Shankh Mitra
Analyst · Evercore
Thank you, Tim and good morning everyone. I will now review our quarterly operating results and provide additional details on performance, trends, and recent investment activity. We're delighted to inform you that every segment of our business has either exceeded our met our expectations this quarter. We came into this year expecting a slow and steady recovery to take hold in our senior housing operating our SHOP segment. However, I have to admit for three quarters in a row, our SHOP results have exceeded our own expectations. Relative to our initial expectation - 2.5% to 2% NOI growth in SHOP for 2019, we have year-to-date delivered a solid 3% NOI growth, driven by strong pricing power. Q3 was no exception driven by significantly better-than-expected U.S. results. Overall, same-store NOI was up 2.8% in Q3 driven by 3% revenue growth and partially offset by 3.1% expense growth. Though we experienced a slight decrease in occupancy, year-over-year, primarily driven by a Canadian portfolio were increased by overall sequential occupancy growth. We continue to achieve very strong pricing power differentiating our extremely well-located and diverse portfolio. While labor cost inflation continues to be challenging with 4.8% year-over-year growth, we're encouraged by 4.4% compensation per occupied room or ComPOR growth in U.S. Particularly noteworthy was 30 basis points of sequential ComPOR growth, which is the best we have seen in the last five years. Though, we have not and will not provide monthly results, in anticipation of questions, I want to point out that we did not experience sequential decline in NOI or occupancy on an intra-quarter basis. Occupancy continued to build through September following normal seasonal patterns. Our U.K. business continues to perform as expected. Although same-store portfolio growth moderated, as we discussed last call, our overall U.K. SHOP NOI growth was close to double-digit. Canadian SHOP portfolio is still trying to find the bottom. This quarter we have been impacted particularly by new deliveries in Quebec. We're cautiously optimistic about our Canadian portfolio in 2020 from a growth standpoint. Our U.S. portfolio shined through all the rhetoric around supply and labor cost inflation with 4.3% NOI growth in the quarter. We continue to see significant outperformance of assisted living relative to independent living and the gap widened to a multi-year high. Top markets had a particularly strong quarter primarily driven by solid pricing power. Washington DC, Seattle, Chicago, San Diego, all experienced double-digit NOI growth this quarter. Several of our operating partners contributed to this industry-leading growth and I want to thank them on behalf of our shareholders. As we have said repeatedly, we own the best assets in the best markets; however, the hallmark of our portfolio is our 25 best operating partners. The strong structural alignment between us and our partners is especially important when the industry fundamentals are not necessarily lifting all the boards. To paraphrase Warren Buffett, in these times of low tide, you get to know more about other people swim suits. To continue the team of operating partners, we are delighted to inform you that we have initiated a RIDEA relationship with New England based highly-reputed operator LCB Senior Living. We bought one asset together and transitioned two former Brookdale properties to LCB. We have strong growth plans for this relationship. As such, we have negotiated - fully negotiated a RIDEA 3.0 management contract and aligned development contract with LCB. This is our fifth new RIDEA relationship this year and we are very excited to welcome Mike Stoller and his team to Welltower family. In this quarter, we expanded our relationship with SRG by adding one asset in the San Francisco Bay Area for a pro rata investment of $35 million at a valuation of $360,000 per unit, which is a significant discount to the replacement cost in that market. While we have seen this kind of far unit pricing in Florida and Texas, recently by other market participants, we're excited to achieve such remarkable pricing in the San Francisco Bay area. We are also delighted to inform you that we continue to grow with our existing operating partners such as Frontier and Oakmont. Subsequent to the quarter end, we have closed on two additional SHOP assets with Frontier for $39 million or $197,000 per unit which is also a significant discount to replacement cost. As a result of overbuilding in last few years we are starting to see more capital deployment opportunities in the Memory Care segment. We are also incredibly excited to grow with Oakmont in California. We signed a definitive agreement to buy six newly built Class A properties with approximately $297 million. The initial cap rate is in the low 5% range on the current NOI, as one of these assets, just opened in the third quarter of this year. We expect the yield will grow into the high 5% range as this assets stabilized over next 18 months. Oakmont will take 10% of the proceeds in OP units or Welltower stock at approximately $91 per share. We will continue to grow with Oakmont in California markets. Turning to our post-acute business, we significantly de-risked our enterprise this quarter by divesting a majority of our LTAC exposure. As part of this process, we sold our Vibra portfolio for $265 million. We're delighted to inform you that we have effectively manage through the Life Care reorg process and re-tenanted the building with two operators. We have lost approximately $2 million of annual rent as a part of the restructuring process, but we have improved coverage and credit that back these assets. Though income loss and high cap rate sale are dilutive in near-term, we have strengthened the quality of overall portfolio by minimizing the exposure to this property type. These experiences - this experience highlights the detailed discussion we provided on triple-net leases a few quarters ago. The key to value preservation is to have the right basis or price per unit, credit support, and alternative set of operators, while keeping the overall exposure to a manageable level. Both times we have given rent concession in case of Genesis previously and last year and now we did not have many or all of these boxes checked. However, we believe that today we're in a different position in both Senior Housing Triple-net and skilled nursing space after the many restructurings that we have done in time through last three years that Tom mentioned. We now have manageable exposure, low basis and our credit and the ability to turn to our operating platform to protect our shareholders. This point cannot be over-emphasized. Turning to our health systems business, we're pleased with the investment we made last year with our partner ProMedica Health. Since that time, the regulatory environment has turned more favorable and asset pricing has soared. We believe the outlook for total return or forward IRR has materially improved in the last 18 months since we announced the transaction. We have received multiple unsolicited offers for many assets in the last six months in that portfolio. Though we have no current desire to sell these assets in size, we are considering two specific deals. One, with one transaction for handful of assets, in which the buyer has gone hard on the deposit. These offers present evaluation in excess of $150,000 per bed versus our combined basis of roughly $57,000 per bed. The sheer magnitude of this price increase hopefully gives you a sense of what we think the total return looks like today versus when we made that investment. We own real estate at a very low basis with cash flow that has great support and term. Speaking of cash flow, when we set the range for this portfolio at $143 million versus pre-org rent of $474 million we did this precisely because we did not want to guess when the cash flow will turnaround. Though I will refrain from commenting on other people's opinion on our partners credit, I want to put things in perspective. ProMedica has a net debt of approximately $800 million with a revenue of $6.8 billion with billions of dollars of unencumbered assets on their balance sheet. One might argue that systems 20% ownership in our JV along with a reasonable market multiple to the home health and hospice business, the system would be able to pay off all of their outstanding debt. In the past, we have talked about $75 million or so of synergies when the transaction was announced. We believe roughly $46 million will be achieved this year. We are pleased with how the integration has gone so far and continue to anticipate the system will achieve significant synergies of above our target. We continue to believe this rental stream, which is roughly two times covered at HCR level will improve, as we look forward in the near to medium term. We also remind you that we have significant structural protection beyond HCR level coverage. However, instead of rehashing what we have said before, I'm delighted to inform you that our collective business case has only gotten better. HCR ManorCare leadership is engaged with several not-for-profit health systems to partner with to solve the need in this critical, but not easy to execute part of the healthcare continuum. We look forward to discussing many of this with you next year. For our outpatient medical business, same-store NOI growth of 1.4% was ahead of our budget, though in-quarter growth remains muted for reasons we described previously the leasing velocity has been brisk. Based on this leasing velocity, we believe this segment is prime for growth in 2020. We remain very active in the capital deployment side in this segment. In this quarter we closed 9 Class-A assets for $193 million and expanded our relationship with Novant, Summit Medical Group, Baylor Scott & White, and TriHealth. Summit and Novant are two prime examples of how we have replicated our relationship business model into medical office sector. Post quarter end, we have signed a definitive agreement to acquire 18 outpatient assets for $258 million, which will expand our relationship with several systems such a CommonSpirit, University of Texas Health, Henry Ford, and UPMC. This portfolio is approximately 98% leased, has remaining weighted average lease term of 8 years. The portfolio is owned by a private owner, which has directly negotiated the transaction with us instead of going to the market due to our reputation and certainty of close. This once again shows the power of our platform and how we can create significant value in a competitive industry through executing on completely off market transaction. We have a handful of other capital deployment opportunities in a similar off market fashion that we have been negotiating over last 9 to 12 months. In Q3, we have funded approximately $141 million of developments and an expected accretive yield of 8.1%, while we are encouraged by a robust cost and access to capital, we remain disciplined and will deploy capital only if we do - and do so on a long-term total return basis. To illustrate this point year-to-date, we have closed $2.95 billion of acquisitions at a blended 1-year yield of 5.5%. As described in our last earnings call, we expect many of this newly built assets to stabilize in next 12 to 24 months and consequently that 5.5% will grow above 6%. In addition, we announced today an additional $594 million of post quarter acquisition in a similar mid to high 5% cap rate range. And as Tom said, the year is not over yet. At the same time, we've sold $2.675 billion of assets this year at a cap rate of 6.2%, which includes $558 million of high cap rate post-acute transactions, which implies we have sold $2.1 billion of senior housing assets at a cap rate of 5.35% including benchmark disposition described last call which resulted into a $520 million gain. The operating environment and the market for all of our assets remain incredibly vibrant and we think thoughtful capital allocation can create significant alpha for our shareholders. We are focused on building new relationships with the best in class senior housing operators and health systems while realizing growth opportunities with these partners one asset at a time. With that, back to you, Tom.