Kite Realty Group Trust (NYSE:KRG) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kite Realty Group Trust (NYSE:KRG) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 14, 2024

Kite Realty Group Trust  isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good day, and welcome to the Q4 2023 Kite Realty Group Trust Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to John Kite, Chairman and CEO.

Bryan McCarthy: Thanks. And this is Bryan McCarthy to kick it off. Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Kite Realty Group’s fourth quarter earnings call. Some of today’s comments contain forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions of future events and are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. For more information about the factors that can adversely affect the Company’s results, please see our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-K. Today’s remarks also include certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to yesterday’s earnings press release available on our website for reconciliation of these non-GAAP performance measures to our GAAP financial results.

On the call with me today from Kite Realty Group are Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, John Kite; President and Chief Operating Officer, Tom McGowan; Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Heath Fear; Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer; Dave Buell; and Senior Vice President, Capital Markets and Investor Relations, Tyler Henshaw. I will now turn the call over to John.

John Kite: Thanks, Bryan. And thank you, everyone, for joining today. We are understandably proud of what we’ve accomplished in 2023 and over the course of 2024 we will continue to operate from a position of strength. Heath will walk you through the details of our results and our 2024 guidance and I’ll spend my time looking back at some key 2023 accomplishments and our action plan for 2024. At the beginning of 2023, we guided to NAREIT FFO of $1.93 per share at the midpoint with same-store growth of 2.5%. We delivered NAREIT FFO of $2.03 per share and grew same-store by 4.8%. Our primary focus in 2023 was to lease space at attractive risk-adjusted returns. And in fact, we leased 4.9 million square feet at blended cash rent spreads of 14.3%.

New leasing volume represented 1.1 million square feet with a blended cash spread of 41.3% and a return on invested capital of approximately 30%, 380,000 square feet of new leasing was in the fourth quarter representing an all-time high for KRG. We leased 26 boxes in 2023 to high-quality and well-capitalized tenants, including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Total Wine, PGA Superstore, Golf Galaxy, Sierra, Homesense, pOpshelf, Five Below, Foot Locker, Restoration Hardware and West Elm to name a few. Our leverage improved to 5.1 times net debt-to-EBITDA, one of the lowest in the sector and our liquidity remains at $1.1 billion. Our development and construction teams delivered and opened 235 tenants, representing $36 million of annualized NOI in 2023.

We continue to have success pushing higher embedded rent bumps primarily in the small shops. In 2023, fixed rent bumps for new and non-option renewal shop leases were 300 basis points, which was 60 basis points higher than the in-place shop average. Improving our long-term growth trajectory will take time, but we remain focused on elevating the growth profile for the entire portfolio. We have duly recaptured space from poorly capitalized or lower growth tenants and replaced them with tenants that have superior balance sheets, better offerings and higher growth. As we’ve mentioned time and time again, we measure our leasing success in terms of tenant quality, merchandising, rent growth and return on capital. We kept our development spend in check, while at the same time preparing our pipeline for activation once we’ve completed the elevating leasing activity.

We relentlessly advocated for a ratings change resulting in an outlook upgrade from S&P, which we expect will materialize into a full upgrade to BBB in the next 12 months. During 2023, we sold four noncore assets for a mid-five cap, generating $142 million in proceeds. We purchased Prestonwood Place in the Dallas MSA for a high six cap for approximately $81 million. Over the past two years, the blended cap rates on dispositions have been approximately 125 basis points tighter than the cap rate on acquisitions. Based on our success in 2023, it follows that our action plan for 2024 would be very similar. We will aggressively lease up our vacancy while achieving higher embedded growth and enhancing the merchandising mix. Our signed-not-open pipeline increased to $31 million, and we expect 87% of the NOI to commence in 2024.

Over the first half of 2024, we expect the SNO pipeline to remain elevated, reflecting the velocity of new lease execution against the rapid pace of tenant openings. On Page 7 of our investor update, we detailed a compelling opportunity for investors based on the current share price and the potential prices at various capitalization rates taking into account the $31 million of signed-not-open NOI. It’s important to note that this page does not account for any additional lease-up or the significant value of our entitled land bank. We expect to spend over $200 million on leasing capital in the next two years, while still generating free cash flow. As we’ve emphasized on numerous occasions, leasing space in this environment is hands down the best use of capital as it relates to the absolute and risk-adjusted returns.

It’s worth recognizing the longer-term AFFO cash flow and leverage implications due to our elevated leasing activity and associated capital spend. Looking at our model, our leasing spend begins to normalize towards the back half of 2025. At the same time, the incremental rent from all new leasing activity begins to peak, resulting in a meaningful earnings and dividend growth plus a dramatic increase in AFFO per share. Our leverage levels dip significantly and the cash available for investing activities ramps up to a level well in excess of $100 million a year. During 2024, we’ll keep our development spend in check and provide more detail on each of our opportunities when appropriate. We expect acquisitions will be match funded with proceeds from dispositions with the goal of exiting lower growth properties or one asset markets and relocating that NOI into our target markets.

We’ll also keep the pressure on the rating agencies in pursuit of ratings that more accurately reflect our credit metrics. Lastly, we’re embarking on an investor outreach plan called 4 and 24. Our goal is for investors to better understand the high quality of our portfolio and the depth of talent across the entire organization. We look forward to seeing many of you at our first event in Naples next week and at the subsequent events in Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas. In closing, KRG produced another year of operational outperformance in 2023 and we intend to exceed expectations again in 2024. Thanks for your time and continued dedication and commitment. I’ll turn the call to Heath.

Heath Fear: Thank you, John. For the fourth quarter of 2023, KRG earned $0.50 of NAREIT FFO per share and $2.03 per share for the full year. During the quarter, same property NOI grew by 2.8%, primarily driven by 170 basis point increase in minimum rent and 120 basis point increase in net recoveries. For the full year, same property NOI growth was 4.8% with primary contributors being higher minimum rent, all time high overage rent and lower bad debt. As John mentioned, we exceeded our original 2023 FFO guidance by $0.11 per share. $0.07 of the increase is related to operational outperformance in our same property pool. $0.02 is attributable to properties outside the same property pool with the remaining $0.02 related to the net impact of non-cash items, termination fees and net transactional activity.

We are establishing 2024 NAREIT FFO guidance of $2 to $2.06 per share included in our guidance are the following assumptions. A same property NOI growth range of 1% to 2% and a full year of bad debt assumption range of 75 basis points to 125 basis points of total revenues. On Page 5 of our fourth quarter investor presentation, we set forth a bridge to quantify the impact of year-over-year trends in our 2024 NAREIT FFO guidance and the same property NOI growth assumption. It’s important to note that, but for the following three items, our 2024 same property growth assumption would have been 200 basis points higher at 3.5%. The net impact of the bankruptcy of Bed Bath & Beyond, the failure of a large theater tenant to renew its lease in November of last year and during 2023, the company experienced a historically low level of bad debt at 42 basis points of revenue, while the mid-point of our bad debt assumption for our 2024 guidance is set at 100 basis points of total revenues.

Taking a longer-term view on growth, from 2021 through the mid-point of our 2024 guidance, our FFO CAGR is anticipated to be 10.6% and our average annualized same property NOI growth is anticipated to be 4.4%. Also, it’s worth noting that from 2021 through 2023, our dividend CAGR was 18.8%. Our net debt to EBITDA stands at 5.1 times, which remains at the lower end of our long-term target. Additionally, our debt service coverage ratio remains above 5 times and we have over $1.1 billion of liquidity. Subsequent to quarter end, KRG returned to the public debt market by issuing a 10-year $350 million bond at 5.5%. The fact that we were more than 10 times oversubscribed was not by accident. We spent a year reintroducing KRG to the fixed income community and successfully navigated a very tight issuance window.

While we are very pleased with the execution and demand, we see an opportunity for further spread compression as our bonds become more liquid and our ratings improve. Proceeds from the bond will be used to satisfy all of our 2024 debt maturities when they come due at the end of June. In the meantime, we have the proceeds invested in an account earning interest in excess of the yield on the maturing debt. Thank you to the fixed income community for effectively rerating our cost of debt to levels that are more reflective of the state of our credit metrics. As John mentioned, we look forward to showcasing our Naples portfolio at our first 4 and 24 event next week. The dates of the next three installments in Dallas, D.C., and Las Vegas are available on our website.

Thank you for joining the call today. Operator, this concludes our prepared remarks. Please open the line for questions.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Todd Thomas with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Todd Thomas: Hi, thanks. Good afternoon. A couple of questions. First, in the guidance, you included $0.02 related to the theater at City Center, which closed late last year. Can you just speak about plans to backfill that space, which I think it’s a third floor space, and just talk about – if you could just give us an update on that and sort of the opportunity to backfill that.

Tom McGowan: Sure, Todd. This is Tom. So we embarked on a process of trying to bring in four to five potential users. We have now broken that down into one that we’re focusing on very aggressively, had calls with them yesterday. So our hope is to try to bring them in with an executed lease by the end of the first quarter. And based upon the condition of the space, we should be in a position to commence rent very aggressively. So we have moved through that process in an expeditious manner. So we should be ready to go by the end of March.

Todd Thomas: Okay. And Heath, the $0.02 impact, does that assume any commencement during the year? Or is that basically assume the space is vacant throughout the year in its entirety?

Heath Fear: That assumes that the space is vacant, Todd. So any rent that Tom can turn on this year is going to be incremental to our guidance.

Todd Thomas: Okay. And then the expense recovery rate increased in the quarter. It was above 92%. I know you’ve focused on efforts to transition tenants and sign new leases with fixed CAM provisions. How should we think about that expense recovery rate moving forward? I guess, what’s assumed year-over-year in terms of the impact from net recoveries in the same store forecast?

Heath Fear: Yes. So Todd, both of those numbers, the NOI margin and the recovery ratio were a little higher this quarter. Part of its timing, part of it was we did better on real estate tax assessment challenges. We got a real estate tax refund that was related to a prior period. So I would tell you that right now we’re sort of normalizing in the NOI margins in the mid-70s and the recovery ratio in the high 80s, sometimes approaching 90. But again, as we start signing up more and more of this fixed CAM in our leases, this is going to be the gift that keeps on giving over time. Those numbers are going to continue to crawl up, again, as we get more people on fixed CAM.

Todd Thomas: Okay, great. All right, thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Floris van Dijkum with Compass Point. Your line is open.

Floris van Dijkum: Hey, guys, thanks for taking my question. I gather there is a bit of conservatism, both John and Heath sort of alluded to that in your initial guidance, which is always good, but it can scare people a little bit sometimes. Maybe, John, I would love to hear your thoughts on the significant transformation that has occurred at KRG over the last, call it six, seven years. Maybe in terms of portfolio quality and I think Heath sort of alluded to it in terms of the balance sheet as well. What do you think in your view? What are the biggest transformational changes that you have seen, and what does that mean for growth going forward?

John Kite: Well, actually, Floris, I think if you look at our investor presentation, there’s a handful of pages in there that are really important. One of them is Page 8, which kind of shows you the metrics and the growth that’s occurred and the improvement in the quality of the portfolio that’s occurred since 2019. And it’s pretty easy to look at that when you look at our ABR growth, you look at our blended cash rent spreads, and you look at our FFO CAGR since 2019 over that period of time, against a few select peers of the bigger peers, I mean, we’ve outperformed, we’ve been number one in each category. So the transformation has been massive, and it’s happened very quickly. And maybe people, I understand the intro to your question in terms of guidance, it’s – what is it?

February. So it’s very early in the year. This is how we approach it. We look at every variable, and there’s a lot of them. And again, this is a portfolio in transition. But as we laid out in the prepared remarks, the upside here is very substantial. And that’s just mathematics. That’s just the metric upside. The upside in getting people to understand the quality is the other thing that we have to focus on, maybe even more so, because it’s happened so quickly and people maybe haven’t been able to really get out there and see the assets. And I know we’ve spent some time together on the ground. So I think you understand what I’m talking about. It’s not just the assets, but it’s the relative quality of these assets as compared to peers with much higher multiples and lower cap rates.

So it’s a question that I could probably talk to you for an hour about. But the reality is the portfolio has changed dramatically. It’s improved dramatically, and our people have improved dramatically who are executing this plan. So, long story short, it’s just way better. And I think the metrics make it clear.

Floris van Dijkum: Thanks, John. Maybe – Heath, maybe if you can touch on a couple of things, presumably that you have in your back pocket. I know that you have a big portfolio of non-income producing lands. Maybe are you seeing some demands from investors on some of those land sites? And then maybe if you can also update us on what’s happening in California, in the other theatre that you had there that I think you’re looking to entitle to a different use.