Macerich at Citi’s 30th Annual Global Property CEO Conference: Strategic Path Forward

On Tuesday, March 4, 2025, Macerich (NYSE: MAC) presented its strategic vision at Citi’s 30th Annual Global Property CEO Conference 2025. CEO Jack Tsai outlined the company’s forward-looking plan, emphasizing deleveraging, asset sales, and enhanced leasing strategies. Despite challenges, Macerich remains optimistic about achieving its financial targets by 2028.

Key Takeaways

• Macerich is ahead of schedule on its $2 billion asset sales plan and $500 million equity raise.
• The company aims to increase in-line permanent occupancy from 84% to 89% by 2028.
• CEO Jack Tsai personally invested in the company by purchasing 56,000 shares.
• Macerich targets a debt to EBITDA ratio in the low to mid-6x range by 2028.
• Expansion opportunities are being considered in Sunbelt regions.

Financial Results

• Sales per square foot at the end of Q4 2024: $837
• Target FFO per share by 2028: $1.80, with a range of $1.65 to $1.95
• Current debt to EBITDA: Slightly under 8x, aiming for low to mid-6x by 2028
• Completed asset sales: $800 million out of the planned $2 billion
• CMBS financing closed in Q4: $525 million at a 5.37% rate

Operational Updates

• Current leased occupancy rate: 94.1%
• In-line permanent occupancy in non-EDDI portfolio: 84%, targeting 89% by 2028
• Leasing goals: Approximately 4 million square feet annually in 2025 and 2026
• 2025 renewal leasing: 85% complete
• New tenant space leasing: 40% complete, expected to reach 65-70% by year-end

Future Outlook

• Expect same-store NOI growth in the second half of 2026
• Plans to complete $500 million in outparcel property sales, with $100-150 million in 2025
• Potential portfolio expansion in Sunbelt regions
• Further updates expected between the Q1 2025 earnings call and the NABRE convention in June

Q&A Highlights

• Identified $300-400 million in assets for potential giveback or sale over the next two years
• Leasing for giveback properties to be outsourced to a third party
• Not planning to join Scottsdale Quarter, but open to partner management

Readers are invited to refer to the full transcript for a detailed account of the conference call.

Full transcript - Citi’s 30th Annual Global Property CEO Conference 2025:

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: Conference. I’m Craig Melvin with Citi Research, and we’re pleased to have with us Macerich and CEO, Jack Tsai. This session is for Citi clients only and disclosures have been made available at the corporate access desk. To ask a question, you can raise your hand or go to liveqa.com and enter code GPC25 to submit questions. Jack, I’m going to turn it over to you to introduce your company and team, provide any opening remarks, tell the audience the top reasons an investor should buy your stock today, and then we’ll get into Q and A.

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: Sounds great. Thank you. Well, first, let me introduce my team. Dan Swanstrom to my left is CFO of our company. To my right is Brad Miller, who’s an SVP that runs our portfolio management effort.

And the far left is Samantha Greening, who is involved in our IR effort. Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you all. If you don’t know me by background, I became I’m the president and CEO. I was hired last March by the board, and I started on the the first of twenty twenty four. I spent thirty years on Wall Street focused on real estate investment banking, a good portion of my career, completing over $300,000,000,000 of m and a and equity raising transactions across a multitude of property sectors, including regional malls.

I became CEO of Spirit Realty on 05/10/2017, where we restructured, grew, and sold the company to Realty Intim at the beginning of twenty twenty four, which generated a 61% total shareholder return for our Spirit shareholders, outpacing our peer companies by three to four x during that same period. So now let’s talk about Macerich. Macerich celebrated its thirtieth anniversary on the NYSE back in March 2024. Maestroich owns and operates preeminent enclosed super regional malls and open air lifestyle centers in California, Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Colorado, and and Virginia. Many of our properties are recognized as some of the top properties in America, including Tysons Corner, Scottsdale Fashion Square, and Carolyn Commons.

Today, we own over 43,000,000 square feet of real estate consisting of 40 regional retail centers. Our sales per square foot at the end of q four twenty twenty four was $837 Our least occupancy rate is 94.1%, and customer traffic at our centers are back to pre COVID levels. So what did I do in my first ninety days at Macerich? When I first joined, I toured most of our key properties, the majority of them, and visited our regional offices, spent time with the teams, particularly leasing, development, asset management, property management, and operations. I asked a ton of questions.

I was trying to assess our strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. During that period, we discussed and developed a property ranking system. We came up with a mission statement and new corporate values. Our Masonrych mission statement is to own and operate thriving retail centers that serve our communities and and generate shareholder returns, customer traffic, and help and work with our customers. Our corporate values are excellence, empowerment, optimism, relationships, and fun.

Early in that time in our in that first ninety days, I formed a process improvement committee to focus on improving our communication within our leasing teams and the rest of the organization. This was to provide customer data on on leased conversations so that asset management, development, tenant coordination, and legal could all spend time and understand information off this platform. This platform is in place, and it’s gonna save 15,000 person hours at Macerich annually. At the time, I learned that in that first ninety days that Macerich only focused on annual budgeting as a way to run the business, and there were three major forecasting events that happened within the year. We really needed a multiyear ability to analyze our business, so we quickly created a top down five year corporate model that helped enable us to design our deleveraging plan.

We refined and launched our initial path forward plan in July of twenty twenty four, where our leverage was around nine times debt to EBITDA. Today, we’re slightly under eight times debt to EBITDA, and we’re moving towards the low to mid six times range and a dollar 80 in FFO per share by 2028. And I’ll remind everyone our range is a dollar 65 to a dollar 95 per share. After one year on the job, we’re operationally firing, our leasing dashboard tools are fully integrated, and our five year Argus models are complete for each asset, all rolling up into our five year corporate model. I have confidence and belief in the ability for us to achieve our twenty twenty eight leverage and earnings targets that we laid out.

Maistrich has great people and excellent competency in our leasing, development, asset management, property management, and operations teams. I recently restructured and realigned these business units into four key groups with resulting in four direct reports to me. All permanent specialty and anchor leasing teams have been merged under one leader. Our asset management team went from a 145 person team to 30 people. We removed property operations and corporate marketing, you know, out of that group into another area line of business.

The asset management team of 30 are the keepers and architects of our five year Argus models and are tasked to drive value through leasing goals, asset sales, development, and capital allocation decisions at our properties. Realigning these units, shifting resources, coupled with our tech tools and systems are driving new leasing momentum and results. If you’re new to the Maestroich story, please review the July 2024 path forward deck. We plan to provide another update between our first quarter twenty twenty five earnings call and the annual NABRE convention in June. We’re also going to provide more detail and metrics around our go forward portfolio along with more detailed leasing disclosure in our Q1 twenty twenty five supplemental, outlining the mix of new, renewal, rent, term and TA cost.

In terms of the plan we laid out, it involves $2,000,000,000 of asset sales and loan givebacks, raising $500,000,000 of common equity and incremental leasing, which will result in our 2028 leverage and earnings targets. We’re well ahead of pace on $2,000,000,000 asset sales. We completed the $500,000,000 equity raise, and we’re 40% complete on our new tenant leasing goals. Our primary our primary remaining tasks are one, to complete the $500,000,000 of outparcel property sales, of which a hundred to a hundred and 50,000,000 will be complete by this year, and the majority of the remainder in 2026. And two, the leasing objectives I laid out on our call in in twenty twenty twenty twenty five and 2026 of approximately 4,000,000 per square feet annually.

The majority of the space are renewals, and we’re 85% complete for 2025, and we’re now focused on 2026. There is a very important group of new tenant spaces we need to lease. We’re currently 40% complete for that group and expect to be 50% complete by midyear, and by 6065% to 70% by year end. The balance will be completed in 2026. We expect to see our go forward portfolio generate same store NOI in the second half of twenty twenty six as new tenant spaces are cleared, demised, rebuilt, and rent commencement days initiated.

Our current sign not open lease portfolio pipeline of $66,000,000 will grow to $130,000,000 based upon our leasing completion rate. Our current occupancy is 94.1% system wide. In our non EDDI portfolio, our in line permanent occupancy rate is 84%. We expect to increase this to 89% by 2028. Total occupancy will be in the mid-ninety percent range.

Increasing in line permanent occupancy not only generates substantial incremental rental revenue, but our new tenants will pay fixed cam and taxes, helping us reduce current operating expense leakage from having too much temporary tenants in our portfolio. Another exciting opportunity for us as part of our plan will be to deliver tenants into 20 current vacant anchor stores within our go forward portfolio, which will increase foot traffic and overall productivity in our centers. As a point of reference, in the last four years, we only backfilled 12 vacant anchor stores. So we’re moving very quickly towards contractually putting the building blocks together to deliver what we said we would do for 2028. It’s a very exciting time for all of us.

So Craig, you asked me at the beginning, why buy Maestroich stock? And I’m glad you asked that question. This morning, I bought 56,000 shares. I believe in the story. Obviously, I’ve been buying shares throughout since I started the company.

But more importantly, I think we’ve laid out a great plan last July that will address our leverage and portfolio composition. We’re well ahead of schedule on the reduction of debt on our balance sheet through the $2,000,000,000 asset sale debt giveback plan. And on the crucial strategy of leasing or moving our permanent in line physical occupancy from 84% to 89%, our momentum and run rate will get us to 65% to 70% by year end, driving our snow pipeline to over $100,000,000 We’re going to end up here with a thriving retail portfolio with solid tenancy that will drive traffic, sales, rental revenue and earnings growth. And with that, I’ll pause for questions.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: That was a great overview. Does anyone in the room have any follow ups to that to start off with? All right. Well, I’ll jump right in. I guess it was amazing to me to hear that the lack of asset management discipline that was at the company before you showed up in a one year rolling capital plan.

As you guys have rolled this out, really started to kind of model and go through, I know that you had bucketed the portfolio into your three classifications. As you’ve gotten deeper into this and gotten more modeling done, has there been any changes in how you guys are looking at specific assets in the portfolio in any of those buckets about how much capital you may need to spend? I know you’re going to give an update on the path forward plan. Any preview of that, feel free to do it now. But I just want to I’m just kind of curious as what has come out of this process already, that maybe you weren’t expecting?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: Well, I would say generally the ability to have our five year fully vetted ARGUS models, which we actually initiated in the summer of last year, it took literally six months to complete in terms of getting full buy in from asset management, leasing, ranking each space, market rent, and then having that drive through Argus and rolling up into our corporate model. I think the best thing I can say is we have a really minute to minute clarity on capital allocation relative to strategy and tenancy and how it affects our balance sheet and earnings on a go forward basis. Kimberly can’t comment on why things were done in the past the way they were done, but all I can do is say, based on the way things were done, showed up with 94% system wide occupancy, decent same store sales actually. If you look at same store NOI over the last couple of years, it’s been around 2% generally. But there’s a big opportunity to kind of close the gap on the in line.

And that takes, you know, filling anchors, leasing a mainline space, closing down some of the expense leakage that’s that’s occurring within our portfolio. To answer your question on the rankings, you know, our rankings continue to evolve. And I think where it’s been interesting is maybe properties that not a lot of them, but we’re looking at properties differently as it relates to, are we getting the right return for our capital going forward for what this property needs? Are there better uses for our capital? And having an ability to analyze with direct tenant spaces rolling over a five year basis, we may have some tweaks on the bottom steady eddy portion of our portfolio, but I’d say generally the portfolio is intact.

The one piece that I didn’t do a very good job on our earnings call of following through, I made a comment about our same store NOI, and the comment was related to it’s going to be kind of flat, slightly up, down, sideways for the next couple of years. I was making reference to the entire portfolio. And one thing that I need to make very clear is our EDDI portfolio, especially the ones that are on the give back program, are not having any direct capital contribution from Macerich. Actually, the the leasing of those properties is gonna be outsourced to a third party, you know, later this year. We’re directing all our energy towards the new leasing initiatives on the go forward portfolio.

You know, the same store NOI for some of those assets in the Eddie portfolio will see year over year high single digit declines. Now we know these are leading, so, but so when I made the reference, what I didn’t follow through was the core portfolio going forward will obviously start to see comp same store NOI growth in the second half of twenty twenty six as we move through Express and all that capital is lapping through into the go forward portfolio. So apologize for make not making that clarification.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: And if you think about it, right, the Fortress and the Steady Eddies, if you pull out the negative on the Eddy, kind of where does where do those two buckets kind of trend? And as you look out, what could the power of the portfolio produce from a same store basis longer term as you guys fix the leakage that you may have, improve MPVs on leasing, right, all the initiatives that you’re going through?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: I mean, I’d love to use as an example, Caroline Commons. If any of you have visited Caroline Commons, we virtually have no space available in that center. There’s excess demand, and our ability to actually drive rate there if we want to make space available is quite compelling. So obviously, getting your in line fully occupied with with quality permanent tenancy is critical. I believe that once we’re able to accomplish what we’re talking about here, we will, in three years, have all of these tenants in place on the in line.

The majority of our anchor locations will be leased. We’re selling them to tenants. In some cases, we’re providing TA, but they’ll be retail users in those locations. And at that point, I think that our current pre COVID traffic levels will increase. If we’re increasing productivity, we’re driving more sales for our tenants.

Their occupancy costs enable them to obviously pay more for us. And then we’re also closing down some of the operating expense leakage. So same store sales, I think, will look very, very you’ll start to see the growth in ’twenty six, in the second half. You’ll see very significant growth in ’twenty seven and ’twenty eight, obviously, as we lap into the final aspects of our plan.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: And you guys have about 66,000,000 of snow today. You said that’s going to go north of $100,000,000 by year end. By year end. I would assume a portion of that $60,000,000 may predate your arrival possibly. And so I’m just kind of curious if you guys have gone back and looked at the NPVs of the lease deals that were done and may hit versus kind of what you’re able to do now with a better five year plan and Argus runs and probably more appropriate capital for each asset, kind of how that NPV has trended on the new lease deals?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: I mean, I would say first as a general matter for tenants under 10,000 square feet, for some of the better quality tenants, The amount of TA that we’re providing on a new ten year deal is about one year’s rent, just as a rule of thumb. So if you think about the net effective rent, it’s 90% of the starting rent. But then also remember, we’re picking up CAM and tax, which we’re not able to collect on our temporary tenants. So I think that’s a pretty it’s similar to Tanger’s experience, and I’m sure others that compete in our business. Really, the kind of complexity is around the anchors, right?

So we own a number of Seritage, Sears locations. We know a number of Nordstrom locations, Lord and Taylor locations. And the calculus that we go into is, should we sell the box to the retailer? Should we give the box to the retailer depending on the center and what that’s they’re doing to the property? Should we build a store and generate anywhere from an 8% to 12% return, yield on cost or rent on cost?

So the calculus is like based on where the center is, our capital availability. And so I think what I did when I started last year, I saw a lot of vacant anchors that were sort of being held for densification or redevelopment over a five year period. And that’s if you listen to our mission, that’s not what we do right now. That’s not really what our focus is. So it was really pretty much to get those anchors functional to the best of our ability.

Company, Dick’s House of Sport users like that or multiple user retail users in one box, because that’s enabling us to kind of lease out those wings concurrently. And so a lot of energy was put into driving that effort beginning when I got to the company. And by the way, merging department store leasing into permanent leasing was one of the ways to create that, what I call, stalemate that was occurring probably prior to when I got here.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: We got some questions coming in. This is more of an update on the strategic path forward. How many properties do you expect to hand back the keys to over the next few years? Is there a way to complete these sooner than presently expected?

Dan Swanstrom, CFO, Macerich: Yes. So in the plan as outlined on our call, we have over the next two years, we’ve identified internally three to four assets that are likely give back candidates potentially a sale if they could clear above the debt. And the timeline on that as we sit here today is now through the end of twenty twenty six as the maturity dates come upon us. These things do take time. We defaulted on Santa Monica Place last April and we’re still kind of working through that process to get off title.

But that’s the plan in terms of the $300,000,000 to $400,000,000 in totality in terms of the givebacks.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: Can you just walk through the process for people on what has to happen before you could even hand back an asset and sort of the timeline of dealing with the lender and all of that?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: I guess I could take that. Santa Monica Place was a little bit unique. That was kind of one of my first actions when I got to the company. Think about our property rankings, that’s one of our highest per square foot. But there are a lot of other considerations as it relates to how we look at retail real estate going forward.

And that ended up being an Eddie out of the gate. And that ended up, hey, we’re defaulting on this loan, which obviously surprised a lot of people at the company and at the board, but it’s the right thing to do. When we approached the lender, the lender basically said, Hey, look, why don’t you guys we’ll give you an extension. Kick the can. Why don’t you do that?

No, that’s not really for us. And they said, Well, would you like to buy the asset? They said, We’re not even going to give you a price because we don’t think it makes sense for you. So at this point, the servicer has been working through their process. We’re still fulfilling a couple of requirements on build out for we delivered Ding Tai Fung.

We’re building out Club Studio and Arte. And they’re actually getting another party to actually manage the center, not us anymore. So it’s just a rush a moment. It’s a sort of time when we come off title, which I effectively will think later this year. But unfortunately, I think it’s more endemic of sort of CMBS.

There’s time is really, in my opinion, not that mall’s friend right now, but you’ve got people that get fees and sort of want to take time and change maybe managers and do different things. And honestly, like collateral value is going down. So that’s not for us. We’ve made that decision and we’re moving through. So but that’s kind of the process on CMBS, at least, as it relates to what we’ve experienced.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: Another question that came through with the Westfield assets no longer on the market. How much more of a scarcity value does that add to Macerich’s core portfolio?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: Sorry, Craig. I didn’t could you say that again?

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: With Westfield assets no longer on the market, how much more of a scarcity value does that add to Macerich’s core portfolio?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: Look, I think our portfolio is extremely valuable. There’s Legacy West is a really interesting retail center in Plano, Texas that is under contract that we think at a pretty aggressive cap rate and price. Scottsdale quarter is an auction that’s happening right across the street from Carolyn Common. It’s got a lot more office space than we have at Carolyn. We’ve got a lot better, in my opinion, retail.

If when that property clears and people see the price and cap rate, I think it will reflect really well on at least our open air centers, which are Carillon, Santan, Broadway Plaza and The Village At Corte Madera. As it relates to A Class malls, we bought out our joint venture interest on GIC on obviously on Los Cerritos and Washington Square. I’m not sure you can really read too much into that cap rate. That was buying out a minority partner, and it wasn’t a fully auction process. I’m not sure there’s really great clarity on what I call Fortress Malls being sold today.

What I can tell you is Steady Eddie pluses and our top Steady Eddie’s, the differential in cap rate, in my opinion, today is still really wide and hasn’t closed yet. You know, when we sold The Oaks, you know, The Oaks was actually one of our top tier properties ranked on the bottom. We ended up selling it. I didn’t think that property was refinanceable in its current situation. The buyer was able to get new debt on the property.

We were able to pay off Pru at par, which is great, few dollars for us. But more importantly, like an asset like that that has a real story, it could it’s gonna go backwards in NOI before it goes forward, needs a multi density non retail solution to kind of generate the IRR. It’s it’s really compelling that that got financing, and and there are equity sources willing to put meaningful equity behind it. It’ll be interesting to see that, like, the the benchmark cap rates for those kinds of properties, kind of what I call it, are are probably 10% to 12% going in right now. So I think as time moves on, less supply, that might inure and tighten, which would reflect well in our portfolio.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: And then we have a clarification question coming in. Is the $100,000,000 of snow by year end accounting for the portion of the $66,000,000 that is expected to start in 2025? And just confirming, is that roughly 15% of core portfolio rents?

Dan Swanstrom, CFO, Macerich: The 100 is incremental to the so 66 is the snow as of the beginning of the year. It would be 66 plus to get to the 100, in terms of how the leasing is going right now.

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: And that’s by year end and the total is $130,000,000

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: the

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: opportunity out there.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: So you’re essentially assuming $36,000,000 commences in $2,025,000,000

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: dollars Yes. Okay.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: Any questions from the audience? Yes. Maybe you can talk about just the sales that you plan to do, just kind of the progress and maybe you could put that in your interest.

Dan Swanstrom, CFO, Macerich: Yes, sure. So to Jack’s opening point, we had identified $2,000,000,000 of total sales. To date, we’ve completed $800,000,000 of those sales and that includes the $300,000,000 of debt on Santa Monica Place to be given back. To my earlier comment, there’s now three to four givebacks or sales that we’ve identified, $350,000,000 to $400,000,000 to get you close to $1,200,000,000 which would be about 60% of that. The balance is one mall asset currently that has $325,000,000 of debt on it.

And then the rest is what we’re team’s focused on really right now is the $500,000,000 of outparcels, freestanding retail and land. And we’ve identified $100,000,000 to $150,000,000 of the $500,000,000 that we expect to complete in 2025, and the balance would be in 2026. So that would come that would bring the full $2,000,000,000 sort of done, complete, sold by the end of next year.

Unidentified speaker: Given the givebacks, have you seen any impact on your cost of financing with lenders? And would you consider keeping CMBS in the mix of your financing sources given your comments?

Dan Swanstrom, CFO, Macerich: Yes, we haven’t seen any impact. In fact, in the fourth quarter, we closed on a $525,000,000 new CMBS financing at Queen Center at a very attractive all in rate of 5.37. So we see those CMBS markets continuing to be open and constructive and strong. And so that’s sort of the plan as we sit here today. As we achieve our objectives and goals with respect to the broader plan and we get down to closer to low to mid six times debt to EBITDA, I think that gives us some optionality to look at more of a diversified suite of potential debt and financing options.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: And then Jack, apologies. One more confirmation on the snow pipeline. Someone wants to know, can you confirm that only the core portfolio and excludes any Eddie properties? Correct.

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: Correct.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: Okay. Jack, you had mentioned Legacy West is on the market, but under contract with someone else.

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: Scottsdale quarter on the market?

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: Yes. But you also have Scottsdale Quarter, right, across the street from Peerland Commons. I think after NAREIT, where we did the property tour with you guys, I had asked, is there any world where you could get involved with Scottsdale Quarter and maybe JV Kierland? I just want to circle back. Is that could that ever be in the cards if it’s a partner that’s willing to do it where you would be willing to kind of joint venture Kierland to get access and put those two properties together?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: Well, I would say theoretically and hypothetically, having one group manage those two properties is really powerful because that’s a lot of critical retail in an area where a lot of retailers want to be. I would say that we’re not in the process, but I’ve talked to our partner like, hey, if we if the other partner would let us run it, we would contribute our equity, they would contribute their equity. And we’ll see who ends up winning this thing and maybe we’ll have that conversation. At this point, we’re not going to be able to be putting capital in at that kind of yield. That doesn’t make sense.

But we can use the embedded equity in Kierland to use that. And we believe that those two assets under one operating structure can drive a ton of incremental NOI for both properties actually.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: And if the cost of equity were to go back above where you were issuing equity already, so call it north of $20.19 dollars 20 dollars Do you get to a cost of equity or blended cost of capital that makes sense to be acquisitive at some point once you funded your CapEx? Like what’s the longer term plan for the portfolio to grow?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: Do you

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: have to go outside of traditional enclosed malls, go more lifestyle centers that complement some of the stuff that you guys have in, say, Phoenix or elsewhere? I

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: would say the blue sky opportunity for us is, like, we’re going to be, I’ve laid out kind of what my leasing goals are. By the end of this year, I’m going to look like we’re largely complete. And basically, I will lay out contractual schedules, I’ll show you how this works. What we will be focused on is more opportunity to grow our portfolio potentially in Sunbelt regions. I think we have too much on the coast.

So obviously, I’ve had a lot of experience in my prior company with assets in that region. Under the right circumstances and under the right cost of capital. So to me, that would be a really exciting opportunity for us and our shareholders if if we have a built in fully occupied in line, fully majority occupied anchors, which is great retail centers. And then that you can really drive some rate and then try to find opportunities where we can apply the same magic to some existing assets that are out there. There are assets that were managed out of COVID not dissimilar to the way our company did.

I’m not saying that the big companies did it this way, but if you were looking at valuations going down and you were looking as an institutional owner of an asset, putting more capital in, a lot of times those people didn’t do that. And so our assessment is gonna be, can we turn the property? You know, is it in the right trade area? Is is the anchor solution manageable in time? Are we able to if tenant certain tenancy left, can we bring them back?

And we’re gonna know better than anyone, right, as was one as well as anyone. And if you look at who’s buying centers today, you know, it’s not Simon, GGP, and Westfield or us. You know, it’s all private operators. They’re very good that are representing private institutional opportunistic capital right now, and and that capital is actually growing pretty significantly. We’re seeing it on our sales.

So I think that would be a really exciting opportunity for us once we complete what’s at hand right now.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: And just our rapid fire questions. What do you think same store NOI for the retail group overall could be in 2026?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: I still think that the demand is there for our other peers that are more fully occupied. So I would assume that they’re still going to generate you know, healthy comparable returns the way they are now.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: And then more or less of the same amount of public retail companies in the year?

Jack Tsai, CEO, Macerich: I still say about the same.

Craig Melvin, Citi Research Analyst, Citi Research: Great. Thank you. Thanks so much.

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