Ken Bernstein
Chief Executive Officer
It’s a conversation that we started having all three, four, five months ago as we saw the dollar rally; in the past week or two maybe that cut the other. So, first of all, the short answer is no, as it relates to our retailers coming back to us and staying either, they have lost any level of enthusiasm for those markets that are kind of most international tourist driven. So, so far not yet but we always are going to have to watch and observe and see how transitory might some of these shifts see or versus kind of long-term circular. And then if it is long term, it is something you certainly want to take into account as you would the price of oil, as you would a host of other factors that we always think about. But what is worth noting, for instance Miami, which certainly benefits from a lot of international tourism with a fair amount of international tourists coming from oil generating, energy generating countries, you think or I would have thought is that we would see some led up there first. And while thankfully we sold at a huge price, honestly we did not sale our Lincoln Road portfolio in anticipation of anything to do with currency; it was purely pricing and event driven. But as we speak to our retailers about Lincoln Road, about Miami, they are watching it, they are cognizant of it but so far we have not seen that enthusiasm decline. And then when we get elsewhere into our portfolio, yes, there is a fair amount of tourism in New York but overall, the majority of our assets are either in what I would call, more live-work-play Tribeca for instance, it’s not a tourist driven location, it is a live-work-play destination, Brooklyn, the same thing. Soho would have some of this as I pointed out on our call, our leases are well below market. So I am not particularly concerned, elsewhere in the portfolio kind of same type of analysis where Chicago gets some international tourism but it’s more domestic than not. Thus, we’re not hearing it from our retailers yet, we’ll watch it but there is no reason to think that they’re making these long dated multi-year, if not multi-decade commitments to these key locations. It’s not clear to me that this will have any impact. Secondly, we’re pretty well insulated, so we may hear about it later than some other folks.