Sun Communities, Inc. (SUI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Citi's 2026 Global Property CEO Conference. I'm Nick Joseph here with Eric Wolfe with Citi Research. I'm pleased to have with us Sun Communities and CEO, Charles Young. [Operator Instructions] Charles, we'll turn it over to you to introduce the team and company, provide any opening remarks, tell the audience the top reasons that investors should buy your stock today, and then we'll get into Q&A.

[Technical Difficulty]

Can you just press -- yes, it needs to be red.

Red is talk, alright...

Surprised me.

Threw me off on that one. All right. I'll start back over. Thank you, Eric and Nick. To my right, we have John McLaren, our President. Directly to my left is Aaron Weiss, our Head of Strategy and Business Development; and Fernando, who is our Chief Financial Officer. I'll do our comments, and we'll jump into kind of overall, if that's okay. So good afternoon, and welcome, everyone. It's great to be here. I'm pleased to be at the conference, new in the seat. If those of you who listened to our last earnings call, 2025 was a transformational year for Sun. The sale of the Marinas marked an important milestone for the company. Frankly, it simplified our business. We had a chance to strengthen our balance sheet as seen by our net debt to current EBITDA, repositioned Sun, frankly, as a pure-play MH RV company. Over the past year, with all of that, we've had a chance to reduce leverage, which resulted in credit upgrades from both Moody's and S&P, enhanced our financial and strategic flexibility and returned more than $1.5 billion of capital to our shareholders. And so I'm excited as we come into the year with that foundation, we're operating from a position of strength and couldn't be more excited about what's in front of us. Our core manufactured housing and annual RV businesses continue to demonstrate durable fundamentals. We operate in sectors supported by strong demand, limited new supply and compelling affordable advantage relative to other -- housing sectors, if you will. Manufactured housing provides a high-quality living experience at a cost meaningfully below alternatives. And our RV communities, frankly, offer accessible short-term and long-term vacation options that resonate with today's consumer. These segments generate recurring predictable rental income streams. Our MH and annual RV is highly occupied. We can get into those details if you want it. And we continue to see the benefit of the long-term resident engagement and retention across our asset class coming from where I came from, it's kind of great to see that low turnover that's in our portfolio. To that point, I've had a chance over the last several months, opportunity to spend time with our communities in multiple states, meeting with team members, meeting with residents, and guests. And what stands out and strength of our portfolio and operations is the sense of community that you feel when you're in one of our communities. So I encourage everybody to try to visit if you can. This is a compelling value proposition for our residents and guests. And as we look ahead, our strategy is focused and practical. It builds on what's worked, what this team has built before I showed up, and we're really focusing on sharpening our execution to drive long-term value. As I talked about on the call, I see 3 core pillars that's guiding this approach. First is disciplined capital allocation that includes maintaining a strong flexible balance sheet while pursuing value-enhancing growth opportunities. Number two is continued optimization of our operating platform to drive greater consistency, accountability and efficiency across the organization. There's a great foundation laid as to how do we build upon that. And third is strategic investment in our communities, in our infrastructure and in our digital capabilities to enhance the resident and guest experience and enable faster, better data-driven decision-making going forward. We believe this focused approach positions Sun to deliver steady earnings growth, margin expansion over time, supported by durable cash flow characteristics of our core business. We're pleased to be here today with you. As I said, we got the whole team here. I'll pause there and open it up for questions.

Perfect. Well, you touched on the 3 pillars that you're focused on. If you think about the company over the past few years, there's been a lot of change. So I guess how do you think about implementing more change from here? Obviously, there's -- you're seeing opportunities to do so, but how do you make sure that it is actually implemented in the right way so that there's not either missteps or kind of challenges that aren't foreseen right now, just given what we have seen with the rollout of the new ERP system or others. How do you think about the pace of change versus making sure it's done correctly?

No, it's a great question. The strength that I've seen spending my time here is the culture. And I want to make sure that we are preserving and building off that strength of the culture. There has been a lot of change. Much of it has been for the better in the last 1.5 years in terms of the simplification that I referred to. In terms of ERP specifically, there were some challenges along the way, but ultimately, we have more access to data now than we've ever had. So with that, all that I said, the culture, the team, the systems, we want to build off of that and be thoughtful in terms of how we implement, how we build off of it. When John gets a chance to speak, there's been a lot of focus since he came back to the company around fundamentals and execution. We're going to build off of that and continue to add elements and information that allows us to be thoughtful in our decision-making. And part of what I -- why I didn't rush in here making a lot of different changes, doing my listening, learning, engaging is that so the organization can understand who I am, what my approach is, what my background is, how I think about it. They understand that I'm here to just win as a team. It's not about me, it's about all of us. It's about the we. And with that attitude in place, we got a lot of great things to do. And the plan, the core pillars and the strategic priorities that I've rolled out to the organization so far this year have ultimately been putting a mirror back to the company. They've told me what we want to do, and they're looking for these things that we're implementing, and we'll be thoughtful about how we do that and conscious of the risks that come with it.

So maybe -- I apologize, I'm losing my voice a little bit, so bear with me. But you talked about rebuilding, I think, the sort of data architecture of the company. Can you just describe what that means in sort of more detail and sort of what the opportunity would be like? So what are you looking to accomplish on that? Because I think we hear these things and we kind of want to try to measure sort of tangible goals. What sort of tangible goals should we be looking toward over the next couple of years when you say things like, oh, we're going to rebuild the architecture. What is that going to do for the organization?

Yes. I think as we think about it -- this is not an overnight change, right? So I would say, hey, be patient as we think through building this infrastructure in this unified digital backbone, as I'm calling it. There are some things that we're doing this year, and I'll let John speak to that specifically that we think are going to have an impact specifically in our RV portfolio. But the long-term approach is building off the foundation, as I spoke about with our ERP, what systems are we connecting to it, the data that we have, where does that data go? Is it clean data? Are we able to put some data scientists on top of it to look at it and make sure that we're running it through with the proper either finance look, asset management look, our operational look, marketing look to make sure that we are driving the right decision, being more effective and efficient with our decisions. Again, it doesn't happen overnight. There are a couple of things that we're doing this year in terms of booking channels, in terms of our customer journey, in terms of the centralizing some of our contact center opportunity and putting new data on top of that, that, again, new systems on top of that, that, that data then gets put into a data lake and a database that ultimately gets to be mined and that we can look at it kind of cross-functionally to come up with the answers. So not able today to put numbers on it. We'd look to try to do an investor presentation in the future. We can start to quantify some of that. But in the meantime, for the short term, there are some things that we're doing that I think are going to help enhance our guidance and where we're trying to go this year in terms of how effective we are. Do you want to jump in with any of this, John?

Sure. Yes, Eric, I think if you recall, last year, I spent when we were here, we talked about just getting back to our execution, something that everybody was very familiar with in terms of how Sun operated. And obviously, the ERP implementation that happened in 2024. I think everybody probably know that after being on a different ERP system for 20 years, that's a heavy lift, to go through that process. And so really unlocking that 2025 sort of represented the first step of that. I talked a lot about transparency and ranking. All that came from data. Data and a look that we had that we hadn't had before, and making it visible to our team, so that we could focus on the things for 2025 that we felt like were most important and could move the needle the farthest, not just on the expense side, but on the top line side. And so when we walk into 2026, we've talked about 2025 being really a setup for that. And so when you ask like what are some of the things you can do to make sure that you are successful in the movement forward that we have, some of the things that we're doing today, for example, Charles alluded to opening up to new booking channels that are specific to RV. This is something that happened later in 2025 that we haven't even realized the benefit from, in 2026. So we look to that to be something that's going to be meaningful, in so far as a step forward. Additionally, we talked about digital booking enhancement. And that's really leveraging the tech, that we have in place with the ERP, the unified data lake that Charles is talking about and applying the nimble booking window that we have and aligning that with the revenue management capabilities that are well built at Sun. And so when you sort of bring those 2 things together and then on top of that, on the RV side specifically and you think about just the guest journey, if you will, okay, which is how does a guest -- a potential guest find us? How is the process for them in their booking? What is the ease of that process? What is the experience on the ground, the things that I've shared with you before. And more importantly, how do you capitalize that in the form of a rebooking? How do you capitalize that in the form of an extension of an existing stay? How do you capitalize on that in terms of referral, and bringing people to the community. And so the data is central to all of it. And one of the things that we have now, just like I was saying last year about things I had then that I hadn't had before, what I -- what we have now with the data is marketing folks like to talk in terms of clicks and likes and impressions and those sorts of things. And really, what matters is the transaction. And does it ultimately get from A to Z, with the result that you wanted. And so we now can track all the different channels that we have and be able to align those in a more targeted approach rather than like the broad-based approach that we might have taken in the past in terms of the marketing spend. So we're more efficient with the spend that is delivering a better return on those dollars because we're being targeted in terms of our approach. So that's just some of the examples.

Yes. Short term, the revenue management optimization, just it's already a great system, but what more data can we add, especially on the RV side. I'd also say over time, as we build this, where are there efficiencies in the organization to be thoughtful based on what we're doing in terms of how we run the business, whether it's on the procurement side, utilities and otherwise, that can flow through to how we operate and efficiencies and the experience that we're creating for our residents. So this is an ongoing effort, and we're building a good foundation now. But each year, we're trying to build on that because that's the long-term benefit of focusing on this side of the business.

Got it. And then on the annual RV side, you mentioned on the call that what you're doing is working. You put out lower rates this year. I think you said that you were ahead in terms of acceptance of those renewals. Can you just talk about that? If possible, could you quantify it to say this is how far we are ahead of last year? Just trying to understand to what degree we might actually see occupancy build or some beneficial impact from being ahead of...

Yes. I think the way that I frame that, Eric, is, yes, like I said on the call, we focused our attention in much of 2025 on retention because it's obviously a lot simpler for us to have a customer or a guest stay at the property rather than having them leave and ultimately have to go through the bandwidth to refill that site with a new guest. So we are focused on that, which is why we had a tempered approach to our 4% rent increase on the annual RV side. We're very open about that. I think it was the right approach. And it has led to being ahead of our renewal pace this time versus actually ever since we launched the process, we've been ahead. And what that really translates into is if you look sort of broader, we had good success in 2025 in terms of our net leasing of annual sites, which adding another 600 coming off of 3 straight record years that we had. I think it's also led to -- I think what we've shared with everybody has been that we would guide to a similar sort of 600-ish range in net conversions for 2026. So all that makes me feel good in terms of where we sit today to achieving that. But I will add that I think one of the things that has sort of emerged in this process and thought about retention has been optimization across RV, which is to say, if you look at certain individual communities and you really look at the business from the ground up, there's a good question to ask of what sites should actually be converted versus not? And so we've sort of graduated to that point now where because of our success, because of continued success, we can actually do that, differently than we could before. And so I've put out a number around 600. It could be plus or minus that, but it would be a result of optimization that might affect that outcome is what we believe.

On the transient side, it looks like you're calling for a little bit more stability this year. We've seen a number of sort of down years over the last couple of years. I guess what gives you the confidence that this year will be a little bit more stable? I know it's, I think, still down a little bit for your guidance, but I think that's sort of after conversions, correct me if I'm wrong. So either way, it's calling for a more stable year. So what gives you the confidence in that?

I can start. I think the main thing is just when you look out into our booking window and what we see, Eric, I mean, that's the straight answer in terms of what we see in the form of reservations going out into 2026. Obviously, you know the meat of the year usually is in the second and third quarters, and that will become clearer in the focus as we get closer to those quarters as well. But I will share that you sort of characterize that it's been challenging on the RV transient side the last couple of years, it's true. 50-plus percent of that is a result of the great success that we had with the conversion program. So that's a big piece of that. And I also think that, frankly, COVID had a pretty big effect as you saw us spike in terms of transient revenue during the couple of year period of time. If you really looked at that over a longer stretch of time, you would see a more steady growth curve. And that would be something you would expect. And so this is why I feel like besides what we're seeing in our data at this point in time and sort of like stretching out that curve with COVID, why I feel like that -- and the fact that we were 9% down on transient revenue last year, we're guiding to down 1.5%. I mean that's a clear signal in our guidance how we feel in terms of how things are stabilizing.

I'll just come over to top as I've had an opportunity to go visit many of our RV sites, more to see, again, just 5 months in. But if you step back and you look at the -- in the medium to short term, what I've seen is many of the strategic changes that the team has made, whether it's strategic dispositions of some of those assets, whether it's the conversion from transient to annual, we've gotten to a place where it feels pretty balanced and pretty healthy. And to John's point, it's more of an optimization effort going forward. But as I look at it and have seen these assets, this is an unrivaled portfolio on the RV side. And this was -- if I'm going to anticipate a question what's been a surprise for me. I'm surprised to the upside of the quality and the energy that we have on many of these communities and the opportunity in front of us long term to really unlock the value that's here. Yes, there was kind of a steady growth and a little bit of a pop during COVID and things have normalized. But I think we're -- the work that's been done is kind of set up this portfolio to have an opportunity to continue to have steady growth and ultimately, an opportunity with all that we're doing around asset management and data and the rest of it to kind of unlock it and create some value on that side of the business. So I'm excited about what's ahead. A lot of work to be done, more that I need to do, but there's a real opportunity in my mind.

Makes sense. Maybe if we turn to the U.K., I think on the call, you mentioned that you'd evaluate it like all other capital allocation decisions. Is there an active market to sell it today? Are you seeing a lot of assets trade in the U.K.? How about kind of from a portfolio perspective, what would you -- how would you characterize the acquisition market there?

Let me go high level, then I'm going to ask Aaron to weigh in on the market. Overall, again, I've had a chance to spend time with that team, get over and make sure I understand the business. Great asset, great operating platform, best-in-class team. It's a challenging macro. But ultimately, the best thing we can do is execute and support the team. We've done some work with the ground leases that create operational flexibility and optionality as we evaluate the broader market. And so just so everybody hears from me, I'm always as a capital allocator looking at all sides of our business. RV, as we just talked about, U.K. being no different. We're spending time making sure that we are understanding what the options are. In the meantime, we're going to execute best we can. With that, to answer your question specifically on the market.

Good question to speak about the U.K. generally. We do have the best team in the market. They've been operating incredibly well through a very difficult backdrop. So hugely supportive of what they've been doing and again, continue to deliver results despite the backdrop that has been challenging from a transactional perspective, not dissimilar from the U.S. market. Things have been muted since we announced our acquisition in late '21 and closed in '22. So there haven't been a lot of large-scale institutional transactions broadly in this asset class in the U.K. We've seen incremental transactional activity more on the single assets, more portfolio side. But there is institutional investment in the space broadly among sort of the large global private equity firms. So we would expect they'll continue to look at the space. But in the last few years, there just hasn't been that level of transactional activity. We think with a more benign market backdrop, we have seen, as I said, some more of the single assets, small portfolio deals transact. We've been a seller of a few of those assets to that market, but we can't point to sort of broader institutional transactions, again, not dissimilar from the U.S. where it's been pretty muted over the last few years. But again, we're a public company. So we certainly hear from folks, and we'll engage in constructive dialogue alongside what Charles indicated vis-a-vis our bigger picture strategic capital allocation strategy.

I was going to say when you -- sorry go ahead, you...

No, no, I was trying to save your voice.

No, it's going to go in one of these sessions. I was just going to say, when you say that the ground lease is enhancing your flexibility, I mean, does that just effectively mean that there's just certain buyers out there that if you were to ever sell at some point, just wouldn't consider owning it if they didn't have control of the ground lease? Like what does it mean?

Good question regarding the ground leases. When we acquired the business, it came with in-place ground leases. They've been in our numbers since we acquired the business. We had a unique opportunity to acquire them. I think, frankly, as a real estate owner globally, you want to own freehold underneath your real estate. And so we had a unique opportunity to do that. The team there was hugely supportive of it. There are some dynamics day-to-day in terms of having a landlord, information sharing, single asset sales, if you want to sell single assets, you need to work through substitution rights. So I think, first and foremost, it was an attractive use of capital. We had the financial flexibility, thanks to the safe harbor sale to effectuate that over the course of 2025. Additionally, certainly having freehold investment in real estate could provide more flexibility from a bigger picture financing perspective where we had to finance something directly in the U.K. to the extent we wanted security or from a strategic perspective, for ourselves or however the business plays out in the future. So it was a pretty compelling opportunity set regardless of the larger strategic opportunities that may avail themselves, but we're really happy to be a primarily freehold owner. Post those deals, 90% to 95% of our NOI in the U.K. comes from assets we own freehold. So very compelling from a strategic and financial flexibility perspective. And remind me, do you have any U.K. debt?

And remind me, do you have any U.K. debt or no?

Even U.K. debt, it's all at the corporate parent.

Just on the operating side in the U.K., when do you lap the tougher expense comps on the minimum wage increase?

I mean I can answer that from the operating expense perspective, the national minimum wage, the U.K. operates on an April fiscal year. There was a raise in April '25, which was incorporated. There is another one coming up in April 2026 for that fiscal year from April through the first quarter of 2027 that is incorporated into our OpEx guidance for 2026.

What was the '25 and '26 -- what are the '25 and '26 raises?

They depend on where you sit from a national minimum wage. They're pretty public, but there's an increase for full-time employees. There's also raises based on ages and what would primarily impact our U.K. business are the seasonal employees you'd see in the summer. So it varies depending on the employee and type of FTE or part-time employee.

Looks like we're getting a couple of questions here on the MH side. I'll try to ask them. I guess maybe just stepping back, I get a lot of questions on your all-age versus age-restricted portfolio. Would you say that 2 of them operate any differently from one another? I mean, is your all-age portfolio more exposed to like lower job growth and other things that are impacting the apartment market right now? Or would you say that the fundamentals are very similar? And then we had a question from an investor sort of along the same lines, which is like your growth here has been great. But at what point is there going to be increased regulation if you're growing at 5% every single year?

Yes. I think to answer the first part of your question, I think that -- what we typically see in an all-age community is going to be the growth that we've had and typically as far as like rate increases as one of the pieces to it, we have seen typically between 100 and 150 bps ahead of inflation for a very, very long time. And I think that, that -- what it boils down to, Eric, is really the community itself, okay? Is it being cared for? Do we have the continual reinvestment? Do we have -- is the sort of equity, if you will, spread across everybody, okay? That's what makes it go because we've always described our business as a marathon versus a sprint. And then when you think about it from an affordability standpoint, and we've shared this before, in tougher times, the way that we've described Sun overall is if this is a more -- my hands up here for anybody watching, if this is a more robust economy and below that is a more challenging economy, Sun sits in the middle of that and that band moves around us. So we may very well lose some people at the margin that move in with parents or family or something else. But it's -- what we've seen, at least over the course of my 24 years with Sun has been in those tougher times, many more come in at the top of the funnel, okay? And they're getting pushed into our asset class. And so -- and I think because of the long-term approach, the reinvestment in everything we do, this is why we're so good at capturing those residents live in our communities. This is one of the reasons why you see the very high tenure that we have in our communities that we've had for years as well.

I'll just add and going back to -- I'll give it to you in a second, Fernando. Just going back to the regulatory question. I just want to highlight that as we think about that discussion, it's mostly around affordability and affordability for housing for Americans. And from Sun's perspective, we think we're part of the solution in support of affordable housing relative to other housing alternatives. The other thing I'd keep in mind -- so to that point, we're making sure that we're keeping an eye on all regulations that are out there and making sure that people understand exactly what we do. And one of the things to highlight, as you talked about the rent growth number, that's just on our site rent. We have a unique model here relative to other housing classes where we ultimately -- the resident ultimately owns the home and they're paying rent in our community on that individual site. So it's a small part of their overall number. And part of why we've always been thoughtful, if you go back over the 40 years that we've operated, it's been kind of a steady growth. There hasn't been a lot of up and down because there's a shared model of making sure that we are being thoughtful about what that number is. People stay with us for decades. They stay a long time. And that turnover is low because there's this kind of shared perspective. I'm going to turn it to Fernando, who can talk a little bit around the equity value creation that happens.

And I think it's important to note, our residents have created significant value in the ownership of their homes in our communities. Over the course of the last 6 or 7 years, the home prices or the equity value has increased at a high single-digit CAGR for residents in our communities that own their homes. So that's a significant and very compelling reason for that home being and them owning a home in a Sun community versus a competitor.

Another question come in, just on the regulatory side and changes to the HUD code and what that ultimately could mean for manufactured housing broadly and if there's greater flexibility in home design and configuration potentially drive obsolescence for some of the older MH stock.

It's a great question. It's come up a few times. I think the chassis piece is really interesting. I think the manufacturers stand to benefit from that. And I think from our standpoint, we're watching it closely. We think that it's a net positive, Nick. In terms of like home design, we'll just say home design and affordability, at the same time, potentially because of how a house can be built, how it can be set up. It will be -- it will be interesting to see what it means because we don't know yet in terms of transport and setup of the homes in the communities, whatever is required from a foundation perspective. But as we've shared before, from the regulatory front, sometimes there'll be talk or federal mandates that happen. The real linkage needs to happen between that and what actually happens locally. And so our hope this could be positive from that standpoint because Sun for One has worked very closely with the manufacturers in our space for many years to develop the types of homes that we have today. We have literally designed some of those ourselves with some of the manufacturers. And I think that the chassis piece maybe just helps that whole discussion at the local level because you can provide a product that is, we'll just say, more like what they're used to seeing from a residential perspective.

Maybe with the last 4 minutes here, talk about capital allocation. You're sitting on, I think, around $550 million of cash. That's after some uses. Like what would be ideal to be able to do with that? I think your stock -- let's just say your stock doesn't come back to the $125 range where you've typically been a buyer. What are you going to do with the cash? And then I guess, in a situation where you can't find good acquisitions or other opportunities, are you just going to pay off your mortgage debt that's maturing in the middle of the year?

Yes. We talked about it a bit on the earnings call. We're in a really flexible and a lot of options in front of us given the cash that we have on our balance sheet and our current debt levels. There's kind of 3 tools in the toolkit. One, we talked about in the 3 pillars that I discussed that we're going to first invest in our communities and a bit in our infrastructure to make sure that we're building an opportunity to hit this kind of perpetual long-term durable growth for our shareholders. So we're going to be thoughtful on that spend. And there are opportunities in front of us, and we spent some time looking at those. The data piece that we talked about will help us drive like where we put that. So that's some of the benefit long term that we're talking about. The other piece is we are looking. We showed that last year, we bought almost $0.5 billion of core assets in our MH and annual RV communities. We bought 14 of these. We're going to continue to look. The team historically has done an amazing job of being able to source these. So we're continuing to look for accretive growth opportunities in the markets that make sense that are kind of tucked into our markets to create efficiencies. And so that's definitely a big part of our toolkit. And as you mentioned, we'll be thoughtful around shareholder return, whether that's buying back shares at a compelling price that makes sense. And that's another tool that we use as we watch what's out there. And so we're in this, what I call, enviable position to be able to have some tools and some capital to be thoughtful about. And we will, long term, think about what we're trying to do on the debt side. I don't know if there's anything to add there, Fernando. But these are all the things that we're paying attention to as our capital allocation or use of cash that we have on the balance sheet.

And we do have a rapid fire in a minute, but I just want to quickly touch on how Sun is using or implementing AI, kind of where you're seeing the opportunity, where you're seeing the efficiencies and then how you're actually doing it? Is it buying? Is it building and partnering? How you're thinking about that?

Yes. So again, within Sun, I'm still getting my head around kind of where we are. I think there's more of a buy and partner at this stage, not as much of the build, although the tools, as you all know, are getting much more sophisticated and all of that is moving very fast. So some of the basics that most companies have are in our systems, and we're going to use that, whether it's in the marketing side and other parts of the business to make sure that we're pulling data out and being smart and being efficient with it. Longer term, as we talk about this data architecture, I think that's where you start to use this more and more. That's where there could be some build. But at this point, it's more of a partner make sure that we have the infrastructure in place. And from there, we'll figure out what part do we buy on top of it, do ourselves, bring in data folks with data scientists to get on top. So it's going to be a balance. I can't give you percentages. But right now, it's about getting the data right and then utilizing the core opportunities that are out there that we can get off the shelf.

And then just on the rapid fire, same-store NOI growth for MH overall next year sector-wide in 2027?

There's only 2 of us.

Including the private sector.

Yes. For 2027, I say between 4% and 5%, NOI growth.

I guess this one there is only the 2 of you, but will there be more fewer of the same number of public companies next year?

Same.

Terrific. Thank you very much.

Thank you.