Macerich Company (The)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Q4 2023 Mace Rich Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you would need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Samantha Greening, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us on our fourth quarter 2023 earnings call. During the course of this call, we will be making certain statements that may be seen forward-looking within the meaning of the safe harbor of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding projections, plans, or future expectations. Actual results may differ materially due to a variety of risks and uncertainties set forth in today's press release in our SEC filing. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the earnings release and supplemental filed on Form 8K with SEC which are posted in the investor section of the company's website at macerich.com. Joining us today are Tom O'Hearn, Chief Executive Officer, Scott Kingsmore, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Doug Healy, Senior Executive Vice President of Leasing. And with that, I turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Samantha. By now, it's old news, but on Monday, we announced my pending retirement after 31 years at Macerich. So today is my 118th Mace Rich earnings call and my last. I will miss all of you. I would like to say I'll miss all of you, but I'm not so sure about that. When I joined Mace Rich 31 years ago, it was to help Mace Segal and Art and Ed Coppola take the company public. We did that in March of 94. Our total market cap was a modest $650 million. Today, our market cap is $11 billion. We went from having a portfolio of malls in the mid markets doing about 350 a foot in sales to a portfolio in major coastal markets doing $836 per foot in tenant sales. There's been a dramatic improvement in the quality of the portfolio to say the least. When I joined Maestrich in 1993, no way in hell did I think I'd be here 31 years later. Nothing in my Ironman background prepared me for a run of that duration. I will be forever thankful to my Mace Ridge colleagues and friends for our collective accomplishments. Today, Mace Ridge is extremely well positioned for the future as I pass the baton of leadership over to a man most of you know, Jackson Shea. He's the right person to take the company forward and to continue to execute on our strategy of densifying and diversifying our portfolio of top quality town centers. Regarding the upcoming leadership change, There is a detailed press release in 8K on the topic, so I will refer you there. So the remainder of this call, we will be focused on the quarterly results and the guidance and outlook for 2024. So now to focus on the quarter, I'm very happy to be leaving on extremely positive news. We had a strong fourth quarter, which included same-center NOI of 3% for the quarter and 4.5% for the year. Occupancy is now up to 93.5%. That's a 90 basis point improvement over the end of 2022. We had a total shareholder return of 46% for 2023. That's a top 10 finish among all REITs. We posted positive releasing spreads of 17.2% for the year. We had quarterly EBITDA margin improvement of over 100 basis points versus the fourth quarter of last year. Our partnership sold the One West Side office building to UCLA for a pro rata share of $175 million to Mace Rich. We did over $890 million of financings that was closed or committed in the fourth quarter. More on that from Scott in a minute. We signed over 4 million square feet of leases during 2023. That's an all-time Mace Rich record, and that's on the heels of the prior record, which was set in 2022. Portfolio average sales per foot was 836, down slightly from last year, but nonetheless, a top quality sales productivity. Bankruptcies continued to be at a record low. We continue to expect gains in occupancy and net operating income as we progress through 2024 and into 2025. Also, keep in mind, as a result of the very strong leasing activity in 22 and 23, we have a very large and healthy leasing pipeline with nearly 2.2 million square feet of leases that have been signed but are not open yet. Once those tenants open, it is going to fuel or NOI growth in 24 and 25. And now I'd like to turn it over to Scott to discuss in more detail the financial results, earnings guidance, and the significant financing activity we had the past few months.