Earnings Transcript for GIPR - Q4 Fiscal Year 2021

Operator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Generation Income Properties Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all lines have been placed in a list only mode. Please note that today's conference call is being recorded. Replay information is included on March 17th press release, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of company's website at gipreit.com, along with the fourth quarter and fiscal year earnings release. I'll now turn the conference over to the company's Investor Relations representative, Mary Jensen. Mary, please go ahead.

Mary Jensen : Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. I’m joined this morning by David Sobelman, Chief Executive Officer; and Allison Davies, Chief Financial Officer. David will provide an overview of the company's growth strategy, business and capital markets activity, 2021 milestones and the 2022 outlook. Allison will review our quarterly and year-end financial results and balance sheet. Today's conference call includes forward looking statements and projections that reflect the company's current views with respect to among other things, our pipeline and planned acquisition activity, anticipated market size, expected consolidation in the industry, future events and financial performance. These forward looking statements are subject to the inherent uncertainties in predicting future results and conditions. Certain factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in these forward looking statements, new risks and uncertainties arise over time, and it is not possible for the company to predict those events or how they may affect it. Therefore you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. During this call, we will refer to FFO, core FFO, AFFO and core AFFO, which are each non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations and net income to the most comparable GAAP measures to these non-GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release or in the investor presentation available on our website. We ask that you refer to our most recent filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward looking statements and projections including the risk factors included in our form 10-K for the 2021 fiscal year to be filed with the SEC. As such it is important to note that management's comments include time sensitive information that may or may not be accurate as of today's date Friday, March 18th, 2022. Following management prepared remarks, the call will be open for your questions. We request that you ask only one question and one follow-up to allow ample time for everyone to ask questions. If time permits, we will welcome you to re-queue, to ask additional questions. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, David Sobelman.

David Sobelman : Thank you, Mary. And welcome to our earnings call. For those of you not familiar with our company, Generation Income Properties is an internally managed real estate corporation formed in 2015 to opportunistically acquire and own retail, office, and industrial net lease properties located in densely populated submarkets with a focus on investment grade tenants. We intend to elect to be taxed as a real estate investment trust. We currently have 13 assets in our portfolio across eight states and the district of Columbia. We specialize in underwriting, both the credit worthiness of our tenants and the underlying fundamentals of the real estate. In particular, we focus primarily on single tenant net lease properties across multiple asset classes that have a high probability of either maintaining their current tenancy or re-tenanting the asset in future years. Further, our acquisition strategy targets occupied commercial properties with lease durations under 10 years and tenants with a high credit profile. We believe this strategy should provide GIPR with an opportunity to generate above market returns. Stabilized assets with shorter lease terms to investment grade tenants are attractive because our comprehensive and detailed underwriting process, which allows us to uncover opportunities that may be overlooked by large institutional investors. We focus on this segment because we believe shorter lease terms provide flexibility to realize attractive rental rate increases, higher value and stabilized assets and resilience to economic fluctuations. This past year was nothing short of metamorphic for Generation Income Properties. With your continued support, the GIPR team achieved transformational milestones that have positioned us to pursue significant growth. Key to these achievements and to our continued growth will be our team's adherence to our core investment principles. High credit quality tenants, shorter-term and flexible lease durations as well as favorable underlying real estate fundamentals. These investment principles driven by our underlying corporate values led to notable accomplishments this past year in our capital structure, our portfolio and our team. It is important for me to outline these achievements to set the stage for our direction in 2022. We believe internal growth combined with external growth initiatives will be a catalyst to achieving our goals. One of the initial steps to achieving this is access to capital. First, we had a successful on underwritten public offering in September 2021 that generated gross proceeds of approximately $16.5 million, including a partial over-allotment. This was of course, a major milestone for all stakeholders of GIPR. It broadened our access to capital and created greater liquidity, something we have been discussing since our inception. Second, our relationship with American Momentum Bank included a $25 million commitment letter to fund individual acquisitions. Utilizing this debt source allows us to close on properties more efficiently by avoiding the traditional channels of approval that typically come with most property level financing. This financing source is a direct reflection of our strong relationship with American Momentum Bank, the company's original lender since 2017. During 2021, we also remain focused on strengthening our balance sheet by lowering our cost of debt through refinancing assets at lower interest rates with our current lenders to mirror the shift in market rates. In 2022, we will remain focused on lowering our overall debt and strengthening our balance sheet. Moving on to our operating portfolio which has remained tremendously resilient. We continue to collect 100% of our rents, and have done so since our inception, including the years through the ongoing headwinds from the pandemic. In fact, none of our tenants have asked for rent abatements or workouts, which we believe is a testament to our underwriting abilities. All but one of our 11 tenants or their parent companies, have investment grade or equivalent credit ratings. With that said, we have one tenant with a BB plus credit rating from Standard & Poor’s, which is one step below investment grade. However, this tenant shares trade on NASDAQ with a market capitalization of approximately $1.8 billion. With that said, we monitor all of our tenant’s credit quality before and during our ownership in order to make necessary changes to our port portfolio due to altering dynamics within a particular company. We also extended one lease in Virginia with Maersk Shipping, who had a BBB plus credit rating. We found that regular and direct communication with our tenants, both at the corporate level as well as the local level, allows us to glean detailed information on their operating trends and stay ahead of any potential challenges while also positioning GIPR as a better partner. Our business strategy is twofold

Allison Davies: Thank you, David, for your kind remark. I'm happy to be a part of the GIPR team and excited to work closely with you and the talented and devoted team assembled. Last night, we issued a press release announcing our financial and operating results for the three and 12 months December 31, 2021. Net cash used in and provided by operations for the three months and fiscal year ended December 31, was $321,000 and $149,000, respectively. This was driven by our resilient real estate portfolio with high credit quality tenants. We believe our tenant base and the well-located real estate assets that comprise our portfolio kept GIPR relatively insulated from shifting economic headwinds and potential impacts from future pandemics. Nothing demonstrates this better than our portfolio's occupancy and rent collections remaining steady at a 100% throughout the COVID 19 crisis and resulting economic slowdown. GIPR ended 2021 with occupancy of a 100% in a weighted average lease term of 5.6 years. We have one lease expiring in ‘22 and none in ‘23. This represents 6% of our current annualized base rent and ending the year with a rent coverage ratio across our portfolio of 5.8x. In addition, our team is in ongoing lease renewal discussions with our tenant with the upcoming renewal. Net cash generated by financing activities for the 3 and 12 months ended December 31, was $1.7 million and $13.6 million, respectively. This compares favorably to the $496,000 and $256,000 of cash provided by and used in, in the same respective period of last year. During the year, we focused on enhancing our cost of capital. We may strive toward this goal with our successful underwritten public offering last September, which generated approximately $16.7 million in gross proceeds. In addition, we received $2.1 million in proceeds from the issuance of redeemable non-controlling interest, as well as $4.5 million in mortgage loan borrowing. We also utilized our commitment from American Momentum Bank to fund acquisition activity. Currently, we have $17.5 million remaining. These financing activities in concert cash flows generated by our real estate portfolio and the $900,000 gain from our Walgreens disposition allowed us to

David Sobelman: Before opening the call for your questions, I want to remind you that the name Generation Income Properties was derived from our ethos of generating income, not just for today, but for the generational long term. It is our philosophy that the multi-generational families benefit from making decisions affecting not only those who begin the legacies, but those that come after. It also has been our goal to be a part of that effort for all stakeholders of GIPR. And we thank you for the confidence you have placed in us for your generations. With that, operator, please open the call for questions.

Operator: Our first question today is coming from Michael Diana from Maxim Group. Your line is now live.

Michael Diana : Hey, thank you. Dave, you mentioned your pipeline for potential acquisitions is robust. Can you give us some feel for the state of the acquisition market right now in terms of availability what's going on with cap rates? Those sort of things.

David Sobelman: Good morning, Michael. It's good to hear from you. So multi-part question. What we are seeing is cap rates have compressed, about 100 basis points or so, and that is making it a challenging environment for most investors in today's market. However, like we noted, our cap rate for our new acquisitions, average cap rate for our new acquisitions, was 7.7%. So, well above what we would consider a market cap rate for credit quality assets in today's market. We feel like our pipeline is robust, like you mentioned, and supportive of our capital requirements.

Michael Diana : Is there any of your various property types or any of them more active than others in the market -- in the availability?

David Sobelman: Yeah, we are finding opportunities in the three asset classes in which we target, which are retail, industrial and office. So depending on the market, we focus on those to diversify our portfolio.

Operator: We’ve reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over to David for any further closing remarks.

David Sobelman: We realize this is a crucial time in our company's history and at the threshold of a greater profile. In short, our work is just beginning, and we are focused on creating generational wealth as our company name implies. Thank you for joining us. Have a great weekend. And we look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.

Operator: Thank you. That does conclude today's teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.