City Office REIT, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the CISI Office Reads Inc. Fourth Quarter 2022 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. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. If you require operator assistance, please press star, then zero. It is now my pleasure to introduce you to Tony Muresic, the company's Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer, and Corporate Secretary. Thank you, Mr. Muresic. You may now begin.

Good morning. Before we begin, I would like to direct you to our website at cioreap.com, where you can view our fourth quarter earnings press release and supplemental information package. The earnings release and supplemental package both include a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures that will be discussed today to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. Certain statements made today that discuss the company's beliefs or expectations or that are not based on historical fact may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. While the company believes that these expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, we can give no assurance that these expectations will be achieved. Please see the forward-looking statements disclaimer in our fourth quarter earnings press release and the company's filings with the SEC for factors that could cause material differences between forward-looking statements and actual results. The company takes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements that may be made in the course of this call. I will review our financial results after Jamie Farrar, our Chief Executive Officer, discusses some of the quarter's operational highlights I will now turn the call over to Jamie. Good morning and thanks for joining today. To start our call, I'll provide a brief summary of our 2022 key accomplishments and then focus on where the company is headed in 2023. In 2022, we achieved the highest annual core FFO per share in the company's history. The $1.57 per share that we recorded was a 15% increase over the prior year. The main driver of this increase was integrating and stabilizing the 975,000 square feet of acquisitions in Raleigh, Phoenix, and Dallas that we completed in December 2021. These three newly constructed, highly amenitized properties are performing very well are 90% occupied and have a weighted average lease term remaining of approximately 10 years. Also contributing to our strong core FFO per share performance in 2022 was the completion of our share repurchase program. We invested $50 million at an average price of $12.48 per share, which was accretive to both earnings per share and net asset value per share. Another highlight, 2022 was the closing of the sale of our Lake Vista Point property in Dallas, which generated a $22 million gain. On the operational side, we completed approximately 800,000 square feet of new and renewal leases throughout the year, with 108,000 square feet of that amount occurring in the fourth quarter. Our spec suite program also had a positive impact on leases. During 2022, we signed new leases for 93,000 square feet of spec suites. We also signed new leases for 82,000 square feet of space where we had completed vacancy conditioning. We started to benefit from the investment in this program, but the full extent will be realized over time as suites are leased and free rent burns off. And one last note on recent events before we move to our 2023 strategy. I'm pleased to report that we announced today some planned succession changes within our board. John Sweet, who's been an independent director since 2017, has become the chairman of the board. John's contributions to our company, extensive industry knowledge base, and his prior leadership of a public company board make him an excellent fit as our chairman. He assumed a position from John McLerman, who will continue as an independent director. John McClernand has been our outstanding chairman since our IPO in 2014. We're grateful to both of these terrific directors for their continued service to our company. Additionally, we announced that Michael Mazan has been appointed to the board. Mike's highly experienced with 30 years as a private equity investor, investment banker, and management consultant. Mike also brings an extensive finance and governance background, having previously served on 12 boards throughout his career. We look forward to Mike's involvement. And last, we announced Will Flatt has stepped down from the board after nearly 10 years of service, dating back to our IPO. Will contributed immensely to the company over that time period, and we'd like to express our deepest thanks for his positive and thoughtful impact on our company. Now, moving to 2023 and beyond, we continue to benefit from the tailwinds associated with our Sunbelt focused portfolio, where population, employment, and office occupancy trends are outperforming. Counterbalancing this are the challenges our industry has been facing, including rapidly rising interest rates, volatile conditions in the capital markets, and headwinds across the office industry. We've spent a considerable amount of time formulating an approach to best position ourselves for strong performance. Our plan continues to balance caution and strategic initiatives. To that end, I'll lay out our focus areas for 2023 and how we expect that these steps will position us. An important way for us to create long-term value is to grow quality, net operating income at the property level. We intend to achieve this primarily by completing select renovations, and building ready-to-leave spec suites, both of which we believe optimize their leasing potential and have long-term cash flow benefits. Specifically, we currently have 18,000 square feet of spec suites in our inventory and over 150,000 square feet of spec suites under construction or planned for 2023. We're also advancing significant renovations at our Santan and Pima Center properties in Phoenix, as we believe these investments will drive leasing. On a related note, our Pima Center buildings in Scottsdale are set to benefit from a new $80 million entertainment development called the Sydney, which is directly adjacent to our property. This development recently broke ground and is slated to provide a number of walkable restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues that will greatly enhance Pima Center's amenity offering. It's an ideal time for us to launch the Pima Center renovation and we've already experienced the pickup and leasing activity with approximately 17,000 square feet leased so far in 2023. Another important element of our strategic plan is selectively pruning our portfolio to optimize alignment with today's leasing trends and what we believe are the leasing trends of the future. We've identified approximately 900,000 square feet of our portfolio that we are targeting to divest over the next few years. This amount could fluctuate up or down depending on opportunities and market conditions. Our guidance reflects a portion of this occurring in 2023 with a range of dispositions assumed to be between $25 million and $75 million. These non-core dispositions, when they occur, will benefit our already strong liquidity and leverage profile. An enhanced balance sheet will position us to take advantage of future opportunities that drive shareholder value. So, in summary, we will continue to operate with caution while focusing on strategic positioning. This plan will help to maintain a fabulous core portfolio, lower overall leverage, and enhance our dry powder to take advantage of future opportunities. Given our outlook on our portfolio and strategy, we are not at all satisfied with our current stock price which we believe is a major discount to the inherent value of our company. As one data point, recall in December of 2021, we sold our life science portfolio in San Diego for $576 million, which generated a $429 million gain. We reinvested those proceeds into $614 million of best-in-class properties in the top sub-markets of Raleigh, Phoenix, and Dallas. The aggregate purchase price of these transactions equated to about $14 per share at the time and were closed without property-level debt. The magnitude of these acquisitions, as compared to the size of our company, significantly raised the quality of our portfolio as a whole while reducing risk. Despite challenging capital markets This profile of premium asset is exactly what investors continue to desire today. We don't believe that these considerations are reflected in our current stock price. As we look forward, we believe that we've carved out an attractive niche of premium Sunbelt properties and that the proactive steps outlined earlier will help unlock value and close the share price gap. I look forward to providing further updates on these initiatives and will hand the call over to Tony Moretto to discuss our financial results and our 2023 guidance. Thanks, Jamie. Our net operating income in the fourth quarter was $27.6 million, which is $500,000 lower than the amount we reported in the third quarter. This decrease is primarily a result of the departure of Toyota from our Santan property in Phoenix in the middle of the third quarter. While operating expenses have increased as a result of inflation, in various categories, the impact on net operating income has been muted as recoveries mostly offset this impact. We reported core FFO of $15.4 million, or $0.38 per share, which was $1.1 million lower than in the third quarter. The drivers of that decrease were primarily lower net operating income at our Santan property due to Toyota's vacate, along with higher interest rates on our floating rate credit facility. Our fourth quarter AFFO was 5 million or 12 cents per share. The largest single item to impact AFFO was 700,000 of tenant improvement expenses related to a 13,000 square foot new tenant at our Circle Point property in Denver whose lease commenced in January, 2023. As Jamie mentioned, we also continue to invest in building out ready to lease spec suites and implementing vacancy conditioning, which is a key part of our business plan. The total investment in spec suites and vacancy conditioning in the fourth quarter was $1.4 million, or $0.03 per share. During the quarter, we recorded a non-cash impairment of real estate charge of $13.4 million. This represents a write-down of the book values of two of our properties to their estimated fair market values. Those two properties were 190 Office Center in Dallas and Cascade Station in Portland. The combined 430,000 square feet of these two properties represents approximately half of the anticipated selective pruning of non-core assets that Jim described. We are considering all of our options at those two properties, both of which advantageously have property-level non-recourse debt. For 190 Office Center in particular, our best strategic option may be to transfer the property to the lender, given our view of the value of the asset relative to its loan balance. That would eliminate approximately $39 million of debt, and we anticipate would also have a positive impact on near-term core FFO, as interest costs for that property are expected to exceed the property's NOI. Moving on to some of our operational metrics. Our fourth quarter same store cash and OI change was in line with our expectations at negative 1.2%, or $200,000 lower as compared to the fourth quarter of 2021. Fourth quarter same store cash and OI was impacted by free rent periods associated with new leases at a number of our properties. Our total debt as of December 31st was $690 million. Our net debt including restricted cash to EBITDA, was 6.4 times. We had two small maturities in the fall of 2023, and both of these loans are secured by high-quality properties at relatively low leverage levels. We anticipate completing a refinancing later in the year. As far as our liquidity, as of December 31st, we had over $95 million of under-run availability on our credit facility. We also have cash and restricted cash of $44 million as of quarter end, along with highly financeable unencumbered properties as an additional source of liquidity. Subsequent to quarter end, we executed two debt-related transactions which enhance liquidity, reduce our exposure to interest rate fluctuations, and give us better visibility into our future earnings. First, we expanded our credit facility by $25 million by entering into a new three-year term loan. We entered into a swap that fixed the term loan interest rate at 5.9% and used the term loan proceeds to reduce the floating rate portion of our credit facility. Second, we fixed the majority of our floating rate credit facility at 5.6% by executing a $140 million interest rate swap. After the swap transactions, over 90% of our total debt is effectively fixed as of today. Moving to guidance. We have provided full year 2023 guidance in our press release. Our guidance is reflective of the 2023 strategic business plan that Jamie outlined. We are projecting core FFO of $1.38 to $1.43 per share. At the midpoint, that would represent a $0.16 per share decline as compared to our 2022 results. Approximately 13 cents of the projected 16 cent decrease is our expectation of higher interest expense year over year. The completion of our recent swap transactions will help mitigate the potential impacts from further movements in the federal funds rate. The balance of the decrease is primarily attributable to expected net dispositions during the year which will result in operating with lower leverage. We have assumed property dispositions between $25 and $75 million for the year with no acquisitions. We expect that our same-store cash NOI will grow between a positive 2 and 4 percent in 2023. The three acquisitions, which we close in December 2021, will be added to the pool beginning in 2023. Our occupancy guidance reflects relatively flat occupancy throughout the year. We also anticipate continuing to invest in vacancy conditioning and building out high-quality spec suites. We expect ASFO will be impacted by up to $10 million if we are successful in completing all that we have planned for 2023. We believe these investments will drive earnings growth primarily commencing in 2024 and beyond. We refer you to the material assumptions and considerations set forth in our earnings press release for further details. That concludes our prepared remarks, and we'll open up the line for questions. Operator?

Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, you can press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, you may press star 2. Please ensure you're unmuted locally when asking your question. Our first question for today comes from Robert Stevenson from Gen A. Rob, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Good morning, guys.