Chatham Lodging Trust

Ladies and Chairman, good morning and welcome to the Chatham Logging Trust's second quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please signal the operator by pressing star and zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Chris Daly, President of DG Public Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Chatham Logging Trust's second quarter 2025 Results Conference call. Please note that many of our comments today are considered forward-looking statements as defined by federal securities laws. These statements are subjects to risks and uncertainties, both known and unknown, as most recent Form 10-K and other SEC filings. All information in this call is as of August 6, 2025, unless otherwise noted, and the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to conform the statement to actual results or changes in the company's expectations. You can find copies of our SEC filings and earnings release, which contain reconciliations to non-GAAP financial measures referenced on this call, on our website at chathamloggingtrust.com. Now to provide you with some insight into Chatham's 2025 second quarter results, allow me to introduce Jeff Fisher, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Dennis Craven, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Jeremy Wegener, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Let me turn the session over to Jeff Fisher. Jeff?

Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone. I certainly appreciate everybody being on our call today. Before I comment on our second quarter, I want to update some of our key corporate initiatives. We completed the sale of all five hotels we listed in the fourth quarter and are very happy with the results. We sold five hotels, as a reminder, with an average age of 25 years at an approximate 6% capitalization rate on 2024 NOI levels for proceeds of $83 million. Each of these five hotels were among the six lowest rent-par hotels in our portfolio at cap rates lower than our cost of debt and our value enhancing. We currently have two additional hotels listed for sale, and of course, it's too early in the process to comment on the specifics of each transaction, but these would be further opportunistic sales. We intend to use the proceeds from the five asset sales, as well as those currently listed if we sell them, to fund our Home 2 Portland development, acquire hotels, and repurchase of our stock, and we look forward to being opportunistic on all those accounts to continue to add shareholder value where we can. Our Board of Trustees approved a $25 million share buyback plan in May, and during the quarter we repurchased approximately 20,000 shares at a weighted average price of $7.02. Since we intend to be a bit more active in the third quarter given current share price levels. And our balance sheet continues to get stronger as we've reduced our leverage to now only 21% and are projected to create almost $20 million of free cash flow in 2025 after dividends. We positioned ourselves to add value in multiple ways. During the third quarter, we intend to launch an upsize and recast syndication of our credit facility and term loan, further enhancing our financial condition and lowering overall borrowing costs. We're hopeful that process is complete by the time we speak again in November. Operationally, we're pretty pleased with the results of our second quarter, delivering We rev par and FFO per share at the top of our guidance range. Second quarter occupancy of 82% matched last year's second quarter occupancy in a supposed pandemic high. Additionally, we hit an all time high in ADR and rev par in May. We grew our operating margins this year, and yes, we did benefit from non-recurring refunds, But even excluding those one time impacts, margins would have declined less than 1%. Not bad considering the rev par results for the quarter. I believe our island operating team will do even better in the third and fourth quarters in that regard. After a challenging start to the quarter when April rep, our was down 4%. We grew rep par in May and June to essentially finish with flat rep par for the quarter. Our core business segment business traveler remains healthy and growing as we are seeing our highest occupancies during the week. When comparing us to our pairs, I want to reiterate that we've beaten industry rep par growth for now 14 consecutive quarters or three and a half years. Our largest market, Silicon Valley, continues its recovery to pre-pandemic levels and it was good to see our occupancy at all four hotels reach 80% in the quarter, which is an important hurdle. The amount of investments being committed by tech companies combined with the applied materials expansion and the Nvidia Innovation Center will certainly help facilitate additional demand growth in the valley. And those demand generators are around the corner from our two large hotels in Sunnyvale. Another good sign of the underlying momentum in Silicon Valley is that multifamily rental growth rates are accelerating. For example, in their recent quarterly report, Essex Property Trust pointed out that their highest growth rates are in the Northern California regions. Our press release included details on our largest market performance and Dennis will expand further on those, but I want to highlight some interesting tidbits from other markets. Our Sunbelt markets are performing well with our two Charleston hotels showing strong growth and encouragingly, our two Florida hotels experiencing rep par growth in the quarter after being down last year and in the first quarter this year. Texas, as a reminder, three of our five hotels are being adversely impacted due to the closure of their cities' respective convention centers for expansion and that being specifically downtown, Dallas, and Austin. Rep par in the entire Austin market is down 6% year to date and down 14% in the quarter, with the only good news being the domain market is less bad than that at down 5% in the quarter and 11% year to date. In Seattle, the entire market, including Bellevue, is soft and feeling the effects of reduced Canadian travel with rep par down 2% year to date and 4% in the second quarter. The automobile border crossings in the region were down 47% in the second quarter. And lastly, driven by some great events, our second quarter in Pittsburgh was huge with growth of 23% and its second quarter rep par of $161 was its highest second quarter in history. Second quarter events, special events included its first motocross championship in April, three concerts and the Monster Jam in May and then the US Open in June. Next year during the second quarter, we have the NFL draft right outside our front door, which should be great for the hotel. As we look forward ahead to the balance of the year, we are essentially leaving our guidance unchanged. Growing business travel demand across a good portion of our portfolio is encouraging, yet not saving that is weakness in the convention demand in Austin, Dallas and San Diego, which had an all-time best year in 2024. Leisure demand has held up well for us, yet the decline in travel from Canada and Europe is certainly impacting the industry overall. For us, government travel rebounded post-liberation day after our three DC hotels saw rep par decline 9% in April. Rep par was up approximately 2% for the balance of that quarter. As an industry, I believe we are poised for some better performance in the coming years. Supply demand, that is the key here and of course we all know that new supply should continue to be muted for some time as we look forward. It is expensive to build and it is my belief that development only makes sense in some very special markets in the U.S. Looking past 2025, current GDP growth rates are encouraging and the outlook is even more so given the massive investments being made by companies across the U.S., including the substantial commitments made to the technology advancements and all things AI. Adding to this is all the announced foreign investment coming in the U.S. in the coming years. Historically speaking, we all know there is a strong correlation between GDP growth and rep par growth. Operationally, as a reminder, we have great internal growth potential with the continued recovery of the Silicon Valley hotels. There is quite a bit happening in the market, not only with the largest companies in the world that are based there and the future continues to look bright. Silicon Valley once again took over the number one ranking for startups and is the global epicenter of innovation with abundant capital and continuously creating groundbreaking technologies. In conclusion, I am excited about our prospects going forward. We have executed on most all strategic fronts and sit in a great position to grow and add value with a very strong balance sheet. With that, I would like to turn it over to Dennis.

Thanks Jeff. Good morning everyone. Some additional rep par color. Rep par growth at our four Silicon Valley hotels, like Jeff said, was up 3% and we were able to grow Hotel Epida an additional 3% to almost $5 million. Our Silicon Valley hotels were really no different than our portfolio in that April was quite soft due to the consecutive Easter and Passover holidays along with the initial reactions from liberation day. Within the quarter rep par to four Silicon Valley hotels was down 2% in April, then up 3% in May and a strong 6% in June. At our home to in Phoenix as a reminder, it opened in early 2024. We acquired the hotel in late May of 2024 and rep par was up over 60% in the quarter. As we enter the fall, we are encouraged with our sales efforts there, especially related to the convention center and other group related business that often has to be targeted at at least a year in advance. LA rep par was up 1% in the quarter as demand related to the California wildfires pretty much left the market and especially our Woodland Hills Hotel where we had a significant amount of business there in the quarter. Within our LA market, our three hotels, our residence in Anaheim was up 6% and our Marina Del Rey Hilton Garden Inn was up 3% with our home to Woodland Hills down 5%. Our six predominantly leisure hotels account for about 20% of our EBITDA and they had a great quarter with rep par surging 4% when you exclude our Portsmouth Hilton Garden Inn that was under renovation into the quarter. Our top five rep par hotels in the quarter were our residence in Washington DC with rep par of $239 followed by our Gaslamp residence in and both of those rep par were the highest second quarter rep par in each of their respective histories. Rounding out our top five were our Hilton Garden Inn Marina Del Rey, our residence in White Plains, New York and our Hampton, Portland, all three with rep par over $200 in the quarter. On the operations front, for the third consecutive quarter, we drove our gross operating profit of ,000,000. Our average profit margin is higher, 30 basis points above last year's levels. Although we benefited from about a $800,000 workers compensation related refund, it was really attributed to very good claims experiences and kudos to our operating team for minimizing those costs. As we all know, labor and benefits are by far our largest expense and on a per occupied basis, these costs were down 7%, but when you take out the impact of that refund, labor and benefits were still down year over year on a per occupied room basis. We continue to allocate meaningful energy closely monitoring our productivity at that level. Most other operating line items were relatively stable year over year, though guest acquisition related commission costs were up approximately 15% is increased, our exposure has increased due to different channels of booking business in the quarter. That increase impacted margins by approximately 30 basis points in the quarter. We had 17 hotels produce over ,000,000 of GOP in the quarter and for the 14th consecutive quarter our gas lamp residence in led the way with GOP of almost ,000,000. Our two Sunnyvale residence in's made the top five for the first time since the heavy and not to be outdone, our embassy suite Springfield, Virginia delivered GOP of ,000,000 in the quarter and coming in fourth despite a tough market was our Bellevue residence in with GOP of $1.6 million. On the capex front we spent approximately ,000,000 in the quarter and importantly so far in 2025 we've added eight rooms to our existing portfolio, converting meeting and other spaces into more profitable guest rooms. Those rooms include five rooms at the Hilton garden in Portsmouth, two rooms at the residence in White Plains and a suite at the Hampton and Exeter. Within these locations at any reasonable valuation we've added probably $3 to $4 million in value to our portfolio at a fraction of the cost. Our last two renovations of 2025 are to commence later this year in the fourth quarter with those being at the residence in Austin and the residence in Mountain View, California. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeremy.

Thanks Dennis. Good morning everyone. Our Q2 2025 hotel EBITDA was $30.9 million, adjusted EBITDA was $28.5 million and adjusted FFO was $0.36 per share. Our GOP margin for the quarter of .3% was up 30 basis points from Q2 2024 despite the flattish REVPAR environment due to continued strong expense control, moderating inflationary cost pressures and the benefit of approximately $1.3 million of workers' compensation, insurance and tax refunds. In Q2 we continued our asset recycling by completing the sale of the Courtyard Houston for $23.5 million, which represents an LTM cap rate of 5.8%, including $3.6 million of required capital expenditures. Our successful asset recycling over the past few years has reduced the age and improved the quality of our hotel portfolio and significantly reduced our leverage. The reduction in leverage along with the successful refinancing of our material debt maturities over the last couple of years has significantly enhanced our financial flexibility. This added flexibility gave us the confidence to announce our first ever share repurchase program in Q2, which we started utilizing in June. With leverage of 3.5 times net debt to EBITDA as of June 30th, we have significant capacity to pursue attractive investment opportunities, whether in the form of acquisitions or share repurchases. Turning to our Q3 and full year 2025 guidance, we expect REVPAR of minus .5% to plus 0.5%, adjusted EBITDA of $24.7 million to $26.8 million, and adjusted FFO of $0.29 to $0.33 per share in Q3, and REVPAR growth of flat to plus 1%, adjusted EBITDA of $89 million to $93 million, and adjusted FFO per share of $0.95 to $1.3 per share for the full year. This guidance assumes no further asset sales, capital markets activity changes, and floating interest rates. This concludes my portion of the call. Operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star and 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star and 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question comes from the line of Godav Mehta from Alliance Global Partners. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. I wanted to go back to your comments around asset recycling. I think in the prepared remarks you mentioned that you're looking to sell two more assets in addition to five that have been sold. For the two additional hotels that you're looking to sell, are they going to be similar lower capex, lower RevPAR sort of hotels?

Hey, Gaurav, this is Dennis. I think in one of the two instances, yes, it's kind of one of the older lower RevPAR assets. Another one is really just an opportunistic transaction we're looking at that I think would minimize some capital requirements here in the next few years. But we're certainly just in the early phases of that process and hope to have some of them to talk about a little bit more on our next earnings call.

Okay. Then maybe in terms of deploying the capital, I think you mentioned development in Portland and then acquisitions. Can you maybe remind us the timeline for development in the Portland and then what kind of opportunities are you seeing in the acquisition market?

Yeah, I'll start on the development side, just on the timing, then I'll let Jeff chime in on acquisitions. But generally speaking, it's going to be around the 21 to 24 month construction timeline. We still have some work to do there with respect to just understanding soils and all that kind of good stuff. So ideally, we'd like to get started on that sometime within the next six months or so. But again, probably as we kind of get to the next call, we'll have a little more information on kickoff and all that kind of stuff.

And relative to acquisitions, I think it continues to be the same story for most of us. We're always looking, we're always underwriting, we're always talking to owners that we've dealt with before and or the brokerage community. I still think there's a pretty wide, kind of bid ask scenario going on. But I think over time, that gap should lessen. In the meantime, we've got our stock buyback program. And we certainly, as we indicated earlier, probably going to ramp that up just a little bit more given the stock price today.

OK, thank you. That's all I had.

Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and Chairman, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and 1. Once again, a reminder, ladies and Chairman, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and 1. As there are no further questions, I would now hand the conference over to Jeff Fisher for his closing comments. Jeff?

Thank you very much. Well, it was a short call there. Maybe there's a little vacation time involved, but nonetheless, we will continue on our course and look forward to talking to you for the next call.

Thanks. Thank you. Ladies and Chairman, the Conference of Chatham Lodging Trust has now concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.