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Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust is a CA$7.8b mid-cap, real estate investment trust (REIT) based in Toronto, Canada. REIT shares give you ownership of the company than owns and manages various income-producing property, whether it be commercial, industrial or residential. The structure of CAR.UN is unique and it has to adhere to different requirements compared to other non-REIT stocks. I’ll take you through some of the key metrics you should use in order to properly assess CAR.UN.
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REIT investors should be familiar with the term Fund from Operations (FFO) – a REIT’s main source of cash flow from its day-to-day business activities. FFO is a higher quality measure of earnings because it takes out the impact of non-recurring sales and non-cash items such as depreciation. These items can distort the bottom line and not necessarily reflective of CAR.UN’s daily operations. For CAR.UN, its FFO of CA$431m makes up 98% of its gross profit, which means the majority of its earnings are high-quality and recurring.
CAR.UN's financial stability can be gauged by seeing how much its FFO generated each year can cover its total amount of debt. The higher the coverage, the less risky CAR.UN is, broadly speaking, to have debt on its books. The metric I'll be using, FFO-to-debt, also estimates the time it will take for the company to repay its debt with its FFO. With a ratio of 10%, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor would consider this as aggressive risk. This would take CAR.UN 9.96 years to pay off using just operating income, which is a long time, and risk increases with time. But realistically, companies have many levers to pull in order to pay back their debt, beyond operating income alone.
Next, interest coverage ratio shows how many times CAR.UN’s earnings can cover its annual interest payments. Usually the ratio is calculated using EBIT, but for REITs, it’s better to use FFO divided by net interest. This is similar to the above concept, but looks at the nearer-term obligations. With an interest coverage ratio of 3.56x, it’s safe to say CAR.UN is generating an appropriate amount of cash from its borrowings.
In terms of valuing CAR.UN, FFO can also be used as a form of relative valuation. Instead of the P/E ratio, P/FFO is used instead, which is very common for REIT stocks. In CAR.UN’s case its P/FFO is 18.12x, compared to the long-term industry average of 16.5x, meaning that it is slightly overvalued.