SL Green Realty CEO ‘very comfortable’ with where dividend is today

SL Green Realty CEO Marc Holliday responded to an analyst question about the company’s dividend by stating, according to a transcript of the company’s Q2 earnings call: “(We) think when people invest in SL Green buyer stock, it’s a blended play. People want current return, and they want evidence of our ability to be able to generate cash flow either through ordinary operations or gain on assets and be able to reward shareholders throughout the year with the dividend in addition to doing our redevelopments and developments and creating growth and driving share value. And in most years, that’s reflected in some years, like we have today, where the market sentiment is very negative, we just work our way through that. But I think what I wanted to state is that we believe that a dividend is an important component of the overall investment thesis for anybody to invest in the stock. We all own the stock at the managerial level for most of us. It is the largest, if not almost the exclusive source of our net worth is the stock that we own. And we want to create value, and we want to create cash flow and see distributions in the form of dividends. So we are very comfortable with where the dividend is today, given the earnings that we’re generating and the gains that we’re generating on some of these very important sales, we’ll do next year’s business plan next year. we’ll have a sit down in November, December, and we’ll roll that entire plan out with our objectives and our earnings levels, et cetera. But suffice it to say, which is what I said earlier is we take all of those points very seriously. And our goal is as best as possible to maintain the levels as much as we can.”