Lou Haddad
Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead
Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us today. In addition to analysts and investors, there are many of the Armada Hoffler family on the call, including joint venture partners. On behalf of our Founder and Chairman, Dan Hoffler, the Board of Directors and executive management, we sincerely thank you for being a part of our team. So the last two years have been challenging to say the least, your hard work, dedication and expertise have seen us through our fifth recession. As has been the case following the previous four, your efforts have poised us for a significant growth and additional profitability. Similar to the five years preceding the pandemic, I feel certain that investors will soon recognize the trajectory of our company and reap the rewards of our growth. I'm proud to be associated with each one of you. The primary focus of my comments today will be on our 2022 guidance deck released this morning. Later in the call, Mike will go over our fourth quarter and full year results. As you can see from our earnings release and the other announcements we've made in recent weeks, our company has been extremely active. For the last few months, we've acquired a $270 million trophy property, signed several new leases and strengthened the balance sheet with noncore dispositions and capital market activity. As we forecasted six months ago, all three of the asset classes in our stabilized portfolio are now over 95% leased. This activity, combined with near-term development deliveries make us extremely bullish about 2022 and beyond. A quick word about 2021. The fourth quarter was very strong with normalized FFO of $0.27. The full year normalized FFO of $1.07 represents a 7% increase from the midpoint of our original 2021 guidance. Record NOI from our multifamily properties, combined with robust leasing in the office and retail sector as well as our off-market acquisitions, all played a role in this outstanding achievement. As happy as we are about our recent performance, the true excitement in our company centers around the current quality of our NOI and the future trajectory that we expect will fuel the substantial growth in the net asset value of the company. As you may recall, our goal for 2021 was to substantially increase NAV through our leasing initiatives, improved quality of NOI and exciting development starts. The continuation of this theme will become self-evident as we walk through the components of our guidance. Please see our guidance presentation that was released this morning. Page 4 outlines the components of our earnings guidance. Compared to 2021 results of $1.07, our 2022 normalized FFO guidance midpoint of $1.13 represents a solid 5.6% increase. Now turning to Page 5. 2022 is a year in which we will continue to focus on increasing the quality of portfolio NOI, accretive acquisitions and multifamily development deliveries. In short, we anticipate that our activities over the course of 2022 will build a solid case for expansion of our multiple while we continue to ramp earnings and dividends over the next few years. As you can see by the data on the top of this page, we expect significant increase in 2022 NOI from 2021 levels. This increase is driven by the acquisition of the Exelon building, the lease-up of Wills Wharf and the leasing activity at our retail properties which are expected to yield a material increase in NOI. Even more important is the dramatic rise we anticipate in our future NOI once our current development projects stabilize. While all of our property segments are expected to exhibit healthy increases, the main driver is the 75% increase in multifamily NOI through development deliveries. The majority of the funds necessary for these projects has already been secured. The remainder will be satisfied in the least dilutive manner possible. As the company's largest active equity holder, management remains committed to generate long-term value for all shareholders. Our primary goal is to increase NAV and turn a substantial amount of this growth into FFO. Turning to Page 6. You'll see the same NOI totals in bar chart form with the overlay of our anticipated fee income. Notable here is our projection that third-party construction fee income will remain near the top of it's historical range for the foreseeable future. Our contract backlog for this division will soon be at an all-time high. And as we have been stressing for several quarters, our lending program will continue to be deemphasized as we deploy more of our capital on hard assets. Thus, the fee side of the business will soon become a single-digit percentage in a pool of rapidly growing income. This was a conscious decision made in 2019 and one that sacrifices short-term earnings but is on track to produce substantial increases in NAV. Let's now take a look -- a closer look at the property segment composition of this NOI. Starting with Page 7. The multifamily segment performance has been nothing short of spectacular. Every 2021 metric listed here registered the highest increases in year-over-year results that we've experienced in our history. Perhaps the most important statistics shown is the future of 55% growth in the number of units delivered through our development pipeline and the expected dramatic rise in NOI over the next few years. We believe that the current and increasing value of our multifamily properties is underappreciated by the market and we hope that the true value of our multifamily portfolio will soon be recognized. These are recently built best-in-class assets that we believe would receive sub-4 cap rates on the open market. Page 8 is a snapshot of our office segment, again, showing very impressive occupancy, same-store NOI and re-leasing spreads. As we have said for a number of years, top quality office buildings in mixed-use environments outperform the general market over the long-term. Also noteworthy, we have very little in the way of lease expirations over the next few years. Inclusive of the Exelon acquisition, a quick look at our top 10 tenants will confirm that roughly 1/2 of our office NOI is derived from investment-grade tenants in trophy class buildings. Next page details our retail assets. As we predicted, occupancy has fully recovered from the pandemic and same-store NOI and re-leasing spreads have been robust. As we have only a small amount of retail in the pipeline, we are anticipating reliable growth in this segment, primarily through continued rent increases and acquisitions. Page 10 details our development projects. All projects are well underway with the exception of the Harrisonburg Apartments which we expect to commence construction this spring. Our Chief Operating Officer, Sean Pivot, is on the call, if you have specific questions regarding any particular development. I'll call your attention to the bar chart to the right of the page. You'll see that we are anticipating the value creation to be larger than our traditional target of 20%. This increase is primarily due to the compression in multifamily cap rates. As I said earlier, apartments make up the majority of the pipeline. We anticipate announcing at least two additional projects later this year. Page 11 shows our recent acquisition activity. Over the past 14 months, we acquired six properties totaling over $500 million, adding a total of $35 million in NOI. The acquisitions include 500,000 square feet of retail, 450,000 square feet of office and nearly 700 multifamily units. We intend to continue with these types of opportunistic acquisitions in 2022 and beyond. Of a total of over $0.5 billion in recent acquisitions is impressive in and of itself. It's important to recognize that each of these purchases were off-market transactions. This approach requires patience and long-term relationships. We believe that we could sell each of these almost immediately at a meaningful profit. The full NOI impact of the assets listed here will be in place for virtually the entire year. In addition, our 2022 guidance includes additional purchases of $100 million in the second half of 2022 as we prepare to receive the proceeds from our partner's sale of the Interlock project in West Midtown Atlanta early next year. On Page 12, you can see that our core markets span from Baltimore to Atlanta with the highest concentration in Maryland and Virginia, the locations of our two master planned communities. On Pages 14 to 17, you can see the magnitude of Baltimore's Harbor Point and the Town Center of Virginia Beach. Both of these master planned communities are multi-decade partnerships with municipalities and represent best-in-class mixed-use developments that continue to thrive and expand through multiple phases. Additionally, we are seeing a tremendous number of opportunities in our other markets of the Carolinas and Georgia and expect that we will continue to grow in those areas as well. The remainder of the deck consists of a detailed description of the Exelon purchase which Mike will speak to and individual pages on each of our development projects. Now, I'll turn the call over to Mike.