John Goodey
Analyst · Jordan Sadler with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead
Thank you, Keith, and good morning everyone. It’s my pleasure to provide you with the financial highlights of our third quarter 2018. As you have just heard from my colleagues, Q3 has been a successful and very active quarter for Welltower whether it be investing, portfolio management or improving our income quality and balance sheet. This quarter was particularly active and investments completed. In aggregate, we invested $2.2 billion in acquisitions and joint ventures in Q3 at the blended rate of 7.9%. We also placed three development projects into service totaling $96 million at the blended stabilized yield of 8.5%. Alongside these, we completed $256 million of dispositions and received $60 million in loan payouts. I would like to expand on Tom’s comments as to the continued increase in the quality of our income line, over the last five years, we have divested $8 million of assets as we refined that portfolio towards future earnings stability and growth. In that same time period, we have recycled this capital and invested in and developed over $16 million of high-quality assets with financially strong best-in-class partners often in premium locations such as New York, LA, London and Toronto. In addition, we have also significantly reduced our earnings from our loan portfolio. Welltower as an organization continues to improve our operational excellence and I would like to thank our colleagues that work judiciously on this every day. These efforts enabled us to report G&A cost for the quarter from $28.8 million, a continued reduction over prior year levels. Our overall Q3 same-store NOI growth was 1.6% for the quarter, slightly above the midpoint of our full year guidance. All our business segments grew in Q3. Senior housing operations, same-store NOI grew by 0.3% and as you heard from Shankh, we are encouraged by the recent occupancy improvements. Senior housing triple net growth was strong at 4.2% with both outpatient medical and long-term post-acute growth at 2.1%. Today, we are able to report a normalized third quarter 2018 FFO results of $1.4 per share. As in the past, we do not include one-off items such as lease modifications, or loan repayment fees in our normalized numbers. Last quarter was also very active for Welltower on the balance sheet and capital fronts. Our Q3 2018 closing balance sheet position was strong with $191 million of cash and equivalents with $1.7 billion of capacity available under our primary unsecured credit facility. Our leverage metrics were slightly above trends. However, expected dispositions will reduce this number significantly in the coming quarter or two and I would reiterate that over time, our average plan sees our leverage returning to levels generally seen prior to the acquisition of QCP. In July, we closed on a new $3.7 billion unsecured credit facility with improved pricing across both aligned and credit and off term line facility. In August 2018, Welltower successfully placed an aggregate $1.3 billion of senior unsecured notes across five, ten and thirty year tenants with an average maturity of 15.4 years and a blended yield of 4.4%, again demonstrating our strategy of managing our balance sheet in a long-term durable way. In addition, during Q3, we raised $232 million through our ATM and DRIP programs at an average price of $66.07 per share. I would now like to turn to our guidance increase for the full year 2018. We are increasing our normalized FFO range to $4.02 and $4.07 per share from $3.99 to $4.06 per share prior. This is based upon updated, current operational performance expectations with the full year 2018 overall expected adjusted same-store NOI guidance range remaining at approximately 1% to 2% and the reduction in anticipated disposition proceeds on $2.4 billion to $2.2 billion at a blended yield of 6.0% overall from 2018. As usual, our guidance includes only announced acquisitions and includes all dispositions anticipated in 2018. On November 21, 2018, Welltower pay its 190th consecutive cash dividend of $0.87. This represents the current yield of approximately 5.3%. With that, I will hand it back to Tom for final comments. Tom?