W. P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Brad Heffern: Yes. Hey everybody. Jason, you have talked about the sale-leaseback market being really robust. I guess I am curious if you are seeing any better lease terms in addition to the higher volumes and cap rates things like higher escalators, longer duration, better lease protections, anything like that?

Jason Fox: Yes. I think I would say all of the above. I mean that’s one of the benefits of sale-leasebacks as we write our own leases, negotiate our own leases, I should say. And to some extent, we can dictate the terms that are important to us. Lease term has been one we focused on for 2022. Our weighted average lease term, I think was 19.9 years for new deals, which is in line with where we have been. I would expect that to be in line or 2023 to be in line with that as well. But we do focus on that. I think in addition to cap rates, we still are seeing some upward pressures on the type of bumps that we get. I think we are getting some pushback on inflation-linked increases as you can imagine. But our caps that we put in place from time-to-time and that’s maybe more of the conversation now.

Those are higher than where they have been historically. And some of that has flowed through to the fixed rate increases as well. I think historically, we have probably been around 2% fixed increases on average, and we are going to be a little bit above that is my expectation this year. I mean we are above that for the leases that fixed increases for 2022. So, look, I think that we have maybe a little bit more negotiating leverage in some of these deals given that there is fewer alternatives for firms to raise capital. I think sale-leasebacks are really good opportunity right now. There is fewer competition that target sale-leaseback and there is even fewer that have €“ and maybe none that have a history as long as ours in terms of execution.

So, I think all of those factors lead us to having incremental structuring abilities and we will kind of measure what’s important to us and what we get.

Brad Heffern: Okay. Thanks for that. And then I was wondering if you could talk through the watch list. Has it expanded or contracted? And I guess is there anything that we need to be keeping an eye on that maybe isn’t obvious from the 18% of ABR that you disclosed the tenants for?

Brooks Gordon: This is Brooks. Yes, Credit quality overall is quite good. Again, reiterate about 32% of ABR is investment grade. We are largely dealing with large companies with great access to capital and collecting materially all of our rent. From a watch list perspective, it’s in and around 2.5% of ABR €“ to put that into context, maybe the COVID peak was just over 4%. So, credit quality has improved since then. That said, we are certainly watching closely both macroeconomic and industry-specific headwinds. There is not really any trends or themes in the watch list. It’s very anecdotal and tenant specific. But certainly, at this point in the cycle, we want to pay very, very close attention and we are doing that. So, that’s kind of the status of the watch list, and I wouldn’t characterize it as anything different per se in recent quarters.

Brad Heffern: Prefect. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from John Massocca of Ladenburg Thalmann. Please go ahead.

John Massocca: Good morning. Maybe going back to the acquisition side of things and sale-leasebacks in particular, are you seeing a divergence in terms of pricing between investment-grade rated tenants and kind of non-investment grade rated tenants? I know the latter is kind of where you tend to do deals most often, but just kind of has there been a change in terms of pricing expectations for those two different buckets of potential tenants?