Good afternoon. Ooh, that was loud. I'm Scott Kingsmore, the Senior Executive Vice President, CFO at Macerich. I know you'll do some introductions here shortly, but it'll be a bit redundant. Jackson Hsieh is to my left, Doug Healey is to my right, and Floris will introduce them in a little bit more fulsome manner. Just a quick introduction, Macerich has been a public company since 1994. In fact, just rang the bell on the stock exchange in March to celebrate our thirtieth anniversary. Concurrent with that thirtieth anniversary, we have new leadership with Jackson Hsieh, and we'll be talking extensively about our new business plan and strategy over the course of the next half an hour. Today, our portfolio is represented by about 43 Class A retail properties, about 47 million sq ft. Our footprint is predominantly bicoastal, California, Eastern Seaboard, ranging from New York up through Metro DC, and then we have a very significant presence in the Phoenix marketplace as well. Again, under new leadership, we've got a very specific and strategic plan to primarily focused on optimizing our portfolio, so you'll see us being net dispositive over the next couple of years in terms of manicuring our portfolio and recycling capital, with a very keen focus also on de-levering our balance sheet. Ultimately, the goal is to put our balance sheet in a position where we can be very offensive, continue to consolidate what today is the most consolidated commercial real estate sector out there, the Class A mall space. And we envision ourselves in the next few years really playing an important role at acquiring properties from institutional owners today that are in private hands, or consolidating our existing ownership interests from joint ventures into wholly owned assets. So that's really the ultimate goal. We have unveiled that plan most recently, two weeks ago, the Path Forward strategy. It's available on our website, and like I said, we're gonna spend the next 29 minutes and 27 seconds speaking about it. So, Floris, to you. Yeah. Thanks, Scott. So, just by way of introduction, Jackson Hsieh, just to my right, started this year. Career as a banker at Morgan Stanley, worked at -- was CEO of Spirit, sold that company, and has now freed space to create some value here at Macerich. Obviously, Scott, who has been at Macerich for a long time, I think he started in 1996. Prior to that, he worked at Westfield America and also at PwC. To his right, Doug Healey, who is the EVP of Leasing, joined Macerich through a predecessor company, Wilmorite, which was acquired in 1991. When Macerich acquired Wilmorite, it gained access to such assets like Tysons Corner, Danbury Fair, and Freehold Raceway, which are still on the portfolio today and are still drivers of growth going forward. I've been the lone, sort of, you know, positive voice in the mall industry for the last three years. So, I feel honored to be introducing this company. I think I'm still the only one who recommends this. Part of you guys are here because you want to learn about the business, but it's also about, frankly, making money, right? You are in the business of making money. I believe I'm a big believer that buying mall shares and buying Macerich shares allows you to make money and outperform the overall market. Certainly, that has been the case over the last couple of years. Macerich shares have been on a tear, but they still trade at really discounted levels. The mall sector itself is trading at a 33% discount to the overall REIT market. Growth for the malls, underlying growth is going to be in excess of the overall REIT sector, and here we have a company that's trading at a significant discount to the mall sector. And so that's why I think it's important for you guys to listen to what these guys have to talk about the business, because hopefully that'll convince you that you can make money owning their shares as well. Let me talk about the business here, the Path Forward. Part of that presentation that you put out talked about ranking the assets. Maybe could you talk a little bit more about how you rank and look at the portfolio? And, Jack, maybe about what kind of discipline you're instilling into the business. So I'd say, you know, the first, when I first started, which was about 90 days ago, you know, the first couple of weeks, we had a chance to get our leadership team together here in New York, actually, when we did our bell ringing down to New York Stock Exchange. And, purposely, we had a strategy session for a couple of days, really trying to get on the same page first on: What is our mission statement? And our mission statement simply is to own and operate thriving retail centers that bring our community together and drive shareholder return for our partners, shareholders, and, you know, our, our other constituents and our partners. Very simple. It's not densification, it's not doing development, it's just great, thriving retail centers. Next step was corporate values. Some of the success that we had at Spirit was trying to get, obviously, a big restructuring done, but to create and instill corporate values that really resonated and helped us outperform during my years running that company. At Macerich, while I think it's a fine company, it just really didn't have corporate values. That was early on, one of the important things to put in place. Next was the ranking piece. T hat served us very well at Spirit to come up with a very sophisticated ranking system. When I got to Macerich, it was all about sales per square foot. I was like: Okay, but how do you compare a $100 million center versus one that does a $1 billion? They're not the same. How do you compare a center that has 3 million annual visitors versus 20? They're not exactly the same. How do you look at competition? How do you look at trade area dynamic? How do you look at your relationship with Citi? What's your position with vacant anchors? How competitive are you vis-à-vis the best center in the market? Sort of simple, right? Intuitive things. Well, what we did was we actually put numeric rankings on those, weighted them, and actually re-ranked our portfolio very early on, when I started. Some centers that were highly ranked by us, quite honestly, were not thriving in my opinion. Case in point, Santa Monica Place was one of those assets where very quickly, we determined that that's an asset that we're not going to be able to fulfill to its highest potential. Needless to say, we put a lot of capital into that asset. But there were other centers that we felt could be out-positioning the competition, like Arrowhead was a great example of one where, in the next 10 years, that could be as successful as Scottsdale Fashion Place, given what's happening in North Phoenix, with the Taiwan Semiconductor commitment that's going on up there. So Kierland and Arrowhead are prime examples where we're gonna try to double down and reinvest into those to take market share. So it came to be really simple: come up with a ranking, come up with values, come up with a mission statement, and then come up with a strategy on this Path Forward. Not all assets are savable in our portfolio, so the best thing we could do is give it back to a lender, try to monetize it, you know, or in effect, bleed it out. And that's basically what we're doing right now. We're gonna be left with a core group of 30 very outstanding shopping centers when we're done with this process and, hopefully be poised to add more property going forward. You have 14 of those assets are qualified as Eddies. Maybe explain to the audience what an Eddie means, and how many of those Eddies do you think are gonna be in Macerich ownership in 3-5 years' time? I would say, like, first of all, I don't think all the Eddies will leave. We could be sort of sitting with maybe five or six when we're done with the plan. But generally, what an Eddie means is, it's in effect a center that's been out-positioned vis-à-vis the competition. I can think of one of those centers, which prior to me coming, was one of the prime redevelopment candidates. Westfield made a major investment in a competing center and basically crushed us and crushed any opportunity to redefine it as a true shopping center. So we'll monetize that center. It'll be bought by a developer. That developer will probably have some component of residential, which it's zoned for, as well as probably a smaller shopping center. But for us i t's in a very good trade area, you know, but once again, losing out to competition. W hen you look at it, you'd say, "That's a pretty good center," but in our estimation, given the debt that's on it, given the amount of capital it's gonna take to truly bring it back to what I'd call a thriving center, it's not really for us. So, but there are pockets of capital that want to pursue those kinds of opportunities. There's other Eddie-category assets that are just over-levered. Low debt yield, not a clear path to be a thriving center, in my opinion, and so we will continue to draw cash flow until that loan comes due and give it back. And that's just, you know. There's unfortunately, we have not. We'll start to become more transparent on what this list looks like. But obviously, you know, we wanna continue to kind of move through our dispositions as we go through it. But I think what you'll see us do is continue to put more disclosure out as we make progress on dispositions, make progress on identifying assets that are going back to lenders, so that it's very transparent and clear to everyone. Maybe, deleveraging is a big part of the story. You mentioned, in your presentation, there are three paths to it. You know, NOI growth, sales, and hand backs are gonna be the primary drivers, potentially some potential opportunistic equity issuance as well. But maybe talk about the NOI growth, because that's gonna be the biggest driver. And maybe talk about the the SNO pipeline and how that's driving the, the growth going forward. Sure, I'll take that, Floris. So we, you know, over the last 3 years, we've fortunately dealt with just an extremely robust leasing environment. In 2023, in fact, we had our strongest leasing volume year in our company's 30-year history, and that trailed 2022 and 2021, which were fantastic leasing years. So, as a result, we've been able to amass a very impactful lease pipeline for new stores that are signed but not yet open, and it takes anywhere from, you know, 12-24 months to open up a store for the retailer to get permitted, to operationalize the store, fit it into their distribution scheme, and ultimately open and start paying rent. So, what we've seen as a result of this demand is that pipeline has continued to grow over the last several quarters that we've been measuring it. So, our view today is that pipeline will continue to grow. And in fact, we just rolled up the numbers recently, and not only are we surpassing this year where we were last year in terms of signed deal activity, we've also surpassed it in terms of the deals that we review every two weeks. Those are the deals that ultimately go into documentation and get signed, but both in terms of leasing volume, square footage, number of deals, we're surpassing where we were last year. So our view is that pipeline is ultimately going to lead to internal growth, which will be a very important de-levering, organic de-levering, tool for us. As we look elsewhere in the portfolio in terms of NOI growth, we've highlighted in our Path Forward presentation the six-pack of eastern assets, and these are really fine assets. In fact, three of the six happen to be our fortress assets: Tysons Corner, Queens Center, Green Acres. But there's also three other assets, Kings Plaza here in Brooklyn, Danbury Fair in Connecticut, Freehold Raceway in New Jersey, and each one of these assets has something unique going on. In many cases, we've taken space offline, such as at Queens Center, where we've taken over 100,000 sq ft of space offline, with new uses coming: Zara, which is open now; Primark, H&M. And these are high-rent-paying spaces, and so in the interim, it's been very disruptive to NOI. But obviously, you know, once you get those spaces online, traffic picks up, and you've got, you've got great cash flow. So, we've lost anchors in some cases. Some cases proactively, we've acquired anchors back. But I would say in all cases for those six assets, we have plans in place that have either been executed or in the process of being executed, or deals are in documentation. So our view is that from that very powerful collection of six assets here on the Eastern Seaboard, we should see over the next four years, roughly 25% NOI growth. We're calling it $65 million of NOI growth amongst those six assets, so we feel very bullish about our positioning on the East Coast. Elsewhere, Scottsdale is absolutely on fire for us. Scottsdale Fashion Square is a flagship property, a trophy fortress asset for us. Our luxury leasing continues to be extremely robust. I wish I could announce a name that we just committed to lease, but we will as soon as we can. But this is a luxury expansion that will be anchored by the likes of Hermès and other very prominent international luxury names. It will have a very high-end F&B, food and beverage, offerings, which will include Catch, Élephante, Din Tai Fung, and others. Scottsdale seems to not have a ceiling in terms of market rent. We keep pushing the envelope successfully there. We're also looking at other assets like the Portland market, Washington Square, which is in suburban Tigard in Portland. We've got a great opportunity to capitalize on what's happening in the downtown Portland market, where retailers are exiting downtown Portland due to conditions that are unsustainable there. So we've got a great opportunity to consolidate there. Broadway Plaza, great growing asset. We continue to add very prominent flagship uses and are optimistic we'll be able to announce more later this year. The list goes on and on, but we look at our portfolio, again, highly dense demographics, very affluent demographics, and there's really a significant amount of opportunity. I think fundamentally, what we've done in the last few weeks has just helped to prioritize where our energy is and where our capital allocation's gonna go, and that view is very crystallized now. So we look forward to it, and I think what we've underwritten, which is effectively 2.5%-3% same-center NOI growth, is very achievable, very achievable. Maybe if you can talk a little bit about the luxury expansion possibilities within the portfolio, and, Doug, maybe if you wanna comment on how many of your assets are suitable for luxury, and how much of potential demand could you see going forward in three to five years' time from that segment? Well, as Scott alluded to, Scottsdale is our primary luxury asset. And it was so successful. As you recall, we re-leased the Neiman Marcus wing to a global luxury. That was so successful, we ran out of space. We're doing the same thing now in the Nordstrom wing, and Scott mentioned the bellwether tenant there is Hermès, and we've had a lot of success. I think we're over 80% committed right now, and that's all luxury. So Scottsdale really is our luxury property. I think you could see us maybe sprinkle in a little bit of luxury here and there. I think about Walnut Creek. I think about Marin, Tysons, although most of the luxury at Tysons is across the street at the Galleria. But I think we could still sprinkle some in, and perhaps up at Washington Square. Take some of the luxury from downtown and bring it to our property. And those, 'cause again, that's, it has knock-on effect, higher rents, presumably, you know, 3x your typical rents and much higher sales, so, you know, presumably, that, you know, boosts the value of your portfolio significantly. Exactly. Talk about the optimization of the portfolio. Maybe Jackson, if you can talk a little bit about, you know, you talk about the, you know, the, the asset sales and handbacks and $500 million ballpark figure of proceeds out of that, right? Yeah. Well, I think stepping back, you know, as, as Scott and Doug were going through, if you think about the AEs as a minute, you know, just for a second, it's 14 properties. When I first came in, first couple weeks, you know, I looked at some of our leasing national package deals, and we were able to get this guy to go into this center. Clearly, they don't wanna be in that center, but we're making them go in that center. But we're also incentivizing them by letting them go into Tysons and some of these other centers. So I'm like, "Well, how much money is that costing us?" W ell, it's really hard to figure out. They don't really wanna be in that center. Could we push rent higher? We don't know. So one of the things about having this Eddie’s category, whether it’s leasing, capital allocation, asset management, we will run these properties differently. They should be run differently. They shouldn’t be subsidized on a national leasing basis. They probably should be leased in a different way, more lease incentives, more local leasing. Don’t tax our national platform leasing team, which is really best-in-class. Our asset managers have to approach those assets differently. T hese centers are, are generally good real estate locations. You know, do they have power capability? There’s other uses that could possibly be used, but freeing up that asset manager to not think of it as trying to make it a regional mall, because it’s not going to be in time, make it into something else. That's really the task of trying to free that up, so then we can really concentrate on those 30 properties, how to really drive, drive more through for, either tenancy or competition by taking share from others. A s people know, it's, there's not a lot of landlords, and so when landlords kind of get positioned, they will attack another center. They will buy business. They will do things that can really kind of damage your center, so you just gotta be ready to hold the line when it comes to that point. And so I think we're gonna be well-positioned the way we've kind of restructured the way we're looking at this portfolio, so that we end up with those 25-30 really, really strong centers. We don't segment the data right now, but if we were to share what the fortresses, steady Eddie pluses, and steady Eddies do on a re-leasing spread basis, occupancy basis, it's pretty stout. And so in time, we'll start to do that once all our tenants wanna know, "Hey, which are the Eddies? Are you gonna tell us which ones are going back?" Yeah, we will. And we'll start to communicate which assets are going back to lenders as we progress through our plan. Just can't do it right now, as you can imagine. B ut we will in time, and I think that will help take some of the naysayers out of this plan because, you know, honestly, it's not a hard plan to execute, and we've got a great team, great assets. I'm fortunate to be working alongside these folks, and I'm very confident we're gonna get it done. O bviously, the NOI growth is the biggest driver of your deleveraging. Some of these asset sales is another major driver of that growth. You'd also mentioned opportunistic acquisitions. What can you say that's new or different, you know, in your view? If I had my druthers on those three, the last thing that I would do is the equity, and hopefully I don't have to do the equity. If we outperform the plan, it'll be less than $500, and hopefully it's very little if we're able to execute. You know, we have an 8% cap rate out there on dispositions. We already announced 6.5. Y ou can do the math on what the spread there is. The givebacks are the givebacks. Our refinancing rate is 6.6%, so we're probably that up today would be a little bit higher. So if you kind of look at the components of the plan, I think there's opportunities to outperform it. And on the leasing side, leasing is as strong as you know. It's really strong, so we're gonna be able to capture that NOI. Hopefully, we can do better. And so people have asked me: How do you think about equity? I'm not gonna do it now. I'm gonna. I wanna show progress in the plan, and we'll start to disclose what that plan looks like, and maybe we're not doing equity. Or if I'm doing equity, I'm buying a partner out, and I'd rather do it that way than just to de-lever. Wanna open up to the audience. Brad? Yeah, thank you. So Jackson, you've got a history of M&A, more recent M&A history. Your plan is to get to 30s, 34 assets. So what, what's next after that? Again, given the fact that you've just finished some M&A, and Floris, you're welcome to comment on that as well, since you covered that sector pretty well. Well, one thing I'll just say, like, cap, it's really weird. Like, we have partners, and I ask them, "So what's your carrying value?" And I'm like: "Well, you look at my cap rate, you look at Simon's cap rate, you really think your asset's a 5.5? How about I sell you mine for 5.5? I'll sell it to you for 5.5." U nlike the office sector, which is seeing transparency and trades, there have been very few in the, what I call the premium, regional mall sector. Obviously, Unibail has not been successful to date. What I hope as an outcome of this plan is that we're positioned with a relatively attractive cost of capital, tight operations, and the ability to add more A-quality properties into the portfolio, or properties that we believe from a value add standpoint can be converted to that. That's my hope. At the very least, it's a much better company, much cleaner company, and given the fact that I came from a sector that had 22 public companies where I was competing against, there's only David and, I guess, Tanger, but they're not really competing necessarily with us. Obviously, Brookfield is a competitor, but in terms of a public competitor. So, you know, if we can drive quality, quality, quality, quality, I think that's gonna serve us well, and that's really the mission. And by the way, that's why we're not gonna do a big equity recap because sure, I could de-lever, but I don't achieve the quality that I want, which I believe will drive NOI. In the back there? Right. You said something earlier about deciding to walk away from Santa Monica Place. It wasn't an asset that you didn't think y'all would be able to get close to its highest potential? Can you expand on that a little bit more? Like, what, what did you see that asset turning into, or what do you think its highest potential could be, and where were you feeling like Mace was in a position to do that or, or didn't want to? So, I mean, if you look at what's happening on the Third Street Promenade, you've got a disparate group of landlords, you know, on that promenade, number one. So that's challenging because it's a knife fight in terms of leasing out there. Second is there's probably not enough retail to backfill that entire promenade. Ideally, for Santa Monica, that Nordstrom's location should be a high-rise residential complex. It should be probably more entertainment-type retail. I don't think luxury fits in that, in that location. And I think the retail along the promenade needs to be rezoned, where there's concentrated retail, entertainment, nightlife along that promenade. You get massive amount of tourists that visit Santa Monica Beach and the pier. It's just a very different setup than it was, say, 10 years ago. And then you have to keep into consideration, Century City has taken their game up tremendously. Caruso's project up in the Palisades, you know, continues to bite away at the promenade, you know, Montana Avenue. You know, so it's. It really needs a more wholesale rezoning, kind of redevelopment aspect, and candidly, it's not-- I believe someone will be able to reimagine it someday. It's just not gonna be us, and it's gonna probably take a lot longer than we're prepared to wait. One more, just a quick one. With Unibail's asset disposition, like, how do you see or how is their portfolio drifting around your asset? So the way we'll approach it is, you know, I think when I looked at our asset list that I thought was monetizable, the first one was one phone call. I made one phone call to the right buyer. We were able to come to agreement pretty quickly. They're hard. You know, they're supposed to close next month. The second one is another one bilateral conversation. That asset is really attractive. It's got really attractive debt on it that's assumable. You know, I think that's probably gonna end up in a positive way. The third one that we have is, we hired the best broker in town. They're gonna flog the bejesus out of that one. It's gonna go to everybody and anybody, and I think someone will land on it. It's gonna be more of a redeveloper with probably a family office attached to it. So I would say we took a very measured approach as to what could be achievable, what that asset meant to our portfolio. Was it strategic? Did it meet kind of the core portfolio configuration that we wanted? I would say that, you know, there'll be a couple Steady Eddies that get sold, some at the bottom. Yeah, that's how we're gonna approach it. Maybe, if I can ask you guys, what do you think the biggest misconceptions are around Macerich? I think people are skeptical about, you know, the plan, which is fine. You know, I bought a lot of stock personally after we launched the plan. You know, I think we're gonna prove it to people. I think the skeptics, I would say, that I've heard is, "Gee, I've got to wait till 2028 to see success." I'd say one year from now, this next NAREIT, you'll know if we're gonna succeed or not. You will know. This is not a wait to the end. You know, it's steady execution of a different series of transactions that we've got to go through, which is why, compared to my last job that I did, I don't want to call it easier. It's a much safer execution because it's very diversified in execution. We've got other means to get to the end. You know, we've got $500 million of very monetizable outparcels that I would love to call Sumit on. I'm not gonna do it right now because rates are not right. But yeah, that's not part of the plan, but if we decided to, we could execute on that. So there are different alternatives within the scheme that we're looking at. And I just think that people may have misinterpreted our comments to say we have to wait till 2028, and I would say in a year, you will see progress, and be able to be your own judge as to whether we're gonna get there or not. You're not gonna have to wait that long. Any other questions from the audience? How do you think about the fashion outlet portion of the business compared to the A mall portion of the business? It's a different business. I wish I had more outlets, you know, and David was smart to get in the outlet business. I was at UBS when we advised him on the acquisition of Chelsea, so that served him really well. I think Art's idea was correct. We just didn't get enough of it and or scale. You know, one of the properties, Chicago, is an outstanding outlet center. You know, Philly's tougher. Obviously, Niagara Falls is tougher, so. Any other from the audience? I'll end it here, but what gave you the confidence to take on this job and, you know, embark on this new adventure, Jack? You know, I had a chance to look at these assets, you know, as I was having the discussion with Tom about the properties, and what's amazing is, you know, you've got assets where people wanna go to, like, 10 million people a year. In some cases, we have assets where 18 million shoppers come in to the doors. It's crazy, right? You've got tenants that want to lease space. Shit, that's a pretty good setup if you ask me. Forget about leverage and all this other stuff. So, I feel like what got me really comfortable-