Dennis Gershenson
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead, with your question
Thank you, Dawn. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to spend the next few minutes covering three topics. First, I want to say a few words about Greg Andrews’ department and where we are in the process of securing his replacement. Second, I will update you on the status of our capital recycling program and how the sale of our noncore assets and the reinvestment of their proceed is facilitating our focus on owning an improvement our portfolio of large multi anchored shopping centers that are concentrated in a select group of major metropolitan markets. And lastly, I will address the status of our balance sheet and explain the reasons for our revised FFO guidance for the year. Greg Andrews left the company on October 16th after five year tenure, departed on very good terms. Greg left after achieving his primary goal of significantly improving our balance sheet, moving us from being overwhelmingly a secured borrower to primarily unsecured debt and expanding our line of credit capacity to ensure financial flexibility. These goals achieved Greg decided to pursue new challenges and opportunity with another company. Relative to his replacement we have identified a number of great candidates for the CFO position and we will be commencing the interview process. It is my reasonable expectation that we will be in a position to identify our choice before year-end. And starting with the sale of our non-core assets, we have sold to-date $66.5 million of properties consisting of non-core shopping centers, vacant land and land leases that we did not see as part of our future plans. We are in contract to sell or have signed letters of intent for the sale of an additional $43 million. The average cap rate for the shopping centers sold to-date at share was 6%. We anticipate that the balance of the sales for the year will generate a cap rate of approximately 7%. The acquisition this quarter of seven joint venture shopping centers, streamlines our business model, grows of our asset base, broadens our geographic footprint and further concentrates our assets in metropolitan markets. Specifically in great areas where we have a dominant retail destination. In addition to using the dollars generated from our capital recycling program for these acquisition, we will use some of the proceeds from this year sales as well as additional sums we will raise from the disposition of non-core properties to be sold in 2016, to continue to fund our program of value-add expansion, shopping center improvements and the replacement of underperforming tenants. The success of these ongoing efforts can be seen in our ability to attract and install at our core shopping centers. National credit, best-in-class retailers, including Nordstrom Rack, Saks OFF 5TH, The Container Store, Stein Mark, Dick's Sporting Goods, raw stores and others. Further, the inclusion of these anchors has created the additional opportunity to drive rental rates for our non-anchored tenants who will benefit from these new significant draws. It is our intention for the balance of 2015 and well into 2016 to focus our energies on our core portfolio for these growth opportunities. In addition to adding value to many of our legacy shopping centers, the large multi anchored centers we have acquired over the last several years, lend themselves to significant densification and the creation of the sense of place. Both of which translate into above average returns on new dollars invested and ever increasing rental rates. As our ideas for this later group of centers matures over the next several quarters, we look forward to sharing our plans with you. Now, let me take a minute to talk about our balance sheet and year-end guidance. John Hendrickson will provide details on the income statement. Our balance sheet remains strong with leverage metrics well in line with our average interest rates of 4.15%. We anticipated closing another $15 million of private placement debt in early November. These financings are consistent with our strategy of being a corporate follower as the proceeds from these loans have been used impart to refinance secured debt. The result of these new financings is an increase in our unencumbered asset pool to approximately $2 billion. ROI balance at the end of the quarter was $125 million, which will be reduced by year-end as a result of our addition $50 billion private placement debt and our pending asset sales. Our balance sheet strategy remains unchanged, which is to maintain ample liquidity with predominantly fixed rate debt, well staggered maturities and above average term of debt of 6.4 years. Now concerning our guidance, we are revising our 2015 FFO guidance for the year to reflect our ongoing confidence in our business plan as well as to account for a number of one-time items. We anticipate that our comparable year-end operating FFO will range between $1.32 and $1.33, which is of the high end of our prior guidance. In addition to our comparable performance there are four one-time non-reoccurring components that drive our third quarter and year-end numbers higher. They include lower G&A cost of $0.02, which is primarily driven by the resignation of Greg Andrews during the quarter as well as a proactive hold on hiring as we evaluate our human resources needs in relation to our long-term strategic goals. Our normalized G&A number would have been in line with our previous guidance of $22.5 million to $23 million. The second element of our one-time increase involves a re-measurement for the quarter of the fair value of our total shareholder return grants under our long term incentive program. The program is re-measured on a quarterly basis and will be adjusted again at year-end based on our performance measures. The third non-reoccurring component involves the additional income benefit from postponing the timing of a number of our 2015 dispositions, which was primarily the result of a conscious decision to harvest additional sales proceeds from the execution of pending leases. Lastly, we experienced a short-term interest expense savings, as a result of a reversal of the default interest on our Aquia loan, our prepayment of four mortgages without penalty by using our line of credit and by working with our private placement lenders to extend the time for closing on new financings. These four one-time events contribute approximately $0.04 to the quarter and $0.05 to $0.06 to our new FFO guidance for the year of $1.37 to $1.38 per share. Again excluding these anomalies we project operating FFO of $1.32 to $1.33 per share, which reflects the benefits of executing on our business plan. I would now like to turn this call over to John, our COO who will discuss the details of our operations, after which I will conclude with a brief statement about the company’s strategic direction.