Operator
Operator
Greetings and welcome to Ramco-Gershenson Properties Trust First Quarter 2012 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ms. Dawn Hendershot, Director of Investor Relations for Ramco-Gershenson. Thank you. Ms. Hendershot, you may begin. Dawn Hendershot – Director, Investor Relations: Good morning and thank you for joining us for Ramco-Gershenson's first quarter conference call. Joining me today are Dennis Gershenson, President and Chief Executive Officer and Gregory Andrews, Chief Financial Officer. At this time, management would like me to inform you that certain statements made during this conference call, which are not historical, may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Additionally, statements made during the call are made as of the date of this call. Listeners to any replay should understand that the passage of time by itself will diminish the quality of the statements made. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ from expectations are detailed in the quarterly press release. I would now like to turn the call over to Dennis for his opening remarks. Dennis Gershenson – President and Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, Dawn. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It's with real pleasure that I report our company's first quarter solid achievements in growing income, improving shopping center fundamentals, and advancing our capital recycling program while simultaneously promoting a sound capital structure. These results provide concrete evidence of significant advances in the repositioning of our portfolio and the achievement of a much stronger balance sheet. Our efforts to chart a course that supports growth in long-term shareholder value were evident in our fourth quarter 2011 numbers and are even more impactful in the statistics we are reporting today. As it relates to our shopping center performance, we believe that the momentum we have created over the last 12 months, which was reflected in this quarter's same center net operating income growth of 3.3% and a core asset occupancy consistently above 93%. We'll continue to build throughout 2012 and beyond. Supporting this conclusion in the first quarter, we achieved meaningful positive leasing spreads across the board. We also continue to improve our shop leased occupancy, a critical factor in driving income growth by 50 basis points. One reason for our success in achieving smaller tenant occupancy gains is the number of multi-store agreements we are signing in the soft goods category of 3,000 to 5,000 square feet with national retailers including Carters, Rue 21, Dots and (indiscernible) as these users position themselves among our new anchor tenancies. In addition, tenant retention at growing rental rates remained strong at over 85%. Subsequent to quarter end, we have signed a new anchor lease with Ross Dress for Less to replace a large portion of the Sweetbay grocery, which closed in the first quarter at our Village Lake Center in Florida. Supporting our goal of generating consistent, sustainable income growth, management has the responsibility to assess, anticipate, and respond to an ever changing retail environment. Thus, we have been actively engaged in a conscious effort to reduce our exposure to certain retail categories and to proactively work with those retailers, we anticipate closing stores who are downsizing their footprint. By way of example, over the last 18 months, we have worked with our three office supply retailers to replace their tenancy, where sales fell short of their expectations and where we could constructively achieve a reduction and our exposure to that sector. Since initiating this program, we have decreased the number of office supply stores in our portfolio from 30 to 24. We have also been in active negotiations with certain mid-box tenants who were (designers) of downsizing. These store size reductions have created the opportunity to lease space to a growing list of national in between size retail users occupying 8,000 to 11,000 square feet including ULTA, Five Below, and Shoe Carnival. Historically, community shopping centers consisted of large format anchors and small ancillary retailers. Thus, the downsizing of the mid-boxes has created the opportunity to accommodate these exciting retail concepts. An additional benefit designing these in between retailers like ULTA is that their tenant fee generates interest from other complementary operations. Also in the category of large format retailers who are working to redefine their identity. Best Buy has recently announced a series of store closings and they have revised their prototypical footprint, which is now smaller than many of their existing stores. We applied Best Buys in the portfolio. None of our stores are on the closing list and the majority of our locations call within the range of their new prototype. That said we are positioning ourselves to mitigate the risk to our portfolio if there was a change in Best Buy's current strategy. Each of the five shopping centers, where Best Buy is located is part of a major metro market. Each is an infill location and each is the object of additional national mid-box tenant interest if space should become available. As part of our initiative to upgrade the quality of our shopping center portfolio in addition to our aggressive leasing program to fill existing anchor vacancies and replace underperforming mid-box retailers, last year, we commenced a capital recycling program. At that time, I communicated our intention to sell the number of non-core shopping centers to diversify our markets and the dispose of non-productive excess land. As of the end of 2011, we had sold four retail properties. In the first quarter of this year, we closed on the sale of a shopping center in Troy, Michigan and a freestanding limited term net lease Office Max in Toledo, Ohio. We also sold an undeveloped parcel of land in Alpharetta, Georgia. In progress of our goal to dispose of non-core assets, we are in contract to sell two additional shopping centers, which we expect to close in the second quarter. Counterbalancing our asset dispositions, I mentioned in our last conference call, a pending acquisition. As of this date, we have concluded our due diligence process and we planned to purchase this national credit multi-anchored shopping center in the second quarter. It will be our third St. Louis acquisition and it is located on one of the most dominant retail arteries in the St. Louis market. As with our other two St. Louis acquisitions, this latest purchase needs all of our acquisition criteria including a demographic profile with superior average household income, multiple national anchors with a reasonable amount of ancillary retail space, and the opportunity to add additional value. Please note that with the completion of the first quarter non-core sales and our expectation that we will sell at least two additional non-core properties in the second quarter, we are reaffirming our guidance for 2012. In conclusion, our solid performance in the first quarter relative to our financial and operating results are the product that they focused business strategy to build a stronger high quality shopping center portfolio and balance sheet. A constantly improving asset base will produce consistent sustainable earnings growth and a strong capital structure will generate the liquidity necessary to see the opportunities to grow our platform. We believe that executing on this focused strategy would translate into ever increasing growth in shareholder value. I would now like to turn this call over to Greg Andrews for his comments. Gregory Andrews – Chief Financial Officer: Thank you, Dennis. Let me start with a few remarks about our business overall. Then I'll cover the balance sheet, discuss our income for the quarter, and conclude with our outlook. Over the last three years, the shopping center business has been challenging. At Ramco-Gershenson, we have responded to the challenges with top notch day-to-day execution on all fronts notably leasing, property management, and collection. These efforts have been paying off in terms of fewer anchor vacancies, improving shop leasing, solid expense control, and more timely collection. We have also responded by rethinking, where we are steering our ship. We have made several important decisions all centered on creating a company built on quality. Allow me to sight three areas on which we are intently focused. First, we are improving the quality of our assets. Three of our top 10 assets by base rent are members that we acquired over the last two years. Over the same period, we have sold, transferred, or held-for-sale 8 non-core shopping centers as no longer than our criteria. As a result, our typical shopping center today is a stronger, larger, multi-anchored property located in the core major metro market. It is over 93% leased and generates nearly $2 million in annualized based rent. Its tenants generate excellent sales at low occupancy costs. For example, grocers in our center generate sales averaging $480 per square foot and have rents that average just 1.75% for sales. Second, we are improving the quality of our tenants. Over the last two years, we have increased our exposure to credit tenants such as the TJX Companies, Bed, Bath & Beyond, and Ross Stores. We have also increased our exposure to high-quality grocers such as Whole Foods and Fresh Market. Correspondingly, as Dennis mentioned, we have decreased our exposure for less productive discounters, office supply retailers, and non-dominant grocery stores. Third, we are improving the quality of our income. Our FFO today is more durable and sustainable as a result of our improved asset quality, lower leverage, and lesser reliance on one-time income items. Now, turning to our financials. During the quarter, we continued to focus on maintaining a strong and flexible capital structure. We ended the quarter with debt to trailing 12-month EBITDA of 6.9 times and improvements of 7.0 times at year end. Based upon the last four quarters, our interest coverage ratio was 2.6 times and our fixed charge coverage ratio was 1.8 times. As a result of paying down $12 million in debt, we ended the quarter with cash and availability under our line of credit of approximately $160 million. We start to maintain a manageable debt maturity profile. The weighted average term of our consolidated debt is 5.9 years. Only $15 million of debt matures over the rest of 2012. We are practical. We are proactively taking to address debt that comes due in 2013. We are also focused on lengthening our debt maturities wherever possible. I will report our progress on these fronts later this year. Finally, our unencumbered pool continues to grow. Subsequent to quarter end, we paid off $19 million in mortgage and we intend to pay out another $11 million mortgage in the second quarter. We were adding the two centers that secured these mortgages to our unencumbered pool, which will raise the pool value to in excess of $600 million or roughly half the value of our operating assets. This provides us with great flexibility to continue borrowing on an unsecured basis and make progress towards an investment grade profile. Now, let's turn to the income statement. FFO for the quarter was $0.26 per share, a 4% increase over the $0.25 per share quarter the year ago. As usual, we are finally down the income statement to explain notable items. Cash NOI of roughly $21 million was approximately $1.2 million or $0.03 per share prior than in the comparable quarter driven by strong same center NOI growth of 3.3% and by the contribution from our net investments in 2011. Our provision for credit loss was $441,000 or roughly on par with the $422,000 reported a year ago. As expected, our lease termination fees were down from the comparable quarter. They included a payment from office FIFO for a space that we expect to back bill as an identified credit tenant. We anticipate only modest lease termination fees during the balance of the year. Our joint ventures are also performing well with same-center NOI increasing 5.3%. However, our equity and earnings of joint ventures was $466,000 or $0.01 per share lower than last year. Last year, we booked a one-time pickup of approximately $300,000 when we wrote up our negative equity in West Acres, a single asset joint venture to zero. This year, we booked a net loss of approximately $140,000 at that same joint venture as a result of one-time costs involved in completing our deed-in-lieu transfer to the lender, because we have now veiled up this joint venture. Our equity and earnings of joint ventures won't be affected by this loss in future quarters. Our G&A expense of $4.9 million was on track with the expectation and lower than the $5.1 million recorded in the comparable period. Due to the timing of expenses, we believe our first quarter reflects a slightly higher run rate than we expect for the remaining quarters of 2012. Finally, during the quarter, we booked a non-cash impairment charge at Kentwood, an operating shopping center. Our proportionate share of this charge is $2 million, because one tenant, which is a private investor that is subleasing space to retail tenants stop making payments during the quarter. We determine that the non-recourse loan balance most likely exceeds the value of the current value of the center that we previously had. We are engaged in discussions with the lender on this asset. Now, let me turn to our outlook. I am glad to say that our fine team of leasing agents and property managers has done a good job of delivering on their budgets so far this year. In addition, I am pleased that our finance and accounting teams are providing ever better in play into where we are headed. Barring any macroeconomic surprises, we still expect 2012 results to be within our previous guidance range of $0.94 to $1.02 per share. We will, of course, provide a further update on next quarter's call. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.