Tejon Ranch's President And Chief Executive Officer Matthew Walker Issues Public Letter Ahead Of The Company's Investor Engagement Event

Dear Shareholders,

Eight months into my tenure at Tejon Ranch Company, I want to speak with you candidly and directly. My goal is straightforward: to show you how I look at our business, where we've made progress, where we're still evolving, how I'm thinking about the future, and my strategy for driving the Company toward success.

I've spent these first months immersing myself in every aspect of the Company. I've celebrated wins, like the opening of our Terra Vista apartments. I've also made decisions that in hindsight I would have approached differently, such as allocating too much capital to a proxy defense effort. And I've grappled with the reality that our share price has been disappointing for far too long. That needs to change.

I've also heard many of your concerns: frustration over years of capital deployed without commensurate returns, skepticism about resources devoted to long-term projects while near-term performance lags, and anxiety about whether management truly prioritizes shareholder value. I've listened carefully, and my job now is to show you, through actions not words, that we're charting a different course.

Why Tejon Ranch Matters

Before diving into what we're changing, let me briefly explain why I believe Tejon Ranch Company represents a compelling opportunity, one worthy of your patience and continued investment.

• Tejon Ranch is Main on Main. We control 270,000 acres at the gateway between the Central Valley and Los Angeles. Everything connecting these two massive economies runs through our land: highways, rail, water, power, oil and gas, telecom, fiber and more. Like a strategic tollbooth, we capture value from the economic activity flowing between California's two largest regions.   We're not just landowners, we're gatekeepers. We generate durable and compounding revenue from the many users of our incredibly well-located property and are constantly looking to expand this revenue base.
• The Central Valley is California's growth engine. While Los Angeles and the Bay Area have stagnated on multiple fronts, the Central Valley and Kern County where we're headquartered are experiencing dramatic population and job growth. This threshold fact underlies our commercial and residential development activities. With our strategic location at the neck of the infrastructure hourglass between Northern and Southern California, coupled with our Central Valley setting within the State's cradle of expansion, Tejon Ranch Company is a well-diversified and extremely effective vehicle for investing in California's growth engine.
• Tejon Ranch Commerce Center (TRCC) is our flywheel. TRCC generated $110M of cash flow from 2004 through 2024 from commercial and industrial development, with 11 million square feet of remaining entitled density. This isn't speculative future value, it's proven, operational, cash-generating real estate in one of the country's premier logistics corridors. Our retail, residential, and industrial assets create a reinforcing cycle: apartments drive retail traffic, outlets enhance residential appeal, and together they make TRCC a more attractive hub for industrial tenants and users. This is the nucleus from which our growth will expand. Moreover, it is important to recognize that the same challenging California land use entitlement process that we are advancing through today on our master planned communities is what we successfully navigated twenty years ago at TRCC. The financial success that we celebrate at TRCC is a testament to our long term investment perspective.
• Tejon Ranch addresses California's housing crisis. Our three master planned communities represent 35,000 potential homes in a state desperate for housing, while also creating thousands of jobs through our additional commercial development. This is the supply and demand imbalance that drives our investment thesis. The question isn't whether California needs these homes. The question is whether we can deliver them in a way that creates shareholder value without disproportionately consuming our capital. I believe we can, and I'll address that directly in this letter.

This combination—strategic location, income-producing assets, entitled development capacity, and multiple paths to value creation—is rare. The challenge hasn't been our assets. It's been our capital allocation. That's what I'm here to fix.

Capital Allocation: Our Most Consequential Decision

I've spent plenty of time in the wilderness over the years. I grew up backpacking in the Sierras with my dad, and I'm the father of four Eagle Scouts (two boys, two girls). In my spare time, I've been exploring the vastness of the Ranch, getting a few flat tires in the process. While in the backcountry, I've been struck by two things. First is the spectacular beauty of the land. The stunningly picturesque landscape of the Ranch reinforces why we've worked so hard to preserve the majority of it while developing a few select areas. My second realization as I've stood at the intersection of countless roads, trails, canals and easements crisscrossing our 270,000 acres, is that it's remarkably easy to get lost here, both literally and figuratively.

As CEO, I face a similar challenge. I'm surrounded by competing strategies, capital priorities, opportunities and distractions. Every day presents decisions about where to deploy capital, which projects to advance, which to defer, and which to abandon entirely. My job isn't to venture down every promising path, it's to make the choices that ultimately create lasting shareholder value.

This is where discipline matters most. For Tejon Ranch Company, with our complex mix of income-producing properties, long-term development projects, and emerging opportunities, capital allocation isn't just important, it's everything.

My approach is straightforward: prioritize capital for opportunities with proven demand that can generate sustainable cash flow in the near term. This starts with investing in TRCC, where we've demonstrated our ability to create value and compound returns. Any capital allocated to long-term investments like master planned communities must be carefully measured and mitigated through joint venture partnerships, ensuring they don't consume a disproportionate share of today's resources or dilute shareholders.