J. Satterwhite
Analyst · BMO Capital. Please proceed
Sure. Hi, this is Gibson. So before I get into those metrics, I just want to back up for a second and just talk about that core portfolio for a minute just to give some context. So it's 27 properties. When we rolled that guidance out, it was like 97.5% of the NOI that we owned at the time. In that mix, I think everybody knows that we converted standalone memory care, so it's more heavily tilted towards standalone memory care, about 30%, 32% of the units in that portfolio. So we're going to see some movement over time from quarter to quarter and performance and our expectations. And it's not exactly analogous to some of the other same-store portfolios of our peers. With respect to the underlying metrics of guidance, the RevPOR is, we're taking that up 50 basis points, and that's really based on the pricing strength that we've seen so far year-to-date. And we've got more price increases coming in the second half of the year. Underlying metrics are good. There's no material difference between the operator's asking rates and the rates at which people are moving in. We feel like the marketing funnel is working and flowing. And so we feel pretty good about that. On the occupancy front, that's really a function of the math. So year-to-date, we're at about 89.7% occupancy. Last year was 89.7%. So if you think about that, to be able to get our initial guide of 150 basis points, you'd have to average 300 basis points over the second half of the year. We felt like because some of the cohort of buildings that we see, that we would need to really make that kind of movement, a lot of that's a standalone memory care. We don't feel like that's an expectation that we're going to anchor. We're not going to anchor our expectations on that kind of movement. Now I will say last year, we saw not only in that segment of the portfolio, but the overall portfolio, we saw a really good move in occupancy in Q3. So, it's not out of the realm of possibility, but if we get that same kind of move, we're really talking about the high end of the guidance as opposed to hitting the midpoint. The RevPOR expectations are really just a function of the occupancy decline -- not occupancy decline, but just the moderation in our expectations. And then if you just step back and think about it, overall, if our operators are able to deliver 14% growth at the midpoint, and I think Pam mentioned this on a prior call, we will have outperformed our underwriting on those new deals. It's about $460 million worth of new deals in that cohort. We will have outperformed our underwriting, and we will have significantly transformed the intrinsic growth profile of our portfolio. So we're really excited about that. It's a low end, which we don't expect to hit and hope not to hit. That's still double-digit growth in that portfolio for the deals that we bought. At the high end, you're at high teens growth. So we're really encouraged. And the way we're thinking about it now, I think our expectations are probably normally distributed around that 14% midpoint. We're not trying to sandbag. We feel like that's a good, reasonable expectation of our operators. But we feel at that growth rate, we will go a long way to proving out the thesis behind turning over $730 million of our portfolio investing in SHOP, making the investments in the platform. And we're really excited about that here at LTC.