Eric Wolfe — Director, Citi
Hey, thanks, good morning. I think you said that April blends were modestly better than the first quarter, which it came in at, I think, around -1.4%. You also said that April was generally in line with your expectations and what you had in guidance thus far. Could you maybe just talk about sort of the ramp that you expect for the rest of the year? I guess it would seem like based on your guidance that you expect a pretty big ramp. I was just curious, you know, when you expect to see that, and if you see any early signs of that increase in spreads based on your forward data. Thanks.
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Yeah, absolutely. Let's sort of frame it. Let's first talk about occupancy. April occupancy is right around 95.4%. That compares to 95.1% in the first quarter. That's a pretty considerable increase. When you look at blended rates, blended rates for us in April, I'm certainly not giving interim data because I don't want our peers to smack me, we are seeing blended rates
Up about 100 basis points in April as compared to what we saw in the first quarter. All of that is in trend and absolutely positive. If you look at how we're thinking this is gonna lay out for the rest of the year, what we're anticipating is a pretty strong third quarter. With the hope that at that point in time, we've got enough of the new supply absorbed, and then that leads into sort of an atypical better fourth quarter than what you would normally see because you've got supply coming down so dramatically. That's what's built into our number.
I will tell you at this point in time, we are feeling pretty good about how April is shaking out, and we're certainly seeing several of our markets that I would classify as showing green shoots. Markets that are jumping out to me would be Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, Nashville, Raleigh, and Southeast Florida. We think those are gonna be the markets that are gonna really lead us in this sort of return to normalcy as all this excess supply is absorbed.
Jamie Feldman — Managing Director and Head of REIT Research, Wells Fargo
Great. First, congratulations, everyone, on all the changes. Excited to see what comes next.
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Thanks.
Jamie Feldman — Managing Director and Head of REIT Research, Wells Fargo
I guess, as we think about, you know, going back to those comments, can you talk about concessions? You know, how have they been trending? As you think about the ramp you expect to see for the rest of the year, what's your expectations for concessions coming in and how that helps?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
I mean, as you know, we don't offer concessions. What we're doing is we have to look and see what's out there in the marketplace. The good news is that we are seeing concessions come down fairly meaningful in most of our markets. Once again, that's really tied to supply. If you look at the vast majority of our markets, new supply is down 50% from its peak. Because of that, you're no longer in a situation where you've got a lot of developers that are trying to go from 0% occupied to 95% occupied and offering every single concession possible to get you there. We are seeing concessions come down, as I said, pretty considerably in most of our markets.
Really the easiest way and sort of the best comp that I have for that is the one asset that we've got in development, which is our Village District community in Raleigh. That particular community, remember that we always assume that you're gonna give one month free in a new lease-up, and that's to compensate for the fact that there's construction activity, et cetera, going on. We are offering a concession there, but it's not much over that one month. What that really does tell you is that concessions are starting to get into check in our markets.
Austin Wurschmidt — Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets
Yeah. Laurie, I think you indicated asking rates on renewal leases are going out in the mid-3% range. I think last quarter you were sending out around 3%, 3.5%, you know, achieved closer to or just below, I think, 3% was the number. Just curious kind of what the take rate's been, you know, from the asking versus achieved and, if you think that starts to narrow a little bit as you get into the peak leasing season, as it sounds like things have picked up a bit.
Laurie Baker — President and COO, Camden Property Trust
Yeah. We saw that in the first quarter, we were going out with the range in the mid-3%s, and I think we reported that last quarter. What we saw is just a little bit of price sensitivity in the first few months of the year. We're now starting to see in our, you know, May, June, July lease renewals that are going out that we're able to get a little bit more of an increase in those numbers. You know, with our renewals being so high, we're feeling pretty good about kind of landing right around the same range of usually 50 basis points on where people sign. As we have the opportunity to push in markets where we're getting a little more pricing power, we'll continue to do so.
In the markets where there's more concessions and supply, we may not be able to get, you know, to those top-line numbers that we're going out at. We feel pretty good about the conversations we're having out there. Just, you know, it has a lot to do with how well we take care of our residents and explaining to them, you know, the costs that are associated with moving, and the product we provide and the service level we provide. Those conversations typically go pretty well. We're, we're feeling good. Our teams are, they are very focused on explaining what the concession market is and how our net pricing equates to that. I think we're, you know, we're feeling good about, as we said earlier, going out with the mid-3%s and a little higher as we get into our peak summer.
Steve Sakwa — Senior Managing Director, Evercore ISI
Yeah. Thanks. I guess I wanted to ask maybe kind of a size portfolio question. Obviously, there's been some stories about industry consolidation. I'm just wondering, at your portfolio size, as you sort of think about the data you gather from your existing assets, do you think that data would be better if you were 2x, 3x, 4x bigger? You know, how are you using other data sources to kind of think about pricing today?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
The first thing I'll tell you is we try not to comment on rumors about mergers and acquisitions that are out there. That's point number one. Point number two, we're very fortunate, and the investor community is very fortunate that leadership at all these companies are really good. Whatever decision other companies make, we've got to believe is right for them. For us, the way we sort of think about this is that bigger is not better. Better is better. If you look at a long-term trends, there's absolutely no correlation between the size of the company and total shareholder return. That's the big picture way of looking at it. When you look at data, here's what I'll tell you.
With the scale we have, we've got enough information, we've got enough data to make the appropriate decisions across every aspect of our business. I do not think that if we were in a situation where all of a sudden we were 2x or 3x the size we are, that we would see any type of significant increase in our ability to collect data, analyze data, and utilize data. I think this is a world where we've got perfect clarity into all of our information. Remember that we're a pretty good sized company, and we've got a lot of units that we can look at, and we can see how those units are behaving, and we can see how our consumers are behaving. I'm not really sure that there's any real significant improvements on the data side to come from being considerably bigger.
Jana Galan — Director, Bank of America
Thank you. Maybe a question on acquisitions as you prepare to deploy the disposition proceeds. Can you talk about, you know, cap rates in the Sunbelt markets, how you typically underwrite year one rent growth? If you're seeing more opportunity in, you know, kind of core product, or are you looking at maybe unstabilized or lease ups?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Sorry, could you repeat your question? You kind of cut out in the middle, and I missed the first part of your question.
Jana Galan — Director, Bank of America
Sure. Sorry about that. Just on acquisitions, curious how you know, what cap rates you're seeing out there, how you think about underwriting year one rent growth. In terms of what's out there, is it kind of more opportunity in core assets or in unstabilized or lease-up assets?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Sure. Obviously, transaction volumes are still clearly below sort of pre-COVID levels. Today are trending in line with where we were in 2025. We are, you know, evaluating a number of opportunities as we look to redeploy the proceeds from our California transaction. Not seeing a lot in terms of lease-up acquisition opportunities this year. Those types of opportunities, I think sellers who have properties in lease-up are really trying to get them to a point of stabilization before they go to the market to create as much liquidity for that asset as they possibly can. But, you know. Then from a pricing standpoint, cap rates have really been stable over probably the last 18 months. I'll tell you that the trades for newer, well-located properties in the Sun Belt, those cap rates are in the 4.5%-5% range and have been for some time.
Jana Galan — Director, Bank of America
Thanks.
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
That's certainly what we're seeing.
Rich Anderson — Managing Director, Cantor Fitzgerald
Hey, thanks. Good morning, congrats to everyone for all the moves. Very exciting. My question is on sort of the cadence of the "recovery from here." I think, you know, if we were sitting here this time last year, we probably would have thought by now we would be seeing more in the way of, you know, real, you know, CPI plus lease type growth, particularly out of the new lease category. It seems like that got delayed a year given the tail of supply.
I'm curious if you could comment about what you think the cadence of the growth recovery will be, you know, as we get into 2027. Is it more of like a hockey stick like we saw in 2022? I would hope not. More of a gradual improvement based on whatever, you know, forces are at work as supply burns off. I'm just curious how you envision, you know, sort of the cadence from that third quarter strength that you talked about and onward? Thanks.
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Yeah, absolutely. The first thing I'll tell you is if you go back and you look at 2025, if you remember, we had a little bit of a head fake because, in 2025, April looked fantastic, and then all of a sudden things just stopped pretty quickly. A lot of that was tied to the factors that we know, Liberation Day, you know, et cetera. If you look at what we are assuming, we are assuming that this recovery could look a lot like what we saw coming out of the GFC.
If you look at what we saw coming out of the GFC, we saw several years of just really considerable growth. You look at 2011, I think our NOI was up about 7%. 2012, it was up 9%. 2013, it was up 6%. You could see something similar to that. Now, if you look at the cadence, we certainly are, and I know you said you hope it's not a hockey stick. We are anticipating sort of a hockey stick in the latter part of 2026 as we get through this absorption. When you get into 2027, at that point in time, clearly not gonna give any guidance, but I would anticipate if you just look back at what we saw coming out of the GFC, it becomes a steady but strong growth on a go-forward basis.
Ric Campo — Executive Chairman, Camden Property Trust
Rich, I would just add to that some numbers around the completions in Camden's markets. The cadence looks like in 2025, we had 200,000 completions. That drops to about 140, 150 this year. That drops to 135 in 2027 and down to 120 in 2028. The thing that's important about that is it's very hard to change the trajectory of that completion number because if it's not already under construction, it's not coming by 2027.
Brad Heffern — Director, RBC Capital Markets
Thanks, Ric. Congratulations on all the promotions. Glad to see the music is sticking around amid all the changes. Going back to the Q1 lens. You know, typically we see a jump sequentially in the first quarter. Your peers have generally reported that last year was 100 basis points higher or so in the first quarter. Sounds like that was already assumed in guidance, but I'm just wondering if you can talk through why you didn't expect or see that sort of normal seasonal pattern.
Ric Campo — Executive Chairman, Camden Property Trust
The first thing is, music's not going anywhere. We love our music, I expect to see that for to the point whenever I'm handing it over to somebody else, that music will continue. If you think about the first quarter, what we were doing in the first quarter was making sure that we were setting ourselves up appropriately for the rest of the year, we feel good about the way our first quarter unfolded. It was in line with our expectations. It was in line with our guidance. You know, it's interesting because there's obviously gonna be a lot of comparison between the multi-families, we completely understand that. We are all in different markets.
If you look at the markets in which we overlap with our competitors, and in particular one of our competitors, we outperformed in most of those markets. However you get there on the revenue side, our revenue results, we feel really good about, and we feel that we're doing the right thing to set ourselves up for a successful second, third, and fourth quarter of this year. When we look at our April results, our April results are doing very well, as we just talked about, and so we feel very good about how our trend is looking.
Haendel St. Juste — Analyst, Mizuho
Hey, guys. Congrats on the promotions, thanks for taking my question. My question's on the buyback capital deployment. As you said, you repurchased this $150 million that you outlined on prior calls. We have another $200 million or so capacity in the buyback. Can you talk about more kind of capital allocation from here, your level of interest in maybe more buybacks? Are they more dependent on incremental dispositions beyond the SoCal portfolio sale? Could you shift a bit of capital from maybe acquisitions to more buybacks? Some thoughts here on capital deployment, the options on the table, then remind us the tax limitations regarding kind of 1031s. Thanks.
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Sure. Between 2025 and 2026, we bought back $693 million in advance of our California sale at an average price of $105 and change. That represents a 6.4% FFO yield, that's been an excellent source and allocation of our capital. Like I said in my prepared remarks, we're gonna continue to monitor our share price performance, as of now, for our transaction plan, we have no additional share repurchases in our 2026 guidance. As far as taxable room, we have planned for $1 billion in acquisitions, which is about the amount we need to maximize the use of proceeds to offset any additional special distributions we would need to make.
I will point out, just because we do not have any other share repurchases in our guidance, that does not mean that we will not do any additional share repurchases. We have plenty of capacity in our balance sheet, plenty of capacity with our leverage once the California transaction closes, that we can absolutely do more share repurchases. That is absolutely something that is up there for opportunities for us as we go forward.
John Kim — Managing Director of U.S. Real Estate, BMO Capital Markets
Thank you. On the Southern California portfolio sale, I know you don't wanna get into the details of it, but I wanted to ask about the rationale of selling to one buyer for the entire portfolio rather than splitting up the portfolio, where you might have gotten better pricing. Given the amount of interest that you've gotten on this sale, why not more actively pursue acquisitions ahead of closing of it?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Yeah. We had a lot of interest, and we had a lot of interest on both the portfolio side, individual asset side, and then sub-portfolio sides. We believe at this point what we have done with picking the one buyer that we have picked is we have limited our execution risk while maximizing proceeds. It is important to note that there were a lot of buyers clustered together. We did make a choice going with a particular buyer because of the strength of that buyer. To your point, whether we could have maximized proceeds by splitting it up, maybe we could have gotten a little bit more, but it would've introduced additional risk that we didn't think made sense to us.
Then, as I did point out in prepared remarks, even though we have picked a buyer and we're still in the diligence process, the good news is that there were several buyers, and there are several buyers that are around. I think there's several buyers really hoping that our current buyer sort of falls out, but we don't think that's gonna happen. Then when it comes to opportunities for more acquisitions, we are really active right now. Since in the last couple of weeks, we've actually been awarded another $250 million worth of acquisitions. That gets us up to pretty close to halfway towards our $1 billion goal.
There is a lot out there, and I will tell you right now, we are the prettiest buyer in the market. Everybody is coming to us. Everybody is showing us opportunities because they know that we have the capacity to close, and they know that we are for real. I'm expecting that we're gonna come out with a really, really great additional portfolio to enhance what we have today from this process. Feeling really good about the acquisition opportunities, feeling really good about the California process and how it's progressing.
Alexander Goldfarb — Managing Director, Piper Sandler
Hey, good morning down there, congrats all around Alex, Laurie, and Ben. I guess you guys will have to lead the Camden company's skits at those offsites. Question for you about the demand and supply. You and a number of the other Sunbelt players have all commented that, you know, certain markets are rebounding and showing strength. Overall, as you outlined, it's still gonna be a tough market until later in the year. Is this a matter of there were a lot of projects from last year that just had slow lease-ups? Is this stuff that leaked into this year, or is it that you need faster jobs? Basically, what I'm asking is this a jobs issue or this is a supply issue? If it's a supply, was this just projects that got delayed from last year or slower lease-ups, or just trying to better understand the dynamics here?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Alex, I'm gonna hit the most important point first. Ric and Keith are not going to be let out of skits. Fully anticipate seeing them and seeing them dressed up on a continual basis. This is entirely a supply story. Demand in our markets are incredibly strong. As I laid out in the prepared remarks, you can look at domestic in-migration, you can look at job creation, you can look at corporate headquarter relocation. All of those favor our markets over the coast. This is merely a matter of absorbing the existing supply that's out there, and that is why we feel very good about how the latter part of 2026 should sort of end up because you will have that excess supply being absorbed.
To a point that was made earlier, if you look at our markets, our markets supply is down 50% over its peak. If you look at most of our markets and you just look at a year-over-year basis, you've got supply just on a year-over-year basis down anywhere between 20%-60%. What that tells you is once that supply is absorbed, we are gonna have very, very healthy revenue growth.
Derrick Metzler — VP of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley
Good morning. This is Derrick Metzler here with Adam Kramer. My question is about the difference in Class A versus Class B or affordable by comparison product and urban versus suburban product. As supply comes down, and obviously it's mostly Class A high-quality product supply that's coming down, how do you see the outlook for the Class A versus Class B and other products in your portfolio and across your markets performing over, you know, the next few quarters or years in the kind of better supply environment?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
A's versus B's for us right now is pretty flat. Where we're seeing the delta is suburban versus urban. If you look at on the revenue side and you just look at last quarter, our urban assets actually were 70 basis points better than our suburban assets. Once again, to the earlier question, this is entirely a supply story. If you look in our markets, apartment supply is falling fastest in urban areas, because of that is where we're seeing the additional pricing power. It's statistics like that that make us feel very good about our ability to get positive rent growth as we move through the year because we do know that once you get past the supply falling in the urban areas, it's going to fall in the suburban areas as well. We'll get it all absorbed, and that is what should lead to continued strength as we go throughout the year.
Speaker — Analyst, UBS
Hi, thanks. This is Ami on with Michael. We wanted to touch on Houston, where occupancy was down pretty materially year-over-year in the quarter. Wondering what the outlook is for that market and if you think that the recent higher gas prices could have any positive impact there.
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
Houston's a really interesting market because if you look at all of the fundamentals in Houston, they are fantastic. When you actually look at the results, they're not as great. There are some really interesting data around the consumer sentiment that seems particular to Houston. Houston's consumer sentiment has fallen pretty dramatically in 2026 as compared to 2025. I think a lot of that is around just some of the effects of immigration, which does have a huge impact to Houston. I think that that negative customer sentiment is having an impact in the way the Houston consumer spends their money, and obviously, that's impacting rent. If you get past the sentiment issue, and what we know about sentiment is humans are incredibly resilient, and they have an ability to return to the positive really fast.
Once they get past that sentiment issue, they're very strong. In Houston, in particular, we've got a lot of job creation. We've got a lot of population growth. We know our consumer is doing really well. In fact, our rent-to-income in Houston is 16%. It's one of the lowest in our entire portfolio. The consumer is there. The consumer has the ability to spend more money. Supply has come down pretty dramatically. Houston will get better. It's just a sentiment issue.
Ric Campo — Executive Chairman, Camden Property Trust
Yeah, let me add to that a little bit. When you think about consumers today, Houston is a great example of that. I echo Alex's issue about immigration because immigration is a big issue, and it's definitely stressing a lot of folks out, especially since Houston is the most diverse, you know, city in America. We have a minority majority of Hispanic, you know, people that live here, and 25% of our population is foreign-born in Houston. Consumer in general is interesting. When you think about consumer sentiment generally across the country, it's not great.
If you look at job growth, you look at wage growth, you look at consumer spending is good. The consumer is kind of stressed about a lot of things. The things that they're stressed about are, number one, inflation continues to be an issue. When you think about inflation and housing, in Houston, for example, housing prices have gone up 60% since the pandemic. In Houston, Texas, people go, "Well, it used to be affordable here." That's bothering consumers. If you look at it nationwide, it's the same issue. Housing costs are up. Apartment rents, of course, have been flat for 36 months, but housing prices continue to be up, interest rates are up.
All those things have kind of created this, and this uncertainty, by the way, politically has created this tension in the consumer. The interesting part is the consumer is actually doing really well. The feeling they have is bad. The underlying consumer strength is good, but to Alex's point, that tension or that stress or that feeling of uncertainty and bad that the consumer has is making them slower to make or is causing them slower to make housing decisions and to move around, so you have less moving around than you would normally have.
The other thing I think is really interesting is that when you look at what's happened to people who have graduated from college this year and last year, is that there's been sort of a failure to launch for about 10% or 12% of those graduates. If you look at stats on people living at home that were not living at home before pre-COVID, we have about a 900,000 increase in 20 to 25-year-olds that are living at home or roommate today. It's a really interesting kind of weird place. Even though the world's good from a consumer perspective, they're fairly uncertain.
Rich Hightower — Managing Director of U.S. REIT Research, Barclays
Hey, good morning, guys. I guess I want to combine two categories into one question for a second. If I think about the earlier question about sort of the benefits of scale and data and how that informs revenue management, of course, the fact that you and several of your peers have sort of put the RealPage lawsuit stuff, you know, in the rearview mirror at this point. I know that revenue management around that topic has already sort of changed throughout the industry.
Just, you know, maybe help us understand when you combine those two threads, you know, what has changed about the way units get priced, how you use information, how the marketplace, you know, the competitive marketplace uses information in a different way, and, you know, has anything really changed fundamentally on the ground since then?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
If you look at, we'll hit RealPage, first of all. All of that litigation, we did come to an agreement in terms, but it's not, it's not in the rearview mirror yet. We've got a little ways to go. Hopefully, we can stop talking about that in the next couple of quarters completely. If you look at, if you look at the way revenue management works, revenue management really does rely a lot on your existing data, on your existing units, the amount of tours you give, how long that particular unit has been on the market, the occupancy of your particular community. Fundamentally, sure, there's been some changes in the way revenue management works, but we do not think that any of those changes will have any negative impact on us whatsoever.
The other thing that's really important is if you look at the way we do it, is we have a full-time department called the Revenue Management Department that does nothing but all day long, but price our individual units. Revenue management, the software is a tool. It is a tool that our humans use. Our humans are constantly going through repricing every single day, looking at recommendations, et cetera.
One of the things that we used to say 5, 10 years ago, was whenever we bought an existing community that was using YieldStar or some other revenue management software, but only just had it turned on without any additional human interaction, we used to say we love to buy those because we knew we could come in and we could absolutely use our talents, use our resources, use our institutional knowledge, and use our data and make it, make it better, make it perform far better than revenue management software on its own. Do not think there's gonna be any delta, any differential here whatsoever. The reality is that we've all been using a quote-unquote compliant software now for quite some time. Feel good about the resources we have and feel good about the way we will price our real estate and do not expect to see any negative impact whatsoever.
Laurie Baker — President and COO, Camden Property Trust
Yeah. I would just add that, you know, the, the benefit we have today is the fact that there are new operating models. There are new tools. We have AI. We have a BI team that is continuing to work with our on-site teams and that revenue team to provide data via our dashboards and gain more insights that we've just never even had the ability to, you know, make in the moment real-time decisions about what's happening in the field.
By the nature of how we've, you know, evolved as an organization and our revenue team who's been involved since the very beginning, they have such good insight into what's happening with all of our properties, and getting the weekly, daily information that allows us now to even price better with that information and those tools. As Alex, you know, shared, this has always been based on what we do internally with our strategy, and our strategies change. Sometimes, you know, what's happening in a submarket, what's happening in a local community is driven by some of the outside circumstances, but it's our on-site teams and the data we have about our occupancy and our traffic and our leasing velocity that dictates how we price and how we look at our renewals.
David Julien — Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to go back to the tax refund benefit. Do you think that's been a big driver of the April sequential improvement in blends? Just because up until this point, it doesn't sound like we were seeing the typical seasonal uplift we would usually expect. How do you think about the duration of that benefit into future months?
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
It's really interesting when you look at the data. You saw this large increase in tax refunds, what happened was folks spent it on a couple of things. One of them, which is, to quote somebody else here, what somebody else said is really un-American, is that they used it to pay down debt. That's sort of a one-time benefit. They used it for a lot of discretionary spend, think going to restaurants, think retail shopping. They're absolutely spending the money. I don't think that that's the driver of what you're seeing in the April uptick. I think the driver of what you're seeing in the April uptick is us hitting the typical leasing season and the continued absorption of supply. I don't, I don't think that's the factor whatsoever, but I clearly do think it was a large component of our bad debt, significant outperformance in the first quarter.
Alex Kim — Equity Research Senior Associate, Zelman & Associates
Hi. Congrats to everyone for the respective moves. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask a little about the development environment today and some of the economics that you're seeing, particularly in relation to kind of your capital allocation strategy. You know, where does development sit in relative to acquisitions? Then, you know, potentially looking at share repurchases. Then, you know, just a bit more specifically on Camden Baker, given that, you know, Denver seems to be a bit slower in the timeline for, you know, its recovery in revenue and in operating fundamentals. Thanks.
Alex Jessett — CEO, Camden Property Trust
If you look at the best uses of our capital today, number 1 is share repurchases. Obviously, we're limited on how much we can buy back if we're using dispositions to fund that. Once you get past that, developments and acquisitions are sort of a toss-up. At one point I would've said developments absolutely. Three years ago, developments absolutely better than acquisitions. Today, what we're seeing is that you can buy real estate at a discount to replacement costs almost everywhere. What that means is that acquisitions becomes a incremental better cost of capital if you're just looking at it, excuse me, better use of capital, if you're just looking at it from 10,000 ft.
When you start to dial it back and you start to really dig into the numbers, there are certain environments and certain locations where developments make more sense. We certainly are continuing to do our developments. We'll talk about Baker in a second, we do have other land sites that we control. At this point in time, we control three additional land sites that we have not purchased. Those three additional land sites we intend to buy this year, and those will be developments, and those will be developments that we believe are gonna create pretty significant value for our shareholders. Keep in mind that we're talking about three development land sites versus buying $1 billion of stabilized assets.
That should answer the question right there about what do we think is a better use on a broad stroke. When you look at Baker has been sitting there on our development pipeline for quite some time. The reason why it's been sitting there and not started is, at this point in time, the math isn't that great, and we are in no hurry to go start something that we do not believe is the right thing to do for our shareholders.
We'll continue to evaluate Baker. Baker is in the sort of central business district of or central business area of Denver. As everybody knows, that area is really soft right now, so we need to see we need to see some improvements in that area. If we see improvements in that area, we will start that development, and if we don't, we won't. We are committed to doing what is right for our shareholders and making sure that we use our capital to create the best investments.
Ric Campo — Executive Chairman, Camden Property Trust
Thank you for joining us today, and look forward to seeing all of you really soon. Hope everybody has a great weekend. Take care.