Navigating Retail's "Big Black Cloud"

Amidst all the closings and bankruptcies of 2017, Grimes says, “RPAI was impacted in a way that would improve the credit profile of our tenancy.”

OAK BROOK, IL—Over the past few years, GlobeSt.com has provided exclusive coverage of the progress retail REIT RPAI has been making on its 10-year strategic plan. Along the way, we recorded the cutback in that timeframe—by more than half—as the REIT aggressively pursued its goals. Good thing, says Steven P. Grimes, RPAI’s president and CEO. As he explains in this interview, the market might not allow such success today.

GlobeSt.com: You’ve got a major milestone approaching. Catch us up on the coming completion of the strategic plan.

Steven P. Grimes: We became public in April of 2012, and in 2013 we announced what was then a 10-year plan to recycle out of 90-plus markets to roughly 10, while remaining the same size—three to five million square feet per market. We made great progress, and by September of 2016, we had reduced the portfolio down to 50 markets and expected the plan to be complete by the end of ’18. We stated one goal was to sell $1.5 billion of remaining assets and acquire $850 million over the next two years.

But at the beginning of this year, we began to see some risk in the market. As a result, we accelerated as much of the dispositions as we could. In Q3 of this year, we announced that we would roughly be complete by the end of February 2018. Between now and then, we have approximately $320 million to close of the remaining $1.1 billion in asset sales. That puts us once again ahead of our own expectations.