Retail Properties of America CEO Announces Acceleration of Asset Augmentation

May 29, 2019

Steven P. Grimes has served as Chief Executive Officer of Retail Properties of America, Inc. (NYSE:RPAI) since 2009 and as a Director since 2011.

Previously, Mr. Grimes was President of the company from October 2009 through May 2018; Chief Financial Officer of the company since the internalization of its management in November 2007 to December 2011; Chief Operating Officer of the company from November 2007 to October 2009; and Treasurer of the company from October 2008 to December 2011.

From February 2004 to November 2007, Mr. Grimes served as Principal Financial Officer and Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer of Inland Western Retail Real Estate Advisory Services, Inc., the REIT’s former business manager/adviser.

Previously, Mr. Grimes served as a director with Cohen Financial, a mortgage brokerage firm, and as a senior manager with Deloitte & Touche LLP in their Chicago-based real estate practice, where he was a national deputy real estate industry leader.

CEO Steven Grimes describes the re-strucuturing of his company and its future prospects, only in this 4,142 word interview:

“The final thing I’ll mention is in all of those repositioning efforts over those five years, which was a year ago now, ending in 2018, was a major improvement in our balance sheet. Our balance sheet, when you look at us back in 2013, was a bit overleveraged, and it was overleveraged on an individual asset basis, so a lot of secured loans.

What we’ve done over the course of the past five years is we have taken our leverage down over two times net debt to EBITDA, which is a metric for leverage, and we’re sitting at 5.5 times right now, which is probably one of the healthier balance sheets in the strip center space. And we have migrated away from secured financing to the tune of almost 90% of our debt is unsecured right now.

And why that’s important for us is because it allows you to be a lot more nimble at the asset level to take advantage of growth opportunities within them.

You don’t have lender approvals required or lender restrictions as to what you can be doing. So our hope was to migrate to a fully unsecured balance sheet, which essentially we’ve done, and get rated in the process, and so part and parcel to that effort, we have been rated by Moody’s and S&P. We are now an investment-grade-rated company.”

Get the complete picture on the future of this REIT exclusively from the CEO Steven Grimes in this 4,142 word interview, only in the Wall Street Transcript.