管理層發言
Welcome to Community Healthcare Trust's 2026 Second Quarter Earnings Release Conference Call. On the call today, the company will discuss its 2026 second quarter financial results. It will also discuss progress made in various aspects of its business. Following the remarks, the phone lines will be opened for a question and answer session. The company's earnings release was distributed last evening and has also been posted on its website, www.chct.reit. The company wants to emphasize that some of the information that may be discussed on this call will be based on information as of today, August 5, 2026, and may contain forward-looking statements that involve risk and uncertainty. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in such statements. For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, you should review the company's disclosures regarding forward-looking statements in its earnings release as well as its risk factors and MD&A in its SEC filings. The company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements, whether as the result of new information, future developments or otherwise except as may be required by law. During this call, the company will discuss GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation between the two is available in its earnings release, which is posted on its website. All participants are advised that this conference call is being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the call will be made available on the company's investor relations website for approximately 30 days and is the property of the company. This call may not be recorded or otherwise reproduced or distributed without the company's prior written permission. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Dave Dupuy, CEO of Community Healthcare Trust.
Great. Thank you, Cindy, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Community Healthcare Trust's second quarter 2026 conference call. Joining me on the call today are Bill Monroe, our Chief Financial Officer; Leigh Ann Stach, our Chief Accounting Officer; and Mark Kearns, our SVP of Asset Management. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that our earnings release and supplemental data report were released last night and furnished on Form 8-K, along with our quarterly report on Form 10-Q. Additionally, we included in our Form 8-K a new strategic plan investor presentation, which is also available in the investor relations section of our website. We encourage you to reference this presentation along with today's remarks. The Board and senior leadership have spent considerable time developing CHCT's strategic plan for renewed growth, and I'm excited to share an overview with you today. First, we are right-sizing our quarterly dividend from $0.48 to $0.33 per share. This decision allows us to retain capital directly for accretive acquisitions and long-term portfolio growth. We expect this reduction to free up $25 million to $30 million in capital over the next two years. Combined with our capital recycling program, this incremental cash flow will accelerate our portfolio investments and fund our acquisition pipeline. Crucially, we expect these investments to be highly accretive to AFFO growth and shareholder value, all while maintaining our current target leverage levels. As part of this capital realignment, we are focusing on four core strategic priorities to drive growth and elevate the overall quality of our portfolio. Those are occupancy improvement, portfolio reinvestment, strategic capital recycling and accelerated acquisition growth. Our first priority is occupancy improvement. We see a clear, tangible path to reaching 92% occupancy over the next 18 months. Our 2026 leasing budget targets a 70-basis-point increase in occupancy to 90.5% by year-end. Year-to-date, we have already signed new leases totaling over 100,000 square feet, surpassing our total volume for all of 2025. Leasing activity remains strong across the majority of our footprint, and we expect these tailwinds to continue into 2027. This momentum is driven by the strategic market positioning of our assets, along with a broader supply shortage of quality health care properties. Fully achieving these occupancy gains and rent growth represents up to $6 million in NOI upside. Our second strategic priority is portfolio reinvestment. We are deploying targeted capital into redevelopment projects alongside high-quality tenants with long-term leases already in place. These projects offer compelling risk-adjusted returns with a 9% to 12% yield on cost. A prime example is our recently completed behavioral hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana, a joint venture between Ochsner Health and Oceans Behavioral Health with a lease commencement that occurred early in the third quarter. Additionally, we are selectively building out speculative suites in high-demand markets. Proactively preparing these spaces allows us to capture prospective healthcare tenants faster, accelerating both occupancy gains and NOI realization. Our third priority is strategic capital recycling. Since launching this initiative in 2025, CHCT has sold seven properties generating $38.5 million in net proceeds. We currently have more than $70 million of assets in the market. We expect these disposition proceeds to fund our high-yield acquisition pipeline while keeping leverage modest. We view this as truly strategic recycling, whereby we are exiting select assets to fund high conviction opportunities, like our attractive inpatient rehab facility pipeline, while simultaneously enhancing the credit quality and profile of our overall portfolio. Finally, our fourth priority is accelerating acquisition growth. In addition to improved occupancy and portfolio performance, acquisitions will be an important growth driver for CHCT. Over the last two years, acquisition volume moderated to $64.5 million and $72.1 million. By combining our capital recycling proceeds with the capital freed up from our dividend rightsizing, we have unlocked the liquidity necessary to step up our acquisition velocity. We expect to close on $85 million to $90 million in acquisitions in 2026, and we anticipate activity to increase in 2027, as this newly unlocked growth capital compounds. In short, we believe the strategic plan is clear and achievable, positioning us to improve our portfolio, increase our acquisition cadence and drive accretive AFFO growth. Next, I'd like to walk through a few key operational updates from the second quarter. During the second quarter, the Geriatric Behavioral Hospital operator, which leases six of our properties, paid approximately $370,000 in rent, representing a $70,000 increase over the first quarter. As previously noted, this tenant signed a letter of intent with an experienced behavioral healthcare operator to acquire the operations of all six facilities under exclusivity. Since then, the buyer has made significant progress. They are now finalizing legal and business due diligence and have moved into drafting definitive purchase agreements, which include new leases for CHCT's six properties. Given the steady momentum through the second quarter and into July, we anticipate a signed purchase agreement during the third quarter, targeting a transaction close by year-end. While the deal is progressing constructively, transactions of this nature remain subject to final documentation and closing conditions. We cannot guarantee a closed transaction, but we remain fully committed to keeping you updated as key milestones are reached. Also, in May, we sold one building in Batesville, Mississippi, and received net proceeds of approximately $460,000, resulting in a small gain on the property sale. We also have signed definitive purchase and sale agreements for four properties to be acquired after completion and occupancy for an aggregate expected investment of $99 million. The expected return on these investments should range from 9.1% to 9.75%. We expect to close on one of these properties in the third quarter and another in the fourth quarter of 2026 and the remaining two in the second half of 2027. That takes care of the items I wanted to cover, so I'll hand things off to Bill to provide additional details on our financial results for the quarter.
Thank you, Dave. Let me add more detail on our capital allocation policy first, given our new right-size dividend. As Dave mentioned, we expect to retain $25 million to $30 million of capital over the next two years, or to put it on an annual basis, up to $15 million of cash flow per year. On a leverage-neutral basis of approximately 40% debt to capitalization, this will allow us to acquire or reinvest up to an incremental $25 million per year, generating an incremental $0.06 to $0.07 of AFFO growth per year, assuming a 9% to 10% yield. As our AFFO grows from this retained cash flow, as well as the occupancy improvements Dave discussed, it also enables our dividend to grow with earnings going forward. Historically, we updated our dividend each quarter, but going forward, we expect to update our dividend on an annual basis while maintaining an AFFO payout ratio of approximately 60% to 65%. I also want to take a minute to point out the additional disclosures we have included within our filed second quarter 2026 supplemental information. Within our reconciliation tables on page 8, we now include our funds available for distribution, or FAD, calculation, which provides a breakout of capital expenditures across tenant improvements, leasing commissions and recurring capex. And within our portfolio overview tables on page 14, we now include a breakout of our properties by ownership type, fee simple and ground lease, a detailed review of our quarterly leasing activity across new leases, renewals, vacancies and acquisitions, dispositions, and a breakout of our lease types across net leases, modified gross leases and gross leases, as well as a calculation of our portfolio's annual escalators. These additional disclosures are a response to investor and analyst questions, and we are excited to provide more transparency on these items. And to help save time for Q&A, I'll very briefly review our second quarter financial performance, which on an AFFO per share basis remains steady at $0.56. Total revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was $31.2 million, with property operating expenses of $5.9 million, general and administrative expenses of $4.9 million and interest expense of $7.4 million. Moving to funds from operations, FFO in the second quarter of 2026 was $13.2 million, and on a diluted common share basis was $0.48. Adjusted funds from operations, or AFFO, which adjusts for straight-line rent and stock-based compensation, totaled $15.4 million in the second quarter of 2026, and on a diluted common share basis was $0.56. As I mentioned earlier, both AFFO and AFFO per share were the same as the first quarter of 2026, but I'm happy to review any of these financials in more detail. That concludes our prepared remarks. Cindy, we are now ready to begin the question and answer session.
分析師問答
Our first question comes from Rob Stevenson of Huntington.
What is the occupancy on the $70 million of assets that you're marketing? Trying to figure out here if you sell all those if occupancy goes down because those are highly occupied assets or goes up since some of those have the bigger chunks of vacancy.
Rob, thanks for the question. Appreciate you dialing in and glad to have you back. So, as far as the occupancy goes on the buildings, what I would tell you is most of those buildings are 100% occupied. We do have a handful of buildings we're looking to sell that should result in relatively modest proceeds that are empty buildings. So the buildings that we are selling are 100% occupied, with the exception of a small handful, less than five buildings that are in market that are empty.
Okay, that's helpful. And then, Bill, it sounded like in your commentary on the dividend that it's now an annual review going forward instead of the small quarterly increases. Is that the takeaway there?
That's right. It's something we and the Board will evaluate on an annual basis.
Okay. And then given your commentary about retaining the cash flow to drive AFFO growth, is there any reason why you guys would increase the dividend from the $0.33 level until you sort of get down towards minimum payout so that you could retain as much as possible for investment?
As I had mentioned in my comments, we're going to be targeting that 60% to 65% AFFO payout ratio, and so that's what we'll be looking at as we evaluate the dividend on an annual basis.
Okay. And then last one for me, Dave, at this point, how comfortable are you with waiting and seeing what happens here in the third quarter with the six behavioral health hospitals? Or are you still running a separate process in parallel just in case something falls through there?
We've obviously over the last year and a half been through this process. The good news is the company has performed well. It has recovered significantly. It's been able to pay additional rent. I would anticipate the rent amount in the third quarter to move up from where it is in the second quarter. That, I think, allows us some flexibility if for whatever reason this transaction doesn't go forward. And as you might expect, given our relationships in the sector, we have other parties that have expressed interest and could be potential suitors. But we think, given the amount of time that the buyer has looked at the business and how it's performed during that time, that this is going to be the right buyer for the business. The delays really don't have as much to do with the buyer as they do with some of the regulatory issues that the company has had to work through in these various states; unfortunately, each state has its own rules and its own hurdles that you have to get through. So I think they've spent a lot of money, they've worked very hard, and they've engaged their operations team heavily in the onboarding process. We feel confident that ultimately they'll end up being the buyer. But the good news is the business is performing so that if they aren't, we think that somebody else could come in, operate the business and be a potential alternative.
The next question comes from Alexander Goldfarb of Piper Sandler.
Dave, you guys addressed the all-stock comp back in early '24, but the dividend was one of those issues that's been out there for a while. It's been a topic of conference calls over time. What finally made you guys decide now was the time to address it versus, I guess maybe when you did the all-stock comp, maybe assessing it then?
Alex, thanks for the question. I'm reminded of a quote: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We have done a lot of great work. The portfolio continues to perform. For whatever reason, the market is not cooperating as far as where our share price is. We and the Board have looked at the dividend; it's a topic of regular discussion at every Board meeting. We decided that the only way for us to get comfortable driving performance in the business, which is ultimately what we're here to do, would be to take on some of that capital, redeploy it and start growing the business again. So there was no single triggering event. It was the last two years of seeing the stock stuck in this band and recognizing that the only way we were going to be able to pull it out is for us to do something different from a growth perspective.
Okay. And second, it's good to hear that you've taken a reassessment of the portfolio and are exiting some assets and recycling capital. So we don't get the impression that nothing was going on in the past few years. It seems like now you guys have taken control again. You're not waiting for Assurance. It almost sounded like you may exit that portfolio if it doesn't get resolved. Can you give some commentary over the past few years on what the leasing was like or what has been going on? Because what you've announced today sounds very active and should put the company in better standing, but presumably you weren't just waiting around for Assurance to resolve this. Maybe some perspective of what's been going on the past few years versus the announcement today.
That's an important point. From a leasing perspective, if you look at the expirations in our portfolio from 2024 to 2025 and from 2025 to 2026, those were two of the biggest expiration years within our portfolio. Some of that is a function of the age of the buildings we acquired early on that were medical office properties. After four to six years, tenants were turning over, so we had big expiration volumes, north of 10% in each of 2025 and 2026. We knew we had to perform better as a company, and that prompted us to bring Mark Kearns on board. He has significant experience and expertise on the leasing side with companies that we admire. We were convinced he could help us restart and re-engage from a leasing perspective. We hired him a little over a year ago; he needed time to get in his seat, hire his team and build momentum. We're seeing that leasing momentum today. It's important to note these building blocks were put in place over the last year. The good news is, if you look at lease expirations remaining in 2026 and into 2027, 2028 and 2029, you see a much lower amount of expiration. So we've got the right team in place, lower expiration risk, and strong leasing activity in our markets. That combination is the change and the catalyst for us to be confident that the 92% occupancy target is real and achievable.
Okay, and just the final question: in the past you guys used to do $120 million to $130 million a year in acquisitions, and presumably the corporate overhead and platform was built for that bigger pipeline, which slowed since the pandemic. Do you feel the overhead and platform are appropriately sized, too big, or in your view do you need to scale to return to the growth perspective that makes corporate costs compatible with that growth?
I think we've got the right team in place. Will we have to add pieces here and there? Yes, but we've already done much of that. We've added a couple team members over the last two years to our asset management group and a couple of leasing members to our leasing team. So I think we've largely built it out. Of course, we'll always evaluate talent, and if an A-plus opportunity arises, we will consider it. But specifically around G&A, we think we've got the platform in place to handle $120 million to $150 million of growth. Ultimately that's our goal: to get back there. We're not going to get all the way there in 2026, and probably not even in 2027, although we'll see. Part of enabling a larger acquisition cadence is the compounding of the capital we're retaining. It would be helpful to have some currency in our share price to execute an ATM as well. We're going to take it step by step, earn our way into share price progress, and we believe we will get there.
The next question comes from Michael Lewis of Truist.
First, I wanted to follow up on one of the questions Alex asked about occupancy. That 92% target has been discussed for a while. It feels like you formalized it in this presentation, but what gets you there and when? You mentioned low expirations in '27, '28, '29. Do you get to 92% at the end of '27, at the end of '28, and then maybe try to go higher? Is there a timeframe around that target?
We feel like we can get to 92% as early as the end of 2027. Getting spaces leased and getting those spaces to actually generate revenue entails some delay between the lease signing and revenue realization, but I think we can get there. I've said previously, and still believe, that our full occupancy for the portfolio is between 92% and 93%. There will always be some level of vacancy in a portfolio heavily weighted toward physician clinic medical office space. But I think there is an opportunity to get to 92% plus or minus and stay there and even grow beyond that. Given we haven't had the currency to grow through acquisition as much as we'd like, part of why we brought Mark in and augmented our teams is to drive performance in our core portfolio. Some of the large expiration years are behind us, and the leasing activity we're seeing can get us to that target.
Okay, and then it appears that redevelopment is the best yield, at least on average. Could you talk about how much of this is available to you and also the risk-reward on these speculative suites?
Redevelopment projects do offer good returns and have the advantage of being in buildings we already own, so we know the building and the market. The trade-off is that during the redevelopment period we're investing capital without immediate NOI, which differs from acquisitions where NOI typically starts day one or shortly thereafter. That's why we look for higher returns on redevelopment. The project I highlighted, one of the largest redevelopments we've done, should be a strong project; I attended the ribbon cutting earlier this summer. Historically, redevelopment projects tend to be in the $3 million to $5 million range, whether full-building renovation, redevelopment, or partial-building work. Over the last three years, we've had roughly $10 million to $15 million of these projects underway at any one time. I think it's reasonable to expect $10 million to $15 million of similar projects going forward, though it's hard to be precise because these opportunities tend to be opportunistic—based on tenant demand in specific markets. Regarding speculative suites, these are also market-dependent. Right now, we have three buildings with speculative suite projects, generally 2,500 to 5,000 square feet—suitable for typical physician group practices. We've had success with one of these projects in a regional market, and we'll remain selective. We're not going to deploy on a large number of speculative suites, but we will do projects where we see strong demand and believe speed to market is critical to winning business. All of these pieces together will help drive portfolio performance.
Okay, great. My last question is on acquisitions. You'll have disposition proceeds, the dividend savings will come in over time, and you have a pipeline of developments to purchase upon completion. What do you think we might see in terms of speculative acquisitions? You mentioned inpatient rehab pipeline, but what other types of assets might you buy, and when might you start pulling the trigger on some of those?
I think we could start seeing additional acquisitions happen in the fourth quarter. It takes time to identify and close these deals, but we could do anywhere from $5 million to $15 million of opportunistic transactions in the fourth quarter. In 2027, we could potentially do another $20 million to $30 million of such transactions. We'll be very selective and picky on which projects we pursue. The good news is we're seeing many opportunities in our fairway—quality properties with high single-digit returns. So $5 million to $15 million toward the end of this year and another $20 million to $30 million next year is a reasonable expectation.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Dave Dupuy for any closing remarks.
Great. Thank you all. We appreciate the interest in CHCT, and please, as always, feel free to call us if you have any questions.
Have a great day.