VNO Bears Build Ahead of Q3 Print

Vornado Realty Trust heads into its November 3 earnings release with short sellers adding conviction even as the stock quietly grinds higher.

Short interest is the standout story in the setup. Bears have added meaningfully ahead of the print: short interest has climbed 20% over the past month to 7.1% of the free float, with most of that jump arriving in a single week, a 6.5% week-on-week increase that pushed the position above 13.7 million shares. Days to cover, at 10.1, add a further wrinkle: at the current pace of trading, it would take short sellers two full weeks to exit. That is a meaningful overhang for a mid-cap REIT. Despite the building short book, the borrow market remains orderly. Availability is generous at 859%, meaning roughly nine shares are available to borrow for every one already lent out, and the cost to borrow is a nominal 0.45%. Short sellers are not paying a squeeze premium. Options positioning leans bullish rather than defensive: the put/call ratio of 0.34 sits below its 20-day average and close to the 52-week low of 0.26, suggesting call buyers are more active than put buyers going into the print.

The analyst community has grown more cautious since the August results. Piper Sandler cut its target sharply from $44 to $37 in October, while Evercore ISI and Truist both trimmed targets in September, keeping their ratings unchanged. JPMorgan is the outlier, lifting its target to $39 from $37 in September while holding Neutral. The mean target across the Street now sits at $39.23, around 12% above the current price of $34.97. Bulls point to Vornado's Manhattan-focused portfolio, the Penn District development pipeline, and solid recent leasing momentum as the underpinnings of a recovery case. Bears focus on the capital intensity of PENN 15, which still lacks the anchor tenants and committed capital to break ground, and on the broader uncertainty around office demand that makes FFO estimates hard to pin down. The PE multiple at 138x reflects how thin earnings are relative to asset value, a characteristic of the REIT structure, but EV/EBITDA at 18.3x is a more practical guide. EPS momentum scores in the 95th to 99th percentile suggest estimate revisions have been running firmly higher over the past quarter, even as the company's earnings yield ranks near the bottom of the universe.

One distinctive signal worth noting is a spike in retail attention. Wikipedia page views for Vornado recently registered a z-score of 2.0 against its own 90-day history, the highest retail-attention reading tracked by the ORTEX Alt Data layer. The dataset is attention data, not a financial indicator, and has not been measured to lead revenue or FFO. But the spike is notable for a name that does not typically attract retail interest, and it coincides precisely with the buildup in short interest.

On the ownership side, BlackRock reported adding 313,000 shares in the September quarter, bringing its stake to 11.9%. T. Rowe Price added 302,000 shares in the same period. Insider activity has been net negative over the past 90 days: EVP Haim Chera sold 90,000 shares in late September for roughly $3.1 million, a discretionary sale with no 10b5-1 plan attached. No insider purchases of comparable scale have followed.

The print will test whether the leasing momentum and FFO trajectory Vornado has been signalling can hold at a level that justifies the stock's recovery from its early-year lows, or whether the short sellers building positions ahead of today's numbers see something the bullish option flow does not.