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

John Moragne: Yeah. No, absolutely we are. And that’s actually the place where we continue to see what we think are the best possible opportunities. The regular-way acquisition market has been slow to adjust to rising interest rate and treasuries and cost of capital a reality for people that are on the buy side, particularly now that you’re seeing a full dropoff of the PE buyer and the 1031 buyer. There’s a much smaller buyer pool than there was before. And as Ryan talked about earlier that bid-ask spread is still pretty high in sort of the traditional market, but where you see a lot of difficulty for folks right now is in those developments. It’s in those sort of creative capital allocation decisions, where they are having difficulty finding their traditional sources of financing, because the bank real estate lending market has completely ceased up, so that’s a great opportunity for us to step in and provide them with a unique source of new capital.

And then we’re just in the process of looking at those evaluating them and trying to make sure that those fit within the net lease wrapper and will be something that is readily digestible by the market and not something too far afield.

Michael Gorman: Great. And then just last one for me. I’m triangulating a few of the comments that you had in prepared remarks and prior questions. You mentioned of the deals kind of not fitting within the buy box mostly from the cost of capital side, but then also with the dispositions kind of some credit risk or some tail risks on the tenant side. I’m wondering if — given what you’re seeing on cost of capital, if you’ve adjusted your tenant credit buy box in terms of what would actually make you comfortable in bringing new tenant credit onboard?

Ryan Albano: Sure. I would say yes, there’s not a one size fits all in terms of how we’re thinking about that today. However, we certainly have adjusted the way that we’re looking at it and how we’re thinking about bringing potential new credits online. In addition to that, I’d say that also goes for the real estate fundamentals. I would say we’re — we always look for a balance between the two, but we’re in an environment where we’ve got pricing backing up and we’ve got financial strength across the market in general. And how long does that persist is a good question at this point, so we have certainly tightened up the way that we’re looking at things. And I think you see that in terms of our selectiveness.

Michael Gorman: Great. Thanks for your time guys.

Operator: Our next question is from Ronald Kamdem with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Unidentified Analyst: Hey, good morning. You have Jenny, on for Ron. I just have two quick ones. The first one is if I dig into your pipelines, I see that Q3 investment is very light so in this higher rate environment for Q4, if you want to compare with Q3 are your new conversations going on right now still kind of in the same pace? Or every party rather want to wait until like early 2024. Like any color on the pipeline would be helpful. Thank you.

Ryan Albano: Sure. I guess, I’d sort of zoom out for a second. I’d say that if you look at Q3 of this year versus Q3 of last year on an overall transaction closing basis for the market as a whole, not just us specifically it’s down about 66%. So I think that tells pretty much everything you need to know. From our perspective, we’re looking at it being very selective. We’ve had a lot of commentary around that. As we look forward here we’re looking for prices to continue to adjust. Since late summer, we’ve seen 100 bps of change in treasuries such as the risk-free rate alone, pushing the change in asset pricing or asset pricing expectations from a buyer perspective. And we’re being highly selective, so I think what you’re seeing is probably yes a light Q3 but we have a number of opportunities that we’re looking at today that have either been broken in the past – and we’re looking at ways that there are good deals.