[NYguy]

https://seekingalpha.com/article/436...all-transcript

Vornado Realty Trust (VNO) CEO Steven Roth on Q2 2020 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Aug. 4, 2020

Michael Bilerman

It's Michael Bilerman here with Manny. Steve, in your commentary, you said it was a great time to be looking through the fog and putting capital to work. And I wanted to know how you think about that from a Vornado perspective? And you think about the Facebook deal now being official, the progress you've made on PENN 1 and PENN 2, would you be more aggressive in, let's say, take down Hotel Penn to position yourself for the eventual next cycle. I guess, what are you thinking about in terms of putting incremental capital to work?

Steven Roth

First of all, we're in great shape, okay. We have a - we have an enormous amount of liquidity on our balance sheet, that liquidity is growing. The Farley Building basically takes a multi-billion dollar asset out of risk and puts it into secure - into the secure financial asset.

.....Your comment specifically went to the Hotel Penn. I don't really have much to say about that except that, as we continue to march - to march along from the Farley Building to 2 PENN, to 1 PENN, et cetera, the Hotel Penn is arguably one of the top two or three development sites that are available in the city. By the way, at 350 Park Avenue, many of the people in the marketplace think is the single best development site. But be as it may be. I couldn't resist getting the plug in.

So - the issue is that Hotel Penn, in order to execute on that, you have to pay par. In other words, you have to build the building and view - the land has a certain value and you're paying par for that, okay. It's not impossible that in this cycle, which I think is going to be a soft cycle for a while that our capital will be able to attract a transaction or other transaction where we will be able to buy great assets at less than par. So we have - we have all the capital we need for our development project - development program.