Cindy Baier
Analyst · Bank of America
Thank you, Andy. I also want to thank everyone who has taken the time to listen to our earnings call today. As Andy described, at our Investor Day, we laid out our goal of growing the amount, quality and durability of our cash flow, improving adjusted EBITDA and strengthening our balance sheet. 2016 is an important rebuilding year for Brookdale where we expect to significantly improve the cash flow of our business and we are pleased to discuss our results with you. This morning, I'll take a few minutes to comment on our overall company results for second quarter 2016 and review our liquidity and balance sheet. I will also describe some adjustments that we have made in our reporting with respect to non-GAAP measures, taking into account some very recent guidance from the SEC on non-GAAP reporting. I want to be clear this is in no way a departure from our outlook or our original guidance for adjusted EBITDA or adjusted CFFO. We will also update our revenue guidance to address the expected impact on our senior housing and Ancillary Services revenue guidance, a planned closing of several disposition transaction. This reduction in revenue guidance does not have any impact on our adjusted EBITDA or adjusted CFFO guidance. I will close with comments about our guidance. First, we accomplished a lot during the quarter. Total second quarter 2016 revenue was $1.3 billion, a 1.7% year-over-year increase. This included a year-over-year resident fee revenue increase of 1%. Our second quarter 2016 average occupancy for the consolidated senior housing portfolio was 85.8% versus 86.1% in first quarter 2016, a 30 basis point sequential decrease. Normal seasonality in our business usually results in a second quarter average occupancy decline, but we were pleased that our average occupancy rose throughout the quarter and we exited June with an occupancy that nearly matched January's level. Move-ins continued to be strong with each of the last five months surpassing last year, and in some cases, reaching all-time highs for the given month. May and June of 2016 were the two highest months for move-ins for those months in at least four years. We gained nearly 70 basis points of average occupancy in the last two months of the quarter. As Andy described, we intentionally made some targeted short-term rate concessions to improve our occupancy and we were glad that these actions drove improved occupancy. As expected, our short-term promotional incentive modestly impacted our rate. We saw a small sequential decline in our rate growth between first quarter and second quarter of 2016. Even so, we are continuing to see strong year-over-year rate growth. Our second quarter 2016 revenue per occupied unit increased 3.3% on a year-over-year basis. As you know, we have pledged to rationalize our portfolio in order to enhance profitability and strengthen the balance sheet. As a result, we do forgo the revenue generated by our disposed of assets. In the last 15 months, we have disposed of 24 communities including seven communities in the first quarter 2016. In addition, we terminated six leases. These dispositions and lease terminations reduced year-over-year quarterly senior housing revenue by $13.7 million in the second quarter. Second quarter 2016 same community consolidated senior housing revenues increased 1.6% year-over-year. Overall, our consolidated same community senior housing portfolio generated a 3% year-over-year increase in revenue per occupied unit, again, reflecting the short term incentive. This was led by our Assisted Living segment where the increase was 3.4%. As a reminder, our revenue per occupied unit is shown net of discounts. For comparison, NIC recorded an asking rate increase of approximately 3%. Average occupancy for second quarter 2016 was 120 basis points lower than second quarter of 2015. We remain optimistic that our initiative to build occupancy through the rest of the year. For the second quarter, we continue to manage senior housing operating expenses well. We experienced a 10 basis point year-over-year same community expense growth in second quarter 2016. Our expenses benefited from an approximately $10.8 million decline in insurance expense. The decline reflected the reversal of reserve established with the Emeritus merger based on our expected claims going forward. Our actual experience since the merger has been much better than we anticipated, and I want to congratulate our legal and our risk management teams for managing the results claims so effectively. We had 3% same community labor expense growth. Our Ancillary Services segment produced $19 million of operating income during second quarter 2016, a 7.4% increase year-over-year. We are pleased with the progress that we have made in growing this business and focus on labor productivity and restoring our label management discipline. We continue to produce revenue growth in both hospice and home health episodes with second quarter 2016 revenue increasing by 6.2% year-over-year. Operating margin for second quarter was 15.4%, on par with second quarter of 2015 and a nice improvement over last quarter's 11.9%. We have now obtained a good number of the required regulatory permits for California and will work to expand that business. We project the expansion into our communities with these new licenses represents approximately $5 million of potential annual revenue over the next 12 months or so. Second quarter 2016 general and administrative expense was $90.7 million. G&A cost included non-cash stock-based compensation expense of $9 million. It also included integration, transaction, transaction-related and strategic project costs of $16.7 million, a decrease of $11.9 million or 41.6% from the second quarter of 2015. General and administrative expense, excluding these items and non-cash stock-based compensation expense was $65 million. I'm pleased with our CFFO and our adjusted CFFO results. Second quarter 2016 CFFO was $106.1 million versus $80.9 million in the prior year period. Adjusted CFFO excludes the $16.7 million of cost I just described plus an additional $600,000 of debt modification and other transaction costs for a total of $17.3 million. Excluding these items for both periods, adjusted CFFO was $123.4 million in second quarter 2016 versus $109.9 million in second quarter 2015. As I said, during the second quarter, costs that are excluded from adjusted CFFO were more than 40% lower than the same quarter a year ago. We were also pleased with the progress we made in the second quarter to positively impact our leverage and our liquidity through a number of portfolio rationalization transactions. We now have 60 communities in assets held-for-sale as a result of ongoing transactions. 10 of these communities were included in assets held-for-sale during the first quarter. When these 10 assets are sold, we expect to receive $67.3 million of gross proceeds and plan to use the proceeds to retire $60.6 million of debt. In the second quarter, six more communities were added to the assets held-for-sale as a result of two new transactions. We signed an agreement to sell five communities with 615 units to a single purchaser. We expect approximately $41 million of gross sales proceeds and expect to repay $28.8 million of debt. A transaction for a single community added a sixth community to the assets held-for-sale, which we expect to sell for $1.4 million. That asset is unencumbered. Additionally, we just recently announced that we entered into an agreement to sell 44 communities with 2,453 units in a single transaction for an aggregate sales price of $252.5 million. The total expected gross proceeds of all of these transactions is approximately $362 million before transaction costs, debt repayment and prepayment penalties. When the transaction closes, we expect most of the net proceeds to repay debt, which will lower our leverage. We expect that most of these transactions will be completed by the end of the year, the license transfers may stretch out the process longer for some assets. In total, for the 12 months ended June 30, 2016, the 60 communities being sold that I just described had revenue of approximately $138 million and CFFO of approximately $4 million. These transactions are examples of our progress in simplifying our business and improving our balance sheet and liquidity and we continue to look for future opportunities. Let me now address the changes in our presentation of non-GAAP measures. The SEC has been clear that they are increasingly focused on non-GAAP financial measures particularly where the non-GAAP measures differ significantly from the GAAP measures. In addition, in May of this year, the SEC issued revised guidance regarding the use of non-GAAP measures. We have carefully reviewed our non-GAAP financial metrics and we are making some changes to our reporting in response to the new guidance and SEC rules regarding the presentation of non-GAAP financial measures. First, we will be reporting CFFO as a measure of liquidity. As such, we will no longer report CFFO per share in our quarterly financial reporting. We will continue to report CFFO in the aggregate and will continue to report weighted average shares outstanding for our historical practice. Second, we are changing our definition of adjusted EBITDA. As a performance measure, the new definition of adjusted EBITDA now includes GAAP amortization of entry fees and no longer includes the cash amount of the net interest fee received or the CFFO from our unconsolidated ventures. To make it easier for you to understand what has changed, our supplement includes a reconciliation of our results using the new definition of adjusted EBITDA to the amount of adjusted EBITDA previously reported using the old definition. The change in definition of adjusted EBITDA results in a lower amount than what would have been reported under our previous definition. This is because the new definition excludes our share of cash flow from the operations of our non-consolidated ventures from adjusted EBITDA. As a result, our net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA is now reported at 6.4 times. While changing the definition doesn't reflect in an underlying change in our capital structure or financial results, it does highlight why we are focused on reducing leverage. Finally, I want to close by talking about our guidance. As we reported in our earnings release last night, we have updated our guidance for 2016. Fundamentally, our outlook hasn't changed. However, as a result of the disposition activity referenced earlier and the changes to our non-GAAP metrics, we did need to make two adjustments. First, with the exception of the original 17 assets that were held-for-sale on December 31, 2015, we did not include the sale or disposition of any communities in our original revenue or adjusted EBITDA or adjusted CFFO guidance. Given our assumptions as to the timing of closing of the transactions I described earlier, we are incorporating their expected impact into our revenue guidance to reflect the planned reduction in units. Compared to our previous guidance, we expect that the fourth quarter revenue will be reduced by $25 million to $30 million as a result of these transactions. Thus, we are removing this revenue from our guidance. And second, we are recapping our previous adjusted EBITDA guidance to reflect the new definition we have adopted. Our original guidance excluding integration, transaction, transaction-related and strategic project costs of approximately $60 million was $935 million to $955 million. As a result of the new definition of adjusted EBITDA, that range becomes $870 million to $890 million. That still excludes $60 million of integration, transaction, transaction-related and strategic project costs. Therefore, adjusted EBITDA as we reported without deducting those costs would be in a range of $810 million to $830 million. We have traditionally included our entry fee revenues on a cash basis in our adjusted EBITDA and we have reflective the CFFO of our joint ventures in this metric. Going forward, we will be excluding any economics of our joint ventures in our calculation of adjusted EBITDA and will be reflecting consolidated entry fee revenues on a GAAP basis. The company's full-year projected capital expenditures guidance for non-development CapEx remains at $230 million to $245 million with developed CapEx or Program Max at approximately $45 million. Our full-year guidance for G&A remains at $255 million to $265 million exclusive of integration, transaction, transaction-related and strategic project costs and non-cash stock compensation. We previously expressed our adjusted CFFO guidance on a per share basis. Stated on an aggregate basis, our guidance for 2016 full-year adjusted CFFO remains in the range of $455 million to $475 million. While we have adjusted revenue for the dispositions, we are still comfortable with our original full-year ranges for adjusted EBITDA as presented under the new definition and adjusted CFFO. If closed as expected, the disposition transactions will be slightly dilutive in the fourth quarter as we adjust overhead and CapEx and fully deploy proceeds over time. But given our year-to-date performance and our forecasts, we still expect to be within those adjusted EBITDA feasible ranges. With the plan that expects significant revenue growth in the second half of the year, it's too early to make significant adjustments to our full-year guidance. The bottom line is that we feel good about our ability to manage the various drivers of our business, revenue and expense, to achieve our guidance ranges. So to summarize, we made progress in the second quarter on executing our plan. We continue to meet expectations for adjusted CFFO for the year. We feel very good about the opportunities to grow revenue in the second half of the year and control expenses, to significantly reducing the amount of costs that are excluded from adjusted CFFO and to improve the liquidity of our business. This current focus on the right thing to bring about these results. I'd like to now turn the call back to Andy. Thank you. Andy?