A Top Fifteen 2013 Wall Street Transcript Interview with the President and CEO & the EVP, CIO and CFO of Parkway Properties, Inc. (PKY): How Did James R. Heistand and David O'Reilly Create a 28% Year-to-Date Total Return for this REIT?
67 WALL STREET, New York - December 13, 2013 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published its Top 15 CEO Interviews of 2013 Report. This special feature contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with successful public company CEOs and Senior Executives. The full issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.
Topics covered: Top 15 CEO Interviews of 2013
Companies include: Parkway Properties Inc. (PKY)
In the following excerpt from the Top 15 CEO Interviews of 2013 Report, the CEO and CIO of Parkway Properties discuss the outlook for their company for investors:
TWST: If you would, introduce our readers to Parkway Properties with a bit of a company history and an overview of the company today.
Mr. Heistand: Parkway Properties is a self-managed office REIT located in the Sun Belt markets. In the past, Parkway has focused on secondary and tertiary markets such as Jackson, Richmond, Columbia, Memphis, as well as Houston and Atlanta. It is actually one of the older public REITs around, but had been a very small company up until the last 18 months.
Before joining Parkway, I was the Founder and Chairman of a private company known as Eola Capital, which was also an office real estate company focused in similar Sun Belt markets. In mid-2011, my private company merged with Parkway, which ultimately led to my appointment as CEO. As we started considering the changes that needed to be made by the company, one of the things that we immediately identified was that the growth prospects in a number of the assets that the company owned didn't provide what we thought were good return metrics on a going-forward basis, and we began to do a major restructure of the company. In doing so, we changed all of the senior management, and we currently have a new Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Investment Officer and Chief Accounting Officer. At the moment, all of the senior management at Parkway has changed within the last 18-20 months. We then proceeded to immediately sell all assets that we believed were not going to have the appropriate returns going forward, which included all of our assets in certain cities that we did not think were going to have the right future growth dynamics.
Since mid-2011, we have sold a total of $733 million of what we call noncore assets in noncore cities, and have purchased over $1 billion in assets in markets that we believe will outperform the national average over the next five years.
So the company as it looks today is a completely different company, as you can imagine. New assets, new people. When I started as CEO, the equity market cap was just over $200 million, and today we're around $1.3 billion. It has been a dramatic change.
One of the things that we've changed within the company's strategic philosophy on acquisitions going forward is a targeted focus on particular submarkets within the major cities throughout the Sun Belt. It's our opinion that within cities, there are certain submarkets that over the years have outperformed, and our goal is...
For more of this interview and many others visit the Wall Street Transcript - a unique service for investors and industry researchers - providing fresh commentary and insight through verbatim interviews with CEOs, portfolio managers and research analysts. This special issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.
