Community Healthcare Trust Incorporated

Welcome to Community Health Care 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.chst.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 5th, 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. Call 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 Health Care 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 8K 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 rightsizing our quarterly dividend from 48 cents to 33 cents 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 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 healthcare properties. Fully achieving these occupancy gains and rent growth represents up to $6 million in NOI upsides. 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 Ocean's 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 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 health care operator to acquire the operations of all six facilities under exclusivity. Since then, the buyers made significant progress. They are now finalizing legal and business due diligence and have moved into drafting definitive purchase agreements, which includes 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 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 six to seven cents of ASFO growth per year, assuming a nine to 10% yield. As our ASFO 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 ASFO 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 ASFO per share basis remains steady at 56 cents. 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 48 cents. 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 56 cents. As I mentioned earlier, both ASFO and ASFO 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.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then 2.

At this time we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Rob Stevenson of Huntington.

Go ahead please.

Good morning guys. What is the occupancy on the 70 million of assets that you're marketing? Trying to figure out here if you sell all those of occupancy goes down because those are highly occupied asset or goes up since some of those have the bigger chunks of vacancy.

Hey, 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 in 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 33 cent 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% ASFO 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?

You know, we've obviously, over the last year and a half, the good news is in this process, 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. And so that, I think, allows us some flexibility if for whatever reason this transaction doesn't go forward. and as you might expect, just given our relationships in the sector, we have other folks that have expressed interest and could be potential suitors. But we think just given the amount of time that the buyer has looked at the business, how it's performed during that time, we believe that that is going to be the right buyer for the business. And 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 that unfortunately each have their own rules and each have their own hurdles that you have to get through. So I think they've spent a lot of money. They've worked very hard, you know, in fact, engaged their operations team heavily and sort of the onboarding process. And so we feel confident that ultimately they're going to end up being the buyer. But the good news is that the business is performing so that if they aren't, We think that somebody else could come in and operate the business and be a potential alternative.

Okay. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the time.

Thank you, Rob.

The next question comes from Alexander Goldfarb of Piper Sandler. Go ahead, please.

Hey, morning down there. 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. You know, it's been a topic of conference calls over time. What finally made you guys decide now was the time to address it versus, you know, I guess maybe when you did the all stock comp, maybe, you know, assessing it then?

Hey, Alex, thanks for the question. You know, I'm reminded of a kind of a funny quote, which is the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. You know, we have we've done a lot of great work. The portfolio continues to perform for whatever reason. You know, the market is not cooperating as far as where our share price is. and as you might guess, we and the board have looked at the dividend. It's a topic, it's part of our regular discussion at every board meeting and we just decided that the only way for us to get comfortable and sort of 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. I think there was no event or there was nothing that was a catalyst. It was just, you know, the last two years of seeing the stock sort of 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 then second is, you know, obviously good to hear that you've taken a reassessment of the portfolio, you know, exit some assets, recycle into better, but So we don't get the impression that nothing was going on the past few years. It seems like right 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. But can you just give us some commentary over the past few years of what the leasing was like or stuff? Because what you've announced today sounds really good and sounds like a lot of activity that should put the company in better standing. But at the same time, Presumably you guys weren't just waiting around for assurance to resolve before doing this other step. So maybe just some perspective of what's been going on the past few years versus the announcement of today.

Yeah, no, I think that's an important point to bring up. So a couple of things that I'll mention. First of all, just from a leasing perspective, you know if you look at the expirations that we had built into the portfolio is going from 2024 to 2025 and from 2025 to 2026 those were two of the biggest you know expiration years within our portfolio and some of that just has to do with the age of the buildings we acquired you know early on that were these medical office properties you know just After four to six years of having those buildings, the tenants were turning over. So we had big years. I think it was more than 10% each and each of 2025 and 2026. And we knew that we had to perform better as a company. And so that's what prompted us to bring Mark Kearns on board. He has a significant amount of experience and expertise on the leasing side with companies that we admire. We were convinced that he could help us restart and re-engage from a leasing perspective. But we hired him roughly a little bit over a year ago and he needed some time to get in his seat, to hire his team and to get some momentum. We're seeing that momentum from a leasing perspective today. And so I think it's important that these building blocks we were putting in place over the last year or so with Mark and his team. And now, you know, the good news is if you look at our lease expirations into remaining 2026 and into 27, 28 and 29, you see a much lower amount of expiration. So we've got this sort of combination of the right team in place, you know, a lower than previous years turnover from an expiration standpoint, and we've got great leasing activity in our markets. And so that combination is really sort of the change and the catalyst for us to have confidence that that 92% occupancy is real and something that's very achievable in the pipeline.

Okay, and just the final question is, in the old days you guys used to do 120, 130 million a year and presumably the corporate overhead and the platform was built for sort of that Big aggressive pipeline that's slowed in the past since the pandemic. Do you feel that the overhead, the platform is appropriately sized? Do you think it's too big? Or in your view, you should be back to a growth perspective that makes where you sit corporately compatible with where the growth will be?

Yeah, I think we've got the right team in place. Will we have to add pieces here and there? Yes. But I think we've already done a lot of that. We've added a couple of team members over the last two years to our asset management group. We've added a couple of leasing members to our leasing team. So I think we've largely built it out. Of course, we're always going to evaluate talent. And if we think that there's an A-plus talent opportunity out there, we will look at it. To answer your question specifically around G&A, we think that we've got the platform in place to be able to handle that 120 to 150 in growth. Ultimately, that's our goal is 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 what allows us to make that larger acquisition cadence is some of the compounding in that capital we're retaining. And boy, it would be great if we had some currency in our share price to do some ATM as well. But we're going to take it one step at a time. We've got to earn our way into seeing that progress from a share perspective, and we think we'll get there.

Thank you.

Thanks, Alex.

The next question comes from Michael Lewis of Truist.

Go ahead, please.

Thanks. First, I wanted to follow up on one of the questions Alex asked about the occupancy. That 92% target, that's been kind of out there for a while. Feels like maybe you sort of formalized it in this presentation. But, you know, what gets you there and when, right? So, you know, you mentioned low expirations in 27, 28, 29. Do you get to 92%, you know, at the end of 27, at the end of 28? and then maybe try to go higher. Is there a timeframe around that target?

I think the timeframe, we feel like we can get to that 92% as early as at the end of 2027. Now, getting spaces leased and getting those spaces to actually generate revenue, there's always going to be a little bit of delay between those two things. I think we can get there. What I've said previously, and I still think it holds true today for our portfolio, I think our full occupancy is between 92 and 93%. So there's always going to be some level of occupancy in a portfolio that's heavily weighted toward our physician clinic, medical office type space. But I definitely think that there's an opportunity for us to get to that 92% plus or minus and stay there and even grow beyond that. And that's where we're very focused. I mean, just given the fact that we haven't had the currency to grow through acquisition as much as we've wanted, part of the reason we brought Mark in and we've augmented our teams both on asset management as well as on leasing is to really drive the performance in our core portfolio. And so I think, you know, Some of these big expiration years are behind us, but we still have work ahead of us to do this. And the good news from our perspective is we're seeing the leasing activity that can get us there.

Okay. And then it appears that redevelopment is the best deal, at least on average. You know, just wondering, you gave an example of one of these, you know, maybe talk about, you know, how much of this is available to you. and also the risk reward on these speculative suites.

So on redevelopment, they do have good returns. They have the added advantage of it's a building, of course, we already own. And so we know the building, we know the market. The trade-off, if there is a trade-off between the redevelopment projects is, of course, now we We try to build this into our yield on cost or returns. There's a period of time where we are investing in a property where we're not getting anything back, which is different than an acquisition. When we acquire something, that NOI starts day one or very soon after the acquisition. So that's why we typically look for higher returning projects. As far as... As far as trying to put a number on those, the project that I highlighted, one of the largest redevelopments we've done, we think it's going to be a great project. Was there for the ribbon cutting earlier this summer. It's a great project with two strong operators in the Lafayette market. But I think in general, those redevelopments size profile wise are going to be more like the other redevelopment projects we've done, anywhere from three to We're very focused on trying to find the right tenant and the right opportunity to utilize and to do these redevelopment projects. It's tough to tell you. My guess is historically of the last three years, we've had anywhere from 10 to $15 million worth of those projects going on over time. I think it's reasonable to see anywhere from 10 to $15 million worth of those types of projects going on over time. But it's tough to be precise with it because a lot of those tend to be opportunistic deals where we know a tenant they've asked us for, do we have any space or availability in a current market? And then we look at doing those projects. The speculative suites is also very much based on what markets are busy and what buildings do we feel like would be good projects. And so right now we've got three buildings that we're working on with these speculative suite projects. but again they're not huge they're anywhere from 25 to 5,000 square feet projects you know about the size for a regular way you know physician group practice and and we you know so far we've had one of these projects that we've done in the Kissimmee market and that's worked out very well for us and so again we're going to be selective we're we're not going to do you know 10 of these things but I think we're going to continue to do projects where we feel like we've got good opportunities where we're seeing a lot of traffic and we think speed to market is going to be critical to winning that business. So tough to quantify, but again, it's all of these pieces working together to sort of drive the overall performance of the portfolio.

Okay, great. And then my last question is on acquisitions, right? So you'll have disposition proceeds, the dividend savings will come in over time. You've got this pipeline of developments you're going to purchase upon completion. What do you think about what we might see in terms of, call them speculative acquisitions, right? You mentioned this pipeline of, you have the pipeline of inpatient rehab, but what kind of other stuff might you buy? And when do you think you might start pulling the trigger on some of those?

I think we could start seeing some of those additional acquisitions happen in the fourth quarter. It takes a while to identify and then close on those types of projects. But I think our thought process would be you could do anywhere from $5 to $15 million worth of those deals in the fourth quarter. And then similarly, in next year, you could do 20 to 30 million of those types of transactions. Again, we're going to be very selective and very picky on which projects we do. The good news is we're seeing a lot of opportunities out there and we think that the opportunities are going to be squarely in our fairway, those high single digit returns for quality properties. Again, 5 to 15 probably toward the end of this year, and then another 20 to 30 next year.

Okay, great. Thank you. Thanks, Michael.

Again, if you have a question, please press star, then 1. 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.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation.