Phillips Edison & Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:PECO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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John Caulfield: Yes. Thanks, Jeff. So I would say on that, the interesting part of this is it has been such a focal point post COVID because there’s variability. And I would say that actually, fundamentally, there isn’t anything unusual in the fourth quarter. It does tick a little higher. But I would also say that historically, our fourth quarter does typically take a little higher, but then we also have experience in the first quarter where it can actually be better than expected. So when we think about the 60 to 80, unfortunately, it’s a challenge to do it on a quarter-by-quarter, and it ends up kind of smoothing out because right now, we’re focused on reversals from one period to the next. But in the fourth quarter, I had reversals from Q2 and Q1 which is why, ultimately, we do look at on a smoothed-out basis, but I don’t want to — we do look at it on a granular neighbor-by-neighbor level and including the type of AR that they have and the like.

And so it was higher, but actually, there was nothing fundamentally that actually drove us to do that other than a slight seasonality.

Todd Thomas: Okay. So not seeing anything in the fourth quarter regarding the sort of tenant health maybe from some of your local neighbors or anything like that, that you can point to just a little seasonality in the fourth quarter, and you’d expect that to sort of just smooth out a little bit during the course of the year.

John Caulfield: I do. And in fact, in the first quarter, both at an AR level and even from a health level, the first quarter is actually better than we would have expected otherwise. So we are not seeing any signs that our neighbors are having difficulties.

Todd Thomas: Okay. All right. Helpful. Thank you.

Operator: We go next now to Floris Van Dijkum at Compass Point.

Floris van Dijkum: Thanks for taking my question, guys. It looks pretty good. Obviously, your portfolio has proven to be very resilient. Something, Jeff, you’ve been harping on about since you went public here. Encouraging to see that actually show through into the numbers as well. Curious about your small shop. You’ve got pretty strong leasing spreads, 17.7 for your average spreads for your small shop. Is it correct to assume that the majority of your sign that open pipeline of around 100 basis points is in that bucket in the small shop, which gives you the confidence in terms of your same-store NOI growth for ’23.

Jeffrey Edison: The answer is yes. That is how we’re looking at our backlog today, and we feel comfortable in our guidance based upon that. But as you know, Floris, we’ve been talking about this for a long time. There continue to be really good pricing power for us in the — on the leasing side. And a point that Devin made earlier, some of these numbers strike you as big numbers like 17% or 35%. But when you figure that’s coming over a long period of time and over a piece of our portfolio, just basically getting them to market. It’s not — these are very sustainable numbers in our view. And so we’re — we do feel like that as long as we stay in this kind of environment where the demand is very — is strong for our space that we should be able to see — continue to see these kind of returns. I don’t know, Dev, if you have any additions on that.

Devin Murphy: No, I think that’s the point, Jeff.

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