Highwoods Properties, Inc. (NYSE:HIW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Brian Leary: Dave, haven’t really seen that yet. And I know, it probably — it just sounds like I’m just talking my book. But, I mean, our customers, even the bigger ones are, through a person, telling us that they want to get their people back. And they see the workplace experience as part of that. So right now, the rents are holding up. The free rent is absolutely there. I think, they’d like to finance their TI through higher rents. Again, not to go back like two years and first they’ve been listening to me for a while. I think I sound like a little bit like a broken record, but a lot of these organizations, while they are cost-focused for sure, 1% of what they spend every year is on utilities, 9% is on real estate, 90% is on people and they’re pretty focused on that 90%. And so, it obviously does have a connection to the 9%. So nothing yet to connect those days. Sorry for the long answer for fairly short yes or no. Ted, maybe a thought.

Ted Klinck: Yes. The only thing I’d add is, Landmark, we did that — to what third quarter of last year, over 200,000 square feet and the rent was pretty high on that space as well. It’s been interesting just looking at our portfolio and it sort of goes to the question. Last year, we only did nine leases greater than about 50,000 square feet, which I thought was an interesting stat. It’s just a lot of the small and medium-sized users, which, again, plays right to our portfolio.

Brian Leary: And that’s out of 425 deals, right? So that gives you an idea.

Dave Rodgers: And then, some of the larger deals you have talked about the backfill of Tivity, or the deal that you did in Richmond. The larger transactions seemingly have focused on suburban markets. Is that not enough data to make that conclusion or leap, or are you seeing that definitely happening where the larger tenants aren’t gravitating to Buckhead, but maybe are gravitating towards Riverwood, or something similar across your markets?

Ted Klinck: I don’t think there’s really been any — enough data points to know and some of it is on renewals, right? You can only renew the ones you have and it’s where the holes you have as well in your portfolio. So, obviously, Tivity, we had a hole, so we’re able to go aggressively try and backfill it. And then, some of the other ones. So it sort of just depends. But I will say, a blanket statement. I think we’ve said this before that, during the pandemic, we have seen a disproportionate leasing out in suburbs versus urban, but I don’t think there’s enough data points to say if there’s any trend, one way or the other.

Brian Leary: I think just to clip on and this is decades in the making where people live is where they like to work. And so there’s a great continue migration of homeownership and home buying by the millennials to the suburbs. And so I think the concept it’s not — commodity suburbs is not something that we think just because of some of the suburbs is competitive by any stretch. And so if you think about what we’ve talked about the repositioning of our assets in Brentwood and Cools Springs — Cools Springs which said repositioning landed backfill of that building. It’s about amenitizing walkable mixed use a place to get a cup of coffee a place to walk and grab lunch a place to workout outside. And we’ve been a fitness center and have collaborative workspace. So it’s — you just can’t drop it down someplace in the suburbs or even in town and expect that to solve your problems, but that’s — it’s what we’ve seen.

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