Flagship Communities Real Estate Investment Trust ($MHCUN)

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Flagship Communities REIT First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded. Today's presenters are Kurt Keeney, Flagship's President and Chief Executive Officer; Nathan Smith, Chief Investment Officer; and Eddie Carlisle, Chief Financial Officer. Please note that comments made on today's call may contain forward-looking information, and this information, by its nature, is subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from the views expressed today. For further information on these risks and uncertainties, please consult the company's relevant filings on SEDAR+. These documents are also available on Flagship's website at flagshipcommunities.com. Flagship has also prepared a corresponding PowerPoint presentation, which encourages you to follow along with during this call. And now I'll pass the call over to Kurt Keeney. Kurt?

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We've gotten off to a strong start in 2026 as we continue to execute on our strategy of driving growth through both organic initiatives and disciplined expansion in our core markets. Our first quarter results reflect solid growth across our portfolio and continued progress on our long-term value creation plan. Our Rental revenue increased by 20.6% over the same period last year. Our NOI improved by 17.4% over the last year, and our FFO adjusted and AFFO adjusted increased by 12% and 10.4%, respectively, over last year. We also continued to see strong growth in Same Community metrics during the quarter. Our Same Community revenue grew by 8.6% over last year, and our Same Community NOI grew by 5.3% versus the first quarter of 2025. In addition to our strong organic performance, we completed a strategic acquisition during the quarter in Cleves, Ohio, which further expands our presence in one of our core markets. This acquisition is consistent with our approach of targeting markets we know well and communities with occupancy upside potential. Nathan will provide more detail on this transaction and how it fits into our broader growth strategy during his remarks. Our financial results provide a sense of the strong fundamentals of our industry and the progress we're making towards our growth strategy. While performance is important, our mission remains our main focus, and that is to provide affordable housing and exceptional residential living experiences in our adult and family-oriented manufactured housing communities, while creating value for our shareholders. Sustainability is embedded in what we do, and we've outlined our ESG practices and performance in our sixth annual ESG report, which is available on our website. We are encouraged by the progress we have made in many different areas, including environmental stewardship and community reinvestment, and in corporate governance. With that, I will now turn it over to Nathan for his remarks. Nathan?

Thanks, Kurt. Good morning, everyone. We continue to see strong performance across our existing communities while also completing strategic acquisitions. Strong performance for us begins at the community level. We continue to see positive results from our core initiatives, including occupancy growth, lot rent and additional revenue increases across the portfolio. We also remain focused on enhancing the resident experience across our communities. We are very proud of our continued investment in amenities, infrastructure improvements and community engagement initiatives, all of which support resident satisfaction and long-term retention. In addition to our focus on operational performance, we continue to pursue strategic acquisitions that are located in key markets where we operate. This past quarter, we acquired a 96-lot community in Cleves, Ohio, further expanding our bolt-on strategy and presence in that market. This transaction builds on our recent acquisition of 3 communities in Greater Cincinnati area and reflects our continued focus on core markets where we can drive operational efficiencies and create long-term value. As with many of our acquisitions, we see the potential to enhance performance through future community expansion that can support an additional 12 lots. The community has also benefited from significant infrastructure upgrades such as newly paid streets and solar lot projects. It also has improvements to its amenities, including a large clubhouse, playground, ballfield and basketball court. Overall, we remain focused on our operating strategy of combining strong organic growth with disciplined acquisitions. With that, I'll turn it over to Eddie to review our financial results in more detail. Eddie?

Thanks, Nathan. Good morning, everyone. Our first quarter results reflect continued strength across the portfolio, driven by organic growth and contributions from recent acquisitions while maintaining a conservative balance sheet. Revenue for the quarter increased by 20.6% over the same period last year due to acquisitions as well as lot rate increases across the portfolio. Same community revenue of $26.9 million for the first quarter grew by approximately 8.6% over the comparable period last year. This increase was driven by higher monthly lot rents and ancillary revenues, combined with a rise in same community occupancy. Net operating income and NOI margin were $19.3 million and 64.5%, respectively, compared to $16.4 million and 66.2% during the same period last year. Same community NOI margin for the first quarter was 54.2%, a decrease of 2% compared to last year. While NOI saw an increase from amenity fees, NOI margins were negatively impacted due to these services having lower margins than what we have historically achieved. Winter storms during the quarter also had a significant impact on costs and decreased margins. FFO adjusted and FFO adjusted per unit for the quarter were $9.6 million and $0.381, respectively, a 12% and 11.4% increase, respectively, compared to last year. AFFO adjusted and AFFO adjusted per unit for the quarter were $8.6 million and $0.341, a 10.4% and 10% increase, respectively, compared to last year. Same community occupancy of 84.8% increased 1.4% over the same period last year, which continues to reflect our commitment to resident satisfaction and ensuring our communities are located in desirable locations. Rent collections for the quarter were 99.8%, demonstrating the strength and consistency of the MHC sector. As at March 31, our total lot occupancy was 84.1% and our average monthly lot rent was $516. We remain focused on maintaining a conservative balance sheet with an emphasis on long-dated fixed rate debt. Our weighted average mortgage interest rate was 4.54% and our weighted average mortgage term to maturity was 8 years. We have no substantial debt maturities until 2030. We had total liquidity of $13.2 million. The REIT currently has 21 unencumbered investment properties with a total fair value of $130.7 million as at March 31, 2026. With that, I'll now turn it back over to Kurt for some final remarks. Kurt?

Thanks, Eddie. As we look ahead, we remain focused on executing our strategy and continuing to deliver long-term value for our unitholders. During the quarter, we were proud to be recognized by the Manufactured Housing Institute as the 2026 Manufactured Home Community Operator of the Year Award. This marks Flagship's second consecutive Operator of the Year award and our fifth National Community Operator of the Year recognition from MHI. This recognition is a direct result of the dedication of our team and their focus on creating safe, amenity-driven and vibrant communities across our portfolio. We believe this continued focus on operational excellence, combined with our disciplined growth strategy positions us well for a year ahead. Thank you for your time today, and I will now open up the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Tom Callaghan with BMO Capital Markets.

Maybe just start off on the occupancy side of things. Q1 was quite strong relative to Q4 of last year. Anything specific to call out there in terms of the drivers? And I know you guys kind of point to 200 to 200 basis points of growth per year. But just given how Q1 came in, is it reasonable to expect that there could be some upside there this year?

Yes. I think that we've still got some runway on the occupancy this year. You know, we had a little seasonality kick in at the end of the year last year. And, you know, sometimes in your home rental fleet, you just have a little turnover, and we had a little bit at the end of the year last year, and we re-leased those units up. And -- but again, I'm pretty optimistic in all of our markets that our occupancy is going to grow in our forecasted range.

Okay. Great. Maybe switching gears to the expense side of things for Eddie, but you did note there kind of the winter storm had an impact in Q1. I guess, is there a way to quantify kind of the impact on expense growth? Or maybe said differently, how should we be thinking about same-property expense growth through the balance of this year relative to the kind of that Q1 number, the 15% range?

Yes. So Q1 was a bit of an anomaly from a couple of standpoints, mostly around kind of the snow removal and the labor work and repairs and maintenance that go along with that. As I'm looking at it, I think that was about somewhere between $0.005 and $0.01 of FFO per unit. So kind of an impact of, call it, $250,000 or so in total year-over-year increase in cost. So as you think about expenses moving forward and you want to remove that effect, I think that's probably a pretty good range.

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Rothschild with Canaccord.Your line is now open.

Can you just talk a little bit about the homes that you've been buying? How will this impact your growth over the next year? I think there's about 150 or so homes that you bought in the quarter. Do you expect to do a lot more of this? And how should we think about that?

We were having a little hard time hearing you, Mark, but I think you asked about the rental home fleet that we added in the first quarter. Every year, our commitment is to try to drive the rental home fleet down as a percentage of our overall occupancy. We think it's a necessary tool in the shed, but we think homeownership is a better tool. And we grew our occupancy through re-leasing rental homes and through home sales in the first quarter. So what we've done with that rental fleet is we're high-grading the current rental fleet, and we're looking to sell off those older units. So again, I don't know that we would put a lot more into the fleet this year, but I'm sure we will as we're managing the individual sites. And sometimes when you get these sites up to 98% occupied, right now, we've got about 40 of our communities are at historically high occupancy standards, if not 98% to 100%. And so when you look at that, those last 2%, sometimes you have to put a rental home in to get those up into the full occupancy.

Okay. Great. And maybe just one other following up on the discussion on expenses. Because Q1 was impacted so much from the weather. Should we expect, all else being equal, stronger same-property NOI growth through the rest of 2026?

I mean, yes, I mean, my thought has always been that we can get to higher-single-digits, low-double-digits on the same-property NOI. Some of that's obviously slowing because of the fact that the year-over-year implementation of our cable agreements are now catching up with themselves, right? And at this point, for 2026, we don't have any additional agreements that are going in place. So we're going to continue to pursue that, which could give us some help with that. I certainly see being able to get that back to the higher single-digit numbers moving forward.

Our next question comes from the line of Kyle Stanley with Desjardins.

I just wanted to switch over to the home sale side of things. How have home sales gone to start the year? I believe there's typical seasonality and strength towards the beginning of the year, particularly post-tax time. So just curious how that's gone year-to-date and maybe how that compares to any previous years?

Well, Home sales were good in the first quarter. They've also continued even into April. But what you did see, though, the weather did impact the homes being able to be shipped. And I think actually, we would have had better home sales in the first quarter if we could actually have gotten the houses to the lot. I mean, many times, Kyle, they went 10 days without shipping any homes because you cannot ship homes when you got snow on the ground in the Midwest. It's not Canada where you guys are familiar with doing that often. In Kentucky, we have like three snow plows. And in Tennessee, they have zero. So that creates a little bit of a problem. So I was very pleased with the first quarter home sales comparing that we were up against.

Okay. And maybe just one more kind of going back to the rental fleet. I did see there was an establishment of a rental fleet maintenance technician team. So just curious, can you elaborate on that a little bit? What is it? Was the need for that just given the larger rental fleet? Just want to understand how to think about that.

Yes. We're just trying to be more efficient. Again, if we have a rental home, we're going to put out a good product, and we've committed staff just to make sure that, that happens and to get those units turned faster. It's more efficient on the CapEx side with them because we can do that. It's one of the benefits that we have because, again, we have this bolt-on spoke and wheel kind of strategy, right? So, like, in Louisville, there's 15 locations. So you can actually have all within half an hour of downtime in Louisville, and that's repeated throughout a lot of our markets. So you can really have these efficiency moments, which makes our margins better. And again, that's just us managing that and being the operators that we are.

Okay. And just to clarify, in the past on turnover of a rental unit, how would that have been managed? Was it outsourced to someone else or...

Yes. So traditionally in the past, you'd have -- we'd have a subcontractor that would come in and do whatever work that would need to be done to turn that unit. What we've tried to do is for -- to Kurt's point, for 2 reasons. One, for timeliness. Sometimes it's hard to get the contractor there and get that turned timely. So we have a vacant rental for a longer period of time. So having our own crew allows that to be done quicker, also allows it to be done more cost-efficient.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Himanshu Gupta with Scotiabank.

So just on same community NOI, it was mid-single digit in Q1. And Eddie, I think you mentioned high-single-digit. Just want to clarify, is that what you're seeing for the full year? Or is that what you're seeing from Q2 to Q4 onwards in that ballpark of high-single-digits?

My assumption is kind of Q2 to Q4, we'll start to see that momentum pick back up and see that the OpEx is more back in line to what we've seen historically. The fact that we actually have a more full seats from our manager standpoint, we're going to see a little higher OpEx just from a payroll and benefit standpoint because we were able to have more of our seats full. While it does hurt you -- I say hurt, while it does increase your OpEx numbers, it also gives us the ability to drive occupancy, right? So part of the reason that some of the things you struggle with on maintaining occupancy or increasing occupancy is when you don't have managers in seats to help us with our home sales or the rental of the units. So I think we'll continue to see the benefits of it, but also from the OpEx standpoint, you're going to see a little bit elevated from a payroll and benefits because we do have those seats full. So Q2 to Q4, I think we can get back in the higher single digits. Full year, we're probably kind of in those mid-single digits.

Got it. Okay. Okay. That's pretty strong. Thank you. My last question is, I mean, you got the Operator of the Year award. What are you doing on the operational side that differentiates you from the others? Like why do you think you've got this recognition?

Well, that's a secret that we're not sharing on this call. If we do that, we'd be telling our competitors what they're doing wrong. But I would say that one of the things that the industry looks at us is how we have integrated home sales into our communities because we're a one-stop shop, and you can only do that when you have communities that are very close together. As I always say, you can't have one in Houston, Texas, one in San Francisco and one in Baltimore and I think you're going to have really great home sales. What you really need is 12 -- 15 in Louisville and 12 in Evansville and 7 in Paducah. That's what you really got to have.

And I think our commitment to investment in our amenities is really powerful and something that the industry looks at as a positive, right? So Kurt says it all the time, people move in because it's affordable and they stay because they like it. And I think that's the key. That second part is more important than the first, right? We invest in the communities. We're putting a playground of basketball and dog parks and walking trails and fishing lakes. All those things make the quality of the community -- it makes it feel like a community, right? It's not just a place to live, it's a community. And I think that, that is what people see when they look at how we operate our company.

Got it. Thank you. And thanks for giving the slice of your secret sauce...

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Kornack with National Bank Capital Markets.

Just quickly on R& -- like just the $250,000 additional costs, is that in your R&M line, just so I know where that.

The majority of it. So in total, we spent about $250,000 on just snow removal in general. But if you look at year-over-year, that's only up about $150,000. The remaining portion of that, yes, is in the R&M line and the increase in payroll. We had a considerable number of amount of overtime during that period, helping plot snow, helping doing any repairs to water line and those type of things. So the majority of it, I'd say $200,000 is going to show up in repairs and maintenance and another $50,000 in the payroll and benefits line.

One of the things our team did was we had to go help our residents. And that does make overtime happen. But you're going to send that maintenance person to help Mrs. Jones get her water line unfrozen because it's the right thing to do.

Yes. I think what's interesting about this is that, I'm really pleased with our first quarter results because when you really add up the -- because we had multiple winter storms hit us, and I'm not making any excuses. But when you have 89 locations get hit by one storm, it shut down our home sales operations for weeks. I mean we were literally shut down because we were helping, to Nathan's point, we were helping the residents plow the streets, plow their driveways, unfreeze their water lines and just trying to be good neighbors. And so I'm really pleased with it because our home sales were up, and we basically took 3 weeks off to do snow and winter weather issues.

I know for us, it was January and February that were particularly bad. Would that have impacted kind of the cadence of your occupancy gain as well? Would the occupancy have been mostly in March? Or did you gain occupancy?

No, we gained in February and March. What's funny is there was a couple of brief moments, and I think people were pretty pent up. So when they came out, they came out. And it's such an affordability play for us right now that they came out and this was tax refund season, and that started mid- to late January. And so they were ready to commit to their new home. And so -- but yes, it wasn't the ideal sales season, and we still came through it and came through it well. So I'm very proud of the team.

Okay. No, that's good to hear. Last one for me, again, back to Eddie, just on the utilities and the utility recoveries. You mentioned that there's no new kind of additive contracts, but the margin there was off quite a bit relative to last year. Is that kind of a new normal? Or is there anything onetime in nature in terms of how kind of the expense versus the recovery will trend?

Yes. So I don't think -- I wouldn't call it onetime. What I would say is that what we saw in Q1 -- so last year Q1, our actual water sewer recapture exceeded 96%, which for us is kind of best-in-class. This year, that was closer to 90%, 91%. Some of that related to the winter storm, just to keep going back to that, but the part of it is related to that. But then, yes, I mean, there is certainly a new normal when it comes to the lower margins on the cable piece of it as well. So we were slightly impacted by the winter weather. But for the most part, it is kind of a new norm there on that recapture.

Okay. I appreciate that. I mean it's a cold spring here, but hopefully, you guys have no more snow in store. So...

Our next question comes from the line of Jimmy Shan with RBC Capital Markets.

So just a couple for me. The lot rent growth was increased by about 6.8% on a quarter-over-quarter. And I recall you had said something about raising by 5.7%. I was curious what changed there? And then I wanted to know if you could elaborate on sort of what's going on in the investment market. What does that look like? Any incremental change in terms of opportunity and pricing?

Yes. I'll take the first part on the lot rent growth and let Nathan talk about the investment opportunities. So the lot rent, there's a couple of things there. Again, this is another play where when you see the -- some property taxes that grow, right, and we have to pass those on. So there's some portion that wasn't -- part of when we call lot rent growth, I'm thinking just our lot rent increases that we send out in November that take place on January 1. There was some additional property tax increases that were added throughout the first quarter. The other thing is the acquisitions that we took over in Q4 of last year, the large acquisition in Seymour, Indiana and then the 3 in the Cincinnati markets, those were not considered as being part of the 5.7% growth. All of those assets had higher lot rent than our overall average. So it drove up what you're looking at quarter-over-quarter, it drove up that average. And I'll let Nathan talk to the.

Yes. We're -- the fourth quarter of last year and even the first quarter of this year, -- it has been pretty light on acquisitions deals out there. And I have not seen cap rates change on what deals are out there. So we continue to look at deals as we say. And we're going to look for deals that are in our footprint. And if they're not in our footprint, we're not really interested in expanding right now into other markets.

Okay. Just a quick follow-up on the lot rent. So the lot rent that you quote then is -- it would be inclusive of any property tax recoveries that you would have?

That's correct. Yes. Yes, that's right.

Yes. We gave guidance that we raised the rent 5.7% on average, and most of that started January 1. But due to those other factors, it actually drove up that on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Dean Wilkinson with CIBC.

Just want to circle back on the acquisition conversation. I look at a market like Nashville and you're seeing some pretty significant corporate commitments to go into that market. Is this an area where you think that there's a lot of growth? I think historically, it's been sort of a tight rental market in MHCs and you've got some occupancy gains you can make there. But what are your thoughts around sort of that market or the submarkets surrounding Nashville as looking to build up more scale there?

Yes. We're always looking in markets that we're already in, especially Nashville. We went into Nashville and sort of with 2 properties there, and we continue to reposition the one, and it's going excellent there. Would we like to buy more in Nashville? Of course. Would we like to also be in other places in Tennessee. We are particularly looking all the time in the 8 states that we're doing it in. But we're -- again, we're not going to buy a 3 cap. It's just not something we're going to do. And -- but we haven't seen an expansion of cap rates either. And so they've been staying somewhere between 4.5% and 7%, and they haven't changed much at all. And so we're still out there looking every day. It just -- it does seem to be competitive. There just doesn't seem -- there does seem to be some sellers that are maybe starting to have some problems here and there.

I also think some of the selling opportunities, Dean, in Nashville or in any market is really going to be, I think, driven by a lot of folks that during the COVID -- around COVID, rates were really good, and people are putting 5-year debt on those assets. That's now -- we're starting to come around to where that debt is coming due. So I do think that there will be some opportunities, I mean, not particularly Nashville, just in general in our business that will start popping up in the near future.

Thank you, and I'm currently showing no further questions at this time. I'd now like to hand the call back over to Kurt Keeney for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for participating today. Please feel free to reach out to our Investor Relations team at [email protected] if you have any further questions. Have a great day.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.