John Kite
Analyst · Citi. Your question please
Thanks, Ashley. Good morning, everybody. The fourth quarter rounds out another successful quarter and year for the company. I wanted to take time to recognize the team’s hard work and achievements, which have positioned the company to capitalize on our future opportunities. Some of the objectives and milestones we achieved during 2016 were: FFO as adjusted for the year of $2.06 per share, which was at the midpoint of our guidance range. We achieved same property NOI growth of 2.9% for the year or 3.7%, excluding our 3R properties. Our same property NOI growth for the fourth quarter was a solid 3.6% or 4.5%, excluding the 3R initiative. We began construction on 14 3R projects during 2016, completing 4 of them and generating an annualized 11.3% return as we continue to strengthen our current portfolio. We executed 390 new and renewal leases for over 2 million square feet and increased our ABR to $15.78. As a point of comparison, our ABR is now almost 20% higher than it was just 3 years ago, which is an indication of just how dramatically we have improved the company’s portfolio over that time period. Back to 2016. We grew our small shop lease percentage by 130 basis points to 88.9%. This increase was led by our Florida properties which grew 240 basis points. We executed on a $300 million inaugural public bond offering with an attractive 4% coupon. We now have only $90 million of debt maturing through 2020 with approximately $430 million in liquidity. And most recently, we increased our quarterly cash dividend another 5.2%, for an overall increase of 26% since 2013. For the fourth quarter, we ended the year on a solid note with FFO as adjusted of $0.50 per share. Our retail recovery ratio increased 190 basis points over last year to 89.2% as a result of our continued efforts to work on expense management. We executed 92 in renewal leases in the fourth quarter, with approximately 570,000 square feet and an aggregate cash rent spread of 11.5% on comparable leases, a high for 2016. We also had some exciting tenant openings in the fourth quarter. We opened 48 new or expansions spaces for over 300,000 square feet. Our focus on continuing to enhance the quality and profitability of the retail portfolio has delivered a diverse space of highly trafficked shopping centers. Our portfolio continues to strengthen as we welcome high-quality necessity driven tenants with a focus on restaurants, health and beauty, service and entertainment concepts that complement our value-oriented retailers. Some of the tenants that recently opened are Carmike theater, PetSmart, DFW, Old Navy, Chipotle, [indiscernible], Five Guys, J.Crew Mercantile, Blaze Pizza, DXL, GNC, and Crunch Fitness to name a few. We do not have a single tenant that makes up more than 3% of our ABR, and over 70% of our ABR is from the top 50 metropolitan areas in the country. Along with the completion of our four projects in the fourth quarter, we commenced construction on two additional repositioned projects from the 3R pipeline in the fourth quarter. At Market Street Village, we recently added a Party City. At our Portofino Phase II, we were replacing vacant shop space with a Nordstrom Rack as well as rightsizing the existing Old Navy. We added an expansion of Holly Springs Phase II with the addition of O2 Fitness and well-positioned small shops. The Holly Springs project has been a very successful roundup development, including the recent opening of Carmike Ovation Cinema, which is a great entertainment option at this 500,000 square foot development. We received proceeds from the last residential sale at Eddy Street Commons at the University of Notre Dame this quarter and are now making substantial progress on Phase II of the project, which will once again include a public incentive component. The Phase II project is proposed to span two additional city blocks. As we reflect back on the success of Phase I of the project, we are very proud to have developed one of the finest university-sponsored mixed use developments in the country. The retail space continues to remain almost 100% leased and the office component is 100% leased and anchored by several prominent business units of the University of Notre Dame. The highly successful multifamily portion of the project includes a total of 266 units, which leads the market in both occupancy and rate. The success of the fully leased multifamily portion of the project is a catalyst to Phase II. Eddy Street Commons Phase I also includes numerous residential components, totaling 205 units. The demand for the townhomes, multilevel flats, garage wraps, and city homes far exceeded our expectations. I also want to provide updates on our disposition activities and our efforts to release the two Sports Authority boxes and the Field & Stream location at Parkside Phase II. On the remaining two Sports Authority boxes, we are in discussions with multiple tenants to backfill the space at Colonial Square at Fort Myers, Florida. In addition, we are also aggressively marketing the space at our Landings at Tradition Center in Port St. Lucie, Florida, and have a couple of viable alternatives as we were not able to come to economic terms with the previous prospective tenant. We don’t anticipate opening tenants for either of these spaces in 2017. The resetting of the former Field & Stream box at Parkside Town Commons has progressed nicely, as we are negotiating a lease with a replacement tenant for the entire 50,000 square feet. This tenant, along with a planned March opening of Stein Mart, would solidify and strengthen the anchor lineup at Parkside Phase II, as Parkside Phase I remains 100% leased. In December, we sold one assets in Florida for approximately $15 million. Given unique circumstances near the end of 2016 with the election and related volatility, we chose to pause on the sale of several additional assets and are now focused on the disposition of $45 million to $55 million of assets in the first half of 2017. Throughout 2016, we worked hard to strengthen our balance sheet and position it to its strongest position it has been in our company history. In the fourth quarter, we unencumbered three additional properties and reduced the ratio of secured debt to unappreciated assets to 16.9% from 23%. Our weighted average debt maturities have increased to a strong 6.4 years while our floating rate debt is down to only 7%, both significantly mitigating the near-term impact of any potential rise in interest rates. Before we get to our 2017 guidance, I would like to provide a quick update on the 3-year roadmap that we issued last year. As we said at the time, the roadmap laid out our aspirational goals for 2018 and we couldn’t build into those goals all of the various contingencies that would happen over that 3-year period. So for example, as we discussed during our earnings call last quarter, the roadmap did not include the public bond yield that we did in 2016. It also didn’t anticipate that some of our redevelopment efforts would proceed as quickly as they have, which require some tenants to vacate sooner than we originally expected. Both of these factors combined with some changes to our disposition assumptions, while prudent for our portfolio and balance sheet are dilutive to our near-term FFO. That said, we do continue to focus on growing our dividend as laid out in the roadmap as well as increasing our small shop occupancy to 90%. And by the way, we are well on our way as we ended the year at just under 89%. We also continue to focus on growing free cash flow and lowering our net debt to EBITDA to the low-6s. And we have already hit the floating rate debt target with 93% of our debt now at fixed rates. Lastly, we are introducing guidance for 2017 FFO as defined by NAREIT in a range of $2 to $2.06 per diluted share. The earnings press release and supplemental, which we filed yesterday detail all of the assumptions to achieve the range. Three primary items affect FFO between 2016 and 2017. First, the proactive public bond deal was dilutive by approximately $0.06, but was a good strategic long-term move as we paid off our lower rate debt term loan and construction debt that significantly extended our maturities. Second, the proactive de-leasing of our 3R projects created an acceleration of non-cash below market lease amortization in 2016 of $0.05 per share that we aren’t projecting to recur in 2017. And third, the projected asset dispositions totaling approximately $65 million between the end of ‘16 and early ‘17, net of related interest savings created a $0.03 dilutive effect. These items combined effect on our year-over-year FFO was approximately $0.14 per share. However, we are tracking a healthy AFFO growth of approximately 5% in 2017 as we continue our focus on free cash flow growth. In conclusion, our business operations are strong as we opened 48 diverse tenant and expansions for over 300,000 square feet in the fourth quarter. We generated 3.6% same-property growth, we raised the cash dividend by over 5% and we have $90 million of debt maturities through 2020, along with approximately $430 million of liquidity and 3.5x debt service charge. Our team is very motivated and looking forward to a productive 2017. Operator, we are ready for questions.