Scott A. Estes
Analyst · Green Street Advisors
Thanks, Scott. Good morning, everyone. As George and Scott discussed, we're very excited about our platform, our relationship and growth prospects heading into 2013. The third quarter was another very active one for our team here at Health Care REIT and we completed another $1 billion of growth investments. We announced our Sunrise Senior Living transaction and then accelerated the anticipated pace of JV buyouts, including announcing the planned sale of the management company. We've raised capital through 2 successful equity offerings to preemptively fund our recent investments, lowering leverage by nearly 7 full percentage points during the quarter. We completed $133 million of dispositions of nonstrategic assets. And during this remarkable period, we have continued to move expeditiously to strengthen and diversify our portfolio, to reduce our exposure to government reimbursement and to position ourselves to benefit from an increasing percentage of future investment opportunities from existing relationship partners. Turning first to our investments. We maintained a very solid investment pace during the third quarter, completing growth investments of nearly $1 billion in the quarter and $2.9 billion year-to-date. As George discussed, our relationship investment program is driving consistent portfolio growth, enabling us to purchase high-quality assets at attractive returns for our shareholders. In terms of our third quarter investments, we completed $880 million of acquisitions at a blended initial yield that averaged 7.1%. Our major highlights included, first, 2 triple net seniors housing portfolios consisting of 19 facilities for $459 million operated by Senior Lifestyle, one of the largest private operators in the country, which makes them the 6th largest operator in our portfolio. Second, we acquired the first 5 Sunrise Senior Living operating properties located in the United Kingdom for $244 million. And Third, we completed $56 million of medical office building investments. In terms of third quarter dispositions, we sold $133 million, generating gains of $13 million, which consisted primarily of a nonstrategic 9 facility skilled nursing portfolio and an 8 facility portfolio of smaller, older, unaffiliated medical office buildings. We also provided a future investment update as it relates specifically to the Sunrise transaction, as well as to what was originally announced as a $925 million third quarter acquisition expectation. As you can see in our earnings release in the table provided, we have $2.9 billion in pending Sunrise investments anticipated to occur through the first quarter of 2013, plus an additional $291 million of other pending acquisitions expected in the fourth quarter. Turning next to portfolio performance. In our seniors housing triple-net lease portfolio payment coverage stands at a solid 1.33x before management fees and 1.15x after management fees. A stable occupancy of 88.7% as of June 30, increased by 50 basis points sequentially and is up 100 basis points versus the prior year, consistent with recent industry trends supporting higher occupancies. The stability of our seniors housing triple-net portfolio was again demonstrated through a third quarter increase in same store cash NOI of 2.8% year-over-year. Our skilled nursing portfolio payment coverage currently stands at 1.84x before management fees and 1.4x after management fees for the trailing 12 months ended June 30. Our stable skilled nursing occupancy declined slightly as often occurs during the second quarter to 87.3%. However, same-store cash NOI remains strong, increasing 3.3% in the third quarter versus the prior year. Our coverage declined sequentially due to another quarter of the lower Medicare rates implemented in October of 2011, moving into trailing 12-month data. And we expect that our overall coverage after management fees will stabilize at slightly above 1.3x next quarter when we report the trailing 12 months ended September 30 of 2012. We also recently did some work to analyze the dispersion of the rent coverage levels within our skilled nursing portfolio, and believe that once we complete our disposition efforts, our entire post-acute skilled nursing portfolio will consist of 5 operators that all cover rent after management fees by greater than 1.2x as of the 3 months ended June 30, 2012. Our [indiscernible], we continue to expect fixed charge coverage levels to range between 1.3x and 1.4x over the longer term after initially stabilizing at about 1.3x for the 12 months ended September 2012. Routine CapEx spending in our Genesis portfolio is currently running at a rate of approximately $1,200 per bed per year thus far in calendar 2012, with their overall CapEx approximating $2,000 per bed when including strategic CapEx, which is running at about $800 per bed per year this year. Finally, the Genesis Sun Healthcare merger remains on track to close in December of 2012. We're excited about the opportunities for the combined organization to obtain both operating and cost synergies and to drive a higher skilled mix over the longer-term. At this point, I'll provide an update on our seniors housing operating portfolio, which is comprised of our RIDEA investments. Our operating portfolio continues to perform well and remains ahead of budget through the third quarter. The blended 88.9% occupancy rate across our 7 operating portfolios for the third quarter increased 100 basis points versus the prior quarter, and is up 2.3% versus last year. Same-store operating portfolio cash NOI for the third quarter, again, increased a strong 7% versus the comparable quarter last year, driven by a 200-basis point increase in same-store occupancy and the 3.4% increase in revenue per occupied unit. Through a combination of strong revenue growth and solid expense control, margins in our same-store portfolio expanded 30 basis points year-over-year. And moving now to the medical facilities portfolio. Our medical office building portfolio continued to perform well during the quarter. Its overall occupancy increased 80 basis points year-over-year and 40 basis points sequentially to 93.9%. Our tenant retention was a strong 90% for the quarter and 82% for the trailing 12 months. As a result of recent acquisitions and dispositions, now 92% of our MOB portfolio investment balance is affiliated with a health system. Our same-store occupancy increased 40 basis points sequentially to 92.9% while same-store cash NOI grew a solid 1.5% for the quarter. We continue to have very little anticipated rollover in our MOB portfolio with only 5% to 6% of the current portfolio leases expiring per year through the end of 2016. We believe we'll end the year with overall MOB portfolio occupancy in the 94% range and have a tenant retention rate of approximately 80%. In regards to our hospital portfolio, our cash flow payment coverage remains strong at 2.35x before and 2x after management fees. We also experienced solid 2.2% same-store cash NOI growth in our hospital portfolio during the third quarter versus last year. Our Life Science portfolio also performed well in the quarter and remained slightly ahead of budget year-to-date through September. The portfolio remained 98% occupied and generated same-store cash NOI growth of 3.6%. We're beginning to see the benefit of several lease renewals which occurred in July and August at rates significantly above previous levels. Turning now to financial results and guidance. We reported normalized third quarter FFO per share of $0.91 and normalized bed per share of $0.82, up 2% and 4%, respectively. Our year-over-year growth was impacted by both dispositions of higher-yielding, nonstrategic assets over the last 12 months and the decision to prefund much of our investment activity announced year-to-date. And we recently declared the 166th consecutive quarterly cash dividend for the quarter ended September 30 of $0.74 per share, representing a 3.5% increase over the same period last year. In addition, the Board of Directors approved an increase in our 2013 quarterly dividend rate to $0.765 per share, or $3.06 annually beginning with the February 2013 dividend payment. As George mentioned, the new 2013 dividend payment rate represents a 3.4% increase over dividends to be paid in 2012. The third quarter G&A expense of $23.7 million was in line with our expectations. After the fourth quarter, we're expecting a similar level of G&A of approximately $24 million. Our capital expenditures came in slightly lower than expectations during the third quarter at $9.3 million, largely due to the timing of funding in our MOB and operating portfolios. As a result, we are anticipating slightly higher CapEx during the fourth quarter of approximately $14 million to $15 million. Next, I'll take just a minute to explain several of the extraordinary items on the income statement that are primarily a result of recent acquisitions and the decision to accelerate our dispositions and portfolio repositioning efforts heading into the end of the year. First, we had $8.3 million of transaction costs that were associated with our significant level of third quarter acquisitions. Next, we made the decision to write off $27 million in loans. This is primarily associated with an entrance fee facility that was transitioned to a new operator a couple of years ago and repositioned as a rental model. As occupancy trends have improved more recently, we're evaluating restructuring the current relationship which requires a current update of the collateral analysis for our loan. We believe we're most likely to restructure this relationship at the RIDEA investment which would allow us to capture more of the upside, but a possible sale is also being analyzed where we'd be less likely to recapture the value of the loan. As a result of our analysis, we determined to write off the loan at this time. Finally, we took a $7 million impairment associated with 5 smaller skilled nursing facilities in Connecticut based on the estimated value we expect to receive when we sell them over the next 6 to 12 months. Now, in terms of capital activity, the third quarter was definitely a busy one for us. In August, we raised slightly over $800 million of equity, largely defined an anticipated $925 million third quarter acquisition pipeline. Then in late September, we were successful in raising an additional $1.7 billion largely to prefund the cash portion of our Sunrise Senior Living acquisition. In addition, we issued 492,000 shares under our Dividend Reinvestment Program, generating $29 million in proceeds. And we also repaid $77 million of our 8% senior notes in the quarter. We repaid $168 million of 4 3/4% convertible debt, and completed our $250 million Canadian-denominated term loan. We sit in an excellent liquidity position in light of our pending transactions. As you can see on the very bottom right corner of the chart provided on Page 3 of our earnings release, it will require approximately $1.6 billion to fund the remaining cash component of our announced deals that have yet to close. We currently have more than adequate liquidity in place to fund this with $1.4 billion in cash currently on our balance sheet, up to $443 million in expected fourth quarter dispositions and our entire $2 billion line of credit fully available. Our capital transactions year-to-date not only put us in an excellent liquidity position, but they significantly improved our credit metrics. At the end of September, debt to underappreciated book capitalization stood at 37.9%, an improvement of nearly 7% during the quarter, which I would point out, excludes any benefit from the $1.4 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Our trailing 12-month interest and fixed charge coverage remains solid at 3.1x and 2.4x, respectively while net debt to adjusted EBITDA as reported in our supplement improved to 4.7x. Importantly, although there are still several moving parts related to closing the remainder of our announced transactions, we will continue to manage our balance sheet in a way that is consistent with our long-term leverage and credit metric targets. Last, I'll provide an update regarding our 2012 guidance and assumptions. As a reminder, our earnings guidance for 2012 includes the impact of, first, investments in capital transactions that are pending or completed year-to-date; second, the going funding of our existing development pipeline; and third, up to $700 million of anticipated dispositions of primarily nonstrategic skilled nursing facilities. As we detailed in the release, the midpoint of our earnings guidance for both normalized FFO and FAD would've increased by $0.04 per share today, if not for our decision to prefund the Sunrise transactions through a large $1.7 billion equity deal, which impacted our 2012 guidance by $0.11. As a result, normalized FFO has been updated and narrowed to a range of $3.49 to $3.53 per share, and normalized FAD has been updated to range of $3.07 to $3.11 per share. I think most importantly, we believe we're in a great position entering 2013 having prefunded our Sunrise transaction as we're accelerating our disposition efforts, and can say that we're all very excited about our platform, portfolio and growth prospects heading into next year. Operator, that does conclude my prepared remarks. We'd now like to open the line for questions, please.