Good morning. I'm Jorge Gonzalez, President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of The St. Joe Company. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our 2025 Annual Shareholder Meeting. In accordance with the notice of meeting, I officially call the meeting to order at this time. We will conduct this meeting in accordance with the agenda you were given when you registered this morning. If you have not registered, please do so at this time at the table just outside of the door. On the reverse side of the agenda is a list of rules of conduct for this meeting. To ensure an orderly meeting, we require all participants to abide by these rules. After the formal business portion of the meeting has adjourned, we will have a presentation, and then we will provide an opportunity for questions and answers. Only validated shareholders may ask questions in the Q&A session.
Out of consideration for others, please limit yourself to not more than two questions. We'll answer as many questions as the morning time allows. Now, I would like to introduce the other members of the board who are present in person. So they're all in the front row, the front seats, starting with Howard Frank, Cesar Alvarez, Rhea Goff, and Mr. Tom Murphy. Also with us today is a representative of Grant Thornton, the company's independent registered public accounting firm, who will be available to answer any appropriate questions during the Q&A portion of the meeting. Thank you. The company's Chief Legal Officer, Lisa Walters, will act as the Secretary of the meeting. Lisa, here you are. We're being assisted today in the tabulation of proxies and ballots by James Hagan, Agent for Broadridge Financial Solutions. At this time, I appoint James Hagan as Inspector of Elections.
The notice of the meeting has been mailed to each shareholder of record as of March 19th, 2025. The Inspector of Elections has informed me that 52,433,364 shares of the company's voting stock are present in person or by proxy, constituting a quorum for today's meeting. A list of shareholders on March 19th, 2025, the record date, is available and may be inspected during the meeting by any shareholder who is signed in. The final report of the Inspector of Elections will include the votes, if any, of shareholders present and voting during the meeting. The company's mailing agent, Broadridge Financial Solutions, has provided an affidavit of mailing to show the notice of the meeting was given on or about April 1st, 2025. A copy of both the notice and the affidavit will be incorporated into the minutes of the meeting.
Next, I will describe each proposal to be acted upon today, and then we'll take the vote. Since no director nominations or proposals for business were properly filed by a shareholder in advance of the meeting, the business of this meeting is limited to the following four proposals. The first proposal before the shareholders is the election of five directors to serve for a one-year term until the next annual meeting. I'm standing for reelection as director today along with the following nominees: Cesar Alvarez, Howard Frank, Rhea Goff, and Tom Murphy. All of these nominees are in attendance today. We recommend the election of these nominees. The second proposal is the ratification of the appointment of Grant Thornton as our independent registered public accounting firm for the 2025 fiscal year.
The audit committee retained the services of Grant Thornton to audit the company's financial statements for 2025, and the board recommends that the shareholders ratify the appointment of Grant Thornton. The third proposal is a proposal to approve, on a non-binding advisory basis, the compensation paid to our named executive officers as described in the compensation discussion and analysis section, the compensation tables, and related narrative disclosure set forth in the company's 2025 proxy statement. We recommend the approval of the compensation of our named executive officers. The fourth and final proposal is a proposal to approve The St. Joe Company 2025 Performance and Equity Incentive Plan as set forth in the company's 2025 proxy statement. We recommend approval of the 2025 Performance and Equity Incentive Plan. We will now vote on the proposals. Those shareholders voting in person should now mark their ballots.
If you have previously voted by proxy, you do not need to vote again today unless you want to change your vote. If you would like a ballot, please raise your hand, and one will be provided to you. We have three, four, five. Anybody else want to print a ballot? Okay. The Inspector of Elections will now collect any outstanding ballots. If you have brought your proxy or wish to vote by ballot, please provide your ballot or proxy to the Inspector of Elections at this time. Okay. Since everyone wanting to vote by ballot has done so, the polls are now closed. Will the Inspector of Elections please report the results of the balloting when you are ready?
Mr. Chairman, the initial tally is subject to verification, and the final tabulation may reflect small changes in the vote I have announced. The final tabulation will be set forth in the formal report of the Inspector of Election to the Secretary of the Company, which will be made after the count has been verified. I certify that a majority of the votes cast has voted for the election of each of the nominees as Director of the Company. In addition, the votes cast favoring the ratification of the appointment of Grant Thornton has exceeded the votes cast against or opposed to the action. The proposal to approve the compensation of the named executive officers has received more votes for than votes against. The proposal to approve the 2025 Performance and Equity Incentive Plan has received more votes for than votes against. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Hagan. I hereby declare that the director nominees have been duly elected, that the appointment of Grant Thornton as the company's independent registered public accounting firm has been ratified, that shareholders approved the compensation of the named executive officers and the 2025 Performance and Equity Incentive Plan. Therefore, this concludes the official business of the 2025 Annual Meeting. The Annual Meeting is adjourned and we will now continue the informational part of our meeting today. Thank you. This is the part I enjoy because I do not like scripts. We will go through a presentation like we do every year, just to provide an update on operations of the company, a little bit about the past, the present, and the future. Like we always do, before we start the informal part of the meeting, I want to play a brief video clip.
Nestled along a uniquely pristine stretch of coastline in Northwest Florida is a growing development that goes far beyond the usual concept of community. One where human activity, wildlife, and Mother Nature come together in perfect balance. Welcome to Watersound, a diverse mix of neighborhoods, businesses, and recreation interconnected by roads, bridges, and trails that weave throughout more than 100,000 acres of real Florida. A vast, uninterrupted stretch of pine and oak trees meandering throughout a bountiful watershed of spring-fed creeks, tributaries, and pristine bays flowing south to the white sand beaches and turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The four-season appeal and timeless character of Florida's Panhandle is one that commands reverence, and Watersound is bringing together the best of what makes this region so special.
Offering a new level of approachable luxury, Watersound's expanding footprint brings together hotels, golf courses, town centers, and outdoor spaces that go far beyond the beach. It is the product of a carefully measured vision not to overtake an environment, but to merge with it. A vision that has given rise to neighborhoods and places to play that will serve as personal recharging stations for people at all stages of their lives. Here, people engage in a peaceful kind of cohabitation with the natural world, a coastal paradise where residents and visitors are united by a connection to place. A place that embraces conservation without sacrificing amenities. A place with a long-term plan for infrastructure, healthcare, and commerce, along with educational and cultural assets that will grow with the population. A place where making connections comes effortlessly and community comes first.
The best part is, with long-term work underway, things are just getting started. Welcome to Watersound, and welcome home.
We have been showing these video clips every year for quite some time as a transition between the formal part of the meeting and the informal notice. Every year, there is less and less vacant land that we show, right? There has been a pretty significant increase in the facilities, the properties that we have developed over the last few years, and there are more people that are being shown in these facilities because really we are in the experience business above everything else. We try to provide experiences for hotel guests, for club members, for residents. That trend is going to continue. I think as we show future videos in subsequent years, we are going to see more facilities and more people in these facilities. Let us go ahead and get started. I always start the presentation with this slide, and this is the slide that goes through our business strategy.
We've been very consistent in our business strategy. We've been very consistent in executing it. We've been very transparent in telling the shareholders, our shareholders and prospective shareholders, what our strategy is, what we're doing, and how we're doing it. In fact, if you go back to annual meetings from as far back as 2016, 2017, 2018, you'll see very similar slides articulating our business strategy, with obviously the first one expanding our portfolio of recurring income, producing commercial and hospitality properties, developing residential communities with long-term scalable and repeatable revenue. Even though residential homesites are not a traditional recurring revenue stream, we believe because of the scale and the runway that we have in our residential communities, they almost behave like recurring income streams.
The third one is a multifaceted capital allocation strategy between capital expenditures for growth, debt reduction, and stock repurchases, and of course, a steady and growing dividend program. Again, very consistent, very transparent on our strategy and what our strategy is and how we're going about it. A reminder on how the company is positioned at a high level: 87% of the 167,000 acres are in Bay, Walton, and Gulf counties. We have entitlements or, as our right, approvals to build over 170,000 residential units, over 22 million sq ft of non-residential. Currently, the majority of revenue is derived from less than 2% of land holdings. Slide three. This is just wanting to give some context. You have often read in my shareholder letters and in our earnings releases the importance of migration to our business. Migration is the key.
As long as there's migration in our region, the company's positioned pretty well to execute on that migration. This is just some snapshot perspective. From 2020 to 2024, the country grew at 2.6%. The South, which was by far the fastest growing region, grew at 5.1%. In fact, the next fastest was the West, which was 1.8%. Pretty significant difference. Florida grew at 8.5%, much faster than the South, which was the fastest growing region. The last three bars that you see on the slide are the three counties where we own 87% of our land. Gulf County grew at 11.8%. Bay County grew at 14%. Walton County incredibly grew at 19%. Florida is, in this time period, the second fastest growing state in the country at 8.5%. The three counties where we owned 87% of our property are significantly higher than Florida.
In fact, Walton County was the fourth fastest growing county in the state. The state of Florida has 67 counties, and Walton was the fourth fastest growing. Bay and Gulf were both in the top 20, 14 and 18. That's a good place to be if you're in the business of this company. Another data point of the growth is the airport. The last full year at the old location, the airport had a total passenger traffic of a little bit over 312,000 total passengers for the year. That was in 2009. There was one airline that serviced the airport, Delta, and there was one nonstop flight to Atlanta. Fast forward to last year at, of course, a new location, the total passenger traffic was 1.8 million. That's about a 500% increase in the passenger traffic.
are five airlines that service the airport as opposed to one, and there are 15 nonstop flight destinations. Pretty significant increase in the growth of the airport. The reason why I wanted to show this slide is that's another indicator, another data point to triangulate on the growth of the region. If the region was not growing, the airport would not have these types of pretty significant growth numbers. The next series of slides are the slides that we show every year, our financial slides, and we show them in the exact same format with the same data. We do this just to continue to show the trajectory of the company. We get pretty good feedback from shareholders, especially prospective shareholders who are looking at potentially taking a position in the company or new ones.
They like seeing these slides in the annual meeting presentations because they can go to one place and kind of get a good snapshot where the company has been. We're going to continue showing these slides in future annual meeting presentations. This is our balance sheet. It has grown from 2016 to 2024, where we have a balance sheet now of a little bit over $1 billion. The compound annual growth rate has been 17%. This is the next slide. Slide six is consolidated and unconsolidated revenue. It has grown from about $97 million to $780 million with a compound annual growth rate of 30%. EBITDA, which is a non-GAAP measure, as everyone knows, EBITDA has grown from $26 million to $166 million, 26% compound annual growth rate. Net income. Net income has all the GAAP accounting measures associated with it.
That's one of the reasons why you tend to see a little bit less linear growth over the years. It has grown from about $16 million to $74 million. Depreciation is something we often mention. Shareholders understand the role in depreciation when they look at our financials, particularly as it relates to the cash generation ability of the company. Our depreciation has grown significantly over the years. In 2024, that number was $46.4 million, which was a 20% increase from the year before. Net income over this time period has grown by 20% to 21% compound annual growth rate. Earnings per share, they kind of track net income, generally speaking, in terms of the trajectory. It's grown from $0.21 to $1.27.
Again, in 2024, just like net income, depreciation accounted for $0.80 per share, which is, again, a non-cash item, and it's a pretty significant number for a company of our scale. The compound annual growth rate is 25%. You might ask yourself, why is that a little bit different than net income? If they kind of track, that's because of the share buybacks, right? That's why that percentage is different in earnings per share versus net income. This is a new slide I wanted to show since we talk about depreciation. Again, it's really a way for just to make sure shareholders understand what role that plays in these financials, and particularly as it relates to cash generation capability of the company. This has been the growth in depreciation over the years. So in 2016, we were at $8 million in depreciation.
Again, non-cash item, net income is reduced by depreciation. You can see that for many years, we were in the single digits. Then we were in the teens, and the last three years, depreciation has been pretty exponential, the trajectory. That is for one reason. We have built a lot of properties, a lot of hotels, a lot of leasing commercial space, and obviously, those are all assets that we depreciate. That is why we have had that increase in depreciation, which has been pretty significant, especially the last three years. I wanted to show the last three years. All those slides we show every year just to show the overall trajectory of the company. This is a snapshot of the last three years, and really, with just net income and EBITDA from 2022 to 2024, you can see them side by side.
You can see the growth from 2022 to 2023 was about a 26% increase, and then from 2023 to 2024 was about a 4% increase. The main reason for the somewhat flat year of 2024 has to do with the residential segment. We have talked about this in our earnings releases. From 2023 to 2024, hospitality and the leasing segment grew. If you recall looking at the numbers, residential was flat, and that is primarily because of what I talk about often, the timing of the seeding and harvesting cycles, which there is a slide I am going to get into a little bit more detail to describe the seeding and harvesting cycle because to develop any residential phase of a subdivision, it is a one to two-year process from beginning to end, and that never fits in a tidy 12-month period.
Depending on when the seeding and harvesting cycles begin and end, you're going to see some skewed numbers. If you just look at the numbers quarter to quarter or in every 12-month cycles, you really have to look at it more in 24-month cycles. Free cash flow. I wanted to go through this. We've shown this slide before, but I want to go through some detail so there's an understanding of what we mean by free cash flow and what components are part of it. Obviously, the top number, this is for 2024, and this is slide 12 for those following on the webcast. Net income was $74 million. Depreciation, which is a non-cash item, gets added to the $74 million. Sustaining capital is subtracted, $7.6 million, which gives us a total of $112,967,000 for 2024. A couple of points on this slide.
R&M, repairs and maintenance, that runs through our income statement. So when you see the net income number, R&M has already been accounted for. It's already been subtracted. So an example of R&M is when an air conditioner, an HVAC unit, is broken in one of our hotels and we have to replace it, as an example. That's R&M. So that already runs through our income statement. We already expense it. So when you see net income, that's already accounted for. Sustaining capital is capital expenditure, and I affectionately refer to sustaining capital as loser CapEx. Everybody in the office knows that. What I mean by that is most of our capital expenditures are winner CapEx. For me, it's about growth. It's about growing the company, building a new hotel, building a new commercial center. Loser CapEx or sustaining capital is CapEx necessary to renovate one of our properties.
A good example of what sustaining capital is when we remodeled the rooms in WaterColor Inn a couple of years ago. We refreshed the rooms, and you have to do that with operating properties on a regular basis or they become stale. That run rate of sustaining capital, about $7 million, that's been pretty in the range of what we've had over the years, $5, $6, $7 million. I wanted to make sure everybody understood when we talk about free cash flow, when we talk about depreciation, when we talk about R&M, repairs and maintenance, and we talk about sustaining capital, loser CapEx, how it all fits in. Because one of the questions I get asked often by shareholders is, well, if depreciation is non-cash, so where are the line items that relate to maintaining your properties? These are it at a high level.
Again, R&M runs through the income statement and sustaining capital, loser CapEx. We break out in this slide. Project-level debt. I think all shareholders know this in this room. Financing we do is project-level financing. Every project stands on its own cash flows. The cash flows that each project generates pays the debt that's associated with that project. We do not have any corporate-wide debt. As of March 31st, 2025, our project debt is 28% of the company's total assets, an average weighted effective interest rate of 4.8%. 73.8% of outstanding debt has a fixed or swapped interest rate, and the average remaining life in years is 18.8. Nobody likes debt. I do not like debt myself, but we feel pretty good compared to other companies, I think, where we are in the snapshot that we have as it relates to project debt level only.
As I mentioned before, in terms of our multifaceted capital allocation strategy, something that we do pretty consistently is we identify priorities for us to reduce debt, and we pay some of that debt back on projects. We have different factors that we consider on which project and which debt we focus at any one time. We are doing that pretty thoughtfully, pretty deliberately over the year because every dollar we save in interest rates. You guys have seen interest expenses have grown with all the project debt we have. We have been doing that pretty steadily over the last couple of years. Slide 14, capital allocation. From January 1st, 2015 to March 31st, 2025, if we were to break down our capital allocation by those three major components, CapEx for growth or sustaining capital, stock repurchases, and dividends, this is how it breaks out.
About 65% for growth, $1.3 billion, 30% for stock repurchase, or a little bit over $600 million, $619 million, and then $110 million or 5% for dividends. Capital allocation is something we talk about all the time. It's not a once-a-year thing or once-a-quarter thing. We make these decisions based on ground-level real-time data and judgment that we're making about the market, about our share price, and of course, about distributing dividends to our shareholders. We have bought shares every year since 2015, except 2021 and 2023. Those are the only two years that we haven't had shares repurchased. In 2024, as you've seen from financials, we bought some shares in December. At the end of the year, we bought some shares first quarter of this year, and that's something that's top of mind and we're actively engaged in.
We understand that's a really important component of the overall capital allocation strategy of the company. So one of my favorite slides. Let's talk about efficiency. Efficient overhead, which is a big part of our business strategy, to be quite candid with you. This is corporate and other operating expenses, or SG&A in my term, as a percentage of consolidated revenue. And when we started this journey in 2016, that was a pretty high number, 24%. By the way, the year before, which we don't show because we want to show 2016 consistently, was almost 40%, which is hard to imagine. And we've reduced that from 24% to 6%. The other component of efficiency, and this is slide 16, is how many acres we sell on a yearly basis to generate revenue.
As part of our strategy to grow recurring revenue, the implication there is that we're going to be more efficient in the use of our land, and particularly using our land very efficiently to invest in it and generate the most revenue we can, as opposed to just selling a lot of acres of land to generate revenue. From 2000- 2015, on the average, we sold over 51,000 acres per year. From 2016- 2024, the average has been a little bit over 1,100 acres per year. Residential homesite development. Of all the things that our company does, the one component that is the least institutional, and what I mean by that is the majority of lots that are developed in this country are done by private capital.
Residential homesite development is not well understood in this realm, and this is something I spent time with shareholders asking me a lot of questions about. I'm a pretty simple guy, so I thought I would show this slide in the simplest way possible using a cash register analogy. This is for homesite development, lot development in our residential segment. I think of it as we take $1 out of the cash register. One to two years later, we put $2 back in the cash register. This math is based on 50% margin in our residential homesite segment. Our margin is actually a little bit higher than that, but we wanted to be conservative, and we did not want to look like we were nickeling and diming. I think it is like $2.13.
Our margins from 2016- 2024 in our residential segment have been 53%, but we use 50% just for the cash register analogy. The one to two years, that's the engineering permitting development part. This is part of that seeding and harvesting cycle I often talk about. Taking the $1 out of the cash register, that's the seeding, and then putting $2 back is the harvesting. The one to two years, we literally mean it. It's not a predictable linear process. There are things that we control more. There are things that we control less. What we control the least is permitting. Just about everything we do, because of the scale that we do it at, we become friends with every federal, state, and local agency, from the Corps of Engineers to State Department of Environmental Protection. Everybody has their own permit process, their own timelines.
They look at things differently. We spend a lot of time and energy in those processes, but it's still something that it's hard to predict the exact time frames. That is one of the reasons why we have this one- to two-year range in our residential homesite development, which we've mentioned before in our earnings releases. That is one of the reasons why it's hard to tie residential CapEx with residential revenue because it doesn't fit in a quarter, and it doesn't even fit in a 12-month time frame. You'll see CapEx for residential in one calendar year, then you'll see the seeding, then you'll see the harvesting, the revenue from that residential segment the following year, but the dollars are not one to one, right?
Because we could be doing some seeding one calendar year where we close at the end of the year some lots, or maybe it is two years away. In an example, that was 2023, right? 2023, we had a pretty significant harvesting year in residential. In comparison, 2024 looked flat because 2023 was such an increase in residential. That is because it just so happened we did a lot of seeding in that year. In 2024, we did a lot of harvesting, and we are hopeful that we are going to be doing more seeding this year. I think you guys saw in the first quarter of this year we had some pretty good results. We anticipated this year to be more of a harvesting year than a seeding year. For illustration purposes, if you want to do some baseline math, it is arithmetic, right?
If you take 1,000 homesites per year using this cash register analogy, that's $64 million in CapEx, which would generate $128 million in revenue. That's at a 50% margin. You can toggle based on the number of homesites. You can toggle based on the margins if the margins go up or down. The margins in our residential segment are pretty broad by community. We have some communities where the margins are really high, and other communities, they're lower. They all add up, and they average to that 53% that we've had over the years. I wanted to break down the residential homesite pipeline a little bit further. We reference the pipeline often in our filings. I think everybody knows we have over 170,000 residential units or entitlements as a right to develop. We currently have 21,309 in production.
What we mean by in production, it means that we put four corners around a property, and we've developed a master plan, a site plan. The first phase of that assembly line is 15,151 units that we currently have in a concept planning phase. What that means is we've land planned the area. We've gotten a sense of yield. We've done preliminary surveys on wetlands, soil conditions, water table to get an idea of yield, but it's still very general, very high level. Again, we have 15,000 in that process right now. The next stage in the assembly line is engineering and permitting. This is where construction center drawings start getting developed by civil engineers. This is where we hire ecologists to do wetland delineations and wetland estimations with federal and state agencies. We have about 3,900 units in that phase of the assembly line.
As you start getting down the assembly line, that's what makes us happier. We have 2,200 units currently under development or platted. Obviously, the next step after that is closings with our builders or retail customers. The first two layers of the assembly line, the 15,000 units and the 3,900, the expenditures for those are what we call soft dollars. That's when we pay and hire civil engineers, designers to create those two steps. The hard dollars, the money in the ground, the construction of infrastructure, that's obviously the last step in the assembly line, the 2,200 units. The speed and calibration of the assembly line, obviously, that's a function of many different components, market conditions, where our builders are in their takedown schedule. We have 20 builders, nationals, super regionals, and locals. They all behave differently. They all look at risk differently.
They all view the world a little bit differently. We kind of manage all those 20 builders and the different ways that they behave. They each have a different agreement that we execute with them with different takedown schedules by quarter. We have to kind of collectively look at all those agreements, look at the builders, look at the market conditions. That is what informs us on kind of the dial of the assembly line. We do not want to be too far ahead, right? Because that is not good to have inventory that is too far ahead. At the same time, we do not want to be behind either. In residential development, realizing that it is one to two years, right? It is not 30 days or 40 days. You constantly have to be looking to see what is around the corner because it is like turning a cruise ship, right?
You can't turn it on a dime. It's not a sports car. Assessing the 20 builders, assessing all the agreements we have with them and market conditions, essentially what we use to calibrate the assembly line and dial up or dial down the speed of it. Latitude. Because it is an unconsolidated joint venture, it takes some effort to read through all the financials to really understand the cash flow of that joint venture. I'm not talking about the contribution for the raw land that's mentioned here, but this is initially I'm focusing this on just cash flow. What does the cash flow really look like? Let's put GAAP accounting to the side for a minute. Let's put the unconsolidated joint venture aspect to the side for a minute.
Each partner, us and Minto, initially contributed $11.7 million to the joint venture for a total of $23.4 million. By the way, neither partner has made any capital contribution since 2021. We have not put a dollar in it since 2021. As of March 31, 2025, the joint venture is 53% of the way through, right? We are only at 53%. Of the 3,500 homes that are earmarked for Latitude, there have been 1,855, 1,855 that have been completed. So 53% of the way through. The earnings for each partner is $67 million for a total of $134 million. I will tell you the way that this joint venture has performed from a cash flow perspective, it has greatly exceeded the original pro forma, the original business model. In fact, it is almost double what was expected. Two main reasons for that.
Obviously, we felt that there was a demand for that. We felt that we can make a compelling case to folks to retire in this great part of the country. The sales price, the average sales price has been higher than we anticipated. Obviously, that has contributed to these numbers. The pace has been quicker than we anticipated. For St. Joe, in addition to the $67 million in earnings, we've also been paid for the contribution of raw land on a unit basis through 53% of the number of homes. That dollar amount for the contribution of raw land is $18 million. That is $85 million, roughly, that St. Joe has benefited from a cash flow and land contribution perspective.
Two components of the joint venture that were really important to us when we made the decision to move forward with this joint venture with our partner, Minto, and to be honest with you, they're almost just as important as the economics of the joint venture. One was that we wanted our partner to manage this joint venture, the A to Z, because that would free us up. I remember this was back in 2017, 2018, 2019 when we were having these discussions. We knew we wanted to grow the company, grow the leasing segment, grow the hospitality segment, grow the residential homesite segment. A project like this one, which includes infrastructure, home construction, it requires a lot of resources.
Having a partner that would do that allowed us to focus our resources on growing the hospitality segment, growing the residential homesite segment in a way where we can maintain efficient overhead structure. You have seen the slide of the reduction in overhead as a percentage of revenue. That was a very deliberate and conscious decision we made at the time as to why we engaged in this project. The second one was equally as deliberate and conscious. We knew that this joint venture was going to create consumers, consumers that were going to be here year-round. I think everybody knows this, but it is important to point out we do not allow short-term rentals in Latitude. These are true homesteaders or true second home owners, and they are mostly homesteaders. There are a few second homeowners. Why does that matter?
The joint venture, including the contributions of our partner, are creating consumers that will have a positive impact in our other segments. For example, the Watersound Town Center, which is a commercial area, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a second. Certainly, we'll talk about it when we go on the driving tour. This joint venture with the good cash flows and the good contributions that we've had from the cash flow are creating consumers that will allow us to monetize that in other ways. As an example, the commercial town center in front of Latitude. The other example is the Marina. That's one of the stops on the driving tour today. We broke ground on the marina on the ICW.
Those were discussions that we had at the time, and they were really important in our decision to move forward, not just with this project, but to move forward with this project under this structure. The other component of the consumers that was important to us is our emerging, what I call, financial services sector, Watersound Closings, Watersound Insurance, and Watersound Real Estate. Those are all emerging businesses that we've started them that are going to be benefiting greatly from not just Latitude, from other communities, but particularly Latitude. Again, we've talked about it before, but I wanted to make sure I gave you a pretty good perspective of all the decision-making process that went into us moving forward with Latitude. The future. The Bay One sector plan, 170,000 units. We have that as of right.
The second step in the sector planning process is for us to obtain approval of what is called detailed specific area plans, which are a minimum of 1,000 acres. These are DSAPs. DSAPs require the approval of Bay and Walton County commissions at public hearings. To date, we have had 10 DSAPs approved. We have only started developing three of those. When you think about the growth we have had, particularly in our residential homesite segment, where we were less than 200 a year to 1,000 a year, that is with only three DSAPs that we have actually started. We have seven other DSAPs that we have not even started yet that we have obtained approval for. Every one of these seven DSAPs that we have not started, we are actively spending soft dollars in. We are spending soft dollars in design and planning and engineering and permitting and DO.
A couple of them, we anticipate breaking ground this year, a couple of new ones. These DSAPs, they are primarily for you to think about residential, residential scale. The numbers that you see in these DSAPs are residential unit approvals. Keep in mind that the non-residential number, we can convert to residential. We have an ability to convert non-residential square feet to more residential units than you see here. It is something we anticipate doing because the non-residential numbers in some of those DSAPs are too large. We want to concentrate residential, commercial, in nodes, in activity nodes. The residential numbers that you see here are not the ceiling. We can do even more than that if we convert the non-residential. We continue to receive phone calls from builders outside of this market.
It's a pretty regular occurrence for us, nationals and super regional builders that have seen the growth in this region. They've seen the incomes in this region compared to other parts. They want to come and be part of our builder program. We spend a lot of time when we get those phone calls getting to know the builders, getting to know how they operate. We try to be very thoughtful about price and product segmentation. We're not just going to put builders in one project and hope for the best. We don't want them to cannibalize each other because that's not good for us. We're not going to be able to sell as many homesites to them. We try to be very thoughtful about how we group builders. We try to group them in ways that create good price and product segmentation.
The new DSAP that we have gotten approved, the most recent one, is Pigeon Creek. That is not the formal name, by the way. I have already had a couple of you tell me, "You are not going to name it Pigeon Creek, are you?" That is just a holding name that we have for internal purposes. That is the one that is just to the east of the entrance to Latitude. You can see it right in the middle of the map, 3,300 units. We got that approved. That was the most recent one. We are actually spending soft dollars now for engineering and permitting. We are in active discussion with one new builder who wants to come into the market, who has a pretty significant interest in this DSAP. There is a lot of this that is part of the seeding, by the way.
Getting the sector plan approved and getting the DSAPs approved is part of the seeding. There's a lot of harvesting to go. The great thing about these DSAPs, they're not all in the same market, right? They're not all in the same sub-market. These maps, we sometimes lose perspective. We show these maps all the time, and it seems like these things are 10 feet apart. These are many, many miles apart, right? Even though they're in two counties, they're in different sub-markets of the county, which is what really is one of the ingredients for growth, right? Because if you're trying to grow a residential segment and it's the exact same market, same consumers, it's hard to grow that because you get to a point where there's a ceiling.
By having these locations across a pretty broad range of markets in our region, that creates an opportunity for growth. Commercial and hospitality areas of focus. Those DSAPs are more about residential. These are the areas that we're focused in. If you look at our over the future, particularly the foreseeable future, if you're wondering where we're going to be focusing resources for hospitality and commercial, this is a pretty good framework. You can understand that. It's great. The Sound of Freedom. The Watersound Town Center, that's a commercial area in front of Watersound Origins. East Lake Powell, we plan on doing something similar. We did at Camp Creek where we'll have a club amenity. We'll have potentially a boutique-ish lodging opportunity, and then we'll have some high-end custom homesites. We're spending time and energy on that project right now, planning and designing it.
The Watersound West Bay Center, which is a commercial area in front of Latitude, just to give you an idea of scale, the Watersound Town Center and the West Bay Center alone, those two commercial areas will double our leasing commercial sq ft, just those two alone. That is conservatively. The sq ft that you see for those town centers in our financial disclosures are pretty conservative because we have not done the detailed engineering yet, so we err on the lower side. Those two alone will double our leasing portfolio. Of course, the FSU Medical Campus, which we will talk about in great detail on the driving tour. Of all things in this slide and probably all things in this presentation, there is nothing that can potentially have the significant impact to our region more than the medical campus.
I'm not sure everybody really understands that yet, but you will. It's a pretty significant asset that's going to have a far-reaching and long-serving impact on our region. Of course, the Marina Port St. Joe, Pier Park East, which we'll stop by on the driving tour today, Breakfast Point East. If you add those to the commercial square feet, you're getting way beyond doubling what we have now, again, in a very conservative way. This is a snapshot. Every word in these presentations has a meaning. If you're wondering where we're going to be spending resources for commercial hospitality, this is a pretty good framework for that. The State Road 79 corridor, that's where we're going to focus our driving tour today.
If you were to ask me what area of our land holdings, of all of our land holdings, has the most energy right now, without hesitation, I will tell you the State Road 79 corridor. Even with all the great things that are happening in Walton and the growth in Walton and the high price points, by far, the most energy is on State Road 79. That is not just us drinking our own Kool-Aid. A lot of the phone calls we get from folks who want to partner with us, residential builders, commercial developers, hospitality companies, they usually start with the State Road 79 corridor. Pier Park North, which is our 320,000 sq ft power center, we just reached 100% occupancy. It is literally 100% occupancy in that center, which I am not sure everybody has that in a power center these days of that size.
Pier Park Crossings Apartments, 360 units, our occupancy is between mid to high 90%. It has stayed pretty steady over the years. The medical campus, of course, the 320,000 sq ft that you see here, that does not include the hospital. That is just the medical office buildings that we anticipate building as build-to-suit opportunities as the hospital is built and that campus grows. Obviously, we have 78,000 of that built in the medical office building that, for those of you that were on the tour last year, you saw that inside. Gateway Crossings Apartments, that is on the southwest corner of the intersection of 79 and Philip Griffith Parkway. We are currently planning engineering that site for potentially 620 apartment units. Particularly as the medical campus gets going, we think there is going to be more demand for apartments.
A kind of good calibration of that is the occupancy that we've seen at Pier Park Crossings, right? It stayed pretty consistent in the mid to high 90%. The West Bay Crossings, and again, these are just placeholder names. If you do not like the name, do not worry. It is a placeholder name. West Bay Crossings is a mixed-use DSAP. That is essentially the northeast and northwest corner of that intersection. We have approval there for almost 1 million sq ft of non-residential. We are actively planning that area, and we are actively in discussions with a potential partner to plan that area. Continue to move up. Of course, the Ward Creek area with the four builders that we have there, 1,600 units, that is the build-out. There are 521 lots that we have sold. We will talk a little bit more about that in the driving tour. Nice price product segmentation in Ward Creek.
The Watersound West Bay Center, that's a commercial area in front of Latitude. $500,000, that's conservative what we can develop there. We have 3,300 right now and working on a couple of new ones and a couple of big ones that hopefully we'll get to announce pretty soon. Latitude, 3,500 units, 1,855 completed. The ICW Marina, we're under construction, 600 dry slips, which is a pretty sizable marina. West Bay Creek, that's the DSAP to the immediate west of Latitude. That's where we plan on continuing the Latitude community to the immediate west. Of course, Pigeon Creek, that's a new DSAP we got approved, 3,300 units. We're in active discussion with one new builder that wants to come to the market and be located there. I often talk about the virtuous circle of value creation in letters and earnings releases.
It's not something that we think about once a year just to impress you guys. It's something that we think about daily, to be honest with you. Every decision we make, every business decision, every investment decision, we're thinking about this. This is slide 23. If you're on the webcast, you're going to see one static slide with all the information. Here in the meeting, I'm going to go through each layer and break it down. It usually starts with our hospitality segment, what we call stay and play. More often than not, that's how individuals get introduced to our region and to us. They stay in one of our hotels. They stay in one of our resorts. They join our club. When they do that, it exposes them to the lifestyle of our region, what we call the Watersound lifestyle and the high quality of life.
They're here. They're like, "Oh, this is interesting." Then they make a decision to look into one of our residential communities and buy a home in one of our residential communities or buy a custom lot and build a home or in one of our apartment communities. When they do that, it creates customer bases for hospitality assets, specifically club membership, right? We've been on a pretty good trajectory of more permanent residents joining our club. Many years ago, most of our members in our club were folks that were not from here, and they would join our club when they would vacation here. We have more and more members that live here that join our club. At Origins alone, our current clip is about a third of residents at Origins are full members of our club.
They stay in our hotels, which we call hospitality segment, the front porch of our company. That exposes them to the area. They choose to buy a home here. That will help the hospitality segment by creating more club members. If they buy a home in one of our communities, it creates a customer base, consumers, like I talked about at Latitude for our town center tenants, for restaurants, retail shops. That allows our shop visit component in our commercial leasing segment, in our town centers, medical offices, office space. Once those facilities are created, that enhances the vacation experience, right?
Because if we have in our town centers restaurants and places to shop, if you're here staying in a hotel or you're a club member and you have a vacation rental home, you're going to visit our town centers to eat, to have drinks, to shop. That is going to help our town center tenants, which is going to help us to continue to build more facilities in our town centers. Of course, it creates a customer base for town center tenants, going back to full circle to our hospitality segment. While this is going on, while this virtuous circle is going on, there's population growth, there's job creation, and then there's investment in public infrastructure, right? As town centers grow, as residential communities grow, those three things are happening.
This is a really key thing that is, in my opinion, really important to understand our company and the potential of our company. While all that is going on, what is happening? It is driving value to all of our adjoining land holdings. That is unique, right? Because if you are a developer and you just do hotels, you do your hotel, get a good cash flow from it, you are pretty much done, right? Same thing with a commercial developer. They may develop a town center, lease it up. They do well with cash flows, but they are done. They do not get to participate in future value creation. Same thing with residential developers or home builders. Since we are in all of these businesses and segments, as these assets are created, they create experiences for consumers.
They perform financially, so they contribute to our cash flow, all while creating more and more value for all the vacant land we own around. That part is hard to put on a spreadsheet, but it is real. It is absolutely real. We live it every day. This is not a graphic that we just created. It is really a graphic representation of what we talk about almost daily. Could not have better introduction. Valuation range. We engaged Jones Lang LaSalle to take a look at our income-producing assets. What I mean by income-producing assets are our private membership club, hotels, restaurants, retail, leasing portfolio, vacation rental homes, marinas, multifamily apartments, senior living, self-storage, and other assets. You can go to item two in our recent quarterly report, Form 10Q, to get an idea of what those are. It does not include vacant land.
It does not include land in development. It does not include any of our residential communities. It does not include Latitude. These are just traditional income-producing properties. We asked Jones Lang LaSalle to value those assets for us. They did it on a net basis. They used NOI, net operating income. They came up with a valuation range from $1.5 billion-$1.7 billion for those income-producing properties. Those income-producing properties in total are 491 acres. That is not including the golf courses. If we include the golf courses, those income-producing properties are about 1,300 acres. The reason why I wanted to show both acres with and without golf courses, the golf courses are unique, right? Number one, they are large. They consume a lot of acres. Unlike an acreage for a hotel, right?
If we have an acreage for a hotel in the 491, you're pretty much done with that acre, right, in terms of future income-producing opportunities. Golf courses are part of our private club program, right? They're always going to be there to help us sell more memberships, which are going to increase the cash flow from the club. So $1.5 billion-$1.7 billion, 491 acres. If you don't include the golf courses, 1,300 acres. You can include the golf courses. That's essentially 1% of the total 167,000 acres that we have. We're going to keep Jones Lang LaSalle engaged. This was actually a pretty thorough process they went through. They brought experts from all over the country that specialize in apartments. They specialize in leasing. They specialize in hotel. They even brought experts that specialize in clubs. This was what I'm not going to do.
Some companies do that. They throw some value number out there and something that somebody scratched off a sheet of paper. We're not going to do that. I have way too much respect for you guys to do that. When we put out numbers like this, they're going to be very thorough, very well thought out, and vetted. This was a pretty intense process for them. We learned, and we had a lot of back and forth with them, kind of understanding. We feel pretty comfortable about this range for these 491 acres. The other thing I want to point out is, as many of you know, a lot of our income-producing assets are new, right? We built them in the last year, last two years. Those assets are not stabilized yet, right?
What Jones Lang did with the NOI, they took the pre-stabilization NOI, which is conservative. We do not like that, right? Because we think once they are stabilized, they are going to generate more cash flow and the value will go up. We understand their perspective. That was a conservative way to do it because it is a snapshot. There are quite a few of those, right? It is not just one hotel. We have five hotels that we opened in the last two years. The valuation that you see here and the NOI that was used for that valuation is pre-stabilization for many of those assets. We are going to keep Jones Lang engaged to have multiple phases of this valuation process where we want to cover vacant land. We want to cover land in development.
Any other asset that we have, we want to make sure that we include as part of this exercise. We're going to do it very thoroughly and very methodically. That's something we're going to be releasing in the future. We have a very diverse real estate operating company. We're not a company that just owns pine trees, that just owns orange groves. Valuation for vacant land is easy if you look at those kind of companies. We have a lot of different stuff, right? A lot of different types of operating assets. Jones Lang LaSalle told us that we were pretty diverse. They thought they would have a couple of people as part of this exercise. They had to expand it significantly and bring experts from all over the country because we're very diversified.
It takes some time and thought if you're going to do it right, right? If you're going to just throw numbers out there just for the heck of it, then we did not need to do this. We wanted to make sure that we were thorough in this process. Of course, this is just, that was really the last slide. This is a reconciliation of EBITDA from GAAP. I'm not going to read the disclaimer to everybody. I think if anybody upsets me in the future, I think I'll do it. Before we do Q&A, I want to make two general announcements. One is I've had a lot of discussions with many of you about the concept of starting quarterly calls. There are some of you that feel that's a good idea. There are some of you that feel it's not a great idea.
The reason for it is the great idea is obvious, right? It's more communication, more opportunity to ask questions. The concern I've heard from some of you about starting those calls is that it may create an expectation that we're a quarter-to-quarter company. We're not. That's fair. Understood. I've had a lot of discussions with you. What we've decided is we're going to start quarterly calls, but we're going to do them in a certain way. The purpose of the calls are primarily to answer questions from that quarter. If there's something significant, something unusual in that quarter that is worthy to point out, we'll point it out. Give you an example. In the first quarter of this year, you saw pretty significant growth year over year compared to the last quarter overall. Pretty significant growth in commercial and residential. Hospitality was flat.
An example of what I would have pointed out if we had the call in the first quarter is Easter this year, holiday, was the latest in the season it has been in 14 years. Easter actually affects our hospitality segment when it falls in the year because that is a pretty big holiday weekend, and it is really the whole week. Easter this year fell the latest it has been in 14 years, so it affected our hospitality numbers in the first quarter. That is something that is an example of something I would point out in a call. We are not going to create a script that is curated by 20 attorneys, right, and orchestrated almost like a theatrical presentation. We are not going to do that. I am also not going to regurgitate the earnings release because I think you guys can read it and you guys can draw your own conclusions.
We'll start the calls, primarily answer questions and point out things like I mentioned that was peculiar for that quarter. The second thing I want to mention is you may have seen this. We decided to expand our what I call asset-light businesses, right? We have Watersound Closings, our title agency, and Watersound Insurance. We made a decision to expand that and start Watersound Real Estate. It's something that we knew we would do. We gave a lot of sight to many folks in the market about that at some point when the company was at a level of maturity. When the market was at a level of maturity, it was something we knew we would do. We felt the time was now. We hired a great leader from the Dallas market to head that business.
It is going to be not only complementary to Watersound Insurance and Watersound Title, but to be very honest, it is going to be a key part of the connective tissue for all of it. Watersound Real Estate opened its doors last week. I wanted to show you a very brief video of Watersound Real Estate. After this video, we will start Q&A.
Every home tells a story. In Northwest Florida, the story begins with the land itself. Since 1936, The St. Joe Company has done more than just develop communities. They have shaped the region. They have stewarded its beauty, and they have built a lifestyle that defines this coast. Watersound Real Estate is a natural extension of that legacy. A new kind of brokerage rooted in purpose, designed to grow with the communities St. Joe continues to create. We are not just here to sell homes.
We're here to guide people, to serve them, and to provide support to our agents to accomplish this with excellence. I get to be aligned with a company that not only has the legacy, but also has the innovation behind it. St. Joe is the preeminent developer in South Walton. We've watched St. Joe build this whole area, doing the WaterColor project, and we've watched them do Watersound Origins. Setting it up just the way they have, it's been very well thought out. It's not just about buying and selling houses. It's about being part of a community, our lifestyle, that everyone wants to be a part of. When I first came in here, it just has really such a peaceful vibe and atmosphere. The sunshine, the way of living around here, the freedom to go to the beach, to play sports all year long.
It is so exciting to me to help people realize those dreams for themselves and their family and their friends. Everything we offer, from marketing to technology to operations, is strategically designed to let the agents focus on what matters most to them: building relationships and shaping communities in Northwest Florida. It will help me to give better service to my clients. Having Watersound Real Estate as part of that creates a legacy. It is not just a company, but it is a vision. Our brand stands for clarity, consistency, and care. Because in a crowded market, trust comes from how you show up every time. We are not just focused on what is here today. We are building toward what comes next. With a 50-year vision in motion, the opportunities in Northwest Florida are just beginning.
That gives me confidence because of their background, which will give people that I get to serve the confidence to work with us. St. Joe is so much more than a brokerage. I mean, they are a community. They're about bringing friends and families together. That's the difference. We're not just selling homes. We're welcoming people into the future. A future built on legacy. On trust. On a belief that real estate should feel like coming home. Relax. Your home.
Our title agency and our insurance agency are profitable. They actually have good margins. The overall revenue number is still not high enough for us to separate them. When you look at our financials, all that comes in under other.
By adding Watersound Real Estate and hopefully the continued growth of those three businesses, which we've started organically, all of them, we'll get to a point where we'll have to make decisions about when do we separate them out, right? You can get a little bit more transparency into how those businesses are doing. What we like about these asset-light businesses is that they generate revenue from investments, capital investments we've made already, right? By creating consumers in residential neighborhoods and closings, obviously, from all the transactions. It doesn't require significant capital investment, which is therapeutic for my other side of the brain. We have other ideas about other businesses that we're going to be adding over time. Again, we're going to be thoughtful about it. We're going to not just do something and hope for the best.
We have many other ideas to continue to grow that financial services segment. Let me open up the floor for questions. Again, if you can, when you—we're on webcast, so if you don't mind raising your hand, we'll give you the mic. Mention your name and who you're representing and your question so everybody can hear it.
Good morning. My name is Danny Hirschberger. I've been a shareholder since 2017. Thank you for the management. Congratulations, Marek, Rhea, Jorge, all of you for the profitable and productive 2024, decreasing debt, increasing cash, increasing revenue, and the hard work of investing for growth with enduring value creation. I have a 30,000-foot view question. If the long-term trend for interest rates over the next 20 years slowly rises higher, could you please talk about what effect this will have on Joe's landholding prices, earnings, and ultimately the stock price?
That is a 30,000-foot question. We're okay? Okay. You know, macroeconomic factors, interest rates, obviously, inflation, those are things that none of us can predict, right? I think there's conventional wisdom about all of those things, what will happen over the next year, two years, ten years. In our mind, those are things that are just factors that we'll adapt to, right? In terms of the valuation of the land, in terms of our investment in projects, the key for us is migration. That's the number one key. As long as migration continues, we're positioned in a way to navigate the ebbs and flows of macroeconomic factors. One of the things that we do a lot of, just as an example, we talked about it earlier today, we project finance everything, right? Everything stands on its own cash flows.
The capital markets have been in a different place than they were a number of years ago, right? Not just in terms of interest rates, but in terms of all the footnotes that you get from term sheets from bankers. You always have to read the footnotes, by the way. We adapt. When we run pro formas, when we look at projects to see if they pencil, if they do not pencil, we will incorporate those new factors, right, over the next few years as they come. From our perspective at this point, we do not anticipate those factors having a material change in the trajectory we have been on. Other questions?
Hi, Jorge. My name is Jordan Shopov. I am a private investor and shareholder. I have got a question relates to something Bruce said. I think it was at this meeting a couple of years ago. He described St Joe as kind of a blank canvas and very unique for that fact. He said that the only thing comparable was probably the Irvine Ranch. I'm sure that you and your team have studied the history of that. I'm just kind of curious as to what lessons you might have taken away in terms of what works and what does not work and how you might be applying that to Joe's acreage.
Absolutely. Do you travel from Australia?
Yes.
It was not just the accent, by the way. Mary told me. Thank you for visiting us. Yeah, we have looked at a lot of analogs over the years because I'm a firm believer in if somebody is doing something well and they are smart, why not copy it, right? Why not study it? Irvine Ranch is probably the closest one, from my personal perspective, that we have studied.
Similar perspective about the virtual circle of value creation, right, in driving valuation, land value up with investments that are strategic investments that are made. The obvious difference is they're much closer to a larger population center than we are, right? That's one obvious difference. We have to think about that differently. I think we have a higher hospitality tourism base. That's one of the reasons why you see our hospitality segment being so prominent. I don't know if everybody knows this, but Panama City Beach has over 20 million visitors a year. Panama City Beach. Walton County is, I think, 12. That's over 30 million visitors a year, which is crazy when you think about it. Less than 10 years ago, we had a total of, I think, 100 hotel rooms in that ecosystem of tourism.
I think proximity to large population centers is one big difference for us in Irvine Ranch and other analogs we've looked at. Tourism, we're a tourism area. Obviously, Irvine Ranch is privately held. We're publicly traded. That's another difference. The biggest difference that I think is a positive is the worn-out Wayne Gretzky saying, right, it's about being where the puck is heading, not where the puck is. We're in a good place, right? Florida is a good place to be in general. In this part of Florida, as you saw the growth numbers, it's a really good place to be because it's what folks are looking for in terms of quality of life, a feeling of safety. We have that here. Yes, Irvine Ranch is probably the closest one, but we haven't found one that's exactly like us, right?
I just pointed out a couple of differences from us and potentially Irvine Ranch. The Villages, by the way, is not one of them. We've studied The Villages a lot. That's a unique—we studied The Villages a lot in terms of us making decisions about Latitude. But it's a kind of more narrowly focused project. Scale is tremendous. What we have here, we think we have opportunities for much broader, much broader placemaking and revenue-generating opportunities.
Hey, thank you for having us. Dave DeMeester. We live in Lander 2, Margaritaville. Thank you. Thank you. It's a great location. My question, it's not really a question. It's more like maybe a thank you. There's a group of us been working with the county, and I know we've got somewhat of an agreement with the county and St. Joe for a piece of property for a new fire station.
Thank you for your assistance with that. From what I understand, permitting is supposed to happen next month and construction in July. Whatever you can do to make sure that does not back up, we would appreciate. It is something we have been working with the county for almost two years now. We appreciate your assistance in getting that thing moving on. Thank you.
Thank you for working with the county. That helps a lot. We are friends with all our county partners and municipal partners. They are all great people. They just kind of have their definition of time, which is different than ours. They are on a different calendar and clock than we are. When we have residents that get involved like you have and make sure they understand how important that is, that makes a difference because there is only so much we can push without that.
Thank you for doing that.
Yep. Mark Glaze, Watersound resident too there in Margaritaville. On the capital allocation, you had 30% or so going to stock repurchase. You plan on continuing that percentage of stock repurchase in the coming years? As far as dividend increases, could you comment any more on that? I know that's a little forward-looking, but anything as to how the dividend payouts are allocated?
Thank you for the question. Yeah, there are too many attorneys here for me to answer that last question. 30% was from 2016 to now. Our company has changed, right? We're a different place than we were back then. The way we look at capital and prioritizing our capital is different than it was in 2016. We 100% believe that stock buybacks are a part of capital allocation. The decisions we make are based on real-time ground-level information.
I wish I can tell you there's a magic number. If I did, I would be just saying it to impress you or the folks in this room. Qualitatively, I can tell you it's an important component. We view it as an important component moving forward, stock buybacks. Same thing with dividends. We want to continue to grow dividends. We're going to grow it very steadily. Those are two really important components for us. It's not just growth. It's not just CapEx for growth.
Steve Olson, individual shareholder. On the subject of capital allocation, it was also listed as debt reduction was listed. It also showed a slide that 28% debt to total assets. I imagine that is the book value of assets.
If you use the fair market value or the value range of some of your income-producing assets of $1.5 billion-$1.7 billion, debt looks relatively modest to me. What are your thoughts about level of debt and why debt reduction is listed as a capital allocation?
Yeah, great question. Debt is something we're, again, we want to make sure we're on the right side of the debt equation, especially as the market conditions have changed and there's been a lot of folks who have gotten in trouble, right, because they can't make debt payments. If you look at it, not on a book basis value, but on a market value, those percentages are even lower, right? We feel pretty comfortable where we are. We just went through a very significant growth spurt, right? That's reflected in the financial slides I show every year.
We opened five hotels in one year. That's a pretty significant growth expansion. In my mind, this is nothing official from the company. It was almost remedial, right, to get the company to a place where we can start really creating a trajectory for growth because for a while there, we didn't even have a baseline. We feel good about the debt. We still think there's opportunities and we're very strategic. Just to give you an example, we've had some small project loans with pretty high variable interest rates that with debt reduction, those loans go away completely. We've been prioritizing. It hasn't been random.
We have not just been doing debt reduction based on spinning a wheel and saying, "We are going to pay this one down." We prioritize it based on the project, the relative importance of the project, the debt that is left, and the interest rate that is left. We have been doing that very, very methodically. We intend to continue doing that in that manner.
My name is Marek Bakun, individual shareholder, and I have clients in my company, ZWD Capital Management. My question is around the capital allocation subject. Would you guys, given you have done the Jones Lang LaSalle evaluation and given where the numbers are, and that does not include all the raw land you have, would you consider taking on debt or a credit facility to buy back shares given where they are trading currently?
Right now, the answer is probably not.
When it comes to the world, it's a very asymmetrical, non-linear place, right? If there's circumstances, growth continues or accelerates, right? There's nothing that we wouldn't consider, to be honest with you. If you were to ask me, is there anything that you categorically would not consider in terms of capital allocation, the answer is no. I think that's the good perspective to have. Right now, at this moment, it's not something we're considering.
Jay Robinson. Thanks. Jay Robinson, also an individual investor. Just asking about the other side of the ledger. How do you think about the risk or how you would adapt if for a period of time your, especially partners on the home building side, see an overbuild and they need to start competing on price or is it just challenging to fill these houses at the rate that people are coming in?
Excellent question. Thank you for the question. In most markets that are growing, the way it typically works is four or five national builders go into that market. They each cut their own deal with an individual property owner, and they all plan for a 5,000 home community, right? If there is a slowdown in that market, it is a race to the bottom, right? Because every one of those national home builders is going to be discounting heavily. We, because of the scale of our land ownership, we are a regulator of that, right? In our market, if you want to build a hotel and you want to build a strip commercial center, there is land you can find that is not ours, and you can do that. If you are a national home builder, what you want is runway. You want a long runway, and you want scale.
You want to build a lot of homes per year for a long time because it's expensive to set up the operation, right? Procurement, trade. They quickly, when they look at this market, they quickly conclude they have to come see us, right? That's what I mean when I meant earlier that we spent a lot of time thinking about builders, their needs, what their model is in terms of how many homes they want to do a year. We try to think a lot about pricing, product, and where to place them. It's not an exact science. I'm not telling you we make decisions perfectly every time. That is a consideration we have.
That is why when somebody first calls us, particularly a big home builder that wants to come to the market, it takes usually a year to two years of conversations because we are trying to understand that because we want to keep the momentum going. We never want to get to the point like you find in other markets where everybody cuts their own deal, they build, they do great. When there is a little bit of a slowdown, then it is a pretty serious problem. Because of the scale of our ownership, land ownership, we almost function, and we do not do it for punitive measures or we do not do it because we think we are important. It just happens naturally, right? We own so much land. We are constantly looking at the demand side. We are constantly looking at the demand side by price and by product.
When we make decisions to bring a new builder into our builder program, we've thought about all that. So far, that has been working out relatively well, right? We obviously have higher interest rates, economic uncertainty at a macro level. Some markets are not doing anywhere as well as we're doing from a residential perspective. Our builders are still closing our home sites. It's a great question. I think us having such a large ownership and builders having to come to us who want scale allows us an opportunity to kind of look at the whole field, right? Where in other markets, they just cut deals with individual property owners. Excellent question. That's something we talk about a lot. Any other questions?
I am Mark Bradshaw, individual investor. I have a question regarding your relationship with your stockholders.
I noticed 50 %+, 54% of your stock's owned by three primary holders. What effect does that have on your decision-making process, the board? What influence do they have on your objectivity, those sorts of things?
It's a great question. The reality is all shareholders matter, right? As I mentioned, I've had dialogue with many shareholders, many of you in this room, about even the idea of starting quarterly calls. That hasn't just been with three of those shareholders, right? I've talked to everybody. We try to run our business very objectively based on what we're seeing at the ground level, right? Because the advantage we have, we're at the ground level and we're in so many different things, right? We are involved in so many different things. We can see the market opportunities and triangulate in a lot of different ways.
My short answer to you is I do not think it impacts us in any material way. We run the business the way that we think it should be run. We are pretty conservative. We try to be thoughtful and respectful to all of our shareholders, whether you own one share or you own millions of shares. Any other questions?
I just want to make a quick comment. One, I appreciate you guys having the annual meeting so that shareholders can come and talk to you guys and interact with you. And then secondly, I appreciate the thoughtful presentation and all the detail. I think it is helpful in terms of just understanding how you guys think about it, how you guys are planning it, and your overall perspective. I appreciate that.
Thank you. If there are no other questions, I did want to give Marek.
Marek, anything on the debt reduction part that you want to mention that I missed?
No. Jorge, you did a great job. Yeah. Thank you very much. And Jorge, the presentation was very well done. As far as the debt, I think one of the comments that came up, one is the 28%. The only thing I really wanted to add, Jorge, is that not all debt is equal, right? Not all debt is created equal. If you think about the debt that we have and you kind of look at the detail and we provide that in the footnotes in a lot of details. For example, when you look at our apartments, a very large percentage of our debt, and I do not have the exact number, but I would say it is probably about half, is on our apartments.
That debt goes to, I think, up to 2064, and it is fixed, assignable, HUD-insured financing. Yes, that is debt by definition, what it is, but it is so contained within an apartment community that you really, the revenues from that community fully amortize that debt. That debt really does not have any incentive. There are actually punitive items in the agreements that would prevent you from paying that debt down. The best way to do it is really just amortize that debt over a very, very long time. It is really great value creation when it comes to it. Really, when we are talking about the debt, and even again, as a percentage, we agree that is a low number when it comes to it.
But then you shrink out the HUD-insured financing, which is all of our apartments, and especially some of the interest rates that we have out there somewhere in a 3%, 3+% range that you really would never want to refinance anyway. We think of different components of debt differently, just like you explained in there. That is really the only comment I wanted to make sure that I point out, that not all debt is created equal out there, and it is important to look at the detail of it.
Yep. Thank you. That is essentially what I am trying to say with a great question. We do not just do debt reduction across the board, some macro percentage. We look at each one separately. One thing I just remembered I failed to mention on the valuation slide, which was really important, the $1.5 billion-$1.7 billion value range.
The book value of those assets is $800 million. That gives you an idea of kind of the value creation. Book value is actually a little bit under $800. I think it is $790. The valuation range of that exact set of income-producing properties is $1.5 billion-$1.7 billion. Almost forgot Howard.
Ashok Gopianandan, individual shareholder. Before I ask my question, I want to share a quick story. Yesterday, I was taking a Lyft ride, and the driver happened to work in one of the St. Joe properties. In my 20-minute ride, she told it at least 10 times how much she loved it working here. I wanted to share that. It is clear you are creating something special. Congratulations. My question is on capital allocation.
In slide 24, it shows that $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion value created at 1% of the acreage, which is pretty amazing. Good. Also, it's clear that you have a lot of acreage. It's not going to be practical to develop all of it. We were at a dinner yesterday. Many of us believe the share price is very undervalued. The intrinsic value is much, much higher than what the share price reflects. My question is, why not sell some of the land in two parts, not just to buy back shares, but also to surface the value? It'll show how much value creation is happening in this area to the wider investment community. Obviously, buying back what we believe is deeply discounted shares. My question specifically is about Tallahassee, some of the non-core, would you consider selling those?
Yes. A great question.
Our land holdings, which is the other math of the 87%, right? It's the other percentage that we own. On the east side of the big river, as I call it, the Apalachicola River, we consider all those land holdings non-strategic. We're not investing a dollar in any of those projects. We're not developing anything. We're a seller. It doesn't show up in the financials because they're just transactions, but we've been actively selling land in Leon County in Southwood. What we've been doing in Southwood is there's massive infrastructure. When we sell a pod, many years ago, the company used to develop lots like we do at Origins. That doesn't make sense, right? The margins, the value, it just doesn't make sense. What we're doing is we're selling pods in Southwood, and then the builders develop the infrastructure and build the homes.
We are very much doing that. We've sold land in Wakulla County in the fourth quarter. That was pretty high margin for us because it had low cost basis. We sold land in Leon County. We're actively doing that. Selling raw land in Bay and Walton, it's a little bit trickier, right? They know that because people call us all the time, right? They want to kind of that value creation kind of circle. They want to get some of that themselves. We have sold some, but we try to be very, very thoughtful about that. For example, it's one of the projects you'll see today. Pier Park East is just emerging, right? We're going to brand it the city center of Pier Park.
We have a lot of interest in that, a lot of opportunities to generate a lot of revenue for a long time. The anchor that we from day one thought would be the best anchor there for our market was Topgolf. We said that to ourselves from day one. We agreed to sell the land to them. Now, we agreed the location we wanted, not the land they wanted. They wanted it on the frontage. We wanted it in the back so we can create value going through the frontage. That's an example of us deciding to sell land, but we did it for a very strategic purpose, right? We got good value for it. More importantly, Topgolf, just because of who they are, the consumers they attract, that's going to create value in all of Pier Park East.
But in terms of just selling land without kind of that uniqueness of the strategic, yes, everything east of the river in Wakulla, Leon, Gadsden, we are selling land. Okay. Thank you. I think this concludes the meeting. Again, thank you. We know everybody's busy. We know how hard it is to travel, to make the time. We always appreciate it. We always welcome everybody coming here anytime. We're open book. So anytime you want to call and ask anything, feel free to do that. We're going to start the driving tour at 1:00 P.M. If you don't mind, those of you going on the tour, if you don't mind getting here a little bit early, it's going to be a shorter, kind of more concentrated tour of State Road 79, but we're going to dig a little bit deeper in a couple of our stops.
If you don't mind being here a little bit before 1:00, and the buses will leave at 1:00. Thank you. Appreciate it.