American Assets Trust, Inc (AAT) Outperforms Competitors for 6.5 Years with High-Quality Portfolio Properties

June 27, 2013

American Assets Trust, Inc (AAT) is leading its peers on a quarterly basis in same-store growth, occupancy and annualized base rents with the company’s high-quality properties in areas where barriers to entry are very high, says Robert Barton, Executive Vice President and CFO of American Assets Trust, Inc.

“On a quarterly basis, we track not only our retail occupancy, but also our annualized base rent, and what’s interesting is that you can have a high occupancy if you drop your rents, but if you have both high occupancy and high annualized base rent, this really speaks to the quality of the property. This is where people want to conduct business, shop, this is where sales are going to take place, and you can see how we continue to outperform our peers on a quarterly basis,” Barton said.

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AAT‘s retail portfolio has consistently outperformed their peers for the last 6.5 years, and Barton touts the company’s high-quality properties in areas that are difficult to build as reasons behind the AAT‘s outperformance.

“We have the Coastal Commission in California, and it makes it very difficult to get those entitlements to build. We own, for instance, Del Monte Center up in Monterey, California. There’s no way you could build that center today with all the Coastal Commission restrictions. It’s just down the street from Pebble Beach. Additionally, John just got the entitlement after 14 years fighting with the Coastal Commission to build an 80,000-square-foot office building with arguably the best office space in San Diego with unobstructed views of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a very special portfolio of properties that we often refer to as irreplaceable, and they are of very high quality,” Barton said.