Mr. Stein: We like to think of ourselves as the leading national owner, operator and developer of grocery-anchored and community centers. We own over 400 shopping centers; total leasable area under management, including tenant-owned square footage, is over 50 million square feet. Those centers are located in top markets across the country - the San Francisco Bay area, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Atlanta, key markets in Florida, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Philadelphia. We believe that our portfolio is distinguished by attractive demographics and strong retailers. The average household income in the trade areas for Regency's shopping centers is over $90,000, which is nearly 30% higher than the national average. And our quality portfolio is anchored by dominant grocers, such as Kroger, Safeway and Publix, as well as leading national retailers, such as Target. And these anchor tenants drive a significant amount of traffic into our centers. In addition, almost 80% of the portfolio is leased to national and regional retailers. And the quality of the tenant base and strength of the company's relationships, in our view, is a differentiating factor for Regency. We have this initiative called the "Premier Customer Initiative," which is our relationship-based operating system that focuses on the national, regional and local retailers that are the best operators in their merchandising category. Regency's Premier Customer Initiative really has become a model in the industry. For almost 10 years, the combination of compelling demographics and quality tenants has produced occupancy rates of approximately 95%, and average growth in net operating income of 3% per year. As a result of the recession, there was a fall-off in 2009, in both occupancy and net operating income. Our operating and development expertise continues to create value for the operating portfolio from new development opportunities. Since 2000 Regency has developed almost 200 shopping centers, representing an investment of $3 billion; 42 of these projects were under development at the end of last year, and they were about 91% funded, and over 88% leased and committed.
Another differentiating factor for the company is our self-funding capital strategy to fund our growth. As evidenced by the sale of almost $1.3 billion of assets during the last five years, we've been very proactive as far as culling non-strategic assets. These are shopping centers that don't meet our very stringent ownership criteria. Regency also has one of the industry-leading co-investment partnership programs, which is also an integral part of the strategy. Our partnerships include the State of Oregon; CalPERS, through its partnership with First Washington; CalSTRS and a new one with USAA. We had a long-standing partnership with our Australian partner, Macquarie CountryWide. The co-investment partnerships have provided reliable sources of capital for developments and acquisitions, and to meet ongoing financial commitments. At the same time, they enable the company to generate a growing stream of third-party revenue while profitably growing the portfolio. In the past eight years, capital-recycling, co-investment partnerships have enabled the company to cost effectively fund approximately $9 billion of investments.
One of the key components of our strategy is having a strong balance sheet and reliable access to capital, which these co-investment partnerships have been an integral part. As a result of our commitment to maintaining a solid financial footing, the balance sheet is in very good shape and is something that we focus on a lot.
The company was founded in 1963, and Regency went public in 1993. So this is our 17th year as a public company.
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