3/24/2022

speaker
Operator

Good day and welcome to the Motive's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call and webcast. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. On today's call, management will provide prepared remarks and then we will open up the call for your questions. To ask a question, Analysts may press star, then 1 on your touchstone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the key and to withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. Participants may also ask a question by emailing ir at motive.com. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Megan McGrath, Investor Relations for Motive. Please go ahead, ma'am.

speaker
spk00

Thank you, Operator, and thank you all for joining us today to discuss Motive's fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results. We issued our earnings release and quarterly investor presentation after the market closed yesterday. These documents are available in the investor relations section of our website at invest.motive.com. I'm here today with Aaron Haffaker, Chief Executive Officer of Motive, and Ray Pacini, Chief Financial Officer. On today's call, management will provide prepared remarks, and then we will open up the call for your questions. Participants may also ask a question by emailing ir at motive.com. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's comments will include forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements are identified by words such as will, be, intend, believe, expect, anticipate, or other comparable words and phrases. Statements that are not historical facts, such as statements about our expected acquisitions or dispositions, are also forward-looking statements. Our actual financial condition and results of operations may vary materially from these contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Discussions of the factors that could cause our results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are contained in our SEC filings, including our reports on Form 10-Q. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Aaron Hatbaker, MoDA's Chief Executive Officer. Aaron, please go ahead.

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

Thank you, Megan. Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining our first earnings call following the recent listing of our shares on the New York Stock Exchange on February 11th. Given this is our inaugural public earnings conference call, and being cognizant that our first quarter results will be coming out in less than 60 days, our focus today will be to provide a bit of backstory for our new investors, highlight the progress we've made thus far, and establish a baseline for future earnings releases. Joining me today is Ray Puccini, our CFO, who will cover our reporting financial results in detail. Then I will close our prepared remarks before we open the line for Q&A. In a few minutes, Ray will review the numbers in detail, but here are a few highlights. We have grown our full year AFFO by 20% to $11.4 million, or $1.51 per basic, or $1.30 per diluted share. We have grown total revenues to $36.2 million, and we've acquired over $90 million of assets at a weighted average cap rate of greater than 7%. Motive's history is unique in the REIT industry and is worthy of a brief introduction. Motive, which derives its name from the concept of monthly dividends, can trace its roots through prior acquisitions all the way back to 2013 to a FinTech company called Rich Uncles, which launched the first crowdfunded net lease REIT to the public. Motive acquired that first REIT as well as Rich Uncles at the end of 2019 creating the largest crowdfunded REIT to have raised all of its capital directly from investors with no commissioned financial intermediaries. Since that time, Motive has grown to over 500 million of assets and over 7,000 individual investors. When Ray Pacini and I joined in mid-2018, our specific mission was to transform the company, both the quality of assets and caliber of management, into an enterprise capable of being both an attractive investment opportunity and a prudent capital allocator. Over the past three and a half years, we have rid the company of an external manager, and become fully internalized with a management team that has a proven history of managing real estate for publicly traded REITs. We've reduced G&A and became a highly efficient team of just 14 professionals, started a capital recycling program that has already seen us eliminate non-core assets, and we redeployed those sales proceeds into strategic acquisitions. We reconstituted the balance sheet with a $250 million credit facility from a syndicate of seven banks led by KeyBank. We issued $50 million of publicly traded preferred equity on the New York Stock Exchange that accelerated our growth plan. We've reduced our office exposure by 11% in just the past six months with a goal of reducing our exposure to just 20% in the next 12 months. We've extended our weighted average lease term by approximately 50% from six years to over nine years through a combination of lease extensions and new acquisitions. And most recently, we avoided a dilutive IPO during this current turbulent market environment while providing our investors full liquidity of their shares through a public listing without the typical market lockups. We confidently believe that these recent results are just a small indication of what our team is capable of achieving as we continue on our mission today and into the future. I will now turn the call over to Ray.

speaker
Megan

Thank you, Aaron. I will now discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2021 operating results, provide an update on our portfolio, and cover our balance sheet, recent capital markets transactions, and liquidity. We reported fourth quarter AFFO of $2.4 million or $0.27 per share, a 41% increase compared with AFFO of $1.7 million or $0.19 per diluted share for the fourth quarter of 2020. For the full year, AFFO increased 20% to $11.4 million or $1.30 per diluted share versus $9.5 million or $1.03 per diluted share in the prior year. AFFO for 2021 rose primarily as a result of a $3.9 million decrease in interest expense, which reflected an $848,000 gain on interest rate swap valuations in 2021 compared to a prior year loss on interest rate swaps of $1.2 million, along with a decrease in average borrowings outstanding for our mortgages and credit facilities. The decrease in interest expense was partially offset by a $2.4 million decrease in revenue. Total revenues for the fourth quarter were $7.9 million, a decrease of 11.7% from $8.9 million in the year-ago quarter, reflecting our dispositions of properties in 2020 and 2021. For the full year, revenues were $36.2 million, down 6% from 2020-2021. reflecting our disposition activity, which was only partially offset by the contribution from acquisitions completed in July and December. Since all of our acquisition activity in 2021 occurred in the second half of the year, the positive impact of these acquisitions was not fully reflected in our 2021 revenues. On the expense side, G&A costs of $2.8 million in the fourth quarter compared with $3.1 million in the fourth quarter last year. For the full year, G&A expenses were $12.6 million compared to $10.4 million in 2020. This increase primarily reflects a $2 million increase in stock compensation expense related to amortization of restricted interests in our operating partnership that were granted to employees in January 2021 and vests in March 2024. We expect G&A expenses will decrease by approximately $2.2 million in 2022 as a result of the termination of our crowdfunding business and other cost-saving initiatives. Our property expenses were $1.6 million in the fourth quarter, consistent with last year's expense. For the full year, property expenses were $6.7 million, down slightly from last year's $7 million. Now turning to our portfolio. We spent the majority of 2020 and early 2021 focused on repositioning our portfolio and monitoring the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-2021, with the portfolio stable, we began to ramp up our acquisition activity. We have repositioned our portfolio to focus on properties in the industrial and retail sectors, and we continue to reduce our exposure to office properties. During the last nine months, we originated a total of $92.4 million of gross investments representing four property locations. The investments included two retail properties and two industrial properties and had an average initial cap rate of 5.95%. I'll break that activity down between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2022. In 2021, during the second half of the year, we invested $15 million in two property locations at an average initial cap rate of 6.55%. The first acquisition was a Raising Cane's retail location in San Antonio, Texas, and the second in industrial property in Ohio, leased to Arrow Trueline, a leading manufacturer of hardware components to the North American garage door market. Subsequent to year end, in January 2022, we invested $77 million in two properties at an average initial cap rate of 5.83%. The first acquisition was one of the three largest Kia auto dealerships in the U.S., located on the 405 freeway in Carson, California. The second acquisition we completed in January was an industrial property in Minnesota leased to Cholera Inc., a company that performs indoor vertical farming. We have a strong pipeline of potential acquisitions under review, and we will continue to pursue accretive opportunities as the year progresses. Now I'll provide some color on our portfolio management activities, which are a key component of our ability to generate long-term returns for our shareholders. During 2021, we sold five properties, recognizing an aggregate net gain of $7.8 million. One of these properties was sold in the fourth quarter for an aggregate net gain of $3.3 million. During February 2022, we sold three office properties and one industrial property for net proceeds of $16.9 million after repayment of the related mortgages, commissions, and closing costs. we plan to redeploy these proceeds to fund future acquisitions. Taking into account these recent acquisitions and dispositions, as of March 23rd, 2022, our portfolio consists of 36 properties, all of which are 100% owned except one tenant in common real estate investment in which we own approximately 73%. The portfolio has roughly 2.3 million square feet of aggregate leasable space which is 100% leased to 29 different commercial tenants doing business in 16 separate industries in 14 states. As of today, our portfolio is comprised of 12 industrial properties, which represent approximately 40% of the portfolio based on annual base rent, 13 retail properties representing approximately 21% of the portfolio, and 11 office properties representing approximately 39% of the portfolio. We expect to continue to reduce our non-core office exposure going forward. Now turning to our balance sheet and capital markets activity. During September 2021, we successfully completed an offering of Series A preferred stock for $50 million, which was used to partially fund subsequent acquisitions. As of December 31, 2021, we had total cash and cash equivalents of $56 million and $183 million of outstanding indebtedness, consisting of $175 million of mortgages and $8 million outstanding on a credit facility. On January 18, 2022, we obtained a $250 million credit facility. We used this facility to refinance $108 million of our property mortgages, refinance a $36 million mortgage on the Kia auto dealership property, which we acquired on the same day, and refinance $8 million $8 million balance on our previous credit facility. An additional $22 million of mortgages were repaid in connection with our February asset sales. After taking into account the new credit facility, the two acquisitions in January 2022, and four dispositions in February 2022, the company's pro forma leverage as of December 31, 2021, was 39%. We define leverage as debt as a percentage of the aggregate fair value of the company's real estate properties plus the company's cash and cash equivalents. After making a $35 million prepayment on a revolver in early March with available cash on hand, we have $45 million of mortgages and $121 million outstanding under our credit facility as of today with available borrowing capacity of approximately $80 million. Over the next 12 months, we are targeting a leverage ratio of approximately 40%. Once we achieve greater scale of roughly $1 billion or more in assets, we expect to reduce our leverage ratio. On February 10, 2022, we announced the pricing of an underwritten public offering of 40,000 shares of Class C common stock at a price to the public of $25 per share. The purpose of this small offering was to facilitate the listing a motives Class C common stock previously raised via crowdfunding technology, and to provide liquidity for those stockholders without incurring significant dilution in a volatile equity market. As previously announced, our Board of Directors declared monthly cash dividends for common share of approximately $0.096 for the months of April, May, and June, representing an annualized dividend rate of $1.15 per share of common stock. I will now turn the call back over to Aaron. Thanks, Trey.

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

As I mentioned at the beginning of today's call, our goal for this inaugural earnings call was to establish a baseline for future financial results. Given that our listing, our new credit facility, and a substantial amount of our over $90 million of acquisitions have all occurred during this current first quarter of 2022 and not in 2021, I believe the baseline we have provided today will be meaningful when we report our first quarter results in less than 60 days. Between now and our next earnings call, we will be relentlessly focused on execution by seeking out accretive acquisitions, continuing to reduce non-core assets, and optimizing shareholder value. Speaking of value, I personally strongly believe that our current share price offers compelling investment value. I'm not alone in this assessment, as our board of directors recently approved a $20 million share repurchase program with the intent to make accretive share acquisitions. When compared to either our recently appraised NAV of more than $28 per share, or the valuation metrics of our peer group, our current share price is trading at a meaningful discount to fair value and offers a compelling dividend yield when taking into account our annual $1.15 per share dividend that is paid on a monthly basis. It is my personal mission and that of our team to close the perceptible value gap and bring our share price in line with fair value estimates. Though avoiding a dilutive IPO during this current turbulent market environment was the most prudent capital allocation decision we could have made on behalf of our investors, there is no free lunch in the capital markets. In the first days following our listing, we experienced price volatility, similar to that seen in meme stocks, as motive was more frequently discussed on Twitter than Tesla and other hot stocks. Whereas typical IPO investor lockups range from six to 12 months, our decision to provide full liquidity to our over 7,000 individual investors has meant that the trading activity of just a handful of our existing investors, often selling small quantities via market orders, has led to to compelling buying opportunities in our currently thinly traded stock. Over the near term, as smart investors continue to build positions in our stock while existing investors' sales taper, we believe our share price could begin to normalize at values substantially higher than our current trading price. Ultimately, continued solid execution by motive, which will be seen in each of our subsequent earnings releases, will be key in closing the valuation gap and providing the investing public the information they need to make long-term investment decisions. In May, when we release our first quarter earnings, we look forward to delving more into our capabilities as a REIT team, articulating our ability to make intelligent investment decisions, and to provide guidance as to where we see our financial results going over the course of the year. Until then, thank you all for participating today and joining us on our financial journey. We will now dive into our Q&A. Operator?

speaker
Operator

Thank you. And at this time, we will conduct our question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press the star key followed by the number 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. Our first question comes from Brian Marr with B Reilly Securities. Please state your question.

speaker
Brian Marr

Good morning, Aaron and Ray, and thanks for all those comments. A couple of quick questions for me. On the acquisition pipeline, Ray, you touched upon it, but could you give us a little bit more color as to how we should think about moving more towards industrial or more towards retail? what parts of the country you're targeting and what kind of cap rates are you seeing on things that are interesting you, you know, in the first half of this year?

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

Hey, Brian, this is Aaron. I'll take the first half and Ray can add to that. I'd say right now, pipeline-wise, we're seeing a lot more industrial assets. They're trading at wider cap rates. So if we look at it on a sort of initial cap rate, you know, first year NOI, You know, the deals that we've been, you know, circling around in investment committee have been greater than six and a quarter, some substantially so, whereas a lot of the retail assets we're seeing on a first-year basis that have term or quality are less than that. So I'd say, generally speaking, we like industrial more, with the caveat that we're looking at – more of industrial manufacturing types of assets as opposed to distribution. I think the distribution assets we're seeing in pretty much every market are compressing at a fast clip. We're seeing more compelling opportunities in industrial manufacturing, things that are either infrastructure-based. And it's on the premise that these are very long-term tenants. If you think about... more onshoring and manufacturing coming back onto our U.S. shores, given the global economics or pandemics and the like. We like some of these names, and so we've been focused on those. I think our focus has been to buy those. I think you'll see us, in a rough comparison, if you think about Ann & Ann, it's probably 83% retail and 15%. I kind of think about us in the inverse. You know, over time, we'll have the vast majority industrial and a component of retail. As it relates to markets, you know, if you think about industrial manufacturing, you know, they're not in urban centers, right? So you're going to find some, you're going to see both Sunbelt and Rust Belt, but you're going to see in certain markets where these, you know, these businesses have been in place for quite a long time. And so the geography to us, It's more about how important that business is to the owner of that business in that particular facility. For instance, our Arrow True Line, which is in Archibald, Ohio, which is not a major market, 100% of their business is done in our building. And they control approximately 27% of the garage door parts market. And so to us, that's their CBD. And so we try to take that approach, which is a little bit different than sort of just, you know, boxing out Coast or, you know, top 30 MSAs. But it's a factor of what we're looking to buy. Ray, you have anything to add to that?

speaker
Megan

Yeah. An example of the type of industrial properties that we're looking at is the pending acquisition that we disclosed in the 10K. The company is Lindsay Precast. They're a leading precast concrete manufacturer. and steel fabricator with a 60 year operating history. The purchase price is 53.4 million, which reflects a cap rate of 6.65%. And they're located in, it's eight properties located in Ohio, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. So that just gives you an example of some of the things we're seeing.

speaker
Brian Marr

Great, that's really helpful. And then on the office side, I think you said, Ray, that it was now 39% or so in 11 properties. How quickly should we see that move down to the 20% level? And what kind of interest are you seeing in the properties that you might have in the marketplace currently?

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

Yeah, good question. So we want to reduce office as quickly as possible without sacrificing undue price. or trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so we're prudent about it. We've got good quality tenancy in those buildings. They're paying rent, so we are thoughtful of that. Our MCOR asset is an office asset we have in Ohio that is under contract. They're going through DD right now to sell, so that one is the next one, the one that's going to happen the next. I think our two office assets in Nevada just went on the market, so we're looking to do those. Some of the bigger ones that are really going to move the needle are going to be assets like Sutter and Costco. We think there's strategic value in those. In fact, we're working with Sutter on a strategic opportunity to increase the value of that space before we decide on next steps. I think those are going to be later in the year events on the chunkier one. And so my guess is, you know, like my goal is, and as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, in the next 12 months, try to be down to roughly 20%. So that's taken us into, you know, late first quarter, early second quarter. I'd like to be there. I think that'll be a combination, candidly, of office sales and also additional purchases. So it doesn't mean that, you know, all things being equal, we'll sell that many assets. If we can get the price, which we are right now, getting the prices that we want, then we'll continue to sell as fast as we can.

speaker
Brian Marr

Great. Thank you very much.

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

Thanks, Brian.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. And just a reminder to ask a question, press star one. Our next question comes from John Masaka with Leidenberg Thalman. Please state your question.

speaker
John Masaka

Good morning. Morning, John. So just a quick follow-up to the kind of previous line of questioning, and apologies if I missed it, but what's kind of the cap rate ranges as you look out in the kind of broader pipeline of the transaction you talked about that was kind of in the works? You gave the cap rate there, but just as you kind of think about your broader kind of acquisition targets, what kind of cap rates are you seeing out there?

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

Yeah, it's good. I mean, so it's an interesting time, and we're being very patient because, Even though we've seen rates increase, and in various reports I've seen people say that we should be approaching an inflection point in cap rates, there's still a tremendous amount of capital out chasing assets. So we've been in a couple of rounds on things where initial price talk might have been $675,000. And final talk or, you know, final, you know, and they will, and instead of doing like two rounds, they're doing three or four rounds. Right. So it's like that's in final and then final, final or something like that. So it's a weird kind of thing. Uh, and I've seen, we've seen them compress as much as to 610 or 605. Uh, and so to me, that's, you know, we're not going to chase these things because there is a lot of money going out there. We're very cognizant of our cost of capital. Um, we don't need to, you know, to be impatient. And I, and I, you know, as history has shown us is that when you do have large shifts in, in, in financing costs that you should see cap rates shift as well. And so, so our, I'd say that's kind of the vault. There's a lot of volatility, the broader range that we've seen, and certainly in the industrial side, it's been between a six and a seven cap on an initial first year basis. You know, we've, Also, as you notice, and not to be cute, we did what Agri does is we calculated a weighted average cap rate too, because I think we are buying assets that have rent bumps and have term. And so we're thinking about them from that perspective as well. So we're thinking about going in cap rates, and we're also thinking about the growth of that in a go-forward environment. Obviously, we're avoiding flat leases. If we look at retail, I'd say retail is five and a half to six and a quarter on a one-year basis. And some of them have compelling rent bumps, but a lot of them don't. And those are really, depending on the size of the asset, which they tend to be smaller assets, you're getting a lot of 1031 buyers. So that's why we're looking more at the industrials for the six to seven. Anything, we have seen very few things maybe one or two, if that, that have been wider than sevens and they've been for really strong reasons why they're wider than seven. But I see that's a broader range. Would you agree with that, Ray? Yeah, I agree.

speaker
John Masaka

And then on the asset management side of things, I mean, what's the outlook right now for some of the 2023 lease expirations to the extent you have any color on that? Maybe kind of what's some color on some of the leasing activity you did either during 4Q or just subsequent to 4Q?

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

Yeah, so we have, we just recently signed an extension of Williams-Sonoma. It was a three-year one. That's one of our biggest assets and we are now going to market for that. And, you know, we had a one-year kick on Cummins. Their decision was in early January. Their notice period was February with the lease expiration of 2023. They extended it to February 2024, not because they plan on leaving in February 2024, but they were still doing space planning. They hadn't had their return to office yet. So, you know, now that they have that extension, we're most likely not going to have an erstwhile conversation with them until the third quarter of this year in the beginning. Solar is one that we're already engaged with and talking to, feel good about. Sutter's got a lot of terms with a near term one, but we're being strategic with, with that asset. Uh, uh, we're waiting to hear, I think it's in July. Costco will let us know if they are going to do their early term or not. Um, and so those are moving parts. I see the one that we have, we're in conversations about, but we, we just don't, they don't have a lot of clarity yet and we don't as gap. Um, But other than that, you know, things have been progressing quite well. We've had a conversation actually with Northrop Grumman. They actually might want to – they've now deemed this building to be more critical than they originally had. They're even talking about building out lab space in it. So we're being proactive in these. We've been reaching out to some of our retail tenants and seeing if we can get lease extensions done. We're always sort of looking to, you know, extend to where we can, even if it's not a looming maturity.

speaker
John Masaka

I mean, as you look out to those expirations, is there kind of a broad rule of thumb maybe on lease roll-ups, roll-downs, or is it just too kind of bespoke to be able to talk about it at this point?

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

I don't know that. I think given that we came out of this You know, a lot of these during COVID, we started some of these extensions. We got mild extensions. I think we're taking them not as a universal rule of thumb, but looking at the facts and circumstances of that tenant and figuring out what the drivers are, figuring out what their other choices might be. The good news is that the vast majority of our assets, they're very sticky tenants. They've been there for a long time. They're just on shorter lease renewals. And so, you know, I think we do have, you know, we run the cows on anything. If, you know, if we're looking at TI or we're looking at, you know, free rent or we're looking at some of these things that come up into getting something leased, we're very cognizant of the math. And looking at, you know, valuations, if they were in the building or they were not, right, particularly as it looks to office because, you know, our goal is to sell those. We're looking at the economic tradeoff of that. But I can't, right now at least, I don't feel comfortable with the broad rule of thumb, because we don't have a real homogenized portfolio on some of these shorter-term leases.

speaker
John Masaka

That's understood. That's it for me. Thank you very much.

speaker
Aaron Haffaker

Thanks, John. We have a couple questions that came in over the Internet. One of them was, how do we plan on getting increasing volume or making the stock no longer thinly traded. Yeah, it's just, and this is, I think a good question that to the extent our retail investors are listening, you know, I think a lot of people see the price and they assume some sort of nefarious conspiracy theory that has gone on. But in fact, it's just simply supply to demand economics, right? And what I mean by that is normally how a company does Originally, we were looking at a sizable IPO, north potentially of $100 million, but it was all dependent on what the pricing was. At the time when we came out, this was right before the Ukraine conflict. This was before the Fed had made any strong announcements. But the fear of inflation was pretty evident. And if you follow the REIT market, broadly speaking, REITs have sold off in that period of time, late January, early February. Net lease REITs in general did. We felt it was important. Our mission was to provide our investors liquidity. We did not want to keep redeeming investors in our old crowdfunding model that would require us to shrink the balance sheet. So we chose to list. Had we listed with a larger IPO, we would have been doing so at probably a substantial discount, given all that broader market risk out there. And that would have meant that we would have issued 50% more shares, so every existing investor would have effectively owned a smaller piece of the pie. And the share price probably would have been not dissimilar to what it is now. Our view was, we don't need the cash today. We do not have a gun to our head, but we do want to provide our investors liquidity. Um, and give them free choice. And that was where the real decision lied in, in terms of, do you give the investor, do you lock them up? Uh, and it's very common in through these quote unquote non-traded REITs to go list and they lock their investors up sometimes more than a year. Uh, and that's great for the share price, but that's not, that's not fair to the individual investor. I care deeply about the individual investor, even if they don't like what I'm doing, I still care about them and their hard earned dollars. And so in this context of giving full liquidity, individual investors had the freedom to choose if they wanted to sell. And they're choosing at a price that the market's telling them is prevalent. So the reason we ran up so much is that in their first two days, before any shares were technically available to trade because they hadn't settled, there were, you know, gay traders, candidly, and it was a very thin volume, less than 6,000 shares were being bought in the open market without necessarily shares to on the other side to match right away, and it caused our share price to run up to 89, right? There's no reason a REIT should ever trade up that high, right? Unlike Tesla, when Tesla takes a dollar of capital and turns it into $10 of revenue because they're making cars, you know, a REIT buys, it takes a dollar of capital, maybe buys $2 of real estate, then that throws off, you know, 20 cents in dividends. You just don't have, you know, REITs by their very nature are not high-octane growth stocks. And sure enough, as soon as our investors saw that and they were able to sell, which was the first day they could sell was on that Tuesday, we saw I think 130,000 shares of the 7.6 million, so a relatively small number, sell. And they sold with market orders. And for those who don't know, a market order has no constraints. And so if there's no real buying volume, they'll fall flat and you'll still get executed versus a limit order. And so we saw a lot of volatility in our stock. And so that's because it's thinly traded. So to the question of how do we increase volume, our mission is we had to get the first earnings out. We had to establish a baseline. We've already had the privilege of two research analysts on this call today. We'll be working to attract more research analysts over time. Having taken a company public before, a net lease company, and also managed to run another publicly traded company, very familiar with the process. You know, from this point on, as each earnings call go out and in between those earnings call, my job is largely to speak to institutional investors, tell them our story, let them know what's going on. And over time, they're going to buy into the company if they see the value they like. And I believe there is a compelling value here. And that will create, that'll increase the demand side of the equation. At the same time, our investors either stop the immediate selling or they realize that they're still getting their dividend and nothing fundamentally has changed about their company. And even though the share price might say a lower price, if they trust the process that their share price, the value of the company should be intrinsically higher, then they'll stop selling and that'll reduce the supply. And then you'll see basically that share prices over time will normalize up. So our job is to increase institutional demand for the company, and we will do over time. And that's about buying good properties, growing our AFFO, our earnings, and just executing on the story. It doesn't happen overnight. Again, we're not a hot meme stock. These things take time in the REIT space. We are in a uniquely volatile period of time with interest rates and inflation now with even a global crisis at hand in Europe. And so as these things subside, so will prices normalize. Next question we had was, I think it was comments about computer share and about how we chose computer share, why we chose computer share, and that experience. For the retail investors who had been with us for all these years, they had the experience of coming directly to our website, logging in, accessing what they needed to access, and having no problems whatsoever. And that was because of the technology we built and the customer service mindset we built and focused. You know, it's probably not unlike what you might see at a Schwab or Fidelity or Ameritrade or Robinhood, where they are customer-minded services designed to use technology to facilitate that. Well, when we knew we were going to list, we had to move to a transfer agent that was used by publicly traded companies. ComputerShare is one of the leading providers, one of the best providers out there as a custodian and a transfer agent. And so that migration happened immediately before the listing. And candidly, the experience there is different than what we're used to. And I think some of our investors found it to be a little bit less seamless, a little bit more frustrating, but it is a best practice experience. You know, a lot of our investors are already moving their accounts out of computer share to brokerage accounts. They might have already had them open, and they're going to get back to that seamless experience. But, you know, we understand that it was an adjustment. But after that adjustment was initially made, you know, we know we picked a great service provider. And, you know, as anything of these things, it's going to sort of normalize, and the experience is going to get more accustomed, even though it may be different than what they had before. Okay, that looks like the last of the questions from the online. I guess I'd make a few closing comments. This is an interesting time. What we've done has been interesting. You know, having been the first crowdfunded NetLease fleet to be the first to have a public security, then to have the first to fully list, to internalize that vehicle. We've done a lot of firsts in the space. Choosing to do a listing with a very small IPO and to provide investors with 100% liquidity was a first. And, you know, we continue to execute. I think the thing that I'm the most comfortable about is the quality of our team. This team is very solid. We executed all of this in a short period of time while we're buying assets. We've bought more assets in the last six months than we did in the prior four years. We're finding them to be very accretive asset acquisitions. We've at the same time reduced our G&A and got it to be as thin and as lean as I think is possible using Colliers as an outsource resource and just thinking about the business in a different manner, trying to be innovative, which we have been historically, and thinking about innovation in a way that inures long-term to the benefit of our shareholders. We will continue to do that. That is all about execution. We come in every day. We're putting 10 hours a day in. We live and breathe this. We love it. And I think in the subsequent earnings, you're going to see even more results. I appreciate everyone's patience. I also appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and look forward to speaking to you at our next earnings call. Thank you very much.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. All parties may disconnect. Have a great day.

Disclaimer

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