Craig MacNab
Analyst · Mister Carwash or like that, we should, maybe, be concerned about from a performance standpoint of the underlying properties
Thank you, Melissa. Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2015 earnings release call. As usual, on this call with me are: Jay Whitehurst, our President; and Kevin Habicht, our Chief Financial Officer, who will review details of our first quarter financial results, following my opening comments. National Retail Properties had a most productive and active first quarter, generating consistent results, while maintaining a pristine balance sheet. In the first quarter, we acquired 56 retail properties, investing $155 million at an excellent initial cash yield of 7.3%. We are very pleased with the yields on our acquisitions completed in the first quarter. The initial cash yields came in higher than what we'd been originally budgeting. In the first quarter, we had 14 different closings, purchasing properties at an average cost of $2.8 million, which is in line with our entire portfolio average. In terms of the acquisition environment, the elevated demand for high-quality real estate means that initial yields continue to decline, and our acquisitions for the balance of the year are more likely to come in around the 7% we previously guided you towards, depending on the mix of retail properties. We continue to deploy capital at very accretive yields, especially when you take into account the predictable rental growth that we realize over the balance of our long-duration leases. In the first quarter, we sold 6 properties for $23 million, generating a meaningful gain that, by the way, is not included in FFO. On this call, I am going to provide contextual information on our disposition activity even though it is not typically a material component of our results in any given quarter. Some of you are aware that we have an outstanding internal dispositions team that is active in the 1031 market, using our own sales platform, extensive database and relationships with buyers plus our proprietary web tool. Our team is very effective at extracting maximum prices for our real estate. And by the way, they have had a lot of success, as no one has sold as many assets as we have over the years. Our disposition team's knowledge is also a useful source of realtime market information for our management team when we evaluate potential properties for acquisition. By way of background, we sell properties for both defensive and offensive purposes, and this differs in every individual transaction that we sell and, of course, from quarter-to-quarter. In the first quarter, we sold 3 properties for $21.7 billion at a 5% average cap rate. One of these sales was very offensive in nature, effectively an anxious 1031 buyer running out of time to complete their exchange. And the other dispositions were a little more defensive in nature. As a broad rule at NNN, we do not sell vacant properties, preferring to re-lease a property in the occasional situation where the tenant does not renew at the end of the lease term. After our team has leased up a property, we will then make a separate decision whether to hold or sell the property based on the specific real estate merits and location of that asset. However, we did sell 1 vacant property this quarter plus 2 small undeveloped excess land parcels that we have owned for many years. The way I think about this is that we are taking advantage of the strong demand for real estate currently to simplify and strengthen our portfolio even though the dollars involved were very small. In terms of our portfolio, we currently own 2,104 properties, which continues to be very well leased, with occupancy at 98.8%. In our portfolio, we recently received a wonderful credit upgrade when our third largest tenant, Pantry, was acquired by Couche-Tard, more commonly identified in the U.S. as Circle K. As Kevin will describe, our balance sheet remains in terrific shape, which means that NNN is very well positioned to continue to build shareholder value, as our excellent real estate team sources new properties for us to inquire. Kevin?