NNN REIT, Inc. (NNN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings. Welcome to the NNN REIT Inc. Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Steve Horn, CEO at NNN REIT Inc. You may begin.

Thanks, Holly. Good morning, and welcome to NNN's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. On the call today with me is Chief Financial Officer, Vin Chao. As this morning's press release reflects NNN's performance in 2026 continues to produce strong results, including high occupancy, impressive rent collections with under 5 basis points of uncollected rent and solid acquisitions driven by our deep tenant relationships. We're well positioned to continue enhancing shareholder value as we move into the second half of the year and beyond. In July, we announced just over a 3% increase in our common stock dividend payable on August 14. Marking 2026 is our 37th consecutive year of annual dividend increases. That places NNN among 70 U.S. public companies and just 3 REITs to achieve that track record. Given our continued consistent performance of the portfolio and the acquisition pipeline, we're updating our 2026 guidance for AFF per share to a range of $3.55 to $3.59, our second guidance increase for the year. This reflects our discipline of long-standing multiyear strategy for consistent per share growth. As far as the portfolio performance, the 3,774 freestanding single-tenant properties continue to perform exceedingly well during the second quarter. Occupancy is up 50 basis points from the first quarter to 99.1%, which is an increase of 110 basis points from last year. We see positive momentum across our tenant base, highlighted by 2 significant M&A transactions announced in mid-July involving tenants in the portfolio. Mavis Tire announced an agreement to acquire PepBoys for approximately $700 million of cash further strengthening its position as one of the nation's leading automotive service providers. Additionally, big brand tire announced an agreement to acquire Belltire. The combination creates a network of more than 530 stores with over $1.5 billion in annual revenue. Acquisitions for the quarter, we invested just north of $290 million in 89 new properties at an initial cash cap rate of 7.3%, more importantly, an average lease duration of just shy of 18 years. The product mix is primarily auto service discount retail and early childhood education with a median purchase price of $2.1 million, an average of $3.2 million. During the first half of 2026, we invested $430 million from 130 new properties at an initial cash cap rate of 7.4%, average lease duration just over 18 years. Cap rates range have been fairly stable over the past 6 quarters, reflecting competitive investment environment. But looking ahead, we believe modest cap rate compression is possible during the second half of the year, supported by the composition of our active acquisition pipeline and the portfolios that are currently in the market today. Our investment approach remains unchanged. We continue to apply disciplined underwriting standards and focus on originating direct sale leaseback transactions with relationship tenants, where we can negotiate favorable economics and structure investments utilizing our laymord-friendly long-term duration triple-net lease. This strategy continues to provide the most attractive risk-adjusted opportunities that broadly marketed assets, including [ 1031 ] driven transactions. Given the visibility provided by our pipeline and our ongoing discussions with transaction partners, we are increasing the midpoint of our 2026 acquisition guidance to $750 million from $600 million. We expect most of the acquisition volume to be sourced through direct original sale-leaseback transactions, reinforcing our emphasis on proprietary deal flow, disciplined capital deployment and long-term value creation. As far as dispositions, during the quarter, we sold 26 properties, including 19 vacant assets, generating approximately $37 million in proceeds for reinvestment. The income-producing assets were primarily noncore properties that were sold at cap rates approximately 170 basis points below our acquisition cap rate, demonstrating continued demand for well-located net lease assets. As we previously discussed, we expect to be more active on the disposition front throughout 2026 as we continue to optimize portfolio quality and enhance long-term shareholder value. While our strategy remains focused on acquiring durable income-producing real estate, disciplined capital recycling is an important component of our investment process. And with that backdrop, we're lifting disposition range to a midpoint of $140 million. Active portfolio management is essential to maintain the high-quality portfolio that is positioned to generate stable and growing cash flows. We believe selectively recycling capital from noncore assets into higher conviction investment opportunities will strengthen the portfolio and improve its long-term earnings and cash flow profile. As far as the balance sheet, I don't want to take all the Vin's thunder, but the balance sheet remains among the strongest in the net lease sector and continues to provide significant financial flexibility. We ended the quarter with a weighted average debt maturity of approximately 10.1 years, which is nearly double the nearest net lease peer, and we also maintained $1.4 billion of liquidity. This conservative capital structure positions us well to fund the remainder of 2026 pipeline while maintaining ample capacity for future growth. Having a robust acquisition pipeline, the strong balance sheet and experienced management team, we remain confident in our outlook. We are committed to our self-funded growth strategy, disciplined capital allocation and maintaining the financial flexibility that has long differentiated our platform. We believe this approach will continue to support sustainable earnings growth and long-term value creation for our shareholders. We're focused on finishing 2026 strong and positioning NNN for continued success over the years ahead. With that, I'll pass it over to Vin. He will can go through our quarterly numbers in detail and updated guidance.

Thanks, Steve. Let's start with our customary cautionary statements. During this call, we will make certain statements that may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities law. The company's actual future results may differ significantly from the matters discussed in these forward-looking statements, and we may not release revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect changes after the statements were made. Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ from expectations are disclosed in greater detail in the company's filings with the SEC and in this morning's press release. Turning to results. This morning, we reported AFFO of $0.90 per share and core FFO of $0.89 per share, up 5.9% and 6.0%, respectively, over the prior year. Results were ahead of our internal projections with upside driven primarily by lower-than-expected bad debt, which totaled about 2 basis points of quarterly ABR. Our NOI margin of 96.6% in the second quarter was up 70 basis points versus last quarter as we further drove portfolio occupancy above our long-run average, thereby reducing net real estate expenses. G&A as a percentage of total revenue was 5.8%, while our cash G&A margin was 4.4%. Annualized base rent grew by over 7% year-over-year to $959 million on the back of our strong acquisition volumes. Free cash flow after dividend was about $56 million in the second quarter. Turning to tenant credit. Our watch list of near-term credit concerns remain immaterial at this time, which has led to better-than-budgeted credit loss year-to-date. That said, our portfolio management team remains focused on identifying and proactively mitigating potential future credit risks through asset sales, targeted lease terminations and leasing. From a capital markets perspective, during the quarter, we exercised the accordion option on our term loan issuing an additional $200 million to bring total term loan size to $500 million. Of this total, $400 million has been swapped to an attractive all-in fixed rate of 4.1%. In addition, we lowered the spread on our term loan and revolver by 5 basis points. In light of our improving cost of equity, we were active on the ATM in the second quarter, selling roughly 6 million common shares on a forward basis at just under $46 per share. We also settled 1.7 million forward shares, generating net proceeds of about $73 million, which were used to pay down our revolver. From a modeling perspective, these shares were settled on 6/30 and therefore, are not included in the reported weighted average share count. As of June 30, we had roughly $272 million of unsettled forward equity, which combined with our $215 million of expected free cash flow and $140 million of expected dispositions for the year provides us with ample liquidity with which to execute our strategic objectives for 2026 and beyond. Regarding the balance sheet. At the end of the quarter, we had no encumbered assets, $1.4 billion of available liquidity and just 2.5% of our debt tied to floating rates. Net debt-to-EBITDA of 5.7x was unchanged from last quarter, but including the impact of unsettled forward equity, pro forma net debt-to-EBITDA was 5.4x, down from 5.6x last quarter. Our sector-leading debt duration of 10.1 years was well matched with our lease duration also 10.1 years. On July 15, we announced a $0.62 quarterly dividend, which is a 3.3% increase in the quarterly rate and represented our 37th consecutive annual dividend increase, an achievement that we are extremely proud of and one that reflects the sustainability of our growth model. The new dividend rate equates to a 5.3% annualized dividend yield and a healthy 69% AFFO payout ratio. Lastly, I will end my comments with some additional color regarding our updated 2026 guidance. As disclosed in our earnings release, we are raising both core FFO and AFFO per share guidance for 2026 by $0.01 at the respective midpoints. Updated AFFO per share guidance of $3.55 to $3.59 implies about 3.8% year-over-year growth at the midpoint, an acceleration from 2.7% growth in 2025. The primary drivers of our improved earnings outlook are better than planned second quarter performance, a $150 million increase in expected acquisition volume and a $0.5 million decrease in expected net real estate expenses resulting from a faster-than-planned reduction in vacancies. We also raised the midpoint of our annual disposition guidance by $10 million, and from a credit loss perspective, we are leaving our second half assumptions unchanged, but given the year-to-date outperformance versus plan, we now expect full year bad debt to be about 40 basis points, down from 60 basis points as of last quarter. More details regarding line item guidance can be found on Page 3 of our earnings release. While our guidance reflects our near-term outlook over the longer term, we continue to target sustainable mid-single-digit growth driven by disciplined capital allocation, proactive portfolio management and a largely self-funded growth model, supported by our conservatively managed balance sheet. With that, I'll turn the call over to Holly for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question for today is from Ronald Kamdem with Morgan Stanley.

Maybe we could start with the acquisitions. Obviously, the guide raise in the quarter, if you could talk a little bit about just what kind of activity that you're seeing. We did see sort of cap rates, I think, down 20 basis points from the cap rates in the first quarter. So we'd love to hear some -- what you're seeing on the trends in the competition as well in addition to the volumes.

Yes. I mean, just us lifting the acquisition volume from the original guide shows there's plenty of activity out there for us. We're seeing a lot of opportunities. The summertimes things slowed down a little bit, but going into the summer and had a great second quarter because we were able to stack the pipeline. And then the remainder of the year, we have a good pipeline. There's a fair amount of activity. Hopefully, we can end up on the higher side of our guidance, but we don't want to count our chickens until they're hatched. But yes, a robust pipeline, and there's a few portfolios out in the market currently that we could have a good second half of the year. As far as competition, it's the usual suspects, the other public REITs. We're not running into much of the private money out there. That could change the second half of the year, but competition is always robust in the net lease sector. I'm not seeing to go up or down in the remainder of the year. That being said, knowing what's in my pipeline, that's why we're kind of speculating that there'll be a little cap rate compression in the second half of the year.

Got it. That's helpful. And I think you -- my second question is just on the portfolio health and sort of asset management. It seems like the bad debt has been trending well below your expectations or even historical this year. So at this sort of juncture, what other sort of industries, what are you guys sort of watching out for? And is it fair to say that 99-plus percent occupancy is in the best shape the portfolio has been?

I'm going to let Steve handle that historical perspective because he has more of it than I do. But from my perspective, yes, it's the best shape that the portfolio has been since I've been here. But as far as watch list tenants, as I mentioned on the -- in my prepared remarks, we don't really have any material tenants that are on the watch list from a near-term perspective. We do talk about some tenants that have historically had some -- we've been on the watches for a long time like AMC. Again, that's more of a movie theater thing. And quite honestly, the movie theater business has been doing quite well this year. Box office is up pretty strongly. And I think AMC just recently got a credit upgrade from S&P. And so, at least in the near term, things are fairly calm on that front from a line of trade perspective. It's really -- we've never really had a specific focus on lines of trade moving theater being maybe 1 exception. But overall, it's more idiosyncratic in terms of how we think about the watch list as opposed to specific lines of trade, again, as I often say, there's winners and losers in every line of trade.

Yes. As far as the portfolio health historically, our portfolio is in great shape. Currently, given the size of the portfolio, we do deal with retailers, so retailers do come and go throughout the years. But that's why we focus really hard on the asset level, financial performance and real estate quality. But yes, I mean, overall, the portfolio today is as good as it's ever been. But no major retailers in our top are giving us any heartburn. But more importantly, the asset level financial performance seems to be pretty robust for the last 18 months.

Your next question is from Jana Galan with Bank of America.

Congrats on the quarter. Can you walk us through how you're thinking about your marginal cost of capital as you accelerate acquisitions? And then following up on the higher dispositions, are those mostly vacant or opportunistically low cap rates? Or kind of what is targeted for disposition?

I'll let Vin talk about the weighted average cost of capital, how we're looking at it then I'll follow up and talk about the dispositions.

Look, as far as the cost of capital, I mean, we have seen an improvement on our cost of equity, which was nice to see. And so we were active on the ATM during the quarter. And so I think we're in good shape from a liquidity perspective, from a cost of capital, our debt cost of capital is -- one, we always think about things on a long-term basis. So thinking a 10-year debt, cost of equity, we have an absolute hurdle that we think about sort of in the 8-plus percent range, which is sort of a long-term view. And then from an earnings accretion perspective, dilution perspective, we look at the AFFO yield. And so if you take our typical 60-40, we blend probably around 6, 7 today. So that's plus or minus.

As far as the dispositions, yes, the majority of the dispositions this past quarter were the vacant assets, 19 were vacant. However, the income producing ones was from active portfolio management discussing with the retailer. They weren't stellar performers and the retailer was probably going to not renew the lease. That being said, the 5.6% cap rate that we sold, that was a pretty tight bandwidth. But the portfolio is stronger, and it was primarily -- the restaurants were more than 50% of the income producing and the remainder was primarily to being the stores.

Your next question for today is from Brad Heffern with RBC Capital Markets.

Just following up on AMC. The yields on the debt have improved a lot. As you said, it was upgraded by S&P. Do you see theaters trade at all right now? And might there be an opportunity to reduce exposure there just given it seems like the credit profile has improved?

Yes. We sold -- if you recall, we sold one actually in the first quarter. So we're always looking to reduce our exposure on the movie theaters that aren't performing as well that haven't rebounded completely to pre-COVID numbers. We're not seeing them personally many of them on the market. But yes, we are always going through every industry, not just movie theaters and looking at our exposure and the real estate risk associated with those certain tenants. But yes, I'm looking actively to reduce our movie theater exposure as we move forward.

Okay. Got it. And then on the guidance, the FFO guidance, all the underlying assumptions look like they moved in a positive direction from acquisition volumes to taxes to -- well, everything. So what was the offset that kept the high end of the guidance from increasing along with the low end?

The reality is, Brad, I mean, we felt like given where we are in the year, we wanted to narrow the range, but we did feel a $0.01 increase at the midpoint was appropriate. And so that's just kind of how the numbers shake out, but there's nothing really preventing the high end from going up per se, specifically.

Your next question is from Smedes Rose with Citi.

You mentioned M&A activity that took place across the quarter. And I was just wondering, when you've seen this in the past, is there any -- do you have any sort of concerns around potential closings just as maybe competing stores overlap? And just sort of on that, there were some headline news earlier in the year around 7-Eleven looking to close some stores and leaning into a slightly different format. I'm just wondering if you've heard anything relative to your portfolio on that front?

No. As far as 7-Eleven, in 2025, we did a full -- a big renegotiation with 7-Eleven that renewed a lot of their leases, basically all of them at the end of the day. Yes, 7-Eleven is moving to close the larger format store. But our 7-Elevens are very low cost basis. We're kind of more of that $3 million, $4 million range in the 7-Elevens, and now they're building $10 million. I don't want to hone a $10 million in 7-Eleven. I want to maintain that $3 million to $5 million range. So I'm not concerned on our 7-Eleven portfolio. As far as M&A, we have long-term leases with it, so they can't close them, but they've got to pay us rent and then we'll manage the portfolio as we move forward throughout the rental lease.

And one thing I'll just add to that, Smedes, is that on the renegotiations that Steve just mentioned on 7-Eleven, these were -- they could have just taken an option, a 5-year option, but we did renegotiate I think it was 15-year leases with them. So I mean they are -- they wanted to stay where they're at in our portfolio.

Your next question is from Michael Goldsmith with UBS.

Just on the dispositions, I know you touched on a little bit on some [indiscernible] some was active portfolio management. Can you talk a little bit about more specifically, what restaurants you were selling? And then also, are there more dispositions to be coming in the future quarters?

Yes. Good question. As far as the dispositions, we listed our midpoint a little bit signaling that we're going to have more dispositions and got back in the first quarter call, I said 2026 will be elevated. As far as the restaurants, we disposed off the top of my head, on Ruby Tuesdays we disposed of and the Bob Evans in particular, that we're just lower-performing assets and the management team contacted our portfolio manager and decided to work a deal out. And those things were in the high 5s that's sold. So it was a good deal for the tenant and good deal for us.

And as a follow-up, it looks like you increased your exposure to early childhood education of the category that some of the other triple net lease have played in. So can you give a little bit color -- more color on those acquisitions, maybe the opportunity set that you're seeing and then any sort of -- has there been any cap rate compression in that space specifically?

As part -- the last 15 years, we've seen our fair share of volume opportunities in the early childhood segment. And this year, we did a little bit more than we have historically. We have played in that space. We're very knowledgeable. And -- but when we see the right opportunity as far as the initial cap rate and the real estate metrics and the right management team, then that's when we'll lean in and do it. So as far as a risk-adjusted return, we feel pretty good at the tenants that we're doing business with within that segment.

Yes. And just a little -- this quarter, we did do a small portfolio deal with a new relationship tenant, a very strong management team, low levered balance sheet, attractive fungible real estate in that 1- to 2-acre land size and nice size building and high rent coverage to start. So we feel very good with that.

Your next question for today is from Spencer Glimcher with Green Street.

Sorry if I missed this, but just going back to the acquisition pipeline, you mentioned a few portfolios out in the market. Just curious if these are being new tenants, assuming you would land 1 or 2 of these severe deals?