Killam Apartment REIT (KMPUN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everybody. I would like to welcome everyone here today to Killam's Annual Meeting of Unitholders. With us today, and I'll go through the trustees that are currently in the room. First up, Aldéa Landry from Moncton, you can just raise your hand; James Lawley, the Chair of the Board; Laurie MacKeigan from Halifax; Shant Poladian from Toronto; Rob Richardson from head office; Andrée Savoie; and myself, Philip. I will now turn it over to our Chairman.

Good afternoon, everybody. Can everybody hear me back there all right? Yes. Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. I am pleased to chair this year's Annual Meeting of Unitholders. Welcome to Killam Apartment REIT's 2025 Annual General Meeting. This is our 25th Annual Meeting, and we are broadcasting live via webcast with unitholders attending both virtually and in person. In order to ensure that the meeting covers the required business in an efficient manner, we have prearranged with unitholders and proxy holders to move and to second the motions of business. I welcome all guests attending by webcast, but note that only registered unitholders and duly appointed proxy holders physically present at the meeting are entitled to vote on matters before the meeting. The meeting of unitholders of Killam Apartment REIT will now come to order. With the consent of the meeting, I will ask Ron Barron to act as secretary of the meeting. First item of business will be the appointment of a scrutineer. I will ask Lesley Alano of Computershare Investor Services, Inc. of Canada to act as a scrutineer. I've received the declaration prepared by the officer of Computershare indicating that the notice calling this meeting with accompanying management information circular, form of proxy, annual report and the auditor's report were mailed to all unitholders of record as of the close of business on April 3, 2025. Accordingly, with the consent of the meeting, the reading of the notice of the meeting will be dispensed with, and I will request the secretary to keep a copy of the notice of the meeting and proof of service for the minutes of this meeting. I would ask the scrutineer to summarize the scrutineer's report on attendance, please.

Mr. Chairman, I, the undersigned scrutineer from Computershare hereby report that there are at least 3 unitholders and/or proxy holders present at this meeting, representing in person or by proxy 66.36% of the total outstanding units of Killam Apartment REIT.

Thank you. Based on the scrutineer's report, I declare that the requisite quorum of unitholders is present and direct that the scrutineers' report be kept with the minutes of this meeting. I now declare that the meeting has been regularly called and is properly constituted for the transaction of business. As first matter of formal business, I table at this meeting the financial statements of Killam Apartment REIT for the year ended December 31, 2024, with the report of the auditors thereon. I do now propose to ask unitholders to approve the financial statements. We will now proceed with the election of trustees for the ensuing year. I am advised that Killam has not received notice of any further nominations pursuant to its declaration of trust. Accordingly, the only individuals eligible for nomination are described in the management information circular and unitholders were asked to consider an ordinary resolution electing each of the proposed trustees as nominated by or at the direction of the Board of Trustees. I now declare the meeting open for nominations.

Mr. Chair, I nominate the following persons for election as trustees of the REIT to hold office until the next annual meeting of the unitholders or until their successors are elected or appointed: Philip Fraser, Aldéa Landry, James Lawley, Karine MacIndoe, Laurie McKegan, Doug McGregor, Shant Poladian, Robert Richardson, Andrée Savoie and Manfred Walt.

I will ask that Robert Richardson to move and Erin Cleveland to second the resolution to elect those nominated as trustees.

Mr. Chair, my name is Robert Richardson, and I move that those nominated be elected as trustees of the REIT to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of the Unitholders or until their successors are elected or appointed.

Mr. Chair, my name is Erin Cleveland, and I second the motion.

Thank you. You have heard the motion, and there is no discussion. I ask for those in favor to signify by raising their hands. [Voting]

Any abstentions? [Voting]

I declare the resolution carried and those nominated to be duly elected trustees of the REIT to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of the Unitholders or until their successors are elected or appointed. The next item of business is the appointment of the auditors. I will ask Ruth Buckle to move and Dale Noseworthy to second the resolution appointing auditors for the ensuing year.

Mr. Chair, my name is Ruth Buckle, and I move that Ernst & Young LLP, chartered professional accountants, be appointed auditors of the REIT to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Unitholders at such remuneration as may be fixed by the trustees and the trustees be authorized to fix such remuneration.

Mr. Chair, my name is Dale Noseworthy, and I second the motion.

Thank you. You've heard the motion and there's no discussion. I would ask those in favor by signifying by raising their hands. [Voting]

Any abstentions? [Voting]

I declare the resolution carried and Ernst & Young LLP to be appointed auditors of the REIT to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Unitholders at such remuneration as may be fixed by the trustees and the trustees to be authorized to fix such remuneration. Next item of business is an advisory vote on Killam's approach to executive compensation as set forth in the Management Information Circular in respect of this meeting. I will ask Robert Richardson to move and Dale Noseworthy to second the resolution accepting, on an advisory basis, Killam's approach to executive compensation.

Mr. Chair, my name is Robert Richardson, and I move that on an advisory basis and not to diminish the role and responsibilities of the Board of Trustees that the unitholders accept the approach to executive compensation disclosed in the Management Information Circular in respect of this meeting.

Mr. Chair, my name is Dale Noseworthy, and I second the motion.

Thank you. You've heard the motion, and there's no discussion, and you're welcome to have some if you wish. I ask those in favor by signifying by raising their hand. [Voting]

Any abstentions? [Voting]

I declare the resolution carried. If there's no further formal business, may I please have a motion terminating the formal part of the meeting.

I move that the meeting be terminated.

I second the motion.

All those in favor, please signify by raising your hand. [Voting]

Contrary? [Voting]

Seeing none, I declare the motion carried and the meeting terminated. Thank you very much. We'll go on to the fun part. I'll turn it over to Phil Fraser.

Thank you very much, Jim. First off, we have two presentations this afternoon. The first one is by Dale Noseworthy, our Chief Financial Officer, to quickly review the 2024 year-end results plus the first quarter of this year, which was released yesterday.

Thank you very much. I'm pleased to be here to provide a summary of Killam's recent financial results. 2024 was a strong year for both our financial and operating results with funds from operations up 2.4%. There were a number of highlights last year. The first was that we generated record high net operating income growth of 8.4% from our same property portfolio. This was above our original target for the year, which had been set at 6%. And it's an important measure of our performance because it represents the operating results of the majority of our $5.5 billion portfolio. It excludes the impact of acquisitions and dispositions and developments for a true picture of the earnings growth from a stable pool of properties. Same property revenue was up 6% last year, driven primarily by increased rents. Occupancy was strong at 98% for the year. These results reflect the unprecedented demand we saw for multifamily residential sector over the last few years. We have seen a rebalancing of rental market and a little bit of rent -- mark-to-market rents off the peak in the last few months. But what we can see is the demand does still remain very strong for housing, and we continue to see that in our results. The same time last year when rents were increasing, we saw moderation in operating expenses due in part to lower energy costs following a mild winter and lower natural gas prices. Same property operating costs were up only 1.7% last year, which contributed to our record high NOI growth. Another highlight from last year was the strengthening of our balance sheet. We ended the year with debt as a percentage of total assets of 40.4%, which was, at that time, the lowest level in our operating history. And this compares to debt levels of approximately 55% 10 years ago. We've been very focused on reducing our leverage and are very pleased with the improvements that we've made. These lower debt levels provide more flexibility for Killam and reduce the impact of higher interest rates, which was a headwind in 2024. Higher interest rates translated into approximately $10 million increase in interest expense last year, which partially offset growth from our same property portfolio. Completing the lease-up of 3 new developments last year, including The Governor right here in Halifax, Civic 66 in Kitchener and Nolan Hill 2 in Calgary were important milestones for Killam. These 3 properties contributed positively to our earnings growth during the second half of last year and sets us up for a very strong year of growth in 2025, which we have already seen with our Q1 results that were released today. 2024 was the second year of our capital recycling program. We completed $59 million in dispositions last year focused on assets and properties with less long-term growth potential and in noncore markets. This program increases our capital flexibility and allows for the redeployment of net proceeds toward other value-enhancing opportunities. Last year, we invested $90 million in capital projects, including a combination of maintenance CapEx and value-enhancing upgrades. These investments include building improvements, unit renovations and energy investments. Our capital program is focused on the long-term performance and resiliency of the portfolio. Another highlight from 2024 was the completion of a tax-driven reorganization, which resulted in the removal of a taxable entity that existed within our corporate structure. This change is meaningful as it reduces the -- or eliminates potential future corporate taxation that would have been stuck in that structure, and it will increase cash flows available for investments and potentially distributions for unitholders. And finally, speaking of distributions, the Board was pleased to approve a 2.9% increase to our distribution late last year, reflecting Killam's strong operating results and the confidence of the Board in Killam's future growth. Yesterday evening, we released our financial and operating results for Q1 2025. We generated funds from operations of $0.28 per unit, up 7.7% from Q1 last year. Adjusted funds from operations, which is another key performance indicator, was up 9.5%. These results reflect a strong quarter from an operating standpoint with same property net operating income up an impressive 7.8%. This marks our 44th consecutive quarter with positive NOI growth. The same-property performance was driven by 6.6% revenue growth and 4.6% expense growth. With this strong start to the year, our same-property NOI target for the year remains intact, and we expect to end the year in the middle to the upper range of our same property NOI growth target of between 4% and 7%. And as I alluded to earlier, our balance sheet continued to improve this quarter. We ended the quarter with debt just below 40%. So very nice to see that result. Debt to total assets at 39.9%. We are well positioned to deliver earnings growth in 2025 and beyond. We're optimistic about Killam's future and look forward to releasing our Q2 results in August. I'll now pass the meeting back over to Philip Fraser.

Thank you, Dale. Before I ask the next 2 speakers to come up, I will sort of give a little bit of a background to the issue in the topic we're going to talk about. So earlier today on one of the questions on our conference call, we were asked, can you talk about how you think about your capital allocation when you're either going to buy or build an apartment building? And so we answered the question during the call. But it's interesting to think about this in a little bit of greater detail, which we're going to actually present this afternoon. And to give you a little bit of the background, we've been in operations for 23 years. Around 2003, there was 31.5 million people living in Canada. Today, there's 41.5 million people. So the first 14 years, the population increased by 5 million in the country. The last 8 years, it's increased by 5 million again. And what has been fairly consistent has been the number of housing completions we've been able to achieve over that same period of time and actually a lot longer, it's around 40 to 50 years of completions as an industry. And so the highlight, the focus on affordability and do we have enough supply has been in the news and then constant sort of discussion in newspapers are with us over the last 4 or 5 years from COVID. But basically getting back to the question, for many years in the beginning and most of the other apartment REITs, all they do is acquire assets. We started building on our own balance sheet 14 years ago. So again, the question from the analysts was, why do you -- where do you -- the thought process in either spending money, time, resources and capital to build your own assets or why don't you just go and buy all the time? And I think we have the answer in a lot more detail this afternoon. And back from 2 years ago, we have Andrew Kent and Aaron Caldwell to explain the differences and how we think about it when we buy buildings and when we build and all the other parts of it that sort of go into it. And so fellows come on up and help me answer that question.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. So as Phil was just saying, throughout Killam's history, a lot of the growth has come from acquisitions. And so purchasing existing buildings, of course, makes a lot of sense. They're less expensive than building new. They tend to be in neighborhoods that have existing amenities. They provide large units often and often excess parking. They have a stable tenancy. And when vacancy does come up in an existing building, they're usually easier to fill because they're more affordable. And as you know, there's an upside on turns, on repositioning. And when we invest in efficiency projects in these older buildings, we can see tremendous operational savings. So whether that's LED lights or low-flow toilets or triple-glaze windows, we enjoy those operational savings. But in parallel to the hundreds of acquisitions that Killam has made, for the last 13 years, Killam has developed many buildings as well. So most recently, our development portfolio has focused on 3 provinces: Nova Scotia, Ontario and Alberta. In Nova Scotia and Ontario, we have access to CMHC financing, and when we commit to affordable units and energy-efficient buildings, it gives us access to lower borrowing costs. In all 3 provinces, sales tax has been removed from new rental buildings. In Alberta and Ontario, there's no rent control on new construction. And in Nova Scotia, where development fees remain fairly low compared to Ontario anyway, we have existing land holdings that we can infill because those have been enabled through the Housing Accelerator Fund, which was a government -- federal government program. So it begs the question, and we heard it on the call this morning, why we continue to build in these markets, in addition to making new acquisitions? And we -- from our perspective is that we continue to create tremendous value. With our new development projects, we produce amenity-rich buildings. They're high quality. Tenants enjoy them. They're excited to move in. We achieve higher rents with our newer buildings. We create healthy living spaces. We enjoy lower operating costs. We're able to demonstrate our environmental stewardship. And we avoid the capital that's associated with older buildings. And we build hundreds of units right across Canada. We've learned a lot of lessons along the way. Building new allows us to choose sites that we want to build on. It allows us to make design decisions to take advantage of existing land through infill opportunities. One of the reasons I really like working here as a builder is that we intend to own and operate these buildings in the long term. And so we can make decisions on quality, on sustainability, on efficiency that other builders just don't make. We work with our marketing team to understand what tenants are looking for in terms of finishes and amenities. We work with our operations team to understand how to make sure the buildings are maintainable and efficient. We electrify our buildings. We use triple-glazed windows. We add insulation beyond code. We install solar panels. We're essentially building better, more resilient buildings than anything we can buy on the market. And that creates long-term value. It also diversifies the portfolio. It lowers the average age. And of course, it provides housing in the communities that we serve. And along with that new housing supply, we do achieve higher rents in our newer buildings. If we compare 2 buildings in Mississauga, Ontario, they share a site. They are similar in a lot of ways. They have on-site management. They have underground parking. Silver Spear even has an indoor pool, but the Kay is new, and it achieves 67% more rent per square foot. Similarly, if we compare 2 buildings in Kitchener, they're similar location. They're both near downtown, both near live rail transit, but the newer building achieves 62% more rent. And so why is that? In my opinion, it's twofold. The building code requires so much more than it did 50, 60 years ago. And so these new requirements have improved tenant experience with more insulation, better air quality with additional ventilation, improved sound attenuation between units as well as the outside. But secondly, we're able to design in what tenants have come to expect and need. So in all of our newest buildings, we include air conditioning, in-suite laundry, access to fiber internet, electrical capacity to power modern electronics. And depending on the demographic and the level of affordable -- affordability that we're trying to achieve, we can design in amenities that suit the building and suit the target demographic. So for example, we've installed where we've included demonstration kitchens, dog runs -- rooftop dog runs, large and expanded fitness centers and yoga rooms, shared workspaces, theaters, and even a rooftop park next door in downtown where green space is a little bit harder to find. The point is that we continue to learn and get better at building. And while we continue to acquire older buildings, we can certainly take what we learn as developers and become better at building operators. And that's what my colleague, Aaron is going to speak to.

Thank you, Andrew. So I'll take a look at some of the performance metrics that we analyze every year for the whole portfolio. And this first slide compares the energy intensity of several buildings, a few of them that Andrew mentioned, 188 Margaret and Silver Spear in Kitchener and Mississauga, respectively. And then they're comparable buildings, the Kay and Civic 66 in the same markets. So we can see that the traditional gas-fired buildings are achieving an energy performance that is roughly 2/3 to double what the new buildings achieve. And then the Carrick, which is a newer building under construction, planned to open this summer in Waterloo, Ontario, the energy modeling that we've completed through the design process indicates that the performance again of that building will be substantially better than the last 2. We're using a metric here called kilowatt hours per square foot. So this is a summation of all the energy consumed at the building over the course of a year, and we divide that by the square footage of the building so that we can evaluate the performance across the portfolio. And it's a way to give us an apples-to-apples metric to evaluate how the buildings perform. And so also associated with our energy use is the carbon emissions that happen because we use energy to heat and cool our buildings. And so despite the fact that we use multiple energy sources in different markets, the carbon emissions associated with those energy sources can be different. We do quantify this, and it's evaluated every year in greenhouse gas workbook. That's part of our GRESB submission. So we can see that in our gas-fired buildings, 188 Margaret and Silver Spear, our carbon emissions are substantially greater than those built, the newer buildings, which have chosen a path of electrification to heat and cool our buildings. So we use a greater proportion of electricity than natural gas in the new buildings to provide energy to meet our needs. And again, the Carrick, which is the building that will soon be completed. It's in Ontario, which is a very low carbon intensity electrical grid. The carbon emissions at the Carrick will probably be some of the lowest across the portfolio, if not the lowest. Again, we look at another resource consumption metric, and that's water use at our buildings. Because of technology improvements in plumbing fixtures, newer buildings have lower flow water closets and showerheads and faucets, both for lavatories and kitchen use and achieve the same performance for the tenant. So we can see that the cost to operate these buildings from a water use perspective is about 30% to 40% less depending on the building and depending on the market. So particularly in Kitchener, Ontario, the water in that market is quite expensive because it's all sourced from wells rather than surface water, so that we have a good return in Kitchener for sure on any projects where we go with low-flow fixtures. And we have taken this approach as well when we retrofit our existing buildings. So something we've learned from our new builds is that we can take that technology and apply it when we replace the water closets or plumbing fixtures in our existing builds. And we do see quite a good return on that every time we do it. So taking the information that we've learned and the experiences that we have on the new builds, we are learning new techniques, both for building and operating buildings and working with new technologies. So any time we take a major retrofit opportunity in our existing portfolio, we can take what we've learned from the new builds and apply it to the existing buildings. So several things that we consider each time we undertake a major capital project would be insulation and window upgrades, can we reinsulate, add insulation compared to what was there in the past or improve the performance of the windows? Heating plant replacements. If we're replacing a traditional gas boiler system with a new gas boiler system, there are techniques and technology that we can apply to that new installation that will reduce the consumption by 15% to 20% depending on the building. And we've seen this in the last 4 projects that we've done over the last 2 years. Additionally, in existing buildings, we can install heat pumps that can operate as the first stage of heating and cooling for the apartment suite, and then we have a hybrid system where the heat pump provides the majority of the heating and cooling and the traditional gas-fired boiler systems act as a secondary system to provide heat when it's needed beyond what the heat pump could provide. Lastly, when we replace generators, we've taken the approach of evaluating our needs at the existing buildings. So upgrading the generator capacity is often something we consider both to provide additional services to our tenants in the advent of a major outage and also to our telecom partners. Many of our buildings have telecom equipment on the roof which requires in many jurisdictions that it operate for a certain period of time in a grid outage. So we can provide a service to our partners by upgrading that generator, enabling them to operate for a longer period of time when the grid is out. And these measures provide a greater level of resiliency both for our tenants, but also for the wider community around our buildings. So in summary, we've taken basically what we're learning on new construction and now applying it on our existing portfolio and improving our portfolio as we go and invest our capital funds every year. Dale mentioned that we spent $90 million on capital investments last year. Each one of those investments considered these features when we made that investment. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate your attention, and I'll pass it back to Phil.

And so in summary, to answer that question that was asked of us this morning, basically, Andrew answered half of it, which is really we're doing our share of increasing the supply at a time when there is a shortage of housing right across the country and my little preamble of all the sort of the stats and how many people are living in the country now. And we haven't been able to keep up with that sort of build out in terms of the housing stock in the country. And the second part is by being involved in this, we are learning more about the existing portfolio that we bought, improving it over time and working them together, it basically ends up, which I believe is one of the better, if not the best operating platform in the country. So thank you very much. That's the end of the formal presentation. We're around after for any questions. Jim?

Can I say something unscripted?

Yes.

Well, Phil, it's hard to believe it's been 25 years since this company started. And I remember, I'd meet with Phil, we were paying the bills for our college fraternity, and Phil wasn't too happy where he was. And I said, "Why don't we do something on our own?" Yes, yes, yes. Well, one day Philip comes, "I need $50,000 from you." It was a lot of money 25 years ago when I didn't have any Killam stock. And so I, of course, manage to beg, borrow and come up with a check and 8 of us started a very small company 25 years. I couldn't be more proud of this company. Thank you.

Any questions? We're around in just few minutes. Thank you.