Broadstone Net Lease, Inc. (NYSE:BNL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

John Moragne: Not at the moment, but I think it’s also important to dive into the particulars of what our health care portfolio is. You can’t paint with a broad brush the 18% that we have. About 7% of that’s clinical and the clinical assets would have nurses on staff and on site. And so maybe there’s a little bit of a read-through to those assets, but then the other 11% of our ABR is a variety of things including what would traditionally be considered medtail-type assets plasma centers dialysis. We have a decent chunk that’s committed to veterinary services, which wouldn’t have those types of issues. And then we also have some sort of more R&D-type facilities that will be included in our health care bucket, so you can’t sort of look at it as a monolith. And it’s a fairly small percentage that we do have. And there’s not any read-through that we have at the moment on that type of nurses’ strike issue.

Ki Bin Kim: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question is from Michael Gorman with BTIG. Your line is now open.

Michael Gorman: Yeah. Thanks. Good morning. John, maybe just stepping back for a second and talking about dividend policy, obviously a nice little increase in the quarter. Stock is yielding about 8% in a market that seems to want to pay more attention to dividend yields, but given what we’re seeing just generally in the cost of capital environment, how are you thinking about balancing continuing to kind of increase that payout to investors versus retaining what is probably your cheapest cost-of-equity capital here? So how are you balancing out the payout versus retained cash flow for future growth?

John Moragne: Yeah. Good question. Morning, Mike. It’s something that we talked about a lot. And when you look at the hard dollars the total amount of increased dollars that then go out the door as a result of this dividend increase it’s about $1 million, so it’s not a huge amount, but it is something. It’s $1 million that could be applied somewhere else from a capital allocation standpoint. Where we came down on was that in the current environment, as I sort of mentioned in my prepared remarks, the outsized growth that the net lease sector has experienced in the post-GFC world for that 15-year period or so feels more and more difficult. That’s not to say that it’s not going to come back and it’s unlikely but at the moment we’ve gone through the entirety of 2023.

We’re looking at 2024. And us and I think a lot of our peers are looking at 2024 being very similar to 2023. And so in a period when you’re not seeing the type of external growth and the outsized return expectations that come from that which is fed by a low interest rate environment and much better cost of capital than what our industry is currently experiencing we turned and looked at “Okay. Then we need to do better as real estate operators.” And as I mentioned in my remarks, operational expertise financial flexibility solid portfolio performance and durable cash flows are going to be key to success in the short term; and potentially longer term if you don’t see a significant change in cost of capital. So when we looked at that and we thought about how do we provide the best possible value for our shareholders, and the highest possible total shareholder return continuing to provide them with solid dividend growth was a key part of that so that’s where we came down on that decision.

Michael Gorman: No that makes sense and I agree. And I’m curious as you think about 2024 and you look at the opportunity set. Obviously, as you mentioned Broadstone has got some skill sets here in terms of operations and redevelopment and development. Understanding that the cold storage facility is a pretty big lift through October, are you seeing alternative opportunities to step into broken development, step in on sort of mezz financing on properties you’d ultimately like to own at the end? Are you seeing any more unusual opportunities away from the regular-way acquisition market that’s pretty slow?