Unlock stock picks and a broker-level newsfeed that powers Wall Street.

Q1 2025 Agree Realty Corp Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Reuben Treatman; Senior Director, Corporate Finance; Agree Realty Corp

Joey Agree; President, Chief Executive Officer, Director; Agree Realty Corp

Peter Coughenour; Chief Financial Officer, Secretary; Agree Realty Corp

Ki Bin Kim; Analyst; Truist Securities

Smedes Rose; Analyst; Citi

RJ Milligan; Analyst; Raymond James

Michael Goldsmith; Analyst; UBS

Linda Tsai; Analyst; Jefferies

John Kilichowski; Analyst; Wells Fargo Securities, LLC

Ronald Kamdem; Analyst; Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

Spenser Glimcher; Analyst; Green Street

Jana Galan; Analyst; BofA Securities, Inc.

James Kammert; Analyst; Evercore ISI Institutional Equities

Upal Rana; Analyst; KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc.

Richard Hightower; Analyst; Barclays

Presentation

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Agree Realty first-quarter 2025 conference call. (Operator Instructions) Note this event is being recorded.
I will now turn the conference over to Reuben Treatman, Senior Director of Corporate Finance. Please go ahead, Reuben.

Reuben Treatman

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Agree Realty's first-quarter 2025 earnings call. Before turning the call over to Joey and Peter to discuss our results for the quarter, let me first run through the cautionary language. Please note that during this call we'll make certain statements that may be considered forward-looking under federal securities law, including statements related to our updated 2025 guidance.
Our actual results may differ significantly from the matters discussed in any forward-looking statements for a number of reasons. Please see yesterday's earnings release and our SEC filings, including our latest Annual Report on Form 10-Q for a discussion of various risks and uncertainties underlying our forward-looking statements.
In addition, we discussed non-GAAP financial measures including core funds from operations or core FFO, adjusted funds from operations or AFFO, and net debt to recurring EBITDA. Reconciliations of our historical non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release website and SEC filings. I'll now turn the call over to Joey.

Joey Agree

Thanks Reuben, and thank you all for joining us this morning. We're extremely pleased with our performance in the first-quarter of 2025 as we invested over $375 million across our three external growth platforms while further strengthening our best-in-class portfolio.
This represents the largest quarter of investment volume since the third-quarter of 2023 and is characteristic of the accelerating activity that we're seeing across our three platforms. While the macroeconomic environment remains volatile and unpredictable, our company remains a bastion of stability and poised for growth.
Our liquidity, bolstered by our outstanding forward equity and swaps combined with our preeminent cost of capital, position Agree Realty to again take advantage of market dislocations and disruptions. Here to date we have added over a dozen team members, initiated several systems improvements, and sequenced multiple process improvements to accelerate our investment activities.
This growing investment activity is supported by a fortress balance sheet with $1.9 billion of liquidity and over $1.2 billion of hedge capital.
During the quarter we raised another $181 million of forward equity of via ATM program, effectively replenishing amounts settled in the first quarter and maintaining an ample runway to execute our growth strategy.
With no material debt maturities until 2028 and pro forma net debt to recurring EBITDA of just 3.4 times the quarter end, our fortified balance sheet provides significant flexibility and protection against capital markets volatility.
Our balance sheet is paired with what we view to be the country's leading retail portfolio. We launched the acquisition platform in 2010 with a focus on recession resistant retailers that have adapted to a comprehensive omnichannel strategy. Although we have yet to experience a traditional recession since its inception, our portfolio has proven to be pandemic proof, and we remain confident it will be tariff resistant.
We have and will remain focused on the country's biggest and best retailers that sell necessity goods and services. Many of these retailers benefit from the trade down effect during tougher economic times, and they have the scale and balance sheet strength to mitigate higher input costs and withstand margin pressure.
While tariff headlines continue to evolve and dominate the news flow, ultimately, we believe the bid will continue to get bigger in this environment, further validating our investment philosophy over the past 15 years. Given our robust investment pipeline across our three external growth platforms, we've increased our investment guidance range from $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion to $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion for the year.
At the midpoint, this represents a 47% increase over last year's investment volume. As I mentioned, all three of our investment platforms continue to find compelling opportunities that hurdle both our qualitative and quantitative analysis. While increasing our investment guidance for the year, we were discipline and thoughtful in our approach to asset underwriting and portfolio construction during these volatile times.
In addition, we are raising the low end of our full year AFFO per share guidance by $0.01 to a new range of $4.27 to $4.30 representing over 3.5% growth at the midpoint and demonstrating the durability of our cash flows. As a reminder, this number includes realized potential treasury method dilution due to our significant forward equity position.
Peter will provide additional details on our guidance range and the input shortly. Raising our investment in earnings guidance amid the current macroeconomic uncertainty demonstrates that our company is built for all markets. We thrive in periods of uncertainty where we can leverage our speed, relationships, exceptional team, balance sheet flexibility and superior cost of capital.
We launched the acquisition platform on the heels of the GFC in 2010, doubled the size of the company during the depths of the pandemic and are always positioned to take on the next challenging economic period.
Turning to our external growth activity. We had an active start to the year, leveraging our unique market positioning and deep relationships with retail partners to uncover opportunities across all three platforms. During the first quarter, we invested over $375 million and 69 properties across all three platforms. This includes $359 million of acquisitions across 46 assets.
Acquisitions during the quarter included a lender-owned Home Depot in California, a sale leaseback with the leading national grocer and Albertsons back to Ace Grocery Store in Bronxville, New York, an off-market portfolio from a relationship seller, a CarMax ground lease in Colorado as well as approximately 40 one-off transactions.
Our acquisition activity remains focused on industry-leading necessity-based retailers. The properties acquired in the first quarter leased to operators and sectors, including grocery, off-price, auto parts, convenience stores and tire and auto service. The acquired properties had a weighted average cap rate of 7.3% and a weighted average lease over 13.4 years.
There will be 69% of base rents was derived from investment-grade retailers and we continue to add to our ground lease portfolio during the quarter. We continue to see increased activities across our development and DFP platforms as well. During the first quarter, we commenced four new development or developer funding projects with total anticipated costs of approximately $24 million.
Construction continued on 14 projects during the quarter with aggregate anticipated cost of approximately $80 million.
We also completed six projects during the quarter, representing a total investment of approximately $27 million. These projects are with several leading retail partners, including TJX Companies, Burlington, 7-Eleven, Boot Barn, Starbucks, Gerber Collision and Sunbelt Rentals. Our development in DFP pipeline continue to grow with several upcoming starts we announced in the near future.
Our asset management team continues to proactively address upcoming lease maturities. We executed new leases, extensions or options on over 584,000 square feet of gross level area during the first quarter. This included a Walmart supercenter in Rancho Cordova, and Home Depot in Farmington, New Mexico and 16 geographically diverse AutoZone leases comprised of 100,000 square feet.
We remain well positioned for the remainder of the year with only 30 leases or 90 basis points of annualized base rents maturing. Quarter-over-quarter, our pharmacy and dollar store 20 and 30 basis points, respectively. We have been clear that our exposure to both of these categories peaked within our portfolio before their challenges have become newsworthy.
As of quarter end, our best-in-class portfolio comprised 2,422 properties spanning all 50 states. The portfolio includes 231 ground leases comprising nearly 11% of annualized base rents. Our investment-grade exposure stood at 68.3% and occupancy remained solid at 99.2%.
This number represents a temporary dip as we continue to resolve the former remaining big lots in our portfolio. Our second former big lot in Cedar Park, Texas was successfully released to Aldi at a net effective rental lift of nearly 50% during the quarter, while an additional store was acquired during the bankruptcy process for a variety of wholesalers.
Rent has already commenced on both of these locations. We anticipate further announcements on next call about the remaining big lots in our portfolio.
With that said, I'll hand the call over to Peter to discuss our financial results for the quarter.