Four Corners Property Trust, Inc.

Hello and welcome everyone to the FCPT first quarter 2025 financial results conference call. My name is Becky and I'll be your operator today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. I will now hand over to your host, Patrick Wernig, Chief Financial Officer, to begin. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Becky. During the course of this call, we will make forward-looking statements, which are based on our beliefs and assumptions. Actual results will be affected by known and unknown factors that are beyond our control or ability to predict. Our assumptions are not a guarantee of future performance, and some will prove to be incorrect. For a more detailed description of some potential risks, please refer to our SEC filings, which can be found at fcpt.com. All the information presented on this call is current as of today, May 1, 2025. In addition, reconciliation to non-GAAP financial measures presented on this call, such as FFO and APFO, can be found in the company's supplemental report. With that, I will turn the call over to Bill.

Good morning. Following our typical cadence, after my introductory remarks, Josh will comment further on the investment market and Patrick will discuss our financial results and capital position. The start of 2025 continued the momentum we had in the second half of 2024. We took advantage of our sustained strong cost of capital and added to the pipeline, finding deals that both met our quality standards and with pricing that made sense. This led to a Q1 being the highest acquisition volume for a first quarter in the company's history, which similarly followed our highest Q4 volume. So far this year, we've closed $70 million of acquisitions at a blended 6.7% cap rate. Looking back to when we fully turned the acquisition machine back on in late August, we have closed 269 million of acquisitions over the past eight months. While we do not give acquisition guidance, we are continuing to add toward the pipeline and are seeing opportunities that are consistent with our quality thresholds and within our pricing standards. We note that we have not seen much change in cap rates for recently priced deals. We've continued to build significant liquidity while de-levering to preserve optionality on funding new opportunities as they arise. This includes leaning in on the equity sales via our ATM program, which we have used to raise $475 million in equity since July of last year. Including our unsettled equity forwards, we now have our lowest leverage levels in the last seven years. Simply put, we are well positioned for uncertainty. Shifting to our in-place portfolio, we continue to perform well with high rent collections and occupancy. Our rent coverage in the first quarter was 4.9 times for the majority of our portfolio that reports this figure. This remains amongst the strongest coverage within our industry. FCPP's largest tenants are nationally branded restaurant operators, namely Olive Garden, Longhorn, and Chili's. They are leaders for their sectors and generally outperform the industry peers as well as fine dining or local mom and pop brands. Most recently Brinker reported chili same store sales grew 31.6% for the quarter ended March 25. Similarly Olive Garden and Longhorn reported same sales growth of just shy of 1% and 2.6% year over year for the three months ended February 2025 respectively. While these brands remain core to our portfolio and strategy, as we approach 10 years as a public company, we would also highlight our diversification progress over that period. We've grown from 418 properties at inception to 1,236 leases today. Darden has dropped from 100% of our rent roll to now 47% combined across all of their brands. This improvement is despite acquiring 47 Darden properties post-spend. Our top five brands make up 55% of our annual base revenue. On sector diversification, 67% of our annual base rent comes from casual dining and 11% from quick service. Outside of restaurants, automotive service is our largest sector at 11% of ABR, followed by medical retail at 9% of ABR. As for portfolio management, we are not yet experiencing any material tenancy issues in the portfolio and no current indicators that inflation or tariff issues will impact our rent payments. Further, while the current tariff environment remains uncertain, we expect restaurants to be one of the least tariff-affected sectors. Similarly, our other service-based tenants should fare better than average retail operators given their low exposure to imported goods as part of their operations. While we would expect in a recession that we would see some pullback in our tenant performance, we believe that we are well positioned with cushion on our rent coverage to weather any potential issues. Turning to the materials we published last night, we would like to highlight a few new slides in our investor presentation that point to what we believe is FCPT being a comport in the storm. Our portfolio was built brick by brick to be resilient, and we've paired that with a prudent capital management. We have significant liquidity, no near-term debt maturities, granular low-basis properties, high-rent collections, and low overhead. FCPT's portfolio is made up of well-capitalized, sophisticated operators who we believe will be able to navigate and gain share in this challenging macro environment. We pride ourselves on transparency and best-in-class disclosure. So in addition to our press release regime on new acquisitions, this quarter we decided to further break out our portfolio to the top 34 five brands, which make up more than 80% of our ABR. Our goal is for our investors to understand our tenant exposures and have confidence that we'll stay disciplined on meeting quality expectations for the properties we buy. To that end, you will see in our filings we have zero or near zero exposure to the problem net lease sector, such as theaters, pharmacy, high-rent car washes, and big box retail.

Over to you, Josh. Thank you, Bill.

During the fourth quarter, we acquired 23 properties for $57 million at a blended 6.7% cap rate with a weighted average lease term of 17 years. We did not sell any properties in the quarter. While Q1 is typically our slowest quarter, we continue to deliver on the strong investment momentum we achieved in the second half of 2024. As a result, we believe that we stand very well positioned at the end of the first four months in 2025 having both come off a record Q1 to start the year right after record Q4 last year as we continue to build out the pipeline. We are achieving this without compromising on the quality of our asset selection or the credit standards to meet yield or volume targets. Our disclosure regime is particularly helpful in times like these where investors can read through our frequent press releases to see how our acquisitions and the brands we work with are highly consistent with past years. team is being patient and organized tracking our opportunity sets for both on and off market investments and including robust analytics to help us identify the best opportunities in other words we are not chasing deals but rather selecting the best ones that fit our portfolio even if that means leaning in slightly on cap rate to capture these higher quality deals all while still protecting accretion reflecting back on q1 83% of our investment volume was via sale-ease spec, as operators continue to seek stable financing solutions in this current market. As such, our weighted average lease term this year was much higher at 17 years. In particular, we had three sale-ease specs of note with QSR operators, one with Burger King Corporate, another with a large multi-unit Burger King franchisee, and lastly, with a Whataburger franchisee. The two Burger King deals were both part of M&A transactions, while the Whataburger deal was for their newly built stores. It's worth noting that similar QSR properties typically command very aggressive cap rates in the upper 5 to low 6% cap rate range when sold piecemeal. Individual investors favor these small price points per property and the fungibility of their real estate. However, our team was able to achieve accretive pricing here by offering a portfolio solution and efficient execution for our operating partners. All three transactions were negotiated off-market and a product of years of relationship cultivation from our investment team. Looking forward, we will continue to target similar opportunities, nationally recognized brands operated by best-in-class operators with appropriate basis. While this quarter ended up having more quick service restaurants, some automotive, and no medical retail investments, we remind everyone that our team does not specifically allocate target buckets or quotas across our investment sectors. Rather, we make investments when opportunities meet our underwriting criteria. That being said, we still expect these sectors to be roughly even split between these three target categories of ours over the long term. Looking forward, FCPT's opportunity set continues to grow despite a volatile macro environment. We have a steady pipeline built out for Q2 and aim to continue to execute on our strategy with discipline. Patrick, back over to you. Thanks, Josh.

I'll start by talking about capital sourcing and the state of our balance sheet. At SDPT, we are highly focused on official capital raising. We raised over $169 million in 2025 to date on top of the 318 million equity in 2024. Today, we have $254 million of unsettled equity forwards. The ability to raise forward ATM quickly and at scale has allowed us to match sources and uses more effectively. Furthermore, the high SOFA rate has allowed for minimum drag of our forward balance given we received interest income on the balance at over 4%. With respect to overall leverage, our net debt adjusted EBITDA REIT and Q1 continued to move lower to 4.4 times inclusive of outstanding net equity forwards as of March 31st. This leverage is at a seven-year low and provides capacity for us to continue to execute our business plan even if the current volatility persists or we are unable to raise additional capital for the rest of the year. We've also layered in additional hedges to our floating rate exposure, raising us to over 95% fixed through Q3 2027. Our revolver is fully available at $350 million, and we have, with extension options, essentially no debt maturities for nearly two years. Additionally, our fixed charge coverage ratio is a healthy 4.4 times. Altogether, this puts us in a great liquidity position. We have approximately $617 million available for funding acquisitions between cash, unsettled forward equity, and undrawn revolver capacity. Assuming no further equity issuance, we have an approximate $565 million of available capital before reaching six times net leverage. Now turning to some of our financial highlights for Q1. We reported Q1 AFFO of 44 cents per share, which is up 2.3% from Q1 last year. Q1 cash rental income was $63.2 million, representing growth of 9.1% for the quarter compared to last year. On a run rate basis, Current annual cash-based rent for leases in place as of quarter end is $243.9 million, and our weighted average five-year annual cash rent escalator remains 1.4%. Cash G&A expense, excluding stock-based compensation, was $4.9 million, representing 7.7% of cash rental income for the quarter, compared to 7.9% for the quarter last year. This progress illustrates our continued efforts at efficient growth and the benefits of improving scale. We're still expecting cash G&A will be in the range of $18 to $18.5 million for 2025. As a reminder, we take a conservative approach and do not capitalize any of the compensation costs related to our investment team. As for managing our lease maturity profile, our team has made significant progress on 2025 maturities with 88% of those tenants already extending their leases or indicating an intent to do so. As of quarter end, expirations represent just 0.5% of ABR in 2026, 2.3%. Our portfolio occupancy today is 99.4%, and we collected 99.5% of base rent for the first quarter. There were no material changes to our collectability or credit reserves, nor any balance sheet impairments. With that, we'll turn it back over to Becky for questions.

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad now. If for any reason you wish to remove your question, please press star followed by 2. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from John Kilochowski from Wells Fargo. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Morning or afternoon. Thank you. Maybe just on a little bit of slight yield compression in the quarter, is that due to the fact that there's maybe more competition in your sector for these assets given the insulation from tariffs?

Hard to say. I would say the vast majority is related to the high percentage of QSR restaurant acquisitions in the quarter.

Okay. And then maybe just on the pipeline more generally, you know, you have a big fourth quarter followed up with a very strong first quarter. What's your governor on growth? And maybe just some color around what your pipeline looks like. I'm curious, Patrick, you talked about smart capital raising. I'm curious if that's it or if it's just the amount of deals or if it's the size of your team. I'm curious what keeps you from maybe taking up a step further from here.

Sure. And, John, maybe just to more completely answer your first question, I think if we were targeting sectors that were very exposed to tariffs – we would have a much higher cap rate, obviously. But as the great research you've published recently, we have very low tariff exposure in our portfolio. As far as governors to growth, that's a much longer answer, but I think the kind of acquisitions that we're working on is what largely determines how much we buy in a quarter. whether it's sale-leasebacks, which were prominent in this quarter and in Q4, are much more efficient. Individual one-off deals, it becomes challenging to have that many balls in the air on $2 million acquisitions, $3 million acquisitions to put up larger volumes. But we really don't look at it that way. We're trying to score assets. and buy assets that have sufficient quality and then making sure that we raise the money the right way. And I think we feel particularly proud over the last couple of years that when the environment was sufficient for acquisitions but our cost of capital wasn't there, we responsibly paused. But then when there was alignment where there was acquisitions to do and our cost of capital was there, We acted with emphasis.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Goldsmith from UBS. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hi. This is Katherine Graves from Michael. Thank you for taking my question. Just looking at the volume that you achieved in 1Q, so last year the acquisition sort of ramped up through the year. Can you provide any color on what you're expecting as far as the cadence for this year, especially starting at such a higher base?

Yeah. Q4 has historically been a very strong quarter for us, and I'm not sure why, Catherine, to be honest with you. There's a dynamic where people want to get things done in a fiscal year, perhaps. But we have a very good pipeline right now. Deals typically have 60 to 90 day sort of life cycles. 60 would be a minimum. So we really don't have a lot of visibility on the second half of the year. And certainly, with all the macro uncertainty, it's very hard to tell. But we are staffed and capitalized and very focused and organized. in executing the rest of the year. But we don't give guidance because really we want to make sure that we have the best sort of decision making hygiene and making the acquisitions.

Fair enough. Thank you. And then my second question. You acquired several Burger Kings in this past quarter and I'm sure you saw there was recently a large franchisee who filed for bankruptcy. Is your sense that this was sort of a franchisee-specific issue, or has anything changed as far as how you monitor the health of your Burger King tenants?

Very much a specific issue to that franchisee.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Anthony Pallone from J.P. Morgan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you. I know this may not be completely apples to apples because I understand the skew towards QSRs with your cap rates, but we do see some of the other net lease names doing deals in the sevens and so I was wondering if you can maybe give us some sense as to maybe how you see the difference between going from like say high sixes into the low mid sevens and what the give and take might be there.

You know, we certainly see things that are for sale that are, you know, let's not draw too fine a point on it, call it seven and a half caps in north, and they typically have, they're either in subsectors that we don't like, like pharmacy or experiential, or that we haven't historically been involved with, or the credit isn't very good, or the rents are really high. And so all those factors show up in our scorecard to scores that are insufficient for us to proceed. Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't one transaction where you feel like you're getting a great price or another transaction where you still see real strategic reasons to lean in by 20 basis points or something like that. But on average, what we have seen is that cap rates that are higher enough from what we're posting to matter involve, you know, measurably more risk. And I would say that one of the things that's, I think, very helpful about our reporting regime is you know what we're buying for that cap rate. And what we see some of our peers do is pursue what I would call barbell strategies where they disclose tenants that shareholders are happy that they're buying but disclose a cap rate that involves a bunch of tenants that they don't talk about and so I think our straightforward very transparent strategy should give you comfort that what we're buying is thoughtfully selected and not to hit some you know metric for a quarterly disclosure okay thanks and then just on on the pipeline

Are there any larger type transactions that you see in the mix, or is it pretty much all the one-by-ones?

It's a mix. We're always working on larger transactions. We have a handful in the hopper. I would reflect that we haven't really seen a dynamic where there's portfolio discounts. In fact, in some cases, we found that the larger transactions have more competition. And I think we saw that clearly in a large transaction that one of our peers did last winter. So it's a mixed, Anthony, but I also wouldn't say that large transactions come at bargain prices by any means.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from . Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. Can you talk about how you underwrite the smaller franchisees? I think you mentioned you do get a corporate guarantee, but how small are some of these franchisees?

Yeah, so our small franchisees, I think, would be considered very large for our peers. We don't have a ton of franchisee exposure, and the franchisee exposure we have tends to be with franchise times, you know, 100, type size franchisees. So we get financials, we do a typical credit underwriting, but franchisee credit is not a big part of our business. And I would say the dynamic where some of our peers will sort of put people into business by buying real estate for them or developing real estate for them. And by definition, that's a very, very small sort of individual size business entity is not something we do okay and then you have been building up the team developing a lot of new relationships over the last few years just curious how much the new deal flow is from these new relationships um you know it's there's some of that but a lot of it is frankly deals that we've been tracking for years and you know now have a advantage cost of capital and sellers are more willing to meet us on price because of the overall macro uncertainty. So I don't think it's, you know, the algorithm isn't something like new acquisition person at six months has four relationships and at 12 months has eight and therefore you can count on deal flow from that. You know, we have been doing more outreach recently and as you mentioned, we've, you know, expanded our acquisition team. We have the largest acquisition team class coming in this summer of three folks out of undergrad and two interns, and we're really excited to get them up to speed. I think they'll make a real impact.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Kyle Kataryncik from JANI. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning guys. Where is the range of EBITDA coverage ratios for recent acquisitions and is there any difference between restaurant and non-restaurant segments there?

Yeah, we don't disclose on a quarterly basis coverage ratios. Obviously, we have to sign confidentiality agreements to get financials and so I don't think we're going to be in a position to disclose those on a quarterly basis. I would say on a I think the credit metrics are fairly similar across the different industries although I would say within medical it's a little bit harder to define for wall because you might have a patient who's visiting our retail outpatient center for example but also as part of their care going to the hospital system that it's associated with so so saying that that for wall is X is is a little bit more ambiguous. But the credit is very similar on a corporate leverage basis, you know, being in the mid-single digits and four-wall coverage being, you know, typically three-plus times.

Okay.

And then at one point, would you guys consider a lease too conservative where there's potential opportunity cost in the form of lost rents? And then on the flip side, what point would you feel uncomfortable underwriting a new lease in terms of coverage? trying to get a range of and how you guys think about that thanks yeah so if i understand your question is could we take more risk and still be in a safe position yeah that's the gist yeah exactly and then like yeah then like upper limit two conservatives of the coverage ratio like at what point is that is that fixed six and a half times sure so um

Well I guess I'd make two reflections to back test are we being too conservative we do go back and look at things that we looked at and didn't do and it's very clear to us that the outcomes of the things that we passed on are far less favorable than what we've done okay and that's both in taking a buildings that to the naked eye, you know, it's a brand, it's a business that we bought, it's a brand that we've bought, but what you can't see is the lease is too short or the rents are too high or the tenant has bad financials that very frequently things that we've looked at and passed on have turned out to be, you know, unfortunate outcomes. So that's one. Two, I would observe that rents on net lease are relatively random. And so you may have a Burger King that has $70,000 worth of rent and one that has $107,000 worth of rent and one that has $170,000 worth of rent and they look exactly the same other than their rent number. And so the coverage would obviously be way different on the $70,000 worth of rent than the $170,000. And so I think a big part of our job is searching for properties that have great performance but reasonable rents. And so I don't think that there's an upper limit of what we would consider. Now obviously when that lease matures, which is usually very far into the future given extension options, we have some rent upside and we have experienced some positive outcomes there. The last thing I'd point out may be a different answer to your question. Having gone through the financial crisis earlier in my career, the dot-com bust very early in my career, COVID, more recently, there is a dynamic where when there's substantial uncertainty and you have the ability to be on offense, there's enormous advantage to that. And so we go into this current environment with the lowest leverage we've had in a long time. We have more liquidity from undrawn forwards than we've had in a long time. And we have a portfolio that's in fantastic shape. So if the issue is we might be a little bit too conservative historically. I'll take that in order to be in a position to be aggressive if opportunities knock.

Thank you. I appreciate the context.

Thank you. As a reminder, if you ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from RJ Milligan from Roman James. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hey, good afternoon, guys. Billy talked about running leverage at the lowest level it's been in quite some time, if not ever. I'm just curious, given the fact that your cost of capital is attractive here, how do you think about potentially further de-levering or loading up the balance sheet for opportunities that might arise later?

Yeah, so it's a great question. And I think the interesting dynamic is, as Pat mentioned, when SOFR is 4% and so that you pay your dividend in essence on the forward and you receive SOFR and there's some fees involved, but that's the basic building blocks. The cost of having this liquidity is very low. When rates were zero and you're paying a 5% dividend, well shucks, it gets expensive if you have too much of a forward and you're not using it in a timely manner. So we felt that the opportunity cost of having substantial liquidity was very minimal and we were opportunistic because of the fee structure of the ATM and just so everyone's clear, ATM has been the technology we've used to raise equity almost exclusively for something like the last seven or eight years. It has a very advantaged fee and discount structure. And so when that capital was available, because the opportunity cost of holding that forward position was minimal, we took advantage of it. And I think that puts us in a really good position. When I say it's volatile out there, it's not sort of my opinion. You can look at the VIX, and it's a quite volatile environment. But we love being very... liquid when there's stress in the streets.

Okay.

And so, Bill, you had given some same-store stats on some of the tenants at the beginning of the call. Obviously, concerns out there that we might head into a recession downturn. Obviously, the data has been pretty mixed. But if we were to see a downturn or a recession, how do you think that might change the pipeline whether it be volume, competition, or pricing?

We went through COVID and our portfolio performed extremely well, but I wouldn't say there were bargains to be had on any sustained basis during that time. This is a different scenario. I think our portfolio will perform very well We're essentially 100% occupied, so I can't promise that it would improve because it's about as full as it can be, but I think we'd be in a really good position. Do we then have interesting opportunities to deploy capital in acquisitions? Unclear. To an earlier question, we tend to target sectors that have less targeted tariff exposure. There's been two Wall Street research reports on the net lease industry and tariff exposure. I think we were sort of the most favorable of the industry in both of those. I'd encourage you to track them down. But will we get this situation where we have really interesting investment opportunities? I can't say for sure. I can say that we have the money for it, we have the people for it, we are focused on it, but we need the market to come to us to find high-quality deals that we can buy at better than historic prices.

Okay, that's helpful. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Wayne from Barclays. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Rent collections ticked up a bit this quarter. They're still strong, but I'm just wondering what types of tenants are not paying now, and if you're working on anything at those properties to increase the collections numbers further?

Yeah, it's basically one tenant. We have a personal guarantee from that tenant that we're pursuing, and we've made substantial progress releasing the buildings. So it's very, very small sort of a one-off thing.

And what kind of releasing spreads have you gotten on tradeouts like that historically?

Yeah. It's just a couple buildings. I think we'll be in a good spot, but we're not going to comment on ongoing negotiations when it's only a couple buildings.

Thank you for the question. Yep.

Thank you. Our next question comes from James Kammer from Evercore. The line is now open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Thanks for the time. Kind of a bigger picture question, Bill. You mentioned you're building acquisition staff and have been. You've got the balance sheet in a great position. Are you adding other capabilities or data sets to your underwriting? I know you've been pleased with deal path technology, et cetera, today, but I'm just curious how you're setting up for the next phase of growth and if that entails any other incremental steps that you're doing to further enhance the underwriting. Thanks.

That's a really good question. I think like every company, we're trying to figure out how AI will make us more efficient. I think we have just more people to work on projects and to explore potential new industries. We've built substantially more muscle in our asset management group with some really exciting hires there that are getting up to speed. Historically, we didn't need much of that function, but as we have added several hundred buildings, it's become Our portfolio is in fantastic shape, but there's more to do. I'm really excited, as I said, about the new folks that are joining. They'll be able to use the technology that we have. We'll be able to put more emphasis on automating things that can be automated. There's a lot that we can do with the existing technology that we have, and as you mentioned, DealPath is an integral part of running our business, and we've done a number of investor sessions where we take people through our underwriting in DealPath. If there are those who would like to do that, we'd be more than happy to do it. I think investors have almost universally founded a valuable 45 minutes of their time.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you. We currently have no further questions. This concludes our Q&A and consequently today's call. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.