Hello everybody, welcome to Citi's 2026 Global Property CEO Conference. I'm Craig Mailman with Citi Research, and we're pleased to have with us Tanger and CEO Stephen Yalof. This session is for Citi clients only, and disclosures have been made available at the corporate access desk. To ask a question, you can raise your hand or go to liveqa.com, enter code GPC26 to submit questions. Stephen, I'm gonna turn it over to you to introduce your company and team, provide any opening remarks, tell the audience the top reasons an investor should buy your stock today, and then we'll jump into Q&A.
Sounds great. Thanks, Craig. Thanks for having us here. Good morning, everybody. I'm Stephen Yalof. I'm the President and CEO of Tanger, and I'm here today with Michael Bilerman, who's our CFO and Chief Investment Officer, Doug McDonald, who's our SVP and Treasurer, and Ashley Curtis, who is on our investor relations team. Tanger is a leading owner and operator of outlet and open-air retail shopping destinations with 45 years of expertise in the retail and outlet shopping industries. We've been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 1993. Today, we have 41 centers across the U.S. and Canada, comprised of 38 outlet centers and three open-air lifestyle centers. We have over 3,000 different stores in our portfolio and over 800 brand name retailers.
Tanger delivered another quarter of really strong results, capping off a productive year and positioning us for continued growth. Our differentiated and best-class leasing, operating, and marketing platform is powering our ability to drive sustained growth across our portfolio. We're supported by limited new retail development and consolidation of the department store business in a favorable demographic and economic trends in the markets and communities that we serve. We're executing across all facets of our business, including record-breaking leasing production this year at over 3 million sq ft, an accretive integration of our recent acquisitions in Little Rock, Cleveland, and Kansas City. Disciplined expense management across our enterprise, which contributed to core FFO growth this year of 9.4% and Same Center NOI growth of 4.3% for the full year.
We've also strengthened our balance sheet by completing several financing transactions in January, which I would say that our Georgia Bulldogs did an unbelievable job. I'd say that that transaction is a MIT meets HBS case study in how to refinance your balance sheet. It addressed upcoming bond maturities, strengthened our liquidity position, and mitigated our refinancing costs. Our well-positioned balance sheet now provides us the flexibility to reinvest in retenanting and our existing portfolio and align our assets with the growing opportunities in our markets while pursuing selective growth across the country. Craig, you asked us for our top reasons why investors should buy our stock. I think number one is sort of a positive macroeconomic trend. Obviously, very little retail real estate being built across the country right now.
Coupled with that, department store consolidation, I think our retailer partners are looking for growth, and we're a great place for them to come. Second, there's a significant value creation opportunity through Tanger's leasing. You know, our operating and marketing platform, and I think we're doing a really good job of marketing to market our real estate and bringing in better, best quality retailers that drive better sales performance on a per square foot basis and attract more people to our shopping centers. Third is the attractive financial profile. We're low leveraged, we're liquid, we have a flexible balance sheet, we have great access to capital that gives us opportunity to continue to grow our platform, which is a real big focus of ours, particularly going into 2026.
We've got a great management team, I think, that's focused on driving sustained growth for our shareholders. I guess with that, I'll hand it back to you.
Great. Thanks, Stephen. You mentioned you guys have had really good momentum here on the leasing front, driving better pricing, merchandising. Just kind of curious how the pipeline looks for the next quarter or two from, you know, addressing expirations, hitting temp space, and the remerchandising that you're doing? Also, you can hit on L egends. I know that's a multi-parter, but take it, deconstruct it as you wish.
I will. You know, look, I think there's a lot of things that are giving us a great tailwind going into 2026. You know, I talked about the contraction of the department store business. Particularly in the off-price business, a lot of our brands are merchants that principally sell in the wholesale channels. When that contracts, those brands are looking for places to replace some of that opportunity. They find that particularly in our, in our channel.
You know, second of all, the big demographic shift of folks from, you know, outlet shopping centers that we've built over 25 years ago were built two and three concentric ring roads out because it was incumbent on those shopping centers to be far enough away from full price retail or permanent population bases because, you know, the brands wanted their consumers to shop their full price channels. What's since happened, and I think COVID really pushed a lot of this, is that folks started to move closer to where our shopping centers are. Places like Daytona, Florida, Savannah, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina. We're seeing huge population shift and big population boom, and that permanent population is driving seven day a week business into our centers.
Using that as an influence, we've gone ahead and we've re-leased a number of our centers to bring in other uses. whether they're service-oriented uses, better food and beverage, entertainment, things that cater to that seven day a week population that we typically didn't see in some of those geographies when they were originally bought. For us, what that does is in a 400,000 sq ft shopping center, if we dedicate a percentage of that retail space to alternative uses, really densifies that retail, the core retail offering, which makes the space a lot more valuable. Over the past four or five years, we've decreased our renewals from 95% of the annual roll down to 80% of the annual roll. We did so for a number of reasons.
First of all, you know, we've recognized that in order for us to encourage a younger and newer consumer to come into our centers, it's important that we bring the brands that they want. We've done a really good job of flowing the new brands and flowing newness into our centers and creating positive energy across our portfolio, but more importantly, the brands the younger consumer desires, because it's important for them, it's important for us to make sure that we're catering to what it is that they're looking for. They like to shop in store, and we wanna make sure that we've got the stores they want when they come and they visit us.
You know, similarly, we found that our ability to retenant or bring in new tenants, we've gotten significant growth in our rents, and you see that in our NOI performance. We'll renew. Most retailers don't wanna give up spaces. Obviously, we're in a retail challenged environment. There's not a lot of newness, not a lot of new retail centers being delivered into the marketplace. A retailer that has a cash flowing store that's fully amortized, last thing they wanna do is replace it.
Well, for us, we have to make some tough decisions, and, you know, those decisions really pay off when we take an older retailer that stopped investing in their brand and replace them with one that and, you know, that's investing in their brand, that's growing retail, that has a sales performance per square foot, that continues to grow and drives a lot of customers and newness into our centers.
Maybe an update on where you are with Legends. I know you haven't owned it that long. It's a big center. Maybe set expectations about the time it's gonna take to really bring it up to what you underwrote and where you are in the progress so far.
We bought the Legends asset in Kansas City on the Kansas side of the Kansas City market. You know, we brought that, you know, into our portfolio this year. My history, I worked on the retailer side for a substantial portion of my career, and, you know, I put a number of brands in Legends when I was on the tenant side. It's a shopping center I always believed in, but it was always a core outlet type shopping center. Now that the Village West market where that center exists has really come to life with all the, you know, between Kansas Speedway and the Minor League Baseball stadium and the hotels that are popping up, the residential development, Mattel is under construction to put a new theme park.
It really has become quite the destination. That center in our hands, I think is going to have a lot of long-term sustained growth over time, principally because there were a number of retailers that were never in that center. I think, you know, when a non-outlet specific developer or property owner manages a property, there are certain things they don't think about that we think about because of our scale, because of our marketing ability, and just how we understand the outlet business.
It's not uncommon for a retailer to say to us, "Hey, if that's something that you owned, yeah, that'd be something that we'd be interested in leasing space and coming and joining you." You know, obviously the last major shot in the arm is, you know, the Kansas City Chiefs who are looking to replace Arrowhead with a more modern stadium, picked that Village West market where we have our center and said, "Hey, that's where they're going to invest and put that stadium."
I think that's gonna be another great growth driver for us over time, and we're extraordinarily optimistic in our ability to continue to drive rents, perhaps hybrid that center in a way that brings in non-conventional outlet retail, but adds another retailers into the marketplace as that consumer that starts to, you know, sort of work, live, and play in that marketplace wants to come and shop us more frequently.
Do you guys have more of an operating kind of model than some of the other retail peers? You have more akin to a mall, but it's crossover with the open air guys, right? You've talked in the past about, you know, Tanger Club Loyalty.
The rebranding of that and some digital initiatives you're doing. You know, one of the themes you talked about a lot is with AI, right? How are you guys trying to tie in either Agentic Commerce or smarter marketing campaigns with some of these people where it feels like you have a real opportunity to drive traffic. Where are we in your evolution of that? Where are we in the technology to do that? How big do you think the opportunity could be for you guys?
You know, look, you I would say about, you know, 10% of the customers that shop us a year, we've got information on them that they've opted into either our TangerClub or our Tanger Loyalty program. It was somewhere around 12 million people. I think that that's a really good cohort of individuals that we can market to. You know, one of my biggest pet peeves is when I am inundated with emails that have absolutely no bearing on my life whatsoever. It gives me great joy to just delete them without reading them. You know, my whole feeling with my email and marketing team is: How do we send out bespoke emails that speak to our consumer base. So we train them to open the emails and not get that great joy when they delete them.
I think AI is really gonna be able to help us because, you know, if we know that Craig Mailman is one of our customers in our loyalty program, and his favorite three brands are Under Armour, Nike, and Ralph Lauren, I'm not gonna send him Le Creuset offers because if I do, he's not gonna open that email. If I consistently send him offers to brands that I know that he wants to shop, and there's value in the messaging, and every time he opens it, I know that, you know, I'll know when he opens, he's opted into my program. More importantly, if I send you a digital coupon that you put in your wallet and you come into my center, I know when you're there, and when you use that coupon, it's attributable.
I'm able to now use the data that I sent you something, you used that, and then I was able to attribute that to a sale. I know what works for you. I think that AI is really helping us far more rapidly create the marketing, the artwork that goes with that, and then, you know, with great speed, make sure that you and the similar cohort to you know, I'm sure of that 12 million people, there's probably a number of people that fit in that same grouping. We can market specifically to you, get that bespoke email out to you, and make sure that we get you into our shopping center. Our retailers... You know, in the outlet space, and I think this is a really important part of the storyline.
In the outlet space, the retailers don't spend a lot of their marketing capital to tell the consumer to come to outlet. That's just they don't. They wanna get their consumer to go to their full-price stores. They give us a marketing budget to go out and do that marketing for them. We're putting those marketing dollars to great use to drive traffic. You see it in our traffic increase numbers, you see it in our sales performance, and ultimately, you see it in our same center growth.
It feels hard to quantify, but clearly foot traffic leads to sales, which leads to higher rents for you guys. I mean, how do you measure the success of the ROI on some of these initiatives to tell you this is where we need to go deeper, this didn't really work r ight?
Well, look, digital marketing has gone a long way in making your marketing spend attributable, right? You know when I send something to you and you come back in and you scan it, I know that you're there. We know what's working, you know, and what's not working. I would say that's probably 30%-40% of our marketing initiatives have some sort of attribution attached to them. You know, I think that that's only gonna get better and greater in time, and I think AI is definitely gonna support that. You know, that's kinda how I think about that.
What partners are you guys using? I guess, this goes beyond just the digital marketing. Internally, kind of how are you guys looking at it from either an efficiency standpoint on reporting or however, you know, you guys feel it could, it could help Tanger on the kind of efficiency side of things?
Yeah. I mean, you know, what I'm sharing with you externally is really how we're using it in our marketing initiatives, and that's not where. That's a very outwardly facing piece that's easy to talk about. You know, we also use chatbots, and we're using a program called Yellow.ai. It's, you know, one of our big partners, a vendor partner of ours. You know, we use them for customer service. Our customer service is facilitated presently with a back-of-house group of folks that, you know, sit in a room and field phone calls when consumers call us or, you know, text us or email us during the course of the day with questions, problems, things.
Our AI, which is now multilingual, and that's this year, is able to facilitate over half of those interactions. This, If AI will start with all of the interactions, if they can't get through, then they'll go to a real live, living, breathing person during the operating hours of the center. I think that's a real breakthrough for us, and I think it's really helping us in a way that, you know, customers are starting to become a little bit more comfortable, interacting. From a back-house point of view, I mean, you know, obviously, the things that we're able to do from a research point of view, the information that's available to us, the speed at which we're able to process and deposit both payments and receivables, I think is really gonna help us.
You know, look, when you're talking about 3,000 stores paying you rent, the faster you can process and put that money to work for you know, the better off the company is.
How effective are you guys able to do it on the leasing side with documentation or legal? Where you do have a lot of leases, right? That's a lot of paperwork f or your folks.
Yeah. I think it's made our legal team a lot smarter and a lot more efficient, that's for sure. You know, I, you know, look at the Saks leases as just an example. You know, we all know what's going on with Saks right now. For us, you know, there's a lot of lease processing that needs to happen. We wanna make sure we understand each of the use clauses because if there's a sale of a Saks lease, we wanna make sure that we have the right. You know, in which leases do we have the right to challenge a potential user and others? You know, where can we work with a potential user so that we can make sure that we've, you know, we see some upside in some of those transactions.
It's one of those things that, you know, might have taken us two or three weeks to process, and we're able to put that together in relatively short order.
You mentioned Michael and Doug's execution on the balance sheet side. That obviously helped fund the plan, pay down debt, maturity's coming up. As you guys look at what the available capacity you have internally for external opportunities is, what does the pipeline look like? What is the appetite for additional investment? When you are digesting things like Legends, which is a big asset with some capital needs? How much do you want on your plate of maybe some unstabilized or more needing remerchandising versus some kind of more stabilized lifestyle or something else that's.
You know what, I'll give you the sort of the tip of the iceberg, then I'll hand it off to Michael and Doug, who can take you through a little bit more, you know, in detail, just our capacity. Look, you know, for us, we think we can add a lot of value. We're an operating company. I, you know, and, you know, we're shopping center owners that have great skill at leasing, marketing, and, you know, operating our properties. We think we can put that to work at a tremendous amount of property types across, you know, across our channel. Outlet, obviously, you know, we're built for outlet. It's something that we can specialize in. I think an outlet company can, with very little friction, get into the lifestyle business as we have.
I think that those folks in the lifestyle business, there's a lot more friction getting into outlet because the marketing muscle is so critically important, particularly in the outlet side of the business. We're presently evaluating. There's not that many outlet centers that aren't either owned by us or, you know, one of our competitors. Because of that, you know, the population of existing outlets today isn't so grand that that's going to give us, you know, what we would consider enough runway to continue to build our portfolio. Hence, you know, our, you know, moving into that full-price lifestyle center, which we think is right up our alley. You know, Michael's the Chief Investment Officer, so it's something that's very near and dear to him.
I'll kind of turn it over to him to give you a little bit more of an update on how that's going.
Am I on? Is this thing on? Can you hear me now? I was just gonna ask you all the questions. I thought that would be more fun.
Go ahead.
We'll let them-.
Fire away then.
From a capacity standpoint, we'll start with that because we're at 4.7x Debt-to-EBITDA today, which is almost a turn lower than we were five years ago. We've been able to grow, you know, compound annual FFO of 7.5% for the last four years, yet delever in the process. We feel relative to our targets of 5x-6x, we have some capacity to lever up. The second point is we will constantly delever because of the way we're set up from a financial profile perspective, where we're retaining $80 million-$100 million of free cash flow a year. Why is that so substantial? It's because our CapEx, as a percentage of our NOI, is much lower than our retail peers.
We operate today about 15% CapEx as a percentage of NOI. Our peers are 20%-30%. For every $ of NOI, we're keeping $0.85. Our dividend today is set at about 60% of FFO. Of AFFO, we're retaining 40% of that higher cash flow. We continue to see strong EBITDA growth. We have $1.1 billion of capacity today, which is $300 million of cash, $150 million that we have available under delayed draws for the term loan. We have access to $150 that we're not diluting shareholders today with. We have a full untapped line of credit. Nothing about the recent deals gives us any pause about doing other deals.
If anything, the success that we've had across the three outlets that we've bought and one outlet that we developed in the three lifestyle centers has demonstrated to us the value of the platform that we've created. That's where we feel that we can lean in and find opportunities where we can drive leasing, drive efficiencies in operating, and really leverage this marketing platform that we have. You know, we'll continue to work on things both off-market as well as on-market and be very disciplined with that capital allocation because our view is, you know, we can't control the stock price. All we can control is the decisions we make to allocate capital, how we manage our balance sheet, and then how we asset manage and operate.
We feel that we've built a very competitive operating platform that is very attractive to other owners, to bring us in for ability to operate as well as bring capital. We think that provides a lot of opportunity for us in the future.
Stephen, I want to circle back to the balance sheet in a second, but you had mentioned there's not a lot of outlets that either you or your peer don't own, right? Like, is it less than 10? Like, how should we think about that opportunity versus how lifestyle could trend over time as a percent of the portfolio?
Yeah, look, as the markets continue to pivot and change and geographies continue to shift, things that we might have passed on three years ago might be things that become interesting again to us in three years. You know, it's probably a fungible number, probably less than 20, I would be comfortable saying. You know, the economics of building right now don't make sense when you can buy for 40 cents on the dollar. We're gonna be seeking acquisition opportunities over land and development opportunities. Doesn't mean we're gonna not pursue a development opportunity should something have the economics that we could substantiate moving forward. You know, for us. We've built a pretty good operating team, and I think that we add value. The projects that we'll choose to pursue will be those that we can add value.
Michael, going back to the balance sheet quickly. I know when you guys bought Legends, there was an encumbrance there that becomes pre-payable. What's the plan there? Kind of what's the earnings power, especially as debt spreads for REITs have kind of compressed here?
Raising the capital that we did, I said $300 million on the cash, and we have $150 million on delayed draw. That matches up pretty much perfectly with the $350 million bonds in September. The Kansas City mortgage has a November 27 maturity that opens up for prepayment with no penalty this November. The cash rate on that CMBS was 7.57. We marked that to market on a GAAP basis at 6%. You know, our intent is to unsecure, pay off the mortgage, and use our unsecured capacity that is, you know, if we think about the term loan capital, it's about 100 basis points over SOFR. We have swaps in place that effectively fix that debt in probably the mid-4s.
We'll see, as we think about 2027, just that benefit from that refinancing. The only piece of debt that we have to refinance is gonna be the July 2027 bonds, which are $300 million at just under 4%. We have nothing until 2030. We're in this really good spot right now over the next four years to continue to grow our NOI because our rents are still low relative to the tenant sales at 9.7%. We think that there's a tremendous opportunity to continue to upgrade the tenant mix with higher productive tenants that therefore pay us higher rents at the same occupancy cost. We continue to find ways to manage our operating expenses.
If we have the ability over the next few years to accretively deploy this capacity that not only we have today, but that we'll continue to build each year, we don't have a deleveraging plan. We have a leveraging up plan, to take all of this capacity and hopefully be able to deploy it in attractive opportunities. Because we are not, we don't need a market presence because of the way we operate with boots on the ground at every one of our assets and a national platform, we can go to a lot of places that others can't that would be very synergistic with our current portfolio.
That's helpful. Any questions in the audience? No.
Circling back to your fundamentals a bit, Michael, you just noted the OCR is still around 9.7%. I think over the last couple of years, you guys have said over time, depending on the asset, you get somewhere to 10-12 would be a pretty good bogey. Even with the rent spreads that you guys have been pushing through, you're still a little bit a ways from even 10% at the low end. Just kind of curious, as you are remerchandising, you are improving sales per square foot, how quickly can you get there? Is this just runway we should think about for the next several years that gets you that premium same store that you guys have been posting, premium FFO growth you guys have been posting?
Is this algorithm just sustainable because of you guys are constantly chasing rent higher because of what you're doing on the ground?
You know, interestingly, you know, the way that math works is if somebody does $500 a square foot and pays us $50, they're at a 10% OCR. That same retailer does $600 a square foot and pays us $60, we're still at a 10 OCR. You know, the metrics kind of work. You know, they're a little wonky the way the metrics work. We can maintain a flat OCR, but in a sales improving environment, we continue to drive additional NOI.
It's been, you know, when we first sat down together at the first, I guess Michael was on that side of the room at the time, you know, we were at about 8% OCR and, you know, it's taken us about five years to get up 150-160 basis points. I think there's a lot of runway. With that came a lot of expansion in our sales performance. We were, you know, at 8%, but at $385 a sq ft. Now we're at 9.7% at $475 a sq ft.
I just think that, you know, if we maintain that 9.7 or approach 10 in a sales increasing environment, I think we definitely achieve what it is that we're looking to achieve, and that's, you know, Same Center NOI growth across our portfolio.
This doesn't even necessarily take into account. You guys are running closer to 10% temporary tenants, right? Which we've talked about is, you know, historically, maybe you were five. It's a little bit strategic what you guys are doing. It's not just the quality has frictional vacancy. Those tenants are paying, you know, a third or I guess to go full price, you're 3 to 4x what your temp guys are paying.
Look, short-term tenancy takes on a number of different forms in our portfolio. You know, what you're referencing is, like, sort of the mom and pop tenants that fill frictional vacancy, very short-term leases. They're the cheapest. The lease that has the least amount of lease rights is the cheapest lease in your portfolio. That's one where we have the right to terminate or move a tenant on 30 days written notice, right? The most expensive leases in your portfolio are gonna be the ones that only wanna be open seasonally during the high season. Those are the most expensive leases you'll have. You've got short-term leases that run the gamut from the cheapest to the most expensive. We also use short-term leases and experiment. You know, outlet is...
You know, there's many barriers of entry for retailers to enter the outlet space because, you know, they don't know if they're gonna have enough excess inventory to sign a 10-year lease. Many retailers wanna try before they buy, so we engage them in our pop-up strategy. We're often asked, "Well, how much of your short-term tenants are gonna convert to long-term tenants?" Most of our pop-ups do, because once they get a taste of the traffic, the buying power, the... You know, that we've got a, a shopper base that is, you know, looking to, sort of buy into these brands that they love at a low price point, but get traded up throughout the brand's ecosystem. I think there's a number of reasons why retailers wanna be in that outlet space.
I think then the core, you know, vacancy over time, we find that we can replace some of those, some of those, short-term leases. Usually, there's three to four times the value.
Yeah. I was getting at your sales per square foot are skewed lower because you have this 10% that. maybe less productive.
Look, I think the aspirational shopper that shops our centers, you know, finds great opportunity to come in and engage with retailers across our portfolio at a great going-in price point. I think that's a really important part of our story. When we get retailers that wanna come in, you know, like, I'll give you a great example. You know, we'll use Lululemon as an example.
They've got a number of stores across our portfolio, particularly in the outlet space, all of which they sell excess inventory. That's their model in the outlet space. When they open up a store, a new store with us, it's always going to be a short-term lease because they wanna make sure that that market can support a full-term deal. We have a very high hit rate of converting Lululemons from short-term to permanent. That's, you know, that's an important part of their strategy. We embrace it because, you know, we want them to be successful. We know the conversion rate's really high.
We're running out of time, but I wanna quickly ask because Agentic Commerce has been a big talking point with retail. You guys obviously sit at a different value proposition in retail with a different consumer base. I'm kind of curious how, you know, you see this trend impacting maybe your lifestyle centers, but also the outlet business.
Look, you know, I talked about earlier just, you know, the Agentic Commerce for us is, you know, it's how the consumer is going to engage product. You know, at the end of the day, whether they're using their AI agent to say, "I'm going to a wedding that's, you know, casual chic," and you don't know what casual chic is, and they come back and tell you what you're supposed to wear. You know, will they tell you to go shop at Tanger? I mean, one day, I think that that's probably gonna be something that we're gonna see.
Where can I buy that outfit closest to me? Where can I buy that outfit for the least amount of money? You know, I think that over time, we're probably going to see some of that information shared directionally. I don't think we're quite there yet. You know, we're gonna continue to engage. We're gonna stay very, very close to it. If there's an opportunity to ultimately monetize, we're gonna be... That's something that we're gonna invest in. We're gonna make sure that we're sitting in the front row.
Perfect. Rapid fires here. Same store live for the retail group next year.
Three to three and a half.
More, fewer, the same amount of companies in your space this time next year?
Fewer.
Favorite song on your playlist?
How Do You Like Me Now?!
All right, great. Well, thank you guys so much.
I would've said Scarlet Begonias, but that's it.
Great. Thank you, guys.