Earnings Labs

Gladstone Land Corporation (LANDO)

Q3 2017 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 8, 2017

$20.96

+1.06%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.
Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Gladstone Land Corp’s Third Quarter Earnings Call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be provided at that time [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today’s conference Chairman and CEO, David Gladstone. Sir?

David Gladstone

Analyst

Thank you for that nice introduction. And this is quarterly conference call of Gladstone Land and thank you all for calling in today. We really appreciate you taking time out of your day to listen to our presentation. We always enjoy talking to folks on the phone and hopefully we get a lot of questions today so that we can inform you about all the things going on. You know you’re always welcome to come visit us if you’re in the Washington, D.C. area. We are located nearby suburb called McLean, Virginia. And if you have a chance to come by, you will see a great team at work while you see some of them here, many of them on the road looking at different things out there. We have about 60 people and manage over $2 billion now. So we’re going to start with Michael LiCalsi. He is our General Counsel and Secretary. He also serves as the President of Gladstone Administration, which is the administrator for all the Gladstone funds including this one. Michael?

Michael LiCalsi

Analyst

Thanks, David. Today's report may include forward-looking statements of the Securities Act 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including those regarding to our future performance. These forward-looking statements necessarily involve certain risks and uncertainties that are based on our current plans, which we believe to be reasonable. Many factors may cause our actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements, including all the risk factors we include in our Forms 10-Q and 10-K and other documents that we filed with the SEC. These can be found on our website, www.gladstoneland.com, specifically the Investor Relations page of that website, on the SEC's Web site at www.sec.gov. Now the company undertakes no obligations to publicly update or revise any of these forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. And today we will also discuss some FFO terms now is funds from operations. FFO is a non-GAAP accounting term defined as net income, excluding the gains or losses from the sale of real estate and any impairment losses from property, plus depreciation and amortization of real estate assets. We will also discuss core FFO or CFFO, and that generally adjusts FFO for certain other non-recurring revenues and expenses, also AFFO which further adjusts CFFO for certain non-cash items. And you can find a description of all these FFO family of terms on page 41 of our 10-Q that we filed yesterday. We believe the FFO discussions give us a better indication of our operating results and allow better comparability of our period-over-period performance. If you take the opportunity to visit our website gladstoneland.com, sign-up for our e-mail notification service that will allow you to stay up-to-date on our company. You’ll also find just a couple of other pointers as well, Facebook including and the keyword there is The Gladstone Companies. We now have our Twitter handle that’s @GladstoneComps. And today’s call is an overview of our results. So we simply ask that you review our press release and Form 10-Q, again those were issued yesterday. Those will give you a lot more detailed information. Again, those can be found on our Investor Relations page of our Web site. So with that, I will give the time back to David Gladstone.

David Gladstone

Analyst

Okay, Michael. Thank you. 2017 has been a big year for us so far and I think by the end of the year we will be much stronger with already put a $123 million in new farms and these acquisitions are across six different states including the multitude of different crops with significant portion which are organic. Before I jump into the details, I just want to give a brief overview of the nature of our business. As most of you know, the funds that we invest today are defined as asset. We are an asset manager but we are an alternate asset manager. And that’s because we consider -- our assets are considered illiquid. May experts in the business also classify us as being a natural resource segment along with timber REITs for example or companies that may be in oil wells, coal mines, gas pipelines, those kinds of things. We are not in any of those but we are classified in the natural resource area. What makes us very different from most of the alternate asset managers is that we are publicly traded which provides our stockholders with liquidity since they can buy and sell the stock any time they like. And we chose to be a real estate investment trust so that our stockholders can get a cash dividend that have not already been taxed, so after-tax distribution. Our business consists of owning high-quality farm land leased to top tier farmers. We typically don’t own any of the land ourselves and thus generally don’t take any direct farming risk. We pride ourselves in only acquiring the best farms, highest priced farms and leasing them to the strongest farmers. We are really a real estate partner for farmers and we are not their competitors. Our investments focus on…

Lewis Parrish

Analyst

I'll begin by discussing our balance sheet. During the third quarter our total assets increased by about $40 million or 9% due to our new farm acquisitions which were ultimately funded through a combination of new fixed rate borrowings and common equity raised during the quarter through the September offering and sales to our ATM. David already went into details about the asset side, I'll focus on the financing side here. Since June 30th we've obtained additional $56 million in new long term borrowings from three new lenders and five existing lenders. On a weighted average basis these new borrowings carry an effective interest rate of 3.7% which is fixed for the next nine years. In addition to the small common offering David mentioned earlier, we also sold about $6 million of common stock through our ATM program during the quarter. From an overall leverage standpoint on a fair value basis and including our term preferred stock in the debt bucket, our loan to value ratio was about 60% at September 30th and we're comfortable at this level given the relative low risk of farmland within overall asset class. While interest rate and volatility remains a concern of ours about 98% of our total borrowings is currently at fixed rate and on a weighted average basis these rates are fixed for another seven years out. So we believe we are pretty well protected on the debt side against any near term interest rate hikes. The overall weighted average effective interest rate and our long term borrowings is currently about 3.16% which is up by about 10 basis points from a year ago. While interest rates have risen credit remains readily available to us, we continue to be able to borrow money on terms that made the overall economics work for…

David Gladstone

Analyst

Nice report Lewis. This company continues to get better every quarter as we continue to execute our plan. You all know we’ve invested about $425 million in new farms and assets since the IPO in 2013. Just going to continue to add to that figure, we've got a good list of acquisitions. Currently have two properties for about $9 million under sign purchase agreements. Expect those two acquisitions to be completed before the end of the year. We also have some other farms that are in the pipeline, but it's really too early to say regarding whether those transactions will get done in this quarter or next quarter. We currently have enough capital by all of these farms without any need for additional capital. Some of the purchases are expected to involve some issuance of OP units as consideration. We always have plenty of room and get the farmer and the people involved in that, and the company as well. However we are still continuing our due diligence process on many of these properties. And as always, there’s no guarantee that any of them will close. As you know with the increase in the number of farms we own, it comes a greater diversification and protection for our investors. So we’ve set better earnings. As most people know our fund specializes in farms and more recently we’ve gone into the nut and tree corps, and we have some cherries and apples and different things as well. We’ve historically avoided all the heavy farmland that grows traditional commodity crops such as corn, soybean and wheat. One reason for this is we believe farmland growing crops that contribute to health and lifestyle such as fruits and vegetables and nuts is going to be around for a long time as people continue to…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Rob Stevenson with Janney. Your line is open.

Rob Stevenson

Analyst

Good morning, guys. And sorry if I missed this, but what markets and what sort of crops were the two farms that had negative mark to market in the quarter?

David Gladstone

Analyst

Those were the two that we mentioned at the beginning somewhere in the middle were the two families and both of those were strawberries at the time. We leased one of the farms to veggie growers. So that sort of put it down or on that market, on that brand because those guys -- both them are right in the middle of an auction our plain and good farms is just we got caught at exactly the wrong time on that.

Rob Stevenson

Analyst

And then what do you guys expect the return to be on the incremental investment on the almond archery?

David Gladstone

Analyst

So we're earning 5.25% for the first few years in that lease. One sit switches over to a crop of anything, which I believe begins in 2020. The base rate goes down to 4% plus a significant portion of the gross proceeds.

Rob Stevenson

Analyst

And then in terms of the fourth quarter acquisitions, I mean you guys did announce one transaction for just under $1 million. Is there a significant amount that you guys expect to close or most of the stuff that you guys are working through right now is probably in early ‘18 close?

David Gladstone

Analyst

We've got two purchase agreements that we're trying to grind through now in terms of the due diligence that's about $9 million. So I expect those to close, they may not, but they're closed in this quarter. And unlikely any of the others that we have going through this will get dine this quarter, might hit one, but most of them will be in ‘18.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from John Roberts with Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

John Roberts

Analyst · Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

I was little confused on those leases you’re releasing with the farmers died at both of the farms. Is that right?

David Gladstone

Analyst · Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

Well, the farmers owned a company together. And the company was the tenant on the two farms. And unfortunately both of those gentlemen have died. And now most of it -- most of that farming operation has been sold off at a huge discount unfortunately for the farmers. And we have two farms, one of the farms we rented very quickly to another farmer in the area. He does vegetables, so it's not as critical that he got his farm planted right away. And on the other farm, which is the strawberry farm. If you're going to plant strawberries you had to have done it within, probably, two weeks of when we took over the farm. And that was not possible to get a lot of the steady farmers out there. For example, one of the farmers said he couldn't do the farm because it was already stretched in plastic that was brown and they like to use white or maybe that is black, I don't remember. But the farm was set up for particular kind of strawberry, and we were lucky enough to be able to find those plants and get them in the ground within the two weeks. And that's a testament really to the guy who we have an Oxnard. He is a long time farmer there and he pulled together all of the pieces and we got it planted. And now we're watching them grow and obviously taking care of them with irrigation and all of the things which we have to do to get a crop done.

John Roberts

Analyst · Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

I thought maybe you were doing that David because I know you did that before.

David Gladstone

Analyst · Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

Well I knew what he was doing but he is really carried the ball. I know a lot of the farmers out there. We got one of the farmers that is good at managing farms and he came in, he is going to run that part of it for us. We are really not doing any of it. Obviously we are getting others to do it. You can get people to actually operate your farm for a fixed fee. And so, we did that. And then on the selling side, we’ve got relationship with a sales group, actually two sales groups that are going to take the product beginning probably early January, may be end of December and start selling the crop as well. So that will be the telling point when we start selling. In average in that area is above 31,000 per acre. When I ran my farms and Bill Reiman our man in Oxnard ran his farms, and we were doing about 55,000 per acre. So we expect to beat the average significantly. And if we only do the average, we will make a small profit obviously pay for everything that we’ve got in the ground to get all of that money back. We are going to spend about a 1.7 million in plantings and harvesting. And as you know I’ve mentioned the fact that we have insurance such that if the whole farm for some reason didn’t go, we’ll get our 1.7 million back. That cost us about $70,000 to make that debt which I just got comfortable doing that. I never borrow insurance before and neither did Bill Reiman. So we’ve sort of doubled down I guess as we get over and get more cautious. And so that should -- if that comes in, we’ll make a good profit. Also I just mentioned before is that we have some share money coming in that could be $300,000-$400,000, currently closer to $300,000 then $400,000 in the next month. And we will have a press release on that and that will literate any of the down stroke that we’ve had here.

John Roberts

Analyst · Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

And David as far as the leases go, they’re three year leases according to the press release, is that right?

David Gladstone

Analyst · Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

Yes well. We started out with a three year lease. Well, on the farm that we leased to the people who is doing vegetables, that is a three year lease, and that’s a little bit lower than we can get with strawberries. So we take out a little bit of a back there. On the other hand of the spectrum the farm that we are doing, we leased it to the family because they thought they were going to take one of the two farms from us. And then of course as time went on they decided that they had to walk away from it because nobody was paying that much for farm that they had and the people who did it -- who did buy the farm were Northern farmers and wanted the Santa Maria and Watsonville farm down in Oxnard. It will change you will see the two or three people that we have now are very interested in this. You will see in the summer when we start negotiating -- after summer in the spring when we start negotiating you will see that farm get leased up pretty quick.

John Roberts

Analyst · Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

That was a little confusing because you said both leases were three years. And on the three year lease to the farmers doing the vegetables, I would assume at the end of that lease you are going to re-lease that to somebody doing strawberries and get a higher price?

David Gladstone

Analyst · Hilliard Lyons. Your line is open.

We should get a higher price when it comes out but I don’t want to speculate. We wanted to go ahead and do that. And the guy who is doing it is a very successful farmer, does a lot of vegetables in the area. So he will pay us a good amount of money. But we just won’t get strawberries.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, our next question comes from Jeffrey Briggs with Singular Research. Your line is open.

Jeffrey Briggs

Analyst · Singular Research. Your line is open.

David, thanks for taking the question. This is a sort of a general question in regards to you know things like the wildfires and the hurricanes and stuff like that and obviously you guys have mentioned that, it has a direct impact on the farms you guys own, but the question is to do it, when things like that occur does that have any you know either near or long term effect on either the market value of properties like that that are in or outside of that area, do you think sometimes it sure there are still other farms that get maybe wiped out that never go back to farming or you know if there's any sort of historical trend you seeing when things like that happen.

David Gladstone

Analyst · Singular Research. Your line is open.

No if you think about it, the worst that can happen to you is really if you own tree crops or vine crops. Some of the vineyards up in Napa did catch on fire and burn and that meant that those vines probably will never produce and they'll have to replant. That's an expensive process and some people have insurance against it and some don't. So those people will get hurt. The other end of the spectrum for tree crops is that you rarely have tree crops that have ever burnt so I don’t expect those folks to get hurt. From our standpoint all of the stuff that's planted on the flat land you don't have to worry about fires coming out to the flatland, it's not going to happen, it's only when you get closer to the mountains where there's lots of brush that can burn and winds those Santa Anna winds that blow so hot and blow all of that stuff across. So you're not going to see it in strawberries or vegetables being burned out. We worried a little bit about all the rains down in Florida but as it turned out when the Florida rains came from the hurricane they just filled up the ditch beside the row and you couldn’t go in the farmland for a day or two as the water had to seep through and go back down to the aquifer but other than that and we have that every now and then in California as well, what will happen is the rains will come in the fall and you can't really get out into the farmland at that point in time, so you have to wait for it to dissipate. So I don't know of anybody who's ever been burned out and never went back to farming, so that would seem to be way out of perspective. They usually just have to plant again. But maybe there are some, I haven't investigated all of the situations in the Napa and the vine area but it is one of those kind of things where people did get hurt. Other question?

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from John Massocca with Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is open.

John Massocca

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is open.

So, given the kind of activity around Dole, California operations I know your two leases to them don't expire till June 2020 [indiscernible] June 2020, what's your view on them possibly selling their operations at those farms to another operator or how much control. Would you have any control to stop them from doing that? And are they currently operating at both of those farms?

David Gladstone

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is open.

They are operating at one of the farms. The other one, they have put in a much stronger strawberry group that's in the southern one. And we expect Dole to leave. They’ve announced that they’re cutting back and they're probably going to lead the fresh strawberry area, and maybe they keep one farm in some place, but we expect both of them. The one in Watsonville that is such a wonderful farm and has been farmed for years and years in berries that it will go very fast, in fact, we have people that wanted, but Dole is on the hook until 2020. They’ve acknowledged that they're going to be on the hook till 2020. So we have no worries about them. As you probably know, Dole is trying to go public again. And I think they're trying to remove some of the variability in their earnings by getting out of the fresh berry side of the business. So we have the big farm and Oxnard and we have a number of people that want that we are currently talking to people, Dole has said they will leave if we find somebody that wants it. So we're not waiting until 2020 to try to lease it. We will have -- we do have one the sub tenant on the Dole farm, wants the farm. So we pretty much could move that one today in the south and Oxnard. But we don't want to -- don't want to go to quick, make sure we access our return to year and there is a chance that we can get someone that wants to farm even more than the one that's subleasing in that.

John Massocca

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is open.

I think as you look to grow the portfolio here, I mean, when you look at different growing markets, you guys were in versus maybe some new markets. What's more attractive for investment you think you want to expand to get more geographic diversity or do you think you could really boast up in some of your existing markets?

David Gladstone

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is open.

Yes. We can do both and we’ll do both. We are not expanding as much as we probably could and Oxnard -- Oxnard competes heavily with Mexico for fresh berries. And it’s one of those situations in which Oxnard is a little slower to get there. And as a result we decided we're going to let some of the farms go to veggies for a while and then we'll come back to strawberries as the crops come back there but every place else is really open. We like Florida, we like -- we have new farms in North Carolina. We're looking at two more farms in North Carolina. We’re hopefuls to close in New Jersey. I don't know whether we'll make it this quarter or not, but hopefully. And then we've got a couple of more blueberries to do in Western Michigan. All of those are perking along, but we're also now talking to people and Apple Country in New York. And we're getting known in a lot of places that we weren't known before. And it’s quite gratifying to have people who want to do business with you because you are as steady as a rock in terms of being there for them when they need it. So we would see both those areas up and down. East Coast continued to grow and different states continuing to grow. We expect to do something in Georgia in the near future. And then on the Midwest, we're looking at a number of farms that we like that are not corn. And so as a result, we will have several transactions in the Midwest either this quarter or certainly next year and continuing to grow. One of the most difficult problems that we run into is that we have to go slow…

John Massocca

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is open.

And then so you mentioned look forward go for, what is kind of the general of your pipeline as it stands today?

David Gladstone

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is open.

As David said, we got 9 million under PSAs and looking at deals and other phases, LOIs and farms that have closed LOIs, probably another 30 million to 35 million to add. But of course they are not as closed, so it’s less certainty and probably further along than the critical way we’re in right now.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Robert Sinnott with Silver Hill Capital. Your line is open.

Robert Sinnott

Analyst · Silver Hill Capital. Your line is open.

Yes, good morning David. Looking for information on the 1,280 acre farm in Colorado it was purchase, I understand it was a hay farm or is a hay farm. Can you provide some color on that?

David Gladstone

Analyst · Silver Hill Capital. Your line is open.

Yes, the difference is, this is a hay farm but it’s organic. And what’s unique about it is, it’s in the extremely high demand as people were demanding organic beans and organic everything else. So we have a lock on a pretty good sized market there. Those products are shipped all over and it’s been in farmland forever in a day and it’s really solid at this point in time as they took a lot of Operator units. So they are in the equity side of the business as well. So that’s the key there is that it’s organic and going into the organic feed locks and that’s a big plus.

Robert Sinnott

Analyst · Silver Hill Capital. Your line is open.

That seems to be extremely profitable as far as hay goes. So congratulations on acquisition.

David Gladstone

Analyst · Silver Hill Capital. Your line is open.

Yes, we’ve had a number of people that have been interested in buying, I don’t why we got it and somebody else didn’t grab it. But it is exactly as you say it’s a very profitable.

Robert Sinnott

Analyst · Silver Hill Capital. Your line is open.

And one other thing, I know that you folks sometimes go to the market and had an overnight raise of capital. Is there any way that you could may be let existing shareholders participate in that with some sort of formal announcement of offering going forward, thought about that bringing it?

David Gladstone

Analyst · Silver Hill Capital. Your line is open.

Yes, those are called rights offerings and I did two of those many years ago and absolutely we're destroyed in stock price, the shorts come in and they come-in in big lots and they just hammer the stock down cause they know they'll be able to take the, and this was before the recession we kind of saw the recession coming and said it was time to bulk up in equity so that we can survive the recession and we just were hammered. It was horrible, I had three underwriters that were assuring me that they could get it done and they all failed, so I'm not much on trying to get it to anybody the only way you can get it is if you’re in one of the groups that is going to be in the transaction so it's really hard to do it any other way and I'm sorry I wish there was because I think it’s very disappointing not to be able to offer it to everybody.

Operator

Operator

I'm not showing any further questions in queue so I'd like to turn it back over to Mr. Gladstone for closing remarks.

David Gladstone

Analyst

All right. Thank you all for hanging on and go out and buy a lot of fruits and vegetable cause we want to see the stock price go up. Thank you very much.