Tom Olinger
Analyst · Goldman Sachs
Thank you, Tracy. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. The second quarter exceeded our expectations both in terms of our results and outlook for 2021 and beyond. With our exceptional portfolio and teams, we set high watermarks across several measures this quarter. Demand for space is robust and diverse and market conditions remained the healthiest in our 38-year history. In the second quarter, lease signings were 64 million square feet and lease proposals were 84 million square feet, both remain above average and were driven by new and development leasing. Likewise, the Prologis IBI Customer Activity Index reached a new high in the second quarter, an early indicator of strong future demand. Our leasing mix is broad. Currently, the greatest demand is for spaces above 100,000 square feet. For smaller spaces, activity is picking up. We signed 518 leases totaling 18 million square feet in the quarter, the highest volume in this segment in three years. For customer segments, e-commerce continues to lead the way, representing 30% of new lease signings in the second quarter. While Amazon remains steady at 6% of total new leasing, we have seen many more e-commerce players come to the table. For example, we signed 168 new e-commerce leases in the first half of 2021 versus 53 in the first half of last year. Supply chains are raising, beginning to restock. And as they view, we’ll create more demand going forward. Containerized imports are up 33% through May versus pre-pandemic levels, as retailers replenished their supply chains. While inventories have risen 3% from their trough, they have struggled to grow this year as retain sales are up 19% from pre-pandemic levels. We see the current low level of inventories on our space utilization, which at 84.3% is below the long-term average of 85%. This is yet another sign that our customers are operating with suboptimal levels of inventory. Putting together the recent outperformance and ongoing momentum, we are raising our 2021 U.S. forecast for net absorption by 20% to 360 million square feet and deliveries by 8% to 325 million square feet. Looking forward, we foresee continued supply balanced by demand with historic low vacancy of 4.5% carrying into 2022. With balanced demand and supply, acute scarcity in our markets is driving record rents and value growth, while operating portfolio lease percentage rose by 80 basis points to 97.2% at quarter-end. Customers continue to compete for space and are making decisions faster with lease gestation in the quarter of just 44 days. When we look at the factors impacting supply, significant barriers exists in our markets and include a lack of buyable land, increasingly difficult and expensive permitting and entitlement processes and rapidly escalating replacement cost. Our research team released an excellent paper on this last month, which you can find on our website. Our supply watch list remains quite small. We reviewed Houston in the quarter leaving just Spain and Poland. Accelerating demand in the quarter, combined with ultra low vacancies, translated to a very strong rent growth of 4.1% in our U.S. markets exceeding our expectations. As a result, we are raising our 2021 rent forecast an all-time high of 10.3% for the U.S., up approximately 40 basis points from our prior estimate and 8% globally, which is up 300 basis points. Our in-place to market rent spread is now the widest in our history at 16.9%, up 330 basis points sequentially. This represents future gas in the tank of nearly $700 million in NOI, or $0.90 per share. Turning to valuations. Our assets have strongest quarterly uplift in our history, rising 8% in the second quarter alone, with the U.S. up more than 10% and Europe up 5.6%. On the topic of valuation, I want to point out that we enhanced the NAV disclosure in our supplemental related to property management fees. Given the size and scale of our portfolio, we created substantial value through our operational advantages. As a result, we know that real estate is worth more in our hands. Accordingly, we are now including net property management fee income as the bone in the adjusted NOI in our NAV disclosure. Switching gears to results for the quarter, our team and portfolio continued to deliver excellent financial results. Core FFO was $1.01 per share, with net promote earnings effectively zero, rent change on rollover was 32%. Occupancy at quarter-end was 96.8%, up 110 basis points sequentially. Cash same-store NOI growth accelerated to 5.8%, 290 basis points year-over-year. We tapped into favorable market conditions and disposed of $880 million of non-strategic assets across our portfolio. In addition, just last week, we completed the sale of a $920 million owned and managed portfolio, including all of the non-strategic IPT assets. It’s worth noting that to date, we have sold $2 billion of non-strategic assets from our IPT and LPT acquisitions at pricing more than 23% above underwriting. Turning to strategic capital. Our team raised almost $600 million in the second quarter. Equity cues from our open-ended vehicles were $3.3 billion at quarter end, hitting another all-time high. Robust investor interest has prompted private equity limited partners to shift away from diversify to more sector-specific funds, particularly for the logistics sector. In light of recent asset management transactions and public cost, the value being ascribed to our strategic capital business is uniquely understated. For the balance sheet, we continue to maintain excellent financial strength with liquidity and combined leverage capacity between Prologis and our open-ended vehicles totaling $14 billion. Moving to guidance for 2021. Our outlook has further improved given higher rent growth, higher valuations and robust demand. Here are the key updates on an our share basis. We are increasing our cash same-store NOI growth midpoint by 75 basis points to now range between 5.25% and 5.75%. We expect bad debt expense to be approximately 10 basis points of gross revenues, down from our prior guidance midpoint of 20 basis points and well below our historical average. We are increasing the midpoint for strategic capital revenue, excluding promotes, to $470 million, up $15 million from prior guidance. This upward revision is due to increased asset management fees resulting from higher property values. Faster development lease-up and higher asset values are also leading to an increase in promotes. We now expect net promote income of $0.02 for this year, an increase of $0.04 from our prior guidance. We are also increasing development starts by $300 million and now expect a midpoint of $3.2 billion. Build-to-suits will comprise more than 40% of development volume. Our owned and managed land portfolio, which is composed of land, options, and covered land place supports $18 billion of future development over the next several years. We are also increasing the midpoint for dispositions and contributions by $650 million in total. This increase will have roughly a $0.02 drag on earnings this year, given the timing to redeploy incremental proceeds. We now expect to generate net deployment sources of $200 million at the midpoint, with leverage remaining effectively flat in 2021. Taking these assumptions into account, we are increasing our core FFO midpoint by $0.07 and narrowing the range to $4.04 to $4.08 per share. Core FFO, excluding promotes, will range between $4.02 and $4.06 per share, representing year-over-year growth at the midpoint of almost 13%. We continue to maintain exceptional dividend coverage and our 2021 guidance implies a payout ratio in the low 60% range and free cash flow after dividends of $1.3 billion. In closing, the first half of the year has been extraordinary and our outlook is equally promising. Visibility into our strong future organic earnings potential is very clear. We have a significant embedded in-place to market rent spread, the development-ready land portfolio, substantial balance sheet capacity and ability to create value for our customers beyond the real estate. With that, I’ll turn it back to Holly for your questions.