Phillips Edison & Company, Inc. (PECO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Phillips Edison & Company's webcast presentation for its financial advisors and retail investors. My name is Bailey, and I will be your operator today. Before we begin, I would like to remind our listeners that today's webcast is being recorded and simultaneously webcast. And I will now turn the call over to Kimberly Green, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the PECO GROW Update for Financial Advisors and Retail Investors. I'm joined on today's webcast by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Edison; and our Chief Financial Officer, John Caulfield. Once we conclude our prepared remarks, we will answer questions submitted via e-mail or through the webcast chat function. After the Q&A, an archived version of the webcast and presentation slides will be published on our Investor Relations website. Before we begin, I would like to remind our audience that statements made during today's webcast may be considered forward-looking, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties as described in our SEC filings. In addition, we may also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding our use of these and reconciliations of these measures to our GAAP results are available for download on our website. With that, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Jeff Edison, our Chief Executive Officer. Jeff?

Thank you, Kim. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Last week, we reported strong operating and financial results for the first quarter. The PECO team delivered solid growth and achieved record highs in occupancy, renewal rent spreads and retention. The consistent strength of our operating performance is attributable to our differentiated and focused strategy of exclusively owning grocery-anchored neighborhood shopping centers and also our team's ability to drive results at the property level through our fully integrated and cycle-tested operating platform. We continue to benefit from a number of positive structural and macroeconomic trends that create strong tailwinds and drive neighbor demand. These trends include buying local, hybrid work, migration to the Sunbelt, population shifts that favor suburban communities and the importance of physical location in last mile delivery. These demand factors are further amplified due to the limited new supply and lack of new construction since 2008. U.S. markets have been negatively impacted this year by the higher interest rates as well as continued projections for a global recession. We believe the price of PECO's common stock is currently undervalued relative to both the private markets and our net asset value. The public markets are looking at macro real estate and broad asset classes within real estate like retail. Your investment in neighborhood grocery-anchored necessity-based retail provides you the opportunity to realize the potential upside from here. Our operations have never been stronger, and the tailwinds I referenced earlier will continue to drive foot traffic and cash flow growth at our properties. We have an active investor relations strategy designed to improve our valuation. This includes a targeted program to continue to add major institutional funds that are not yet invested in the company. We're currently covered by 11 sell-side research analysts, and we work with them to amplify and educate investors about PECO and to increase our brand recognition and ultimately drive incremental demand for our stock. These analysts include Bank of Montreal, Bank of America, Compass Point, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Green Street Advisors, JPMorgan, KeyBanc, Mizuho, Morgan Stanley and Wolfe Research. Our largest stockholders include many high-quality institutional investors. Together, these funds manage trillions of dollars and continue to believe in the PECO story. They are invested right alongside you. And of course, we have shareholders like you who have been invested in PECO from the beginning. We continue to believe there is untapped demand for PECO stock in both the retail and institutional markets. The demand for space in our grocery-anchored neighborhood shopping centers is better than we've seen in the 30 years in PECO's history. During the first quarter, we achieved record occupancy of 97.5%. PECO's retention rate was exceptional at a record high 95%, driven by increases in small shop retention. PECO's high leasing spreads, including record high renewal rent spreads of 16.1% are driven by strong demand from our neighbors. As evidenced by these operating metrics, our neighbors are thriving in our grocery-anchored centers. PECO's leasing team continues to convert this demand into new leases, which is reflected in our financial results. In addition to our strong rental growth trends, we continue to invest in value-creating ground-up outparcel development and repositioning projects. This activity remains a great use of our free cash flow and produces attractive returns with limited risk. We are making great progress on these projects, and we're working hard to continue to build our future pipeline. In 2023, we plan to invest $50 million to $60 million in ground-up outparcel development and repositioning opportunities with an average estimated underwritten cash-on-cash yield between 9% and 12%. These projects have a meaningful impact on our long-term NOI growth. Additionally, PECO is positioned for growth and to gain share as we identify and buy grocery-anchored shopping centers from a target market of 5,800 identified grocery-anchored shopping centers across the United States. We are pleased with our strong acquisition volume in the first quarter. These high-quality, right-sized, public-anchored neighborhood centers fit well into the PECO portfolio. These neighborhood centers are located in areas with strong median household income and growing populations. We believe that these properties will drive incremental earnings growth that will allow us to achieve and exceed our acquisition hurdle of a 9% unlevered IRR. With higher interest rates and constrain and use our national platform to be opportunistic. Future acquisitions will be accretive to our investors, and we will continue to evaluate each acquisition with the same diligence we've always exercised. There's no question that record inflation, rising interest rates and global conflict continue to be great challenges. Despite these headwinds, the PECO team remains focused on investing in our portfolio and driving cash flow growth. We believe our growth strategy delivers more alpha with less beta. In addition, we still have one of the lowest levered balance sheets in the shopping center space. With the fortress balance sheet and ample liquidity, we remain prepared for the challenges and opportunities that may arise. I would now like to provide a quick update on the proposed Kroger and Albertsons merger. While there haven't been any new developments on the merger, we remain positive on the impact that it will have on our centers. We continue to believe it is ultimately a positive for PECO, for our centers and for the communities our centers serve if the merger should occur. If the merger does not occur, we believe our Albertsons-anchored centers owning and operating neighborhood, grocery-anchored shopping centers anchored by the #1 or #2 grocer in the market. Our top neighbors are strong grocers. Kroger and Publix are PECO's #1 and 2 neighbors, respectively. As we have said, PECO's 3-mile trade area demographics including an average population of 65,000 people and a median household income of $79,000 are in line with Kroger's and Publix store demographics. Our centers are close to the end customer where America's leading grocers make money, and in turn, our neighbors make money, which allows PECO to make money. Over 70% of PECO's current rent comes from necessity-based goods and services, which drive regular and recurring foot traffic from customers in our 3-mile trade area. These categories include grocery stores, quick service restaurants, beauty and health care. We believe consumers will continue to visit and spend in these categories even if they do reduce their spending on vacations, luxury items and other discretionary purchases. We focus on building community at each center we own, which is why we refer to our tenants as neighbors. We are creating centers that will have the right mix of neighbors for the communities they're in. Our nationwide portfolio is geographically diverse. Rather than focusing exclusively on coastal markets, we focus on well-located suburban markets with growing populations and strong demographics. We compete on the corner of Main and Main. In addition, our exposure to at-risk retailers continues to remain limited. This is deliberate, a result of our grocery-anchored strategy and focus on necessity-based goods and services. All of these factors create regular monthly income and strong returns for our investors. PECO's properties and our team have delivered strong performance in all market cycles. We have a consistent track record of growing stockholder value. Our goal remains constant. We're focused on increasing the principal amount of your investment and providing income in the form of regular monthly distributions that can grow over time. With a predictable income stream from monthly distributions, combined with our unique ability to drive internal and external growth, we believe an investment in PECO provides shareholders with the right balance of stability and growth while supporting our long-standing commitment to growing total shareholder value over the longer term. PECO's dividend yield of 3.4% is well covered and supported by the strong returns in the business. PECO has a stable payout ratio, which gives us confidence in the stability of our distribution rate while allowing us to invest meaningfully in our portfolio and drive additional cash flow growth. PECO's conservative payout ratio allows the company to retain free cash flow after distribution to pursue accretive acquisitions and redevelopment opportunities. We're proud of our track record of positive results. We believe our future is bright. We are well positioned to drive strong investor returns going forward. We are an omnichannel landlord, which allows us to capitalize on the future of retail real estate. Our brick-and-mortar centers are a critical component to both last mile delivery and buy online and pick up in the store, commerce for our retailers. This is known as BOPIS. Through BOPIS, customers order their products online, then pick them up at the centers. Grocers have embraced BOPIS as delivering groceries continues to be logistically and economically challenging. Our brick-and-mortar assets are conveniently located in the communities they serve. This makes them ideal for BOPIS customers. Our centers helped solve the last mile delivery dilemma faced by our retailers because they're located close to the end consumer. Our centers continue to be essential to their communities. As the needs of consumers and neighbors change, we are successfully evolving with them. As an omnichannel landlord, we are helping our neighbors grow their own businesses. Lastly, we are well aligned with our investors. As we said, PECO's experienced and aligned management team owns 8% of the company. We have meaningful skin in the game and are committed to driving stockholder value. Being a responsible corporate citizen has always been integral to our strategy. Our approach has an emphasis on environmental stewardship, social responsibility and corporate governance and compliance. We believe that our corporate responsibility initiatives are critical to our success and are focused on actions designed to have long-term positive impact for all stakeholders. Corporate responsibility is part of our mission to create great omnichannel grocer-anchored shopping experiences and improve our communities one center at a time. We are well aligned with our investors' interest and our 30-year track record of success demonstrates this. In summary, we are encouraged by the meaningful growth opportunities that lie ahead. We encourage you to continue to grow with us. We firmly believe PECO is a great long-term investment opportunity. As PECO's largest stockholder, it's important for you to know that I have never sold a share of PECO. I do not plan to sell any of my shares in the near future. We appreciate your confidence in our team and your many years of support. We could not be more excited about the future of PECO, and we sincerely thank you for your investment. We will now answer your questions.

Before we take questions today, I would like to quickly mention that PECO has recently published our first quarter 2023 quarterly infographic, which is available on our Investor Relations website. This helpful resource for investors and financial advisers highlights our operating and financial performance as well as our ESG efforts. So be sure to check it out if you haven't already. In addition, please do not hesitate to reach out to us with questions or information requests during the quarter. We have provided the e-mail address for our Investor Relations team in today's PECO GROW webcast presentation, which has been posted to our website.

[Operator Instructions] I will start with a question we received about some of the recent media headlines. Jeff, our first question is there have been recent concerns with the commercial real estate market. How should we think about PECO as it relates to these less positive media headlines?

Well, first of all, thank you for the question whoever gave it. We -- I think the important thing to note is like commercial real estate is a very big market. And our focus is on a very specific niche. And a lot of the headlines, I think you're getting are some macro trends that are negative for certain parts of the real estate business. But our part of the business, actually, a lot of those things that maybe headwinds for them are significant tailwinds for us. And I think that, that is what's driven our really strong results in this last quarter. And some of the things that those include are suburbanization. If you look at more people living closer to our centers more today, that's what that done. Working from home, again, maybe negative for the office market, but it's very strong for us because it gives us more customers closer to our shopping centers. There's a trend to buy local, again, helping our centers. You put that and the movement to the Sunbelt together, those are really strong tailwinds for us and the growth in our grocery-anchored focus. And those tailwinds create demand for our space. And at the same time, there's been very limited new development in our business for 15 years. And so when you have this kind of demand with a very constrained new supply, that's what's driven our ability to really grow rents and to see the kind of growth that we had in the first quarter, but also as we've had consistently over the last few years. So we're -- I guess, the message there is that you really -- all real estate is not the same. And when you're -- we're very fortunate to be in a segment of the real estate business that is operating as well as it's operated in 20 years.

Next question. A lot of REITs have moved towards a quarterly dividend. Are you planning to change PECO's monthly dividend through a quarterly distribution? And as a follow-up question, do you have any plans to increase PECO's dividend?

Yes. So the answer is no. We like the monthly dividend. We think it's an important cash flow item for some of our investors, and we do not have any intentions of changing that. And as we've said consistently, our strategy for PECO is to grow the value of our stock, pay a consistent dividend and grow that dividend over time, consistent with the cash flow that we grow the company at. And so I think we believe that growing our dividend is an important part of the overall return for the stock and something that the team is focused on making sure that we can achieve over time. And so yes, that's important. So -- and no to changing the monthly dividend.

Next question, again, going back to some of the media headlines. We've seen less positive headlines about at-risk retailers, including Bed Bath & Beyond, Party City, Tuesday Morning. What is PECO's exposure to these retailers?

Yes. So we have very limited exposure. If you combine the 3 that have declared bankruptcy, it's less than 0.4% of our ABR. And a number of those have already reaffirmed their leases with us. So our exposure there is extremely limited. It's important to note that our strategy intentionally limits the number of these types of retailers that we're exposed to. And it's really that right format, grocery-anchored shopping center anchored by the #1 or #2 grocer, we don't have a lot of exposure to them. Non-grocer exposure is to T.J. Maxx, and that's 1.4% of our ABR. So a very small piece of it. And then everyone else is below 1% of our ABR, a really powerful thing. And you can see we have the lowest exposure of any of our peers to all 3 of those retailers combined.