CareTrust REIT, Inc. (NYSE:CTRE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dave Sedgwick: Yes, I’ll start and then James can clean up after me. High level, when we talk about our pipe, we really want to — I mean different people talk about their pipes in different ways. We certainly don’t talk about everything that is on our screen that we’re taking a look at. We really narrow it down to things that are either at least under LOI or very close to it that we have a lot of confidence that we can close. The timing on closing our pipe when we announced it, generally, is anywhere from imminently in a month to nine months or longer depending on how a particular transaction develops. So that’s how you should — in terms of the timing of it, if we say $175 million, you should not expect that to happen by year-end.

And you should have kind of some grace period of one to nine months, give or take. And sometimes stuff falls out of that pipe that we announced. But because of the activity that we’re seeing right now, we’re pretty confident that if something does fall out of that, we’ll be able to replace it pretty quickly. James?

James Callister: Yes. On your question about the yield on portfolio transactions, I mean the easier answer is it depends on the transaction. But I would say the general concept with our experience with portfolio deals is that if we really like them and we have the right operator solution or solutions, then I think we probably would be willing to do a yield that is maybe a couple of turns lower than what we would usually be underwriting it at to try and be more competitive. But we’re never going to go below what we feel like at the time is the right spread between our cost of capital and yield. So we will go a little bit lower to be aggressive and try to get the deal, but typically not somewhere we’re even close to not really having a spread on that deal.

Q – Austin Wurschmidt: That’s helpful. And then can you just discuss or confirm, I guess, the terms on the 11 property portfolio you mentioned just one under contract. And then did you collect any rent from those assets in the third quarter?

Dave Sedgwick: Well, in terms of the terms of the deal, I’m going to demur on that just because even though we just put it under contract today, if it falls out of contract, it wouldn’t be wise to signal to the market what we’re willing to transact out at this point. And in terms of rent, yes, we did receive rents in the quarter from that operator.

Q – Austin Wurschmidt: And then just last…That’s fair. And then just the last one for me. On the Covenant Care deal, did you consider putting those into a single master lease with the existing assets that you owned? I guess, how did you just get comfortable with the operator given you were below 1 time coverage. I know you’ve talked about them quite a bit in the past, but just curious about the latest thoughts on this new deal and how you thought about structure.

Dave Sedgwick: Yes. Great question. What’s encouraged us about the rationale for that really comes to a few different points. One is, like I said in my prepared remarks, Covenant Care same-store outside of these two, we have seen three quarters in a row of improving trailing 12 EBITDAR coverage, getting closer and closer to covering just at the property level EBITDAR. So that’s encouraging. The second point is because these reset in a few years as January 2027 is the reset. We think that, that does a couple of things for us. It continues to provide them with some time, to continue to improve our same-store assets with them and strengthens our relationship with them as well. If there’s like a downside scenario, we’ve always talked about how attractive the Covenant Care facilities are and how much interest we regularly receive from — unsolicited interest from operators to take on those assets.