Park Hotels & Resorts Inc. (NYSE:PK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Tom Baltimore: Great question, Anthony. Look, if you just step back now, we’ve sold — since the spin, sold or disposed of 39 assets, about $2.1 billion. And we are laser-focused on continuing to reshape, improve and upgrade the portfolio. Now we also bolted on the 18 hotels from the Chesapeake deal as part of that. But keep in mind, our top 27 assets account for about 90% of the value of the company. We want to continue to improve and upgrade the portfolio. So this year, we’re targeting another $200 million to $300 million. There’s nothing we’ve been able — as we did last year, if you include Miami, obviously, $435 million, so those 8 asset sales. We’re confident that we’ll be able to continue to make progress there. And again, we’ll use those proceeds to invest back into the company or buy back stock on a leverage-neutral basis. But it will be a constant for us to continue to recycle and continue to reshape and upgrade the portfolio.

Anthony Powell: Thanks. And kind of a related question. I think on the CapEx guidance for the year, 300 to 325, I think it’s the highest since you’ve been a public company, a lot of ROI projects with I view as positive. So this time that you may cycle more ROI projects over time and maybe it’s your approach of ROI projects versus buybacks and capital allocation.

Tom Baltimore: Yes. Great question, Anthony. We’ll seek to find that right balance. Look when you are trading at this count of discount to NAV, you can certainly expect that we’ll be buying back stock. No better investment, as Sean said in his prepared remarks, than investing back in the portfolio. So we’ll find that balance of buying back stock on a leverage-neutral basis, but at the same time, investing in the portfolio. Just a few, the Bonnet Creek that we mentioned in the north of $200 million we’re putting in there. We completed the Reach Resort, which is a sister property to the Casa Marina in Key West, which is a huge success. We’re now going to complete the Casa Marina project. We’ve probably closed the property for about five months, plus or minus.

We’ve given what we think will be the disruption, as well as the EBITDA impact that is baked into our guidance. We have an extraordinarily talented design and construction team led by Carl Mayfield, best in the industry, seasoned. We know how to handle this. We’ve dealt with the extensive hurricanes, major projects. So we’ve got it teed up and we’re confident we’ll get that done this year. We’ll also be able to get the final phase of the Tapa Tower in Hawaii. So look, we obviously paused a little during the pandemic for the obvious reasons but we are being very thoughtful, very strategic. We’re planning well, making sure that all the supply chain issues are addressed. And we know how to handle it, and we know how to handle the large complicated projects as well as anybody in the sector.

Anthony Powell: Right, thank you.

Tom Baltimore: Thank you, yes.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Smedes Rose with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Smedes Rose: Hi, good morning. Hi, I wanted to just kind of circle back a little bit on your RevPAR outlook and margin expectations. Because it looks like if you — after the first quarter, the remaining three quarters of the year at the low end are kind of maybe zero to slightly down to maybe up mid-single digit at the high end? And I guess on the margin expansion, I mean, would you expect that to be more sort of packed into the first quarter and then it sort of flattens out as we move through the year? Or do you think even with a more sort of tepid RevPAR growth through the balance of the year that you can still achieve expansion — margin expansion.

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