T. Andrew Smith
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Thanks, Ross. Good morning. I want to add my welcome to all of our shareholders and other participants to our third quarter earnings call. Brookdale's third quarter performance was strong and we are quite pleased with our results. Before discussing the details of the quarter, I want to update you on certain elements of the strategy we've outlined for you over the past 3 quarters. First, as evidenced by the substantial increase on our same community operating income, we've been laser focused on the organic growth of our current portfolio by improving our sales and marketing functions and our operational execution. The enhancements we've made to attract prospects are producing more leads, better conversion ratios, and thus, more move-ins. The enhancements -- these enhancements include our brand activation, our internal and external call centers and new digital media initiatives. Second, the changes we made at the beginning of the year to flatten our field organization have resulted in better operational effectiveness, tighter cost control, and greater responsiveness at the community level. Third, as evidenced by the 170 basis point increase in the third quarter operating margin for the senior housing portfolio, the investments we've made in support systems are paying off with increased operational efficiency. An important component of this effort is our service alignment initiative. Service alignment is a proprietary process that benchmarks our labor standards to ensure, first and foremost, that we provide top quality services, while secondarily, ensuring that we do so as efficiently as possible. Matching our labor to meet those benchmarks makes us a more efficient service provider, and it ensures that we maintain our high quality -- our high standards for quality. Fourth, we continue to deploy our free cash flow into areas that produce the most attractive returns. Our Program Max initiative, with expected mid-teens returns is just now gaining momentum, and we are just beginning to see the impact on our results through increase occupancy, better pricing, and new capacity on repositioned units. We also acquired the ownership interest in a number of communities so far this year. We will remain active in seeking strategic and tactical acquisitions in a fragmented industry that has considerable potential consolidation opportunities. Lastly, we continue to innovatively expand the services we offer in the marketplace. We are pursuing opportunities such as hospice services and private-pay home care, both inside of our communities and outside of our walls. We place a high premium on innovation, as we analyze the programs we deliver, the services we offer, where we offer those services and even the customers we serve. Turning now to third quarter results. We produced strong growth in operating income and cash flow. We produced over $75 million of CFFO in the third quarter, nearly a 14% increase over the third quarter of 2012. Operating income was up almost 9% and adjusted EBITDA grew by 7%. This year-over-year improvement in both our consolidated and our same community results came through rate growth, occupancy gains and solid expense management. Consistent with the first 2 quarters of the year, our rate growth moderately exceeded our expectations. Senior housing rates increased 2.8%, up from last quarter's 2.5%. Our rate growth continues to gradually trend up as we build occupancy and reduce discounting. Looking specifically at occupancy, we increased our quarterly average occupancy by 100 basis points for the consolidated portfolio when compared to the third quarter of 2012. Sequentially, our consolidated occupancy was up 70 basis points. We saw similar positive improvements in each of our segments and each of our product lines. As we said last quarter, we expect occupancy to gradually build through the balance of this year, and October followed the trend with average consolidated occupancy of approximately 20 basis points. We continue to be excited about our national branding activation effort. We believe that we have a meaningful opportunity to differentiate Brookdale in our communities in a marketplace that doesn't have strong national brand. Over time, we are confident that the name Brookdale will become top of mind for our prospective customers, and will come to symbolize the trusted provider of the highest quality, Senior Living Solutions. We are using a multilayered marketing approach with local, regional and national activities. Some of these are traditional and some our innovative and new. We are creating better awareness of the benefits of our platform and greater opportunities for engagement with our seniors and their families, with the final result of more people experiencing the benefits of what we do and becoming advocates for the brand. While it is still early, we are measuring a number of metrics to track our progress since the brand activation began in May. Here are a few examples of the metrics we're tracking: comparing the 150-day period, pre- and post-brand activation, we saw that our website visits were up 22%; searches originating from mobile devices were up 96%; and prospects searching for specific community information on our website increased by 27%. We feel it is critical to continue to evolve and innovate our sales and marketing activities to adapt to a changing marketplace. Our third quarter third-party call center, which handles and qualifies inbound phone inquiries responded to 40% more calls in September than in May. Our internal call center, which we call the Brookdale Solution Center, focuses primarily on 2 areas of opportunity: first, speed to lead. That is more rapid response to Internet leads; and then secondly, to nurturing relationships with current but older prospects in our lead bank. We're also continuing to develop and enhance our social media presence. One immediate benefit of social media is the creation of new channels for public advocacy for our communities, our satisfied residents and their families. Recently, a number of questions have arisen regarding new construction activity in the industry. As the NIC data has shown, there is an increase in construction of new units. From a high-level perspective, this is neither surprising nor alarming for Brookdale. Why is this? Well, first, demographics are inevitably going to broaden and deepen our market. There are a number of ways to major demographic growth, but all of them showed demographic tailwinds for the industry. For example, consider the growth of those over 85 with incomes over $50,000. This is our demographic sweet spot and today, there are 4.4 million people in this group. But that number is estimated to grow by 7% per year through 2015. Second, the level of new construction is still fairly modest, both on a historical basis and when measured against current inventory. The NIC data for the top 100 markets shows 19,250 Senior Living units under construction, or 2.5% of inventory. That's not a large number in comparison to the almost 800,000 units of current senior housing capacity in these markets, and it is meaningfully lower than the 7% demographic growth that I just described. Of course, the real impact of new construction is more subtle than these broad big national numbers, which don't tell the whole story. We have a very diversified portfolio, both by geography and by product type. So one has to look at the local markets and really local submarkets, in order to make accurate assessments. As we do our planning, we look carefully at our local markets and what is happening in the competitive landscape. For new competition, we look at proximity, which we typically measure as a 5-mile radius, and then measure the demand in that submarket to assess the impact of new capacity. Telescoping down this way shows that the vast majority of the new construction is actually not within our submarkets and is therefore, not actually competitive with our existing communities. That said, there are a few submarkets where we expect new competition over the next several years. In those instances, we plan a response by implementing a comprehensive plan, what we call new competition readiness action plans, to address a number of response areas including marketing, pricing and potential CapEx for the affected community. The reality is, that the new competitor brings added marketing dollars into the market, usually generating additional demand and we most often get a shot at those prospects to sell the value of what we do. So while we keep a watchful eye on new construction activity, we don't currently believe that the current industry's supply-demand equation is unfavorable to Brookdale and the new construction is far from an irrational level. And on a local level, in the limited instances in which we actually face new competition, we believe we're well-equipped to minimize the impact of the new supply. In conclusion, we often tell you that what our associates do is more than a job, it's a passion. Nothing represents our associates passion more than what they have done for the Alzheimer's Association this year. Over the last several months, our associates have been involved in multiple activities and have raised almost $650,000 for this cause. I want to take this moment on behalf of those affected by this terrible disease to thank our associates for their caring and again, showing that this is more than a job, it's a calling. I also want to thank each of you for your interest in Brookdale. And now, here is Mark, to review our financial results in more detail.