Article Excerpt:
TWST: Would you start with an overview of Commercial Net Lease Realty?Mr. Habicht: We're a real estate investment trust focused on owning, acquiring, developing and managing retail properties. We have over 400 properties located in 40 states.
TWST: In general, what kind of real estate properties?
Mr. Habicht: Typically, we're invested in freestanding, single tenant
retail properties ranging anywhere from 2,000 to 100,000 square feet,
but typically in the 10,000 to 50,000 square foot size building. They're
leased to tenants like CVS, Office Max, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and
those kinds of major national retailers, as well as some regional
retailers.
TWST: What's going on in that marketplace at this point on the real
estate side?
Mr. Habicht: It continues to do well. For the last several years, the
consumer has continued to spend, so retail sales have been good and
retailers' business has generally been good. We continue to see some
consolidation among retailers and fewer and fewer retailers in each line
of trade, which we don't necessarily view as bad. But it's clearly more
concentrated. On the real estate side of it, the retailers continue to
find the freestanding real estate format of interest to them in that
they have greater control over the property. When you're a single
tenant, you don't need to worry about adjacencies. You have more control
over some property management items, such as the frequency with which
parking lots get swept, the brightness of lights in parking lots, the
hours of store operations and all those kinds of things. The tenant has
greater control over these things in a freestanding format versus an in-
line or mall type location. For example, Barnes & Noble may want to stay
open until midnight on Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes that's
tough to do in a mall location. When you're freestanding, you just have
greater flexibility over the operation of the property.
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