National Retail Properties, Inc. (NYSE:NNN) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Spenser Allaway: Yes. Okay. That makes sense. And then again, sorry if I missed this in your prepared remarks, but can you just provide a little bit more color on that disposition you guys disclosed, the 5.1% cap rate I believe? And again, sorry if I missed it.

Stephen Horn: So the 5.1% was the overall weighted average of the 7 assets or 5 assets because 2 of them were vacant. So we’re not counted in that. So we were opportunistic. Somebody saw some land that they thought was a lot more valuable than NNN thought it was. So we were willing to depart at extremely low cap rate. But there’s a barbell approach in there, it’s the weighted average cap rate. We did some defensive sales in there that were 7.5% cap, but then we had a couple in the 4s to bring that down to a 5.1%.

Operator: Our next question is coming from Linda Tsai with Jefferies.

Linda Tsai: You talked about headwinds in ’23 to earnings growth, the nearly 10% growth last year, slowdown in scheduled rent repayments and capitalized interest being backed out of AFFO. How are you thinking about ’24? Comparison will be easier. The rent repayment isn’t as much of a headwind. Do you think capitalized interest remains a headwind? Or are there other items to consider?

Kevin Habicht: Yes., we haven’t put out any guidance on ’24 yet, but I — it feels like at this point, and I know it’s really early and the world is changing fast, it feels like, we’ll get back to what we think of as a more normal cadence. Still some headwinds out there, and the capital markets would be my presumption for ’24. And I think cap rates will need to adjust some more, in my opinion. But yes, we should have worked our way through a lot of the onetime items, both good and bad in 2024. And so hopefully, we can get back to what we think of as a more normal cadence of kind of mid-single digit kind of per share growth. It is interesting. If you look at 2022 and 2023 in combination to that 2-year period, we’re right at our kind of mid-single-digit growth rate.

It just happened to be that a lot of it came in 2022 and not so much in ’23. But if you look at the average of the 2 years, it’s kind of what we think of as kind of our sweet spot of a goal of long-term per share growth rate. And so 2024 at the moment feels like the deferrals will be pretty much all behind us. The capitalized interest may continue because we’re still doing more elevate — more split-funded deals than historically. Like I said, a normal year for us is 20%, 25% of our investments is split-funded approach. This year just happens to be closer to 35%, probably. And so I think that will probably normalize with time. But we’ll see. We don’t have any visibility on that, so it’s really hard for me to be very definitive with my thoughts on that.

Linda Tsai: And then in terms of the balance of the year for acquisition volumes, do you expect volumes to be evenly distributed between 3Q and 4Q?

Stephen Horn: We’re a very lumpy business. But as I sit here today, yes, I would guess a little more even than historically, just given the visibility I have on the third Q.

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Our next question is coming from Alec Feygin with Baird.

Alec Feygin: The first one is, are you seeing any acceleration in either new retailer or developer relationships now that the lending conditions are more difficult?