Weingarten Realty Investors Earnings Call Nuggets: Occupancy Gains and Acquired Assets

Weingarten Realty Investors (NYSE:WRI) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Occupancy Gains

Craig Schmidt – Bank of America Merrill Lynch: I wondered if you could give a little more color on the occupancy. It’s great that you still were able to raise it by year-end, but where will that occupancy gain come from, by what tenants?

Johnny Hendrix – EVP and COO: This is Johnny. Our projections is most of this occupancy gain is going to come out of shop leasing. We do have a few anchor spaces, but most of it come out of shop leasing. I think regionally we’re probably going to be depending on Atlanta, little more on Florida I think we can get some more occupancy out of, and a little bit of Raleigh. Phoenix has shown a lot of promise in the last couple of months too. We’re certainly not full in Texas and in California but we’re getting up towards that area of 95%, 96%that’s our room left there.

Craig Schmidt – Bank of America Merrill Lynch: Would you say that the leasing the environment now is stronger than 2002, similar or weaker?

Johnny Hendrix – EVP and COO: In 2002?

Craig Schmidt – Bank of America Merrill Lynch: I’m sorry, 2012?

Johnny Hendrix – EVP and COO: Okay 2012, it’s about the same Craig. I don’t think it’s any better. Most of what we’re looking at are our national tenants and most of the tenants we’re talking to are national tenants and most of those are public companies. I think they have a pretty balanced expansion program and they are under some amount of pressure just because there’s less space available in the market. But I don’t see a tremendous amount of pressure to expand certainly not like it was back in 2006.