Dream Unlimited Corp. (DRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. It's 2:00, and we will now call the meeting to order. My name is Joanne Ferstman, and I'm the Chair of the Board of Dream Unlimited Corp. Welcome to our Annual Meeting. I will act as Chair of the meeting. Robert Hughes will act as Secretary of the meeting. With the consent of the meeting, I appoint Daniela Munoz and Rumela Mukherjee of Computershare Investor Services, Inc. as scrutineers for the meeting. We will first proceed with our formal business. To expedite the formal part of the meeting, Robert Hughes, a shareholder, will move and Shannon Macri a shareholder will second all motions. After our formal business is concluded, our management team will make a brief presentation, and then there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please hold questions that do not relate to the formal business of the meeting until that time. I have an affidavit from Computershare as to the mailing of the notice of availability of proxy materials and the form of proxy. Our circular and other meeting materials were made available through the notice and access system. I would ask the secretary to place the affidavit before the meeting and to keep the affidavit with the corporate records. The scrutineers have advised that there are at least 2 individuals present who are shareholders or who represent by proxy, shareholders who hold at least 10% of the votes attached to all outstanding shares. As a result, we have a quorum, and I declare the meeting to be regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. The first item of business is the presentation of the company's 2023 annual report, which contains the company's audited financial statements for 2023 and the report of auditors therein. I note that the Secretary has placed before the meeting a copy of the 2023 annual report. The next item of business is the election of Directors. As stated in our circular, 8 Directors are to be elected at the meeting and 8 nominees are named. They are; Michael Cooper, James Eaton, Richard Gateman, Jane Gavan, Duncan Jackman, Jennifer Lee Koss, Vincenza Sera and myself. Rob, will you please propose the nominees for election?

I nominate the individuals listed in the management information circular for election as Directors of the Company to hold office for the upcoming term.

I second the motion.

Thank you. Are there any further nominations? Seeing no further nominations, I declare the nominations closed. Are there any questions on this motion? Seeing none. Based on the proxies received, I would mention that each of the 8 nominees received the majority of votes cast in favor of their election as Director. After the meeting, we will issue a press release with detailed voting results. Given the proxies received and as the number of persons nominated for election as a director is equal to the number of directors to be elected, I propose with the consent of the meeting not to take a formal vote on the election of directors. Therefore, I confirm that the motion has been carried and the 8 persons who are nominated have been elected as directors by acclamation. The next item of business is the appointment of auditors. The Audit Committee and the Board have recommended the reappointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Chartered Professional Accountants as auditors. Can I please have a motion?

I move that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP be appointed auditors of the company and its subsidiaries for the ensuing year and that the Board of Directors be authorized to fix their remuneration.

I second the motion.

Are there any questions on this motion? The meeting will now vote on the motion. I propose to take the vote by a show of hands. I would ask those registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who are in favor of the motion to please raise your hands. Any votes withheld? The motion is carried. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP have been reappointed as auditors and the directors authorized to fix their remuneration. The formal items of business as set out in the notice of meeting have now been dealt with. As there is no further business to come before this meeting, I declare the formal part of the meeting to be concluded, and the formal meeting adjourned. I now invite management to make a short presentation. After the presentation, we will have a question period.

We've been fortunate enough to be able to grow our assets under management to about $25 billion. The great majority of it is in income properties, in 4 public vehicles or private funds. We also have a fair amount of assets now that are on Dream Unlimited's balance sheet. And that's an area of the business that's going to continue to grow quite a bit. And in Western Canada, for those who don't know, we basically built our whole business on the first investments we made in Western Canada in 1994. We invested $4 million. We've probably taken out over $400 million, and it turned out to be amazing. And we grew and grew and grew and went great. And in 2013, 2014, it was the last years that it went great, and then oil tanked and bunch of things tanked, and Western Canada was dormant for a number of years. We're still able to get $40 million to $45 million a year of cash out of that business, but it wasn't going that great, but it's really turned. So we're going to concentrate on these things today. Next, please. So right now our securities at Dream Unlimited [Indiscernible], which is basically Dream Office and Dream Impact Trust are having challenges, and they've gone down in value a lot. We also have within Dream Impact as well as on our own some land in downtown Toronto. And that's been really hard to get going, although Dream Unlimited has incredible land, so does Dream Impact. But what I want to focus on today in our presentation aren't those areas. That's what we get asked about all the time. I want to focus on the other 80% of the net value of our business and what's happening there. Thanks, Kim. In Western Canada, we still have about 8,900 acres. I say that because we're up to 10,000 and we kind of have been working away. The 2 areas of the most activity is an area called Brighton or Holmwood in Saskatoon. It's one community of 3,000 acres, which is probably the largest master-planned community in the entire country and it's in Saskatoon. But we've been making a lot of progress on that. We're excited to show you that. The other one is Alpine Park, it's been called Providence in the past. We first bought 320 acres for 19,000 acres in this area in 1997 that we thought we could develop within 5 years. We started 2 years ago, but now it's really rocking. The other thing that's really new and interesting for us is, we started to build residential for rent properties in Western Canada. It's relatively early stage, but it's really gaining momentum. We have a lot of plans. We're going to start a lot more this year. We're excited about that. We also have a decent amount of necessity retail that's part of our communities, and we're going to continue -- we've got a couple of projects we're starting this year. And these things are penciling out way better than things do in Central Canada. Next, please. So this is Alpine Park, this is the one I said we started buying in 1997. There's 4,000 acres of this area in Calgary. It's within the city limits. It's one of the biggest pieces of land in the city limits. I don't know if it's yellow, orange or combination, that's the ring road, and we were not allowed to develop this land until the ring road was built, and it was completed about 2 years ago. We've got 3 kilometers of exposure to that ring road, which is the major highway in Calgary now. And we started to build right at the top, we're expanding to the orange area. That's a huge development that we -- we committed $93 million to develop that land. That's the largest amount we've ever committed to any development. We did it over a year ago in very uncertain times, and we sold a ton of it, and it's working out great. But you can see all the area in blue is still to go, then there's gray, which is not our land. On the far side, there's kind of -- again, I'm not good with colors, salmon, let's say. And that's 1,000 acres, probably worth 130,000 today. By the time we get there in 20 years, probably worth $700,000 to $1 million. So it's probably worth $700 million to $1 billion if we just wait. I love that kind of work. And the green part is a piece of land we bought recently. You can see it's like a bridge from the 2 communities, and we wanted to control that. So I think we're just agreeing to buy that now. It's one of the few pieces of land we bought in the last 7 or 8 years. But this is -- I think it's won a national award for best new development in the country, but it's a really special place, and we're making quite a bit of money on it. Next. This is Holmwood. This is a 3,000-acre development in total. We're not showing all of it. Brighton is the first neighborhood. It's about 700 acres, and we're just about finished the first 700 acres. The next part we're doing is the Holmwood suburban center, and this is near -- I don't know if we told you before, but this is where the provincial government has put up $225 million to build a public high school, a catholic high school, elementary school plus a catholic elementary school and [YMCA] together with the school board to build a big [Indiscernible] there, and this is going to have 3,700 students, and it's going to kick off this community, and it is going to be very much in demand. So we're very excited to kick it off this fall, and it's going to be able to continue the rental properties that we've been building. The Brighton got 50% market share in Saskatoon with all the stuff going on, we'll probably do even better in the future. And by the way, with the amount of land we have left, the future is a long time. Yes, just go back for a second. Just to be clear, this part of the development should take us until 2040, and we have another 1,500 acres after that. This is an area we haven't talked about in the past so much, but it's the income properties that we own on our balance sheet. So we've owned a distillery for a long time. It's turned into a very, very important part of the city. And as the East side gets built out, it's getting better and better. We bought 12.5% more, so we're up to 62.5%. It's a great asset. We've got the retail in Western Canada. We've got apartments in Ottawa, we got apartments in Toronto. So it's really becoming a meaningful business for us, and it's going to grow really fast. This is a graph of what I said. But I think we're going to do at least as well, if not more. Next, and just to be clear, what we're doing, the one on the left is a block that we did in Zibi, which is full market, normal financing. We actually did co-living in it. The one on the next one, that's a big project we're doing by the distillery that is 30% affordable. It's on leased land. We did a big deal with infrastructure in Ontario. The loan we did here with CMHC was a really innovative loan at the beginning of what was then RCFI financing, and that building has completed this year is getting leased up. We have some value-add in Toronto, which is the older building subject to rent control. And there's a picture of what we're doing in Western Canada. These are basically 125 unit buildings. We also built 15 townhouses as part of it, and they take under 2 years to build. They've been renting at good rents and they've been renting quickly. So to be blunt about it, we're trying to figure out how to do to supply faster. The demand has been great. And the asset management we talked about this a lot in the past. It cleared about $40 million last year, and the assets are growing, and we've really turned it as people might know, we sold $11 billion of office profits between 2016 and 2021. And we grew our industrial properties, both in the public and private from about $1 billion to maybe $15 billion or $16 billion now. We've also added development of industrial in the last few years. So that's been a really growing business. And Meaghan to wrap it all, bring it all together.

Thanks, Michael. While there have been ebbs and flows over the years, it's interesting to look back at the income contribution our land division has produced as a public company. On a normalized basis, 2013 was by far the division's most profitable year, selling over 1,800 lots, 41 acres, generating just under $19 million of net margin. Now as part of our Q1 results call, we shared our strongest presales figures ever for the land division with $168 million in committed revenue for 2024, inclusive of earnings in our Q1 figures. Simply using a historical margin run rate and incorporating spec sales for the back end of the year, we actually -- I think 2024 can rival 2013 figures in a way income contribution for the segment, which is pretty remarkable to see. As Michael talked about, our income and [Indiscernible] properties are a steady source of growth for the business as we build out the division. Over the last 2 years by acquiring multifamily rental assets and completing projects on our own lands, we've steadily increased the NOI contribution from the segment with $21.9 million of NOI generated in 2023. This excludes any contribution from A-Basin as it's currently under contract. As we further build out our apartment pipeline such as the next buildings in Brighton and rentals at Alpine Park, we expect this segment to continue to grow. Lastly, moving to asset management with the sale of Global in late 2019, base fees initially declined, but have now steadily rebounded with growth from Dream Industrial. In 2023, we generated fees of $73 million, which was split nearly 50-50 between base fees and transactional and development fees. The latter will fluctuate period-to-period depending on milestones and other events, although we do expect to see steady, if not further growth from these components of asset management over time. To achieve growth, we focused on front-ending investments over the last 2 years, as we built new apartments, started new communities and put up capital for new opportunities. We're at a point now where we are seeing the benefits of these investments come to fruition as our core business lines are growing meaningfully across the company. Combining land, asset management and income [Indiscernible] properties, we expect margin for 2024 to be one of the strongest over the last 5-year period. We're very well capitalized with ample liquidity and fairly conservative leverage and are extremely well positioned to see 2024 as one of the best years for Dream. So with that, I'll ask Michael to come back up and join.

Are there any questions? No? I think the point of our presentation, just to be clear is, there's a lot of noise, real estate isn't in the best places at this moment in time. But 80% of our business is going to have a record year. And that's the context of what we do every day. Obviously, we spend more time on areas that need more attention. But the diversified business that we have is very supportive of our efforts, and it's great to have this kind of business doing this well.

Do you see a lot of opportunity come out of the next 6 to...

Yes, it's a great question, and it's on everybody's mind. I mentioned at the -- I mentioned a couple of people afterwards. I'm starting to hear a word that they call it office curious. Now this is the very, very beginning of saying, maybe I was wrong to say I never buy office again. It's just like, no, it's looking -- so there's a lot of things going on in Canada, the pension funds. They're reducing their weightings, some of them reduce their weightings. They have a -- maybe a mix of assets they do not want. They've all changed their manager except for BCIMC, and there's changes coming. So there may be opportunities coming from there. It's hard to tell -- I mean I love the part that like in office buildings, I won't touch it for $400 a foot, but maybe at $100, I'd be interested. In apartments, I'm not paying a 4.2% cap but to 4.6%, I'll buy the whole sector. So it depends on the sector as to what it takes to get it moving. And I think that we may see some interesting things happen on the apartment side. I think on Industrial, the prices are relatively high, but the values are good. So I think that industrial is a sector that works. Office, we need some courageous new money to come in. For us, I would say that like we may have 100,000 residential units that we can build on our own land. And that's mostly in Western Canada, but it's a couple of thousand in Ottawa and Gatineau and downtown Toronto, we got a lot. So we're working to get 49 Ontario going. We're working at 250 Dundas, going, key sides a big one. So like my look from Dream Unlimited's capital is if we focus on what we have now and optimize it, we're going to make a fortune. So when we look at the opportunities, what we're looking at is, is there a role that Dream Unlimited can serve with large pools of capital. And I can tell you that everybody in the world knows that the Canadian pension funds were very adventurous for many, many years, and they aren't now. Everybody also knows that Canada historically has been overcapitalized with money for real estate. We did a deal with a large sovereign wealth fund to privatize Summit. Everybody knows that there's a chance to come to Canada now. So we're going to see how that plays out. But as far as acquisitions and opportunities, we're constantly having conversations with much large groups. Sometimes we're educating them on Canada. And I guess generally, because a lot of people say, I mean I live pretty good without having any assets in Canada. So I think you're going to see a lot of foreign money. And what's interesting about that money is they can step up in scale. So I'm not sure the opportunity is you got to buy one asset at a cheap price isn't that great. I think that there may be a big opportunity, large transactions. And we are seeing some -- I mean it's not talked about what we're seeing a lot of cases where there's partners and the large partner ends up assuming the smaller partners interest and takes over the obligation, has happened a lot -- I mean, you've seen in the newspaper with some of them. But I think in the background, we're seeing on a lot of partnerships, you need a lot of a good balance sheet now. So there's some of that. But there hasn't been a lot of distressed loans called and things like that. But -- and by the way, we're through a lot of. We're not through everything. But if the market sort of continues, rates come down a bit, even if things stay about the same, the banks, I think, would be patient. So if things stay this way or not, I think there may be some good opportunities. I don't see the opportunity of a lifetime very much, but there might be some of that, but it will be small. The real opportunity in my mind is to get $4 billion of apartments or get $4 billion of industrial stuff like that from the capital, the guys who own and who want to put their capital elsewhere. But everybody has opinions.

[Indiscernible]

I've never even thought about it. What's AFFO for us?

For 2024, we haven't shared that yet.

Yes. We're working a lot on how we present the company. And because it's diversified, it's hard to use the same metrics for different parts of the business. I actually know the answer, but what am I going to do with it? I can't tell you. What I would say is, we've got decent momentum in asset management. We're starting -- we're expecting to start 1,000 apartment units within the next 12 months in the National Capital Commission. We're expecting to start probably another 600 apartment units in Western Canada. So recurring income is going to do very well. But when you look at what we're doing, especially in Calgary and Alpine Park, and especially at Holmwood in that Brighton area, like that school is going to have 3,700 students. That might be 7,000 to 10,000 people who will be -- like who will send their kids there, that's the whole family. There's -- so what we're seeing is, although 2024 is a good year in Western Canada, 2025 is setting up to be the year 2026 is. Beyond that, we don't see as much. But literally, as we get through the winter, we'd probably have visibility to '27, '28 as well, and there's been a major change in Western Canada from how it had been dormant for a while to really having some enthusiasm for growth. People are buying houses. I think we set a record in Brighton for like individual purchasers buying houses in that month. So it's a very different environment than here. I'm saying the recurring income is increasing. I think we've got some ideas for asset management. You put them all together. This year looks good. And the next few years that we have visibility all look really good. Thanks, everybody. We'll be back next year.