Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is Cedar Shopping Centers?Mr. Ullman: Cedar Shopping Centers is a real estate investment trust focused on the acquisition, development, redevelopment, and commercial exploitation of primarily supermarket-anchored community shopping centers as well as drug store- anchored convenience centers in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast quadrants of the United States. Our product, now totaling 93 properties, with 9.8 million square feet of gross leasable area, represents what we would call bread and butter convenience and supermarket-anchored properties. We have a focus in very stable communities that are relatively modest growth areas, but, most important, they have stable traffic patterns. There are a lot of rooftops in our areas with demographics in perhaps the $60,000 per family median income type of level. In those areas where there is modest overall growth, we look for pockets of exceptional demographics and exceptional growth. Examples are communities such as Hershey, Carlisle, Camp Hill, Ephrata, and Trexlertown, all in Pennsylvania, where we have a number of properties. We also look in the close-in suburbs of Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Boston for some of our supermarket anchored products as well. We are a relatively fast growing company. We had what we regard as our true IPO in October 2003, at which time our company had about $300 million in assets and most of those were acquired at that public offering. Both our asset base at cost and our market capitalization are now in excess of $1.2 billion. We have just about doubled each year since we listed on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2003. Our present focus is very much on development and redevelopment in the areas where we believe we have a fairly dominant position in our type of product. In those areas, we have the ability to source and access opportunities for development at unleveraged cash yields which we target at 10%-12% coming out of the ground or through redevelopment. That, of course, is a better yield than we can achieve acquiring stabilized properties. However, we remain dedicated to acquiring stabilized properties that are strategically important in the areas in which we operate. In this regard, we have benefited recently from the stabilization of interest rates at relatively modest levels.
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