Article Excerpt:
TWST: Would you begin with an overview of Cedar Shopping Centers?Mr. Ullman: Cedar Shopping Centers is the successor to certain management companies that were private and date back to 1978. We had our true public offering in October 2003, when we had an offering of $172 million and were listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Our company is focused primarily on supermarket-anchored shopping centers as well as drugstore-anchored convenience properties extending over seven or eight states in the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern areas of the US. We have approximately 58 properties at this point, and we are approaching 6 million square feet in properties. Within our primarily supermarket- anchored shopping center and convenience property portfolio, we still have two different product types. One is the stable, mature properties, which at this point in our portfolio are approximately 97% leased. In addition to that, and a very important part of our story, is that we have substantial development and redevelopment capacity, history and ability in our company. Approximately 10% to 15% of our total value is found in redevelopment properties and projects where we've taken, for example, a mall property and 'de-malled' it, converting it into a power or strip shopping center, adding a great deal of value and reducing costs considerably. We are nearing completion of our first ground-up development property, a supermarket-anchored property in Hershey, Pennsylvania. We have also recycled a number of properties, eliminating a small internal mall area here and there, and also recycling former Ames stores, for example, with new tenancies and rebuilding certain portions of centers. Those types of activities have added much value to some of these properties. We look for a return on investment in the development and redevelopment portion of our portfolio, which is substantially greater than that at which we are able to acquire properties in our stabilized portfolio. Our redevelopment and development properties generally will evidence a return of 11.5% or better on our invested funds, whereas we are able to acquire properties at a considerably lesser yield than that.
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