Q4 2024 Whitestone REIT Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

David Mordy; Director of Investor Relations; Whitestone REIT

David Holeman; Chief Executive Officer, Trustee; Whitestone REIT

Christine Mastandrea; Chief Operating Officer; Whitestone REIT

Scott Hogan; Chief Financial Officer; Whitestone REIT

Mitchell Germain; Analyst; Citizens Capital Markets

Anthony Hau; Analyst; Truist Securities

Gaurav Mehta; Analyst; Alliance Global Partners

Craig Kucera; Analyst; Lucid Capital Markets

John Massocca; Analyst; B. Riley FBR Inc.

Presentation

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the Whitestone REIT fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
It is now my pleasure to introduce David Mordy, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you, sir. You may proceed.

David Mordy

Good morning and thank you for joining Whitestone REIT'S fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me on today's call are Dave Holeman, Chief Executive Officer; Christine Mastandrea, Chief Operating Officer; and Scott Hogan, Chief Financial Officer.
Please note that some statements made during this call are not historical and may be deemed forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those forward-looking statements due to a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors. Please refer to the company's earnings news release and filings with the SEC, including Whitestone's most recent Form 10-Q and 10-K for a detailed discussion of these factors.
Acknowledging the fact that the call may be webcast for a period of time, it is also important to note that this call includes time-sensitive information that may be accurate only as of today's date, March 4, 2025. The company undertakes no obligation to update this information.
Whitestone's fourth-quarter earnings news release and supplemental operating and financial data package have been filed with the SEC and are available on our website in the Investor Relations section. We published fourth quarter 2024 slides on our website yesterday afternoon, which highlight topics to be discussed today.
I will now turn the call over to Dave Holeman, our Chief Executive Officer.

David Holeman

Thank you, David. Good morning and thank you for joining Whitestone's fourth quarter, 2024 earnings conference call.
Yesterday we released results wrapping up a very strong year in terms of earnings growth, and we're going to spend a lot of time this morning helping investors understand what enabled us to achieve those results and more importantly, what the blocks of our future growth are that provide us confidence in terms of our trajectory.
Let's start with who we are. We lead the peer group in concentration of high value, high return shop space, 77% of our ABR. That fact is a critical element in our overall strategy, allowing us to capitalize on change and deliver consistent earnings growth for investors.
I'll start off with what we've delivered over the past three years, then cover what we plan to deliver in the years ahead and the how in terms of our delivering industry-leading earnings growth.
Over the past three years, we have delivered compound annual growth for core FFO per share of 5.5%. In any environment, we believe this is a strong achievement. However, the particulars we overcame are important. Over the past three years, interest rates as represented by the 30-day SOFR curve, increased 380 basis points, causing a double-digit drag on earnings. In addition, we improved our average, represented by a 9.2 times debt to EBITDAre in Q4 '21 to 6.6 times for Q4 2024.
So we simultaneously grew earnings while reducing leverage. The earnings growth also does not fully reveal the degree to which we've strengthened our portfolio for both organically and inorganically. The company's quality of revenue initiative is largely driving the organic growth, and one evidence metric is our bad debt as a percent of revenue improving from 1.2% in 2019 to 0.8% in 2024.
The key component of our inorganic growth has been our recycling program and our TAP score increasing 4 points over the last year and a half is a great measure to focus on there. Today we are encouraging investors to focus not so much on turnaround elements which we've talked about on our past calls, but rather on the strategic drivers that fueled our success and that set us up for continued outperformance. Over the next five years, we believe we can deliver consistent organic core FFO growth of 4% to 6%, driven by 3% to 5% same store net operating income growth.
Beyond organic growth, we are targeting adding 100 basis points of core FFO growth uplift from acquisitions. Tangential to the delivering the earnings growth benefit for investors are the benefits of scaling the model, lowering our fixed cost percentage and broadening our investor base.
However, I face this in terms of per share earnings growth. We have grown over the last three years in a disciplined fashion, and we will continue to grow in a disciplined fashion, delivering per share earnings growth.
Our same store NOI growth has three basic components. One, contractual escalators; two, the spreads we achieve on new and renewal leases; and three, the returns on redevelopment capital that we spend.
While the majority of the recent contracts for shop space have annual escalators in the 3% to 4% range, older and larger contracts bring our blended rate to 2.3%. This is broken down to just under 3% for our shop spaces and just under 2% for our greater than 10,000 square foot spaces.
So this is the base for our same store NOI growth. Adding on to this, we looked at our new and renewal leases in terms of what we have achieved over the last three years. If we conservatively take 50% to 100% of what we've achieved in terms of cash leasing spreads over the last three years and multiply that times what we've got coming up over the next five years, we'll add 0.8% to 1.8% to same store NOI growth per year.
This is on top of the 2.3% contractual escalators. And looking at the fundamentals in our markets, we believe this is a very solid assumption. We have chosen to be 100% in business-friendly states that are benefiting tremendously from population growth and new business starts and job growth as manufacturing is reshoring.
This is combined with the fact that there is a growing supply demand imbalance as new neighborhood retail centers have generally not been built in over a decade, and high construction costs are indicating this trend will continue.
Phoenix is leading on this front. Contracts coming up haven't even caught up with market increases that have occurred over the last three years, but this phenomenon is true in all of our markets.
The third block of same store NOI growth is redevelopment. We anticipate we'll be able to add up to 100 basis points with a slightly higher redevelopment spend. We have already begun the increased capital spend on redevelopment, which will lift same stored net operating income growth into the upper portion of the range starting in 2026. I'll have Christine dive into redevelopment more heavily in terms of our plans there.
Shifting from organic growth to inorganic growth, we continue to see plenty of opportunities in terms of accretive acquisitions of centers. Our seven acquisitions since 2022, Lake Woodlands, Arcadia, Garden Oaks, Scottsdale Commons, two non-owned multi-tenant pads at Dana Park, and a non-owned pad site at our Anderson Arbor property have all been accretive and continued to provide upside in terms of leasing rates and redevelopment and development potential.
We can be very selective in terms of our acquisitions. We've done approximately $125 million in acquisitions over the last 26 months. Going forward, we will continue to use a disciplined mix of cash flow from operations, property dispositions, debt, and equity in terms of sources.
Since 2021, our average same store growth of 5.3% has been boosted by approximately 1% from occupancy gains, so our 3% to 5% long-term projection is perfectly in line with what we've demonstrated we can achieve. Our organic growth is the engine behind the 11% earnings growth we delivered in 2024. Now, about $0.03 of the growth in '24 was higher than average termination fees from our quality of revenue focus, and our 2025 guidance incorporates replacing those tenants with stronger tenants producing higher NOI.
I'll have Scott talk about the guidance walk in greater detail.
All in all, I would recommend looking at our combined 2024 and 2025 performance in assessing our longer-term sustainable core FFO target of 5% to 7% growth. As you may have seen in our recent December press release, we raised the dividend by over 9%, bringing the dividend CAGR since 2021 to 6.5% growth per year while maintaining an approximately 50% core FFO payout ratio.
The core long-term value proposition for those evaluating Whitestone stock is the current approximately 4% dividend plus 5% to 7% targeted core FFO growth which we intend to translate into dividend growth as well. This team is focused on delivering that value proposition for investors, and we believe we have the right model and the right strategy to do it.
Christine?