Edward Aldag
Analyst · Robert Baird. Your line is open
Thank you, Charles, and thank all of you for joining us today for our first quarter 2017 earnings call. 2017 is off to a fantastic start for Medical Properties Trust. For the past four months we have further strengthened our balance sheet which is now one of the strongest balance sheets of all the healthcare REITs. We have made investments totaling 90% of our initial guidance for 2017. We replaced a senior note issue with a new issue with a substantially lower cost and longer-term. We recycled assets we expanded the MPT footprint with the opening of an office in Luxembourg, re-leased three Louisiana Adeptus facilities to an investment grade rated tenant Ochsner Clinic Foundation and Adeptus situation is working out just like we expected and described last fall. Steve will go through the details of our balance sheet in a few moments, but let me take a minute to point out that with our recent equity raise and our $1.3 billion revolving credit facility we not only have the liquidity to make additional investments, but also our pro forma debt to EBITDA of 4.5 times is one of the lowest of all the healthcare REITs. With this ratio we have the ability to make approximately $1.5 billion of additional investments without the need of any additional equity and still keep our debt ratio within our self-imposed levels. Last week we had announced about $450 million of new investments. These consisted of 10 new hospitals in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida. Eight of these operated by Steward were closed on this week. Our hospital in Valencia, Spain, opened for operations and is already seeing more than 200 patients per day. We completed the purchase of one of the two previously announced RCCH facilities in Lewiston, Idaho and expect to complete the purchase of the other one in Pasco, Washington shortly. We started construction on a previously announced hospital in Birmingham, England with Circle and we disposed of one hospital from our original Capella portfolio resulting in a $7 million dollar gain after only 19 months. This is another validation of the value of our portfolio. Last fall Adeptus surprised the market with the news of its liquidity and organizational problems. Because we knew even then about the strength of our master lease structure, our credit enhancements, the market dominant hospital systems that owned the majority of the operators of our facilities, and very importantly the critical and expanding role the freestanding emergency rooms are playing in the delivery system of our acute care services, we were able to immediately announce on the same day that we were highly confident in the value of our freestanding emergency room real estate. We knew that even if resolution of Adeptus problem led to bankruptcy, in fact especially so our original underwriting and master lease structuring would put MPT in the strongest position of any investor or creditor and that is exactly what has happened. The specialized knowledge of our people have about hospital operations and strategies along with the position of greatest strength that our master lease structure gives us are the reasons that over the course of our 13-year history, 250 plus hospitals we have never taken a material real estate impairment. And with very limited exceptions have not missed receiving rental payments even during bankruptcy. We are landlords after all and in the real world tenants will have bumps in the road. Our tenants’ bumps have been remarkably infrequent, but we nonetheless carefully plan for and anticipate them. One of the keys to the success of any business, ours included, is how well the company plans for and then reacts to the inevitable bumps. Our experience with Adeptus is an excellent example of our underwriting, deal structuring and work out strength. As we reported earlier, we disposed of a property that was part of the original Capella portfolio we acquired in August of 2015. 19 months later, we disposed of that property providing us with the $7 million gain. Approximately five years ago, we began our planned investment in Western Europe. Today, we have approximately US$1.6 billion invested in four countries in Western Europe. As in the U.S., we are the undisputed leader in hospital financing in Western Europe. In order to further our efforts there, we have established an office in Luxembourg headed up by Luke Savage, a 10-year veteran at MPT. Let me now address the coverages of our existing portfolio. We continue to work on ways to provide more visibility to our investors, while at the same time protecting the confidential information of our tenants. We've made some of these changes today and we will continue to look for improvements. You will note that until further notice, we have taken out the Adeptus related properties until we are comfortable with the information that they are reporting. As you know they occurred on older rents owed to MPT and with the agreement with Deerfield Management, we expect that to continue. You will also remember that we report coverages one quarter in arrears to give all of our tenants ample time to get their information to us. So as a reminder, the following information is for the fourth quarter. As is typical for hospitals, the fourth quarter was not as strong as the first quarter has been. I'll give you some specific examples in a few minutes. Again, we traditionally have reported our coverages on a same-store basis which we defined as having been in our portfolio for at least two years. This allows us to smooth out the artificial spikes up or down we may have from an unseasoned property being added to our portfolio. Also very importantly, we currently report on an EBITDAR basis, if our tenants does not include corporate overhead or management fee in their numbers, we artificially add a management fee of 5% of net revenue. This is a very conservative method of reporting. And one that we [indiscernible] doesn't give the markets the true strength of our properties. This is one of the issues we are looking at addressing. Our acute care hospitals continue to perform well. As a group their coverage was flat quarter-over-quarter and up slightly year-over-year or 3.9 times coverage. The IRF saw a very slight decline quarter-over-quarter and slightly more of a decline year-over-year to 1.7 times. It is important to note that our U.S. IRFs are covering at a 2.12 times which is flat year-over-year. In the future we may break out the difference between the U.S. IRFs and the European IRFs. The LTACs saw their biggest decline to date. Their coverage was down both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year to 1.3 times. Just to show the magnitude of issues with Boise and Laredo, if we were to eliminate these two facilities the LTAC coverage would be 1.5 times. Now before you get all along, let me address this drop. The fourth quarter was a down quarter for our LTACHs, we have 17 facilities in this category. LTACHs only represent 5% of our total portfolio at this time. 16 of the 17 facilities declined to year-over-year with more than ever the decline coming from four facilities. Out of the seventeen LTACHs we own all, but four of the facilities saw good increases in the first quarter. One of the worst performing facilities in the fourth quarter saw its EBITDA are more than double in the first quarter. Another one saw its EBITDA go from zero to more than $1.7 million in the first quarter. All told the EBITDAR for this group went from $8.2 million in the fourth quarter to almost $13.5 million in the first quarter, so a very strong start to 2017. The IRFs also saw strong increases with the group growing from an EBITDAR of $12.4 million to $17.2 million. Currently our investments in acute care hospitals domestically, represent about 80% of the portfolio. We continue to believe that our portfolio is undervalued as proven by some of our recent shelved and that is resolution. We will continue to educate the market on this particular strength. With our sector leading balance sheet and our industry leading portfolio and the opportunities we have ahead, we look forward to a very bright 2017 and beyond. Steve?