Regency Centers Corporation (NASDAQ:REG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 10 of 11

Paulina Rojas: And if I can, last one, hopefully short. Where do you think that the CMBS market is for grocery anchored centers today?

Michael Mas : Paul, it’s Mike. Hard for us to tell. We’re not really a CMBS user. So I’m not as — as close to or familiar with that market day to day. I will — for our product, grocery-anchored neighborhood shopping centers that are very resilient, have great quality rent rolls with underwritable tenant credit. I would imagine that, that market would be available to us. I don’t know that I would appreciate the pricing of that product. But it’s — as with most of the credit markets, especially today, it’s limited. And borrowers have little less access to debt capital today, but borrowers like Regency with great reputations in the credit market with scale, with quality will have and great relationships. We’ll have more access than most.

Paulina Rojas: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Linda Tsai with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

Linda Tsai : Hi. Just one quick one. With treasuries reversing course and inflation is starting to abate a little bit, is this showing up in terms of more traffic or transactions at your centers?

Alan Roth: Linda, we’re basically flat to 2019. And so we feel really good about the traffic that’s there right now. Again, necessity-based retail, and they’re performing really well. Our restaurants are performing exceptionally well, as are others. So I think we’re back to a pretty steady state right now from a traffic perspective.

Linda Tsai : Thanks. That’s it for me.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Ronald Kamdem with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Ronald Kamdem : Hey. Just two quick ones from me. Just going back to the 96% potential leasing targets. Just curious what we need to see for that to happen. Is that just the current run rate are you seeing? Limit sort of move outs? Just trying to figure out the building blocks, the breadcrumbs to get to that 96% and how achievable that is?

Michael Mas : Well, we know it’s achievable as we look over our shoulder in our past, and we feel even better about the quality of the assets we own today than when the last time we achieved that level. So that’s how we know it’s achievable and where our targets are. You outlined the breadcrumbs. The third element I would give is time. We’ve talked on previous calls about our ability to lease space at pretty meaningful rates. And we delivered on that in 2022. We added 100 basis points of commenced occupancy. I mentioned the 200 bps of percent lease coming from the small shops. So time, continued effort by the leasing team, bankruptcies of a material sense will put kind of holes in the bucket that we then need to work our way through.

And again, that will only be a matter of time, not if we can lease that space but really win. It’s not — Ron, we’re not anticipating that achieving that level, and I’ll just say, in 2023, there’s going to be more time than 12 months ahead of us to achieve that. But we’ll get there in due time.

Lisa Palmer : And I would just add, and setting the bar high, as I expect that our team would deliver that, if not for those bankruptcies, as Alan talked about, our leasing pipeline is really strong. We have a lot of momentum. And my expectation, if we didn’t have the hole in the bucket from those store closures and bankruptcies that we know are coming, we have visibility to it. We’d be able to increase occupancy in 2023.

Page 10 of 11