SKT - Tanger Factory Outlet Centers Inc. (SKT) Presents at Citi's 2023 Global Property CEO Conference (Transcript)
2023-03-07 21:46:02 ET
Tanger Factory Outlet Centers, Inc. (SKT)
Citi's 2023 Global Property CEO Conference
March 7, 2023 5:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Michael Bilerman - EVP and CFO
Stephen Yalof - President and CEO
Doug McDonald - Head of FP&A
Conference Call Participants
Nick Joseph - Citigroup
Presentation
Michael Bilerman
Welcome to the 5 o'clock session at Citi's 28th Annual Global Property CEO Conference. I'm Michael Bilerman, and I'm sitting here with Steve Yalof. We're extraordinarily excited to be here. I'll turn the microphone over to Nick Joseph.
Nick Joseph
You nailed it, and Craig Mailman will be here as well. We forgot the session is for Citi clients only. If media or other individuals are on the line, please disconnect now. Disclosures are available on the webcast at the AV desk. For those in the room or the webcast, you can submit questions through Live QA. Steve, why don't I turn over to you? You can introduce the company, any members of management that are with you today, provide any opening remarks and then we will get into Q&A.
Stephen Yalof
I think Michael wanted to share a few notes on this year's conference before we jumped in. I'm Steve Yalof. I'm Chief Executive Officer and President of TangerOutlets. And I've been with the company for going on two and a half years. I've been in the outlet center since they started, outlets that are in business since they started back in the early 90s. So it’s been my journey both leasing outlet centers and representing retailers in the outlet center space. Sitting with us tonight are Doug McDonald, who's our head of FP&A, and the gentleman on my left who needs no introduction. And I'm going to hand the mic over to him and let him my take over and talk a little bit about Tanger, the founding of Tanger, and where we are today?
Michael Bilerman
Thank you, Steve. I'm extraordinarily excited to be here. It’s weird being on this side of the table versus that side. For those that don't know us, TangerOutlets is a pure play outlet REIT. We're about $2 billion of equity value, $3.3 billion of enterprise value. We are currently 5x debt-to-EBITDA. And of that debt to EBITDA, we are sitting on $273 million of cash. We operate 36 centers across the U.S. as well as two in Canada. Is there Canadians in the room? Afternoon. Okay. We are also celebrating 30 years as a public company this year. Company was founded 42 years ago. And so there is a tremendous amount of heritage and foundation that exists at this company.
And when Steve and I met, I guess it was July of last year, as I thought about my path, I couldn't be more excited to join a company that has such an engaged team overall and such a great growth opportunity ahead of us in a channel that means so much to the retailers and brands that occupy our centers and the consumers that shop every day in our centers. And that uniqueness of the channel is so important overall to both the retailers and the brands, as well as the consumers that shop our centers. And we can go through a number of that, but that's a little bit about who we are, and I'll turn it back over to Nick and Craig to go through the Q&A.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Nick Joseph
Awesome. Thank you. We are doing our opening question. What are the top 3 reasons an investor should buy your stock today?
Michael Bilerman
Only three?
Nick Joseph
Only three. Because you only have 35 minute session, right?
Michael Bilerman
Look, the key one, our strong organic growth with multiple levers to pull to get there. The second is, and I mentioned in the opening comments, but our under leveraged balance sheet with significant cash, which provides us the opportunity not only to be defensive in an uncertain environment, but provides us significant capacity to go on offense. And the third is our team, the Tanger team, and all 600 employees, whether they are full time or part time that's driving this growth, the Tanger brand name and the Tanger operating platform overall, as the three reasons. I snuck three into the three, but that’s okay.
Stephen Yalof
That works.
Nick Joseph
So what are the challenges that has faced Tanger’s sort of the perception gap between how investors may view the company and the outlet asset class versus data attendants. Could you just discuss this divide and maybe some of the ways you think it can be bridged overtime?
Stephen Yalof
I got this. Okay. Thank you for the question. Well, first of all, I think that, if you take a look at Tanger and you take a look at the history of Tanger, they really developed the concept of the outlet. I mean, StanleyTanger four years ago was selling men's sportswear out of the back of his manufacturing facility and finding out there were more customers waiting out back than were waiting out front, and the outlet channel was birthed. Since that time, the trick has been to lease the space to manufacturers, direct to the consumer, so that the manufacturers can ask some of those savings that came from no middleman back to the consumer. And I think a lot of that same challenges with us today, as it relates to what the outlet center makeup looks like. There is a lot of brands that were in the outlets 40 years ago that are still there today, and then we have cycled through a number of brands. And so they are -- the makeup of the shopping centers, the mix of old and new.
For us, as I look at the last, I would say, three years since COVID actually pushed a big reset button on our business is, we have to look at our business slightly differently. I think that you have to look at it from a customer perspective. And then also you have to look at it from the perspective of how do we as asset managers go out and actually monetize a lot of the opportunity in the centers that maybe wasn't as important or things that we -- that hadn't been looked at in the past.
So the levers that Michael was talking about when we talk about organic growth, the first lever is, this team that we have assembled in the last 2.5 years truly believes in the real estate, in our assets and we are at 8.5% OCR, which is our occupancy cost ratio, we think we are the lowest in retail. Forget about being the lowest in bricks-and-mortar. I mean, we are the -- we are as cheap as you can get for a real estate -- for a retail company to come and start a business. But for us, we think there is great opportunity for us to push our rents. So the first big growth driver for us is how do we push our rents? And if you have been listening to our earnings calls or reading along with our growth over that period of time, we have had seven consecutive quarters of rent spread growth. And most notably, our most recent quarter, we have grown our spreads on a blended basis by 10%. That's 30% in re-tenanting and about 8.5% in renewals. And I think renewals is really important, because basically what that is, is existing tenants voting to stay in your shopping center and voting to pay more to be there.
So when you have got some of these tenants, whether it's Nike or Coach or Kate Spade or Ralph Lauren, and their leases are coming up without option, we have the opportunity to go back and reprice our real estate. And we have been doing it quite successfully.
Another important lever that we are pulling is, we are monetizing our external land. I mean that's something that we really hadn't done as a core driver of growth in our business before. So where a shopping center sits on 30 acres that covers the outlet center itself and the parking that extra 20 or 30 acres that we bought when we originally built this, has a lot of external peripheral opportunity. And we put a team together in the last year and a half just to go after that peripheral opportunity.
And then the third leg of growth from a revenue driving point of view is, we get over a 100 million people a year come through Tanger centers, and that's a lot of eyeballs. And we have figured out real constructive ways to go ahead and monetize those eyeballs. Whether we are doing that with digital advertising on-site that advertises not only the retailers that are in the portfolio but also some of -- some external brands, national brands, international brands, Unilever, Heineken, Tesla, who want to monetize the eyeballs on an outlet center and pay us a lot of money to do so. And what's interesting is our scale. So if you do a deal with Tesla, you don't put them in one shopping center for a weekend, you put them in all 40 for the weekend. So there is a lot of opportunity, a lot of upside and that's a big business. We put that in the other revenues line and that's a big growth driver for us.
And then lastly, we know how to operate centers. We put an operating team together. And I would say that the prior Tanger regime was a little bit more centralized. One of the first things that we did when we took over this portfolio is, we completely decentralized our operating team. So I put our general managers, we made them as the CEO of their shopping centers. And we said if there is a square foot of vacancy, you go out and find a tenant to take that vacancy until we put a permanent tenant in that space. So a lot of people have questioned our temp occupancy and say, well, your numbers gone from 6% to 9% or 10%. Well, that's because I now have 36 new leasing people out in the field leasing space, when I've got Under Armour. It can't take delivery possession until '24. We want to make sure I don't have just a coming soon Under Armourside on that space. I've got a vibrant tenant cash flow and paying us rent, lights on. I often say that, the shoppers that come and shop in our centers, they don't know the difference between a short-term tenant and a permanent tenant. But everybody knows the difference between a closed store and an open store. And for us, we want to make sure all of our stores are open, their cash flowing and lights are on.
And then the last piece of that is the ability for those general managers, those CEOs of each of our centers to actually go in and manage the P&L and manage the expense structure. So when we are centralized and we are treating all 36 shopping centers the same, I've got general managers that understand snow in the North, and others that understand the important shade structures in the South. And it's important to have those general managers operate in the centers, they know how to pull expense levers when they need to pull expense levers and we are operating each one of our centers far more efficiently than we had in the past. So expense savings is a growth driver for us as well.
Nick Joseph
That's really helpful. And you hit on a bunch of topics. I want to unpack a few of them. One of the first ones, you mentioned your OCR sub 9%,one of the lowest in the overall retail space. And we had Justin on our property tour on Sunday, which much appreciated you guys participate in that. And he was just going through the opportunity. And maybe to put Michael on the hot seat a little bit here.
Michael Bilerman
I'd love that.
Nick Joseph
Not that he ever did that to anybody. But just to try to put some flesh around, if you were to bring that 9% up to more of where you think the OCR should be for your tenant base for the assets, what kind of earnings growth that may have over time?
Michael Bilerman
A lot. I mean, you can do the math, right? I mean at 8.5%, every 50 basis points is a dramatic amount of rent and it's going to take time for us to get there based on our roll. So where we sit today, we have 17% of our rents rolling this year and another 22% next year. We got 40% roll. And at the same time, we have that shorter term temporary space, which we can see multiples of growth on because our OCR is just in that permanent occupancy. And we feel that over the next few years we'll be able to move that 8.6% higher. Some new deals we're doing are in the double digit spread range and you can do the math in terms of our gross sales. Take our sales per foot times 12.5 million square feet, north of $5 billion of sales, take a 100 basis points of that sales number, start divide by 110 million shares. There's a fair amount of upside over time in our portfolio.
Nick Joseph
And we got a follow-up to that where -- and Justin again touched on this on the bus, but for people that weren't on the tour. The questions outlet retailers typically pay low minimum rent per square foot. Explain how you're able to get these tenants to pay substantially higher fixed minimum rents and kind of sweeping that, that overage rent into that fixed minimum to improve your spreads over time?
Stephen Yalof
You know, I'll go back to the renewal activity that we've seen and I think it's important to call that out. Like I said a few minutes earlier, when a tenant renews in your shopping center, they're voting to stay in a store that's pretty productive for them. Having spent a lot of time in my career on the retailer side of the transaction, I know firsthand retailers are not going to close stores that are cash flowing positively. Not only that, but where they have a built store that's fully amortized, if you take a simple example of a store that costs $2 million to build and has $500,000 worth of positive cash flow, you can't replace that cash flow without spending that money and building a brand new store.
So just that thought process alone gives us a little bit of leverage when we go into a negotiation because we know that the retailer is not necessarily going to close that store. They can pull a head fake. And a lot of retailers do, a lot of retailers threaten to close if they don't get the economic deal that they're looking for. So when we've got pricing power, which is we believe that we do now, and I've got a team of people that are doing our leasing that truly believe that in our real estate and know that we can push more rent through that portfolio of ours, we'll call the bluff and in many instances we find ourselves in a really dominant location where we can actually recast those deals.
What Justin was sharing with you was during the COVID period of time where we were favoring occupancy over rent and we were making sure that we kept retailers alive, lights on, because once a retailer closes the store, there's a very strong possibility you're not going to get them to reopen that store again. We made a couple of strategic decisions to trade base rent for a larger piece of overage rent. And as we all saw in ‘20 and ‘21 outlet and open air retail rebounded probably faster than any other retail category did with the exception of online, obviously. But for us, we saw sales in excess of the prior year sales, which with higher percentage rent breakpoints, yielded us far more rent than we had anticipated getting. And a lot of instances, a lot of the retailers who thought that they were being smart and de-risking their business by say, taking a lower base but paying up a higher percentage, ultimately paid close to the same, and in some instances, more rent than they had been paying in the prior year.
So as we took those short-term leases and we started to recast them, what we did was we took a lot of that variable or percentage rent, put it in the base rate -- base rent line, and therefore de-risked a lot of that variable going forward. So that's sort of how we've been able to build these new structures.
Now, historically, percentage clauses in outlet leasing carried in the 4%, 5%, 6% range, but through COVID where we started to charge 8%, 9%, and 10%, we made a strategic decision as a company that we're not going to go backwards. So now not only are we getting those market base rents, but we're also getting much higher piece of the profit share, 8%, 9%, and 10%. And that's all -- put that all together, that's helped driving these NOI growth that we've been showing you over the last couple of quarters.
Michael Bilerman
And to go back to your comments on the temp space being 5% to 10% and you guys getting questions from investors, but then you framing it as, well, if we're not going to have a commencement for a year or so, I don't want this space dark. I guess if we think about that 5% to 10% temp space, how much of that is actually space that's least in the future with future commencement dates, that's sort of temporary temp space versus just vacancy that you haven't gotten to yet, that's a pilot store or something that is sort of a test case.
Yes. Look, it's probably a pretty low percentage or a lower percentage, and I was using that as an -- just as an example. But I will say without measure that every one of our 10th deals has a 30 day right landlord check. So basically, we control the real estate and that's the most important part of a 10th deal. So if I'm going to put lights on for a retailer in there, get them open while I'm waiting for a permanent lease, somebody who will expand next door, or a new tenant that I'm working on that's just not open yet, at least I know that there'll be very little friction in getting that retailer out, won't cost me anything to move them. And frankly, temp store doesn't cost me anything to put them in there and certainly won't cost me anything to move on.
What's interesting about the temp -- percentage rate of temp space that we have in one of our shopping centers, if I have a center that's less than a 100% occupied, I obviously, have some space in that center to lease. So if I -- using that example that I gave you before, if I put Under Armour in that 2,500 square foot temp space that I'm holding, I give that temp retailer. When I sent him his 30 day cancellation notice up against the Under Armour delivery possession date, I give them the opportunity to take a temp space someplace else in the shopping center. And if they move, theoretically my temp percentage stays the same, but my permanent occupancy is growing and that really all contributes to that 170 basis points of occupancy that we've seen in our growth in our -- in that last quarter. But more importantly, at a 97% occupancy, we've got half of our portfolio is 99% to a 100% occupied right now, and that's coming off of COVID, where we lost 1 million square feet in a $12.5 million square foot portfolio.
And as you think about that, and again, not to dwell on the temp space, but some of it ultimately comes incubator, right, where some of these flyers or whatever you guys call them in terms of...
Stephen Yalof
That's Pop-ups.
Nick Joseph
Try before you buy. Try before you buy. How -- what's the hit rate on that turning into a tenant at that center or a tenant in multiple centers. And to give a return on that short-term investment, for investors to understand that this is just part of the business of fostering new relationship to try and get it on the ground…?
Michael Bilerman
We have a pretty good success rate. I mean, let's go back a couple of years. Tory Burch started out as a pop up. And now we have them in 12 centers. UGG was a pop up. We have them in 15 centers. So a lot of these national brands that everybody knows, you know, they are going to come in, they are going to try outlet before they -- first of all, what's interesting about outlet is we talked earlier about whether it's made for outlet or excess inventory that they are cycling through the outlet channel. A lot of retail, you can't just go into the outlet business and start manufacturing. You have to start with that excess inventory because that's pretty much, what fuels a lot of these pop-up stores. I've got 100,000 units of excess inventory, not sure how long that's going to last, not sure how many units I'm going to have in '24 and '25. So I'm not willing to commit long-term right now. But I'd like to give this thing a go, so let me pop-up until either I run out excess inventory or let's just see what '24 and '25 yields as far as excess is concerned.
And we are finding a lot of instances it turns out to be very profitable channel for a lot of the retailers because they are clearing a lot of access, they're turning it into cash, and they are converting a customer who may shop aspirationally may not -- may see price resistance in a Ralph Lauren store, Madison Avenue he might not want to walk in thinking it's more of a museum. I can't touch anything when they walk into these stores. But in an outlet store, Ralph Lauren, it's aspirational. It's built for people, who love the brand and want to buy in and gives them their first opportunity to do so. It's great for us, because Ralph Lauren is a great draw to any outlet center. And it's also great for the shopper because that shopper gets to buy into a brand that they have aspired to buy into perhaps for many years, and it's great for the retailer because now Ralph Lauren has a brand new customer whose finally bought into their product and it's up to Ralph to figure out how to drive them and get them into their higher price products.
Nick Joseph
And one of the questions I've heard from people, you guys have a pure play outlet. Simon has the premium outlet. I think Chelsea, which Simon bought always said that reputation being more of clearing outlet relative to maybe the view of Tanger in the public market. I mean, could you educate us on the kind of mix of made for outlet in your in your asset base versus that clearing channel? And kind of, give us a sense of myth bust, I guess, to some extent…
Stephen Yalof
Myth busters
Nick Joseph
…that view of your portfolio made for outlet.
Stephen Yalof
Look, I think most outlet retailers really started as clearance channel, a 100%. Whether your Coach, Michael Kors, Kate Spade, it was a clearance channel. There was a customer there. It said a 100 million customers a year are shopping through our shopping, and there is a lot of people thereto buy a lot of that excess inventory. Now what's happened as they begin to evolve, particularly some of the apparel retailers or footwear retailers, if they decide to manufacture some of their goods -- and the goods that they manufacture can come in a lot of different forms, they could make products excess runs, so things that might have been an department store, they just do an access run and a lot of those goods wind up in an outlet channel. They can do that product line called the cut up. And what that means is, if a manufacturer has excess piece goods that they use, they have wool and they have this top seller that they were cutting in cashmere, they take that top cut, that cashmere selling silhouette. They cut it in the wool excess piece goods. They call that cut-ups, and they sell those in the outlet because it's a great style. They know it's sold out, but now they can get rid of some of their excess piece good inventory by selling cut-up goods.
And then, the last piece of it is that a lot of these brands, they wanted size runs. If you go into some of the more high-end luxury outlet stores, you might find in the shoe category size 2 and size 14, and nothing in between because none of the 2 -- none of the size ranges come back to the outlet because they typically sell through. So, a lot of the retailers had to manufacture product in the size ranges so that they don't frustrate and walk customers. So, what we're seeing is a real mixed bag, the more seasoned, the more professional or outlet retailers who've been in the game for far longer, definitely have figured out how to manufacture for the category. But there's some of the newer brands and we've just had a bunch of deals with direct to consumer brands, all Allbirds, Mack Weldon, Serena & Lily, just to name a few. They're in this business to clear excess inventory. They're not in this business because they're manufacturing for outlet right now.
Nick Joseph
So, a couple of questions coming in. First one, your properties are typically in remote locations, not near dense populations. Is it realistic to really add mixed use components to these assets?
Stephen Yalof
That's fake news. So, if you take a look at the outlet center of 30 years ago when I was just a boy leasing outlet centers, yes, they were further away. Why? Because they had all this wholesale channel conflict and Ralph Lauren didn't want to be within 50 miles of a Dillard’s or a Macy's or a Nordstrom's, where there would compete at wholesale price point. That narrative has changed considerably. In fact, I've got a shopping center currently under construction in Nashville, which will open up in September -- September 14th, and it's 12 miles from downtown. So that paradigm has broken, a lot of our shopping centers are far closer or closer in than they'd ever been before. We're also in a lot of destinations that are high American drive to tourist destinations, Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head, Daytona, Palm Beach, just up the street. I would argue that Palm Beach is not in a remote destination by any stretch of imagination, over 150,000 cars a day passing that center on 95.
Nick Joseph
And this goes to one of your other initiatives, right, to shrink down or take some of the existing retail to repurpose to F&B to increased dwell times and just enhance the center. I mean, could you talk about that initiative? What types of returns you think that could ultimately have in tangible and intangible, I guess, as well?
Stephen Yalof
Yes. Well, I think first of all, a lot of these outlet centers have food courts. I think the food court is sort of a thing of the past. I think sit down restaurants are far better experience for shoppers who want to spend a day and make an outing of a shopping center visit. We like to think of ourselves as an experience company, so that we want to make sure that we think customer first, think customer experience. And what does a customer want to see when they come and shop at one of our shopping centers? Not only do they want this great opportunity to buy great brands at value every day, and that's what we offer, that's our core business model. But in addition to that, they're looking for a far better food and beverage experience, looking for better amenities. They're looking for entertainment, ways to keep themselves occupied on center for longer. And they're looking for reasons to come far more frequently. And if we can deliver that compliment of things, whether it's better food and beverage, better entertainment, better experience, better amenities when you're there, and that amenities could be -- whether it's a fire pit in a colder climate shopping center, or our amenities could be TangerClub that is sort of a gamified program that we run where if you're a member of the TangerClub, in addition to the everyday value that you get in our stores, we can provide additional value to you. And the more that you sort of play in the club, the more you can unlock additional value. So, we think that there's lots of different ways that we can take the Tanger brand coast to coast, figure out how to unlock a lot of that TangerClub value and provide a much better experience to our shoppers as they come to our centers.
Nick Joseph
And from a capital commitment perspective, I mean doing that initiative versus maybe unlocking some value in the parking field, either through pad sites that you ground lease or develop themselves. I mean, what kind of -- what's the magnitude of a capital commitment we should think about here, and what would a targeted return be?
Stephen Tanger
Can I turn that one over to my Chief Investment Officer?
Michael Bilerman
So, as we think about -- I will take that. So look, we want to get the best return possible. We are going to target high single digit load, double digit returns on our capital. And you articulated something that we're focused on. It's activating a lot of our land surrounding our assets and being able to bring those uses in on an out parcel basis where we are either going to develop a box or ground-lease the box, and then fill in within the inline space. And those, we want to get appropriate rents relative to other issues. We don't want to take a -- we don't want to take a low rent just to have the use. We want to make sure that we're earning the appropriate return on that capital and on that space.
Nick Joseph
And Michael, maybe be sticking with you, we got a question coming in. Considering the discount to NAV, why aren't you using cash to buy back shares?
Michael Bilerman
So, question that I would've asked myself sitting on your side of the table. We agree, our shares are trading at an attractive valuation, whether we look at it on a multiple basis or a value, implied cap rate basis based on the Citi model. We're trading at almost a 10% implied cap rate. And we look at our capital in a couple of ways. We think about buyback, we would reduce our equity base and raise leverage. We think that capital today would provide us a better use in investing in our portfolio and looking at potential external growth initiatives. And that capital today is earning a yield, right? So, Doug's done an amazing job at getting great interest income on that cash. And so, it's not burning a hole in our pocket right now. And so, then we have to evaluate the best use. But, we don't think shrinking our equity base right now is the right thing for us to be doing.
Nick Joseph
Why do you think you trade at that discount?
Michael Bilerman
I mean, why do you think we trade at that discount?
Stephen Yalof
You answered a question with a question.
Doug McDonald
We’re back. You want to do the rapid fire. You're surprised.
Stephen Yalof
We -- our shares have performed really well. We're not -- we're very cognizant of that, and we're cognizant of our valuation. We think that we are unique in the retail space. We don't really have a comp per se. And I think, it's going to be our job to work with the investment community and demonstrate why we believe our cash flows deserve a higher multiple. But even if we don't get the higher multiple, we think we can provide an extraordinarily attractive total return. We came out with our guidance this year -- that bell's a lot better on this side. So, we came out with a pretty attractive growth profile. And combined with our yield today, which is north of 4.5% with a below average payout ratio, right? So, we are offering a higher than average dividend yield with a below average payout ratio, which is providing us a lot of free cash flow to invest and to bolster our resources. We think that's an attractive total return for shareholders.
Nick Joseph
We have been trying to pro people on ESG initiatives for 2023. Just curious, maybe what the number one focus is for Tanger in this year?
Michael Bilerman
So we have our ESG report that’s out there. One of the key initiatives we have for this year is to continue our commitment to help build out our EV charging network for our consumers that come to our centers. When Mr. Yalof comes in his Rivian, he is able to plug it in, when it works. We’ve actually changed out all of our vehicles at our centers to electric vehicles, which we think is also an important initiative. So, we are trying to do our part in our operations in being ESG friendly.
Nick Joseph
So, before I go to the rapid fires, I think one of the questions that came in, how has Bilerman complained about the conference, i.e. music, food, lack of photos of him. That's verbatim, by the way.
Michael Bilerman
I don't know.
Nick Joseph
I think that's for Steve.
Nick Joseph
Moving on to the rapid fire. Well, before I do that, does anyone have a question from the audience? I don't want to...
Michael Bilerman
Anything. Literally. Anything you can ask me. You've all been waiting for this.
Nick Joseph
Alright. So, what will same-store NOI growth be for, I guess, retail overall, not necessarily Tanger in 2024?
Michael Bilerman
5%.
Nick Joseph
Best real estate decision today for Tanger, buy sell, build, redevelop or hold?
Michael Bilerman
All the above. But I'll give you a -- I will say buy for the spreadsheet. But as a company, we constantly look at every decision every day. And we are going to adjust to the marketplace. We feel today with our balance sheet where it is, and the opportunities that could come unfold, we think that's an attractive market for us to expand our portfolio.
Stephen Yalof
Try to keep it to one more to answer.
Nick Joseph
And then, will the retail sector have fewer, more or the same amount of public companies this time next year?
Michael Bilerman
Fewer. We got 1 minute 36. Come on. Let's go. Rapid -- more rapid fire.
Nick Joseph
Is the Citi office much more quiet without Michael? Again, verbatim.
Michael Bilerman
Is the Tanger office louder?
Stephen Yalof
Yes.
Nick Joseph
Well, thank you guys so much. And Michael, congratulations. I know you missed being on this side of the table. Anything that you would have asked that we didn't?
Michael Bilerman
I mean, on a personal basis, it's wonderful to have had the team and the career at Citi. And for my own self, I was the son of a leather manufacturer growing up. I started as a retail analyst. And I feel a little bit coming home in many ways, coming to a family founded business, and joining a new management team that we’re all really hungry to deliver value for all of our stakeholders. And so, I miss being on that side, but I'm extraordinarily excited to have joined Tanger when I did and hopefully deliver value for our current and hopefully our future shareholders, where we think we have a great opportunity to deliver really strong growth from a channel that's really valued and is open air shopping centers. We trade at the lowest multiple, so hopefully that provides some potential upside. And if anyone needs savings books, Ashley is sitting on the right, because we want all of you to experience. We're extraordinarily excited. Thank you for taking us out to Fort Worth in May, May 17th.
Nick Joseph
May 16th through 18th.
Michael Bilerman
All right.
Nick Joseph
Thank you, guys.
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Tanger Factory Outlet Centers, Inc. (SKT) Presents at Citi's 2023 Global Property CEO Conference (Transcript)