Mr. Mitchell: I think it's going to be a difficult year. The general take is that as long as we're talking about real estate-owning REITs, all of them, we think, are going to have lower rents. Probably the rents at the end of the year will be lower than they were at the beginning, so that the realized rents in 2011 will also be lower. And we think that vacancies are continuing to rise. Occupancies may turn around by the third or the fourth quarter of 2010, but we expect same-store NOIs to be down. And depending on the class of property we're talking about, down anywhere from around 10% to 15% to 18% in 2011 from 2008. So from the point of view of the fundamentals of the business, we think they're going to get worse. Part of that has to do with the fact that, except for the apartment REITs, everybody has long-term leases, so it takes longer for the bad news to actually get into the numbers. After that it's still a separate question about the stocks, and the stocks at this point have nothing going for them. Nobody has a lot of new development coming out, so it's not like all of the sudden they're going to increase their property base sharply because they have new developments. We think that the major factor is not going to be funds from operations, it's going to be whether or not your valuations can be kept up. We've seen the whole group just in the last couple of months go from about 12 times expected funds from operations in 2010 or 2011 to about 15 times. And that's not nose-bleed territory, but it means that interest rates really have to stay low. The spreads between cap rates and interest rates suggest that there might be some room for further valuation improvement, but I don't think it's going to be a lot.
Tickers included in this excerpt: EQR, HME, PLD, TJX, WMT
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.

