. Please go ahead.

John Pawlowski: Good morning, thanks for the time. Scott Brinker, I just had a follow-up question about the dispositions or the appetite to sell assets. Just curious with the pretty resilient private market pricing on Life Science properties that have traded, curious why you aren’t selling assets more aggressively to help close the disconnect between public and private market values?

Scott M. Brinker: Yes. Well, we have sold assets year-to-date and we just said we’re going to look to sell some more. So I mean, we’re doing exactly that. It’s not an easy market to transact in, but that is our expectation. That feels like the best move. At least for assets that we view as highly desirable by some buyers, but maybe not core to our strategy. A tougher to sell super core assets within our big campuses and clusters. At some point, we may have to consider that, but that — we don’t feel like we’re in that spot today. We certainly, from a balance sheet perspective, don’t need to. And sentiment, it comes and goes. Obviously, it’s been more negative lately. We don’t think that lasts forever, certainly. I think the results today, the fundamentals are a lot better than the sentiment. So we’ll see if that in fact transpires in the coming quarters, if not, then we’ll continue to look at additional asset sales.

John Pawlowski: Okay. But the size of dispositions in your mind right now is in a couple of $100 million range likely?

Scott M. Brinker: Yes. right.

John Pawlowski: Okay. Last question from me. Curious in the last few years if you’ve seen any case studies in your Life Science portfolio, where just lower utilization of back office space is requiring maybe an uptick in capital spending from you to repurpose the space or a kind of concession on rents for certain operators just to accommodate different work patterns in the post-COVID environment?

Scott M. Brinker: I mean, John, we sign more than 5 million square feet of leases since COVID, so three years ago, both existing spaces and new spaces. And the allocation between the lab and the collaboration space really hasn’t changed. So understand the headlines and the theories. But when we look at real tenants and releases and real buildings, the mix hasn’t really changed much. So we have not seen that. Could it flex a little bit in the future, sure, it could, and our purpose-built assets can actually accommodate that. A lot of the redevelopment type properties struggle to get to 30%, 40% of the lab mix, whereas our purpose-built labs could go up to, I don’t know, Scott, 75% lab, if they needed to, but we’re just not seeing that.

John Pawlowski: Okay, makes sense. Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Wes Golladay from Baird. Please go ahead.

Wes Golladay: Hey, good morning everyone. I want to go back to that comment about seeing an uptick in discussion with lab tenants. Has that been broad-based or is that more of the pharma or the biotech tenants or anything in between?

Scott R. Bohn: I think it’s broad-based. We spent a lot of time talking to both our large-scale pharma clients as well as VC is talking about company formation startups. There’s probably more activity favoring the sub 50,000 square foot type tenants. There’s a lot of Series A funding going on, a lot of company formation going on. I think those companies that are still in that Series B, C range over the early public are probably the ones that are just now starting to feel more comfortable and as Scott mentioned, and have more clarity on kind of the interest rate and macro environment. So we expect to see more of that coming over the next few months. But overall, the activity as well as the LOIs we talked about are a broad range of tenant sizes as well as kind of where they’re at in the spectrum from a funding perspective.

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