Welcome to the 2024 annual meeting and shareholder presentation for Maui Land & Pineapple Company. I'd like to introduce Scot Sellers, Chair of the Board of Directors, to begin the meeting.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Scot Sellers, Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Maui Land & Pineapple Company, and in accordance with the company's bylaws, I will be presiding over this annual meeting. As Chairperson, I have set the agenda as well as certain meeting procedures and rules of conduct, which can be found on the virtual meeting webpage if you join via the meeting link on our website. The annual meeting will be immediately followed by a virtual shareholder presentation. It is now 10:00 A.M. Hawaiian Standard Time, and in accordance with the notice of this annual meeting, I hereby declare this meeting open. Welcome to Maui Land & Pineapple Company's 2024 annual meeting of stockholders. On behalf of your Board of Directors and the Maui Land & Pineapple Company team, we thank you for joining us this morning.
Our meeting today will take place as prescribed in the agenda, which is available for viewing while accessing the annual meeting of stockholders. Please note that this meeting is being recorded. I would now like to introduce the other members of the Board of Directors who are present on this call. In addition to me, we have Glyn Aeppel, Stephen Case, Catherine Ngo, Ken Ota, John Sabin, and Anthony Takatani. We also have our Chief Executive Officer, Race Randle, and our Chief Financial Officer, Wade Kodama, joining us today. Finally, we have Mr. Cory Kubota, Managing Partner from Accuity LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm, present at the meeting today. The business of the meeting is set out in the notice of annual meeting of the stockholders. Mr. Kodama will serve as the Secretary of this meeting and record the proceedings.
This brings us to item four in our agenda, which is the presentation of the meeting materials. The Board of Directors fixed March 21, 2024, as the record date for stockholders entitled to notice of and to attend and vote at the annual meeting. The notice of meeting, proxy statement, form of proxy, and voting instructions were made available to all stockholders on April 2, 2024. Broadridge Financial Solutions, Incorporated, provided the company with an affidavit certifying the distribution of the notice of internet availability of proxy materials to the shareholders. These materials will be filed with the records of this annual meeting, and the list of stockholders of record entitled to vote will be available for inspection on the virtual platform throughout the meeting. I will now introduce the inspector of election for our meeting.
The Board of Directors has appointed Wade Kodama to act as the inspector of election. He signed an oath of office and is responsible for tabulating the votes. The inspector of election will also sign a report concerning the number of shares which have been voted by proxy. Mr. Kodama will now present his report.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Pursuant to the stockholders list, holders of 19,680,996 shares of common stock are entitled to vote at this meeting. The holders of an aggregate of 17,810,893 shares of common stock are represented in person via remote communication or by proxy at this meeting. This constitutes at least a majority of the company's outstanding shares of common stock entitled to vote as of the record date and constitutes a quorum for purposes of this annual meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Kodama. In light of the report of the inspector, it has been determined that we do have a quorum present for this annual meeting, and I hereby declare this meeting to be duly constituted and convened. This brings us to item six in our agenda for today's meeting. As set out in the proxy statement, there are three resolutions to be voted on at this meeting. The votes will be tabulated after all the ballot resolutions have been considered. I will present each of the resolutions. For proposal one, the seven nominees for election to the Board of Directors who receive a plurality of the voting power of the shares present in person or represented by proxy will be elected as directors.
Proposals two and three require the affirmative vote for a majority of the voting power of the shares present in person or represented by proxy at the meeting and entitled to vote on the subject matter. Proposal number one, the first proposal to be voted on, is for the election of Glyn Aeppel, Steve Case, Catherine Ngo, Ken Ota, John Sabin, Scot Sellers, and Anthony Takatani to serve as directors of the company for a one-year term to expire at the 2025 annual meeting of stockholders or until their respective successors have been duly elected and qualified. The qualifications of each of these directors are described in the proxy statement. The Board of Directors unanimously recommends that the stockholders vote for each of the seven persons nominated.
For those of you who have not voted by proxy or if you previously voted by proxy and wish to change your vote, please mark the virtual ballot accordingly. Voting will continue until all three proposals have been presented. We will now move on to proposal two. Proposal two is to approve on a non-binding advisory basis the compensation of the company's named executive officers. The Board of Directors unanimously recommends that stockholders vote for proposal two. Again, for those of you who have not voted by proxy or if you previously voted by proxy and wish to change your vote, please mark the virtual ballot accordingly. Voting will continue until the final proposal has been presented, and we will now move on to the final proposal. Proposal three is to ratify the appointment of Accuity LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2024.
The Board of Directors unanimously recommends that stockholders vote for proposal three. Again, for those of you who have not voted by proxy or if you previously voted by proxy and wish to change your vote, please mark the virtual ballot accordingly. I will now pause to allow for any additional votes through the virtual meeting portal. Now that all three proposals have been presented, I declare the polls for each matter voted upon during this annual meeting closed at 10:07 A.M. today, May 15, 2024, and direct the inspector of election to tabulate the results. I will now ask Mr. Kodama, our inspector of election, to report the results, and please note that these results are preliminary.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. The ballots and proxies have been counted. The preliminary results are as follows: proposal one, each of Glyn Aeppel, Catherine Ngo, Stephen Case, Ken Ota, John Sabin, and Scot Sellers and Anthony Takatani have been duly elected as directors. Proposal two, the compensation of the company's named executive officers has been approved on a non-binding advisory basis. Proposal three, Accuity LLP has been ratified as the company's independent registered public accounting firm. This concludes the preliminary report of the inspector of elections.
Thank you, Mr. Kodama. The final voting results, including all votes cast today and all proxy votes received in advance of the meeting, will be filed on a Form 8-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on or before May 21, 2024. Now we will have our shareholder presentation from CEO Race Randle. There being no further business to come before the annual meeting, I thank you for your attendance and now declare the business portion of the annual meeting to be adjourned.
Welcome to the 2024 shareholder presentation for Maui Land & Pineapple Company. My name is Race Randle, Chief Executive Officer. Before I begin, I would like to note that this presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements are intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements made in this presentation, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and include statements regarding our current and long-term strategic objectives. Such statements are predictions only, and actual events or results could differ materially from those made in any forward-looking statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including assumptions about future events based on current expectations, planned business development efforts, near and long-term objectives, potential new business strategies, organization changes, changing markets, marketing efforts, future business performance, and outlook.
I refer you to the company's most recent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which contain and identify additional information covering factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements. A key goal of today's presentation is to provide our stakeholders additional information regarding our vision and strategy. With recent leadership transitions in place, we intend to increase transparency in our business operations. We hope this information and our responses to some of your questions will aid your decisions as a stakeholder in our organization. Please feel free to submit questions during this meeting by using the chat function in the virtual platform. We will do our best to address as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. I'd like to begin with a note of gratitude.
Thank you to the Board of Directors along with the Maui Land & Pineapple Team for their efforts this past year as we focused on stabilization of our Maui community following the devastating impacts of the 2023 wildfires. I'm thankful for the diverse and experienced team we have in place during this pivotal time for the community and our company as we start to revitalize our assets and build resiliency for the future. In 2023, after over a decade of efforts to stabilize the company's financial position, we emerged debt-free while retaining our prime assets. Our board, including majority shareholder Steve Case, implemented efforts to chart a new course for the company, which included the appointment of new board and management leaders experienced in large-scale and long-term master planning in real estate management.
After my transition into this role in April 2023, I spent the first months listening and engaging with stakeholders. I spent valuable time with the team, our tenants, investors, neighbors, government officials, consultants, community leaders, and others to gain an understanding of our company's and community's needs. I did a deep dive of the company's business segments, assets, entitlements, our operations, and team, coupled with an analysis of the local market. The board and I realized there was significant potential to create value from our portfolio of land and operating assets. The next key step to developing a vision, mission, and executable strategy required that we recruit a multidisciplinary team of local experts with expertise in real estate, asset management, and community building. This group of thought leaders have worked together, receiving significant feedback from community stakeholders along the way, to evaluate all aspects of Maui Land & Pineapple's business.
We reviewed the extensive portfolio of property, including surveying our commercial properties and re-engaging local experts to examine the opportunities and constraints across our 22,300 acres of land. Most importantly, we performed this effort as a team on the ground on Maui, listening and learning the critical needs of this special place and taking into account the needs made more critical due to the fires in Lahaina. With this input and assessment, we were able to create a new vision and strategic plan for Maui Land & Pineapple Company that we're excited to share with you today. Over 100 years ago, Maui Land & Pineapple Company began operations on Maui to create lasting economic, social, and environmental value. Today, we are driven by a clear vision of a future where people thrive in more resilient communities. Our mission is challenging yet simple.
We will thoughtfully maximize the productivity of our vast portfolio of prime assets to create significant value and improve the quality of life of Maui residents for generations to come. As we look at our business, it is important to note the scale and location of our assets. In West Maui, we own over 20,000 acres, stretching 10 miles from the lush mountains down to the ocean and another 10 miles along West Maui's iconic coastline from Kapalua Airport to the northern point of the island. In Upcountry Maui, we own over 1,400 acres near the historic town of Makawao and minutes from the international airport in Kahului. After a year of stakeholder meetings, community feedback, market evaluations, and understanding the scale and condition of our assets, we established an executable strategy to maximize the productivity of this vast portfolio.
This involves connecting the dots between our assets and the community needs. Because of the scale of our portfolio, we have a unique and profound ability to address housing needs, create additional job opportunities, help ensure food and water security on the island, and build renewed connections between people and place. By connecting our assets with these needs, we set the framework to activate a diverse yet interconnected portfolio of land, buildings, and infrastructure to create significant value and improve our communities for generations to come. Our ongoing strategy revolves around three primary steps as we place land into its most productive uses. Unimproved land is managed to generate revenue and meet community needs. As land is improved via master planning, entitlements, and infrastructure, it is either held, sold, or invested in joint venture projects to accelerate its construction.
Commercial properties built are managed to generate ongoing revenue and elevate the experience in our town centers. Now I'll provide a bit more detail into each stage of our work. Our unimproved land consists of over 20,000 acres, including 10,000 acres of pristine conservation land in the mountain and along the ocean, including the largest private nature preserve in the state, the Pu‘u Kukui Watershed, which provides a significant portion of the fresh water for West Maui. Stewardship of the preserve will continue, and we will be additionally pursuing stewardship arrangements with local nonprofits to help care for the bays and beaches. These efforts support water security and renewed connections for people to this special place. In addition to the conservation land, we also own approximately 10,000 acres of rich agricultural land.
While not fully improved, most of this land was irrigated and graded and actively farmed for fruit-producing croplands for decades. These agricultural lands provide significant potential for diversified economic growth and stable cash flow. The potential to put thousands of acres of fields back to productive agricultural use is high, and our land management and leasing efforts are already gearing up. We have recently begun marketing land for grazing and crops in West Maui to complement our crop leasing in Upcountry and our ecotourism and agritourism activities. The demand for locally grown and produced products is strong, along with increasing desire for agritourism and ecotourism experiences. We envision this portfolio can become a large revenue generator, creating many new jobs and increasing local food production in the coming years. To maximize the use of land for homes, businesses, farms, resort projects, or otherwise, the land must be improved.
These improvements take the form of master planning, entitlements and zoning, subdivision into useful lot sizes, and the addition of infrastructure, enabling it to be placed into productive use. When it comes to sales, our two primary methods will be business-to-business or business-to-customer. For business-to-business transactions, we plan to sell improved parcels to builders or contribute them to joint ventures and act as master developer, providing support, oversight, and expertise. In either case, ensuring what is constructed aligns and elevates surrounding assets and projects. This approach allows for us to gauge the risk-adjusted returns and choose the level of participation, if any, in the vertical development of projects. It is important to note that Hawaii permits the use of buyer deposits for vertical construction, which is typical practice in condominium projects within the state.
We also plan to pursue direct business-to-customer land sales via the delivery of improved lots to homeowners, farms, and ranches. The in-house team now has the expertise to complete the process from planning and entitlement to design, subdivision, sales, construction, and delivery of fully improved lots. As in vertical construction, it is common practice to utilize buyer deposits from lot presales to support project financing for construction and delivery. Funding for land development soft costs, if not covered by our unimproved land and commercial properties cash flow, will come from non-strategic parcel sales and our revolving line of credit. Once infrastructure and site improvements are warranted, financing will come from presale deposits and construction financing. In joint ventures, our joint venture partners are most likely to source the capital for horizontal and vertical development costs, in addition to buyer deposits and project-level financing.
Proceeds from improved land sale projects will generally require six or more years to realize. Shorter-term projects will be pursued where possible. We intend to use the proceeds from these projects and joint ventures to support the acceleration of other projects, the pursuit of additional entitlements, the potential for acquisitions, and/or shareholder dividends. Our commercial properties represent our revenue-generating finished products, which we manage to generate stable operating cash flow. This portfolio provides a reliable source of funding for ongoing team and day-to-day company operations. In addition, it is available as needed to support our line of credit or asset-level permanent financing to support other business opportunities. With over 266,000 sq ft of commercial buildings on Maui, we began 2024 with only 74% leased.
We have already increased the occupancy significantly in the past few months and anticipate cash flow from this business to increase as we further improve its occupancy, we complete the free rent periods provided to new tenants, and execute tenant improvements needed to secure top-tier tenancies. Already underway in Kapalua and in Hali‘imaile, our teams are leasing according to newly designed tenanting plans, which aim to elevate the variety and quality of experiences in our town centers. In addition to stable cash flow in a supply-constrained market, our commercial properties allow us to perform value-creating placemaking for our surrounding landholdings. Now I'd like to share some additional details on our assets in each region. West Maui is home to approximately 21,000 acres of our land and roughly half of our commercial properties.
These coastal lands surround the Kapalua Resort and sit to the north of the high-density resort area known as Ka‘anapali. Gently sloping from the mountains to the sea, these landholdings were purchased in the early 1900s initially as the Honolua Ranch, which expanded into crop production in the mid-1900s and eventually began adding homes and resort elements in the late 1900s. Historic Lahaina Town is located miles south of our location and is the area impacted by the August 2023 wildfires. In the aftermath of the tragedy, it was incredible to see how our team, partners, tenants, contractors, and the community came together. As we worked alongside partners to stabilize families in West Maui, the critical needs of our community were evident. Today, this portfolio of assets can play a significant role in creating a higher quality of life in West Maui.
Our land can provide an increased supply of housing options to address the existing need that has grown exponentially in West Maui after the fires, while also making our commercial properties available to businesses, which can create additional jobs to sustain the local economy. We are currently working to fill our vacancies with strong local businesses. In addition, the vast majority of our agricultural lands have not been in active use since pineapple operations ended in West Maui years ago. These lands can be put to productive use in their current form, creating farms and ranches to provide jobs, economic diversity, and food security on an island that imports approximately 90% of its food. Over 1,000 acres of land within Kapalua Resort is entitled for mixed use and residential development, with the potential to complete the planned build-out of the resort via new residences, lots, commercial spaces, and hospitality components.
With these entitlements in place, we are actively moving these projects forward. As mentioned previously, we will continue to steward over 10,000 acres of forest and coastal conservation lands in West Maui, connecting people to this special place and ensuring sufficient quantity and quality of water for future generations. In the town of Hali‘imaile in Upcountry Maui, we own over 1,400 acres of land. Staying true to our mission, our Upcountry assets will play a major role in elevating the quality of life in this area, improving housing supply, food security, and economic stability. Minutes from the international airport and central business district, the site sits just above thousands of acres of croplands on a gentle slope facing west with views of both coastlines.
Over 130,000 sq ft of commercial buildings on business and light industrial-zoned land allows us the chance to expand on the current experiential merchant mix and establish a thriving town center, already occupied with local businesses and makerspaces, a destination restaurant, art gallery, distillery, and agritourism experiences today. Hali‘imaile is in a designated Opportunity Zone, which adds to the desirability for new and growing brands to build a presence and attract investor capital. In this master planned community, we envision ongoing agriculture and agritourism experiences mixed among smaller farms, supporting an idyllic and convenient small-town quality of life. Currently, we have one joint venture underway with a local neighborhood builder to make improvements to 30 acres of land for lots for sale directly to customers.
Planning efforts have begun to make additional land improvements while we actively lease up our commercial spaces to build energy and vitality in the town center. Our majority shareholder and board member, Steve Case, is with us today. Having been through highs and lows over the past 20+ years and having spearheaded the change in leadership over the past year, we appreciate Steve's vision and stewardship of the company. I'd like to turn it over to Steve Case to share his thoughts on our current efforts.
Thank you, Race, and thanks to all of you for joining this call. I first became a shareholder of Maui Land & Pineapple Company two decades ago, believing that the company's landholdings could eventually be unlocked to create significant value. I join you today quite excited by the company's current potential, particularly as a result of my recent engagement in recruiting new board members and working closely with the board to bring in Scot Sellers as Chair and Race as CEO. Scot and Race already had a terrific relationship, having worked together previously in successfully developing mixed-use communities, including in Hawaii. Race, having spent most of his childhood growing up on Maui, had a longstanding passion for the island and also a proven track record in real estate. We believed Race would hit the ground running during his first year as CEO, and that has certainly been the case.
Scot, who built his career as a successful real estate CEO and continues to serve on a range of boards, works very closely with Race, and together they are focused on realizing the company's potential to deliver value to shareholders and play a pivotal role in building Maui's resiliency after last year's tragic wildfires. Over the past couple of years, I've been spending more time on MLP, including attending the quarterly board meetings in person. In fact, I just returned from spending a week on Maui, and I'm very pleased with the progress that the new management team has made over the past year. Looking forward, I see MLP as a company that can grow considerably and deliver significant upside value to shareholders.
To do so, Race and Scott continue to build a dynamic team of industry-leading professionals that have deep ties to the local community, and they are all now guided by a clear vision and an executable plan. I'm excited for what's to come as MLP positions itself to more fully capitalize on Kapalua and West Maui's potential, as well as the potential in Upcountry Maui, where MLP also has considerable landholdings. I appreciate MLP's structure as a public company, allowing anyone to become a part owner of the business. I hope that by increasing shareholder engagement, including updates like this, all stakeholders can begin to better understand the company's potential. I, like you, have been pleased to see the stock increase in value recently, and with this new leadership team in place and given the opportunities now in front of us, I believe the best is yet to come.
Thanks, Race, for your leadership and for inviting me to jump on this call. I'll now turn things back over to you and move back into listen mode. Mahalo.
Thank you, Steve. We appreciate your increased involvement and direction as we embark on this new chapter with Maui Land & Pineapple Company. We know that success and value creation will require a long-term outlook and a focus on building trust and restoring momentum in the communities we operate. We thank all our shareholders for being with us during this exciting new chapter. This presentation, along with increased communication in our releases, is part of our efforts to improve transparency for all stakeholders. We look forward to sharing more information as we advance efforts in our mission to put our land and assets into their most productive use. Mahalo.
As there were no questions submitted, this concludes our presentation. As a reminder, this recording will be available at our website at mauiland.com. Thank you for your time today. You may now disconnect from the meeting.