Phillips Edison & Company, Inc. Common Stock Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Great. We're Tanger Inc, ticker SKT. We're obviously a retail REIT, about $6.5 billion to $7 billion of EV, $4.5 billion of equity market cap. We are an open-air REIT that's focused on the outlet channel as well as open-air lifestyle centers, 38 outlets. Who's been to an outlet? I've been to one. All right, good. You know what outlet centers are and open-air lifestyle centers. We've been in business for over 40 years. We've been traded on the NYSE for over 30. Just from a financial structure perspective, our current dividend of $1.25 represents about 66% to 60% of our cash flow. The industry is about 75%, so we're keeping more of our free cash flow to invest. From a leverage perspective, we're currently at 4.7 times debt to EBITDA relative to a five to seven times target.

We not only have additional free cash flow to drive our growth, but we have a balance sheet positioned for growth.

Sounds good. Hi, everybody. Ross Cooper, President and Chief Investment Officer at Kimco.

I've been at the company now over 20 years. We own currently about 564 shopping centers at 100 million square feet gross. Diversified geographically throughout the country, but primarily in the top 20 or so major MSAs. We own all types of format of open-air retail, but primarily grocery-anchored and mixed-use shopping centers. We've been in existence since the late 1950s, public since 1991, and current enterprise value is plus or minus $24 billion. We continue to look for opportunities to grow the portfolio, grow the earnings stream. We've seen a tremendous amount of success operationally, which we'll get into in the panel. I won't steal too much of the thunder of the conversation, but excited to be here.

My name is John Caulfield. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for Phillips Edison & Company. I've been at PECO for about 12 years. I think we are sort of the new kid on the block relative to this. We've been publicly traded for five, but we have been around for 35 years. We focus exclusively on grocery-anchored shopping centers. For us, we own about 330 of them in 31 states. We focus on the three-mile trade ring in the neighborhood where that grocery, we have the number one or number two grocer, and then we have in-line neighbors which is what we call our tenants. We're ultimately that place in the community that people go to two and three times a week.

In terms of overall growth profile, we also have a very low leverage, right around five times on a debt-to-EBITDA basis, with a low to mid five times target. We look to grow our internal cash flow 3%-4% a year. We also call that same center NOI growth. But ultimately, we're looking to grow our earnings per share at a mid to high single-digit FFO per share annually, combined with a 3%-3.5% dividend, which we think will deliver 9%-10% annual return to our investors. I think it's a great representation of different styles of open-air retail.

Yeah. Occupancy of retail is very high in this environment, and part of it is because new construction is very expensive. It does have the opportunity to happen. There are places we spend our development dollars on building out parcels in our parking lots, trying to buy adjacent land. But ultimately, overall retail is high. But that allows us to have pricing power. Ultimately, we're seeing, this is, I believe, the third or fourth year in a row where our renewal spreads are over 20%. As rents are coming up and on renewals, that's so important because we put in very little capital dollars for that. Retail real estate, particularly those owned by the REITs, is the best in the market. I haven't seen the stat, Michael, you might know this, or Ross.

It's some fraction that the REITs actually own, and generally the REITs own the best. For us, we're focused on that three-mile trade ring, and we have 83% of our centers have the number one or number two grocer in a market. Ultimately, that brings the foot traffic that allows the retailers to be successful. High occupancy gives us the ability to further push rents, which improves the merchandising rigs, ultimately improves their sales, allows us to push rents more, and it kind of goes from there. I think that it is a very positive environment, and I think that sometimes there's a concern of, well, maybe all the growth is gone, and I would say absolutely not. We continue to generate and that's why I think about the percentage that the REITs own. We have a lot of transaction volume.

We buy a lot of centers. We're going to buy between $500 million and $600 million of assets this year, but we're also selling $100 million to $200 million of assets this year, and that gives us opportunity to refresh what our teams are working on. We do all of our own leasing and all of our own property management, all of our own portfolio management, and we're able to drive rents because we're in the market, and that's what we specialize in.