Paul F. Gallagher - Executive Vice President and Chief Investment Officer
Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed
Thank you Mark. The past year has brought many changes to HCP's portfolio; the addition of the Slough Life Science portfolio and development pipeline, a $2 billion investment management platform, expansion of our mezzanine debt platform through our Manor Care investment, and significant capital recycling from assets sales. Our portfolio now has five distinct segments: Senior Housing, Life Science, Medical Office, Hospitals and Skilled Nursing. We have enhanced our supplemental reporting package by breaking up these segments with additional disclosures including lease explorations, leasing and releasing performance, property age and percent of pooled properties. We have broken out total property performance alongside same-store performance by segment on a sequential and year-over-year basis. This way you not only see same-store results, which Mark mentioned is less than a third of our portfolio, but you see how changes to the overall portfolio affect performance within each segment. Additionally, we modified the definition of cash flow coverage. The calculation previously was trailing 12 months EBITDA divided by annualized rent. We now divide EBITDA by trailing 12 months base rent and additional rent to more accurately reflect historical facility performance. Now let me take you to the five segments of our portfolio. Senior housing. HCP's senior housing consolidated portfolio consisted of 246 properties of which 68% of our total investment is located in mixed top 31 MSAs. The leases typically have an initial term of 15 years and 87% of our leases have renewal options. Our average remaining lease term is just under 11 years with less than 9% of the portfolios rents rolling over the next five years. Rents typically have annual escalators and generally reset the fare market upon execution of renewal options. Purchase options are less prevalent with only 24% of our properties subject to purchase options. The majority of these options are set at fare market value. We structure our leases to provide additional security with 85% of our senior housing properties pooled through master leases, polling agreements or cross guaranties. In addition, we often receive additional credit enhancement in the form of downstream guaranties from either the parent company or the principle of our operator, cash collateral in the form of security deposits or letters of credit or a combination of both. With regard to 2007 performance, HCP senior housing segment reported same-store cash NOI growth of 4.1% year-over-year. Senior housing occupancy remains stable at 90.8%. Despite concerns over the impact of the housing downturn, we have yet to see an impact to occupancy in our portfolio either by operator or location. With regard to our Sunrise assets, property level NOI year-over-year excluding one-time items grew at 5% and average occupancy increased to 160 basis points to 90.7%. Cash flow coverage of 0.93 times was impacted by expense growth in the portfolio over the prior year. We have been working with Sunrise on expense management and we began to see improvements in the trend in the latter half of 2007. Medical Office. Cash same-store performance for the year was up $3 million or 3.2% over 2006, driven by improvement in base rent which was $2.7 million higher. Increased operating expenses of $3.9 million were offset by expense recoveries of $2.9 million and recoveries of bad debt reserves of 1.3 million. 153 MOB leases were executed during the quarter totaling approximately 374,000 square feet, increasing the portfolios lease space to 91.1% at yearend, up from 90.9% at the end of the third quarter. Out of this total approximately 138,000 square feet related to previously vacant space and the remaining 236,000 square feet related to renewal of previously occupied space. The renewed leases brought our retention rate for the year to 78% within our normal range of 75% to 85%. MOB lease rollover for any 12-month period of time typically averages between 13% and 17% of the portfolio with average lease terms of four to five years. In addition to this core rollover approximately 2% to 4 % of the portfolio consists of holdover tenants who are month-to-month leases as renewals are being negotiated. Month-to-month leases totaled 407,000 square feet at yearend 2007 or 3% of the portfolio. And we expect to renew approximately 90% for these leases. The core lease exploration for 2008 is 17% and prospects are good with approximately 15% of the remaining 2.1 million square feet of explorations already leased or in build out. In addition to our normal expected retention, we have a pipeline of nearly 140,000 square feet of new lease under discussion. We had no MOB acquisitions for the quarter and sold one asset in San Diego to the anchor tenant for $8.6 million resulting in a gain of $3.5 million. We completed the Slough build out of 123,000 square foot MOB in Colorado Springs which is 75% pre-leased to Memorial Hospital, the number one hospital in the community with a 57% market share. Our pre-development pipeline includes 7 properties totaling approximately 641,000 square feet with a projected cost of $167 million. Skilled nursing reported solid same-store growth of 4.2% year-over-year driven by rent resets in two of our skilled nursing portfolios. Cash flow coverages and occupancies for the portfolio remain stable at 1.5 times and 86.1% respectively. Hospitals. Same-store growth in our hospital sector of 1.7% year-over-year was in line with expectations. Occupancies are stable and cash flow coverage for the total portfolio increased year-over-year to 2.4 times. Life Science. The Company's Life Science portfolio experienced strong operating results in the fourth quarter as tenant demand in HCP's core markets of South San Francisco and San Diego continued to produce leasing results that exceed our underwriting assumptions. During the fourth quarter, HCP completed approximately 423,000 square feet of leasing activity split 55% to 45% between San Diego and the Bay Area. Of this total 313,000 square feet related to new or renewal leases on previously occupied space that resulted in a mark-to-market increase of rents of nearly 40% over expiring leases, the remaining 110,000 square feet of leasing related to previously vacant space. These results have meaningfully reduced available space within our portfolio to approximately 396,000 square feet. As of 2007 yearend, the portfolio was 93% leased up from 90% at the end of the third quarter 2007. The Slough assets representing 5.2 million square feet were 91% leased up from 88% last quarter and 82% at acquisition announcement. Leasing prospects for 2008 remained robust with 45% of 2008 376,000 square feet of expirations already renewed or released. This combined with the pipeline of over 350,000 square feet of leases in negotiation should produce additional occupancy gains in income growth as rents are rolled to market. We expect to mark-to-market rental increases on 2008 expirations to range from 25% to 35%. On a same-store basis, the Life Science portfolio consisted of only 9 assets representing 739,000 square feet or approximately 12% of the portfolio. Income from these HCP legacy Life Science assets were down nearly 12... 28% year-over-year on a cash basis. As Mark previously mentioned, the decline was due to the reposition of the former Élan campus in San Diego, California. Reposition of this campus is complete and the same property portfolio was now 100% leased. It is worth noting that rent at the former Élan campus increased from $3.9 million per year to $6.9 million representing an increase of 77% over expiring rents. Excluding the Élan campus, same-store was up slightly on a cash basis for 2007 versus the previous year. The Company is committed; development pipeline is unchanged from last quarter, and totals 544,000 square feet in six buildings in our South San Francisco biotech cluster. As we discussed last quarter, these buildings represent new best-in-class Life Science space and are 86% pre-leased to investment REIT tenants, Amgen and Genentech. We expect to complete five of these pre-leased buildings totaling 466,000 square feet over the course of this year. Genentech will take approximately one-half of the space in the first half of 2008 and the remaining half will be delivered to Amgen in the fourth quarter of 2008. The future development and redevelopment pipeline represents an aggregate 3.3 million square feet of expansion opportunity in South San Francisco, Torrey Pines, Halway [ph] and Carlsbad. The changes we've made to the portfolio provide HCP with three distinct rent cash flow streams. Our senior housing portfolio along with hospitals and skilled nursing provide HCP with long-term, high quality private pay, low turnover, growing cash flows. The MOB portfolio has higher expirations, the higher retention ratios than traditional office, allowing HCP to roll 15% to 20% of the portfolio to market each year while maintaining occupancy. Finally, the Life Science portfolio leases are longer term with lower annual rollover but have significant near term growth potential. These three distinct rent cash flow streams are complementary and when layered together with our joint venture development mezzanine debt platforms help to further diversify HCP's growth opportunities. With that review of HCP's portfolio I would like to turn it over to Jay.
James F. ("Jay") Flaherty III - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Thanks, Paul. We are especially pleased with the continued strong momentum of our Life Science portfolio with 423,000 square feet of lease up and 40% mark-to-market increases in the quarter. I will now touch upon a handful of topics. HCP's business model, revenue quality mix, de-levering plan, current environment and conclude with a look ahead. HCP business model. In 2007, we reached critical mass with four product initiatives defined to be platforms of $1 billion or more that are expected to enhance returns for HCP's shareholders across our property segments. These are, one, development. As part of Slough Estates acquisition, HCP now enjoys a focused development and redevelopment platform representing 3.3 million square feet of laboratory, office opportunities in the land constraint, San Diego and San Francisco Bay area markets, two of the three largest life science clusters in the world. Our life science development is mostly build to suit in response to tenant demand. Two, DownREIT. Our February 2007 Medical City Dallas acquisition was structured as a DownREIT, the largest DownREIT transaction ever executed by HCP. We have now closed over $1 billion of transactions structured to include HCP equity as a meaningful component of the consideration to the seller. Three, Investment Management. In January 2007, we contributed 25 senior housing facilities operated by Horizon Bay into a newly formed joint venture with an institutional capital partner. HCP now has approximately $2 billion of assets under management in institutional joint ventures where HCP functions as the managing partner and minority investor of real estate portfolios in the medical office and senior housing sectors. By partnering with high quality institutional investors, our shareholders realize fee income and promoted interests in addition to the pro rata share of cash flows from our ownership. Four, mezzanine debt. HCP has a $1.3 billion mezzanine debt portfolio invested in the leading operators in the acute care hospital, specialty hospital and skilled nursing sectors. Mezzanine debt is a natural extension of our real estate equity underwriting expertise and generates attractive current returns albeit for shorter timeframes than our traditional equity investment activity. The substantial completion of HCP's multiyear repositioning results in a portfolio diversified across five property types, senior housing, life science, medical office, hospitals and skilled nursing. The investment structures are further diversified across five products; sale leaseback, joint ventures, development, DownREIT and mezzanine debt. Our 5X5 investment model, unique within the REIT industry, creates multiple FFO growth drivers and allows HCP to flexibly deploy and recycle shareholder's capital across a variety of operating environments. One of the significant competitive advantages created by our portfolio repositioning are the concentrations of relationships with the premier players in each of our five property types. These include for senior housing, Sunrise, Eriksson, Horizon Bay, Ages, and Bookdale; for medical office buildings, non profits such as Swedish Medical, Norton and Ascension in addition to HCA; for life science, Genentech, Amgen and Pfizer; for hospitals, HCA and HealthSouth; for skilled nursing, Manor Care and Trilogy. If you recall our previous comments of reworking our portfolio in the context of the retailing industry's, SKU concept, key to our portfolio repositioning was the objective of acquiring concentrations of newer higher barriers to entry healthcare real estate, operated or occupied by the leading players in 5 diverse sectors of the U.S. healthcare industry. As part of this rework we have consistently recycled non-core one-off properties especially real estate with exposure to state based Medicaid government reimbursement. Revenue quality mix. We have recently reviewed the underlying revenues for all the rental and interest income flowing into HCP. We grouped the source of these underlying revenue into either one, private pay and Medicare, or, two, state based Medicaid programs and excluded our life science and medical office sectors where there is virtually no Medicaid exposure. For the year ended December 31, 2007, 94% of revenues from HCP's facilities were derived from private pay and Medicare sources. For the facilities comprising the 6% Medicaid exposure, our coverage ratio was in excess of 1.5 times after management fees. Delevering plan. Our delevering plan has two elements: one, returning our credit metrics, especially our leverage ratio, to pre-Slough levels, and, two, terming out our floating rate debt. Our leverage ratio stood at 52% before we announced Slough and 62% after we announced Slough. By the middle of December two months ago, we had dropped our leverage ratio from 62% to 56% before taking it to its current level of 57% following our year-end Manor Care investment. We intend to reduce our leverage ratio to its pre-Slough levels by July 31st of this year through asset sales of $750 million. Of this volume we are in receipt of executed LOIs from interested parties for half of the $750 million and in active discussions for the remainder. With respect to terming out our short-term borrowings, we intend to wait for some level of normalcy to return to the credit markets prior to refinancing the balance. Current environment. Our five business segments are performing well. If you are to envision our performance scale on a continuum of not so good to the left and excellent to the right, I would place each of our five businesses on either side of the very good designation. Life sciences would be on the excellent side of very good and will be even skilled nursing would be right on the very good metric and hospitals and senior housing would be on the good side of very good. Given the slowdown in the U.S. economy, we are particularly pleased to have our portfolio repositioning behind us. The long duration reliable nature of our leases and the premier client relationships that we have added to our portfolio sets HCP up quite nicely in the current environment. We are particularly pleased with the significant reduction in our Medicaid exposure given the growing budget deficits we observe at state government levels. I have taken a half dozen or so calls since the start of the New Year from institutional investors looking to partner distressed healthcare situations with HCP. On education I point out, there's relatively little distress in healthcare, certainly nowhere near what is being felt in the other sectors of the economy. One need only to look at last week's HCA earnings announcement and the price performance of our toggle note investment in that company for confirmation. The bottom-line, people still need healthcare in a recession. Away from the strong underlying healthcare fundamentals, we have seen the current credit environment cause prospective joint venture partners to either retrieve to the sidelines for the time being or seek more opportunistic possibilities, particularly international strategies. As a result, we have elected to pull back the current joint venture marketing of our med cap MOB portfolio and substitute other asset dispositions as part of our delevering plan. Our med cap portfolio once again exceeded expectations in 2007, posting 100 basis point increase in occupancy and a 3.5%, same-store cash increase in NOI. With respect to acquisition activity, the turmoil in the credit market continues to lower volumes across the healthcare REIT space. We expect first quarter 2008 transaction activity for the sector to continue to moderate from 2007 fourth quarter levels. At HCP we are actively reviewing a number of opportunities. In this regard, the high quality concentrations in our exiting portfolio represent a significant competitive advantage for the company. A look ahead. To give the repositioned HCP Enterprise from context, our 5X5 business model has created multiple growth drivers projected to generate a 7.5% increase in reported FFO from our record 2007 results without the need to deploy any shareholder capital for acquisitions in 2008. If you were to set off to the side, the company's attractive mezzanine debt investments comprised of the number one industry leaders in the acute care hospital, specialty hospital and skilled nursing sectors. The remaining portfolio is long duration, inflation protected, reliable rent streams, in lab and medical office and private pay senior housing located in high barrier to entry markets, concentrated with the leading players in each of these sectors. In the space of a few short years, HCP's portfolio had been reshaped from a position of chasing the aging baby boomer demographic in the United States to a position of catching this demographic through the balance of the next decade. At this time we will be delighted to take your questions. Operator? Question And Answer