Prologis, Inc.

Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Prologis Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participant lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, we will have a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Tracy, I hand it to you.

Thanks, Holly, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. The supplemental document is available on our website at Prologis.com under investor relations. I'd like to state that this conference call will contain forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates, and projections about the market and the industry in which Prologis operates, as well as management's beliefs and assumptions. Forward-looking statements are not guaranteed that performance and actual operating results will be affected by a variety of factors. For a list of those factors, please refer to the forward-looking statement notice in our 10-K or SEC filings. Additionally, our second quarter results, press release, and supplemental do contain financial measures such as FFO and EBITDA that are non-GAAP measures. And in accordance with Reg G, we have provided a reconciliation to those measures. This morning, we'll hear from Tom Olinger, our CFO, who will cover results, real-time market conditions, and guidance. Hamid Moghadam, Gary Anderson, Chris Cate, Mike Curliss, Dan Letter, Ed Neckerts, Gene Riley, and Colleen McEwen are also here with us today. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom. Tom, will you please begin?

Thank you, Tracy. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. The second quarter exceeded our expectations, both in terms of our results and outlook for 2021 and beyond. With our exceptional portfolio and team, we set high watermarks across several measures this quarter. Demand for space is robust and diverse, and market conditions remain the healthiest in our 38-year history. In the second quarter, lease signings were 64 million square feet, and lease proposals were 84 million square feet. Both remain above average and were driven by new and development leasing. Likewise, the Pelagis IBI Customer Activity Index reached a new high in the second quarter, an early indicator of strong future demand. Our leasing mix is broad. Currently, the greatest demand is for spaces above 100,000 square feet. For smaller spaces, activity is picking up. We signed 518 leases totaling 18 million square feet in the quarter, the highest volume in this segment in three years. For customer segments, e-commerce continues to lead the way, representing 30% of new lease signings in the second quarter. While Amazon remains steady at 6% of total new leasing, we have seen many more e-commerce players come to the table. For example, we signed 168 new e-commerce leases in the first half of 2021 versus 53 in the first half of last year. Supply chains are racing, beginning to restock, and as they do, will create more demand going forward. Containerized imports are up 33% through May versus pre-pandemic levels as retailers replenish their supply chains. While inventories have risen 3% from their trough, they have struggled to grow this year as retail sales are up 19% from pre-pandemic levels. We see the current low level of inventories in our space utilization, which at 84.3%, is below the long-term average of 85%. This is yet another sign that our customers are operating with suboptimal levels of inventory. Putting together recent outperformance and ongoing momentum, we are raising our 2021 U.S. forecast for net absorption by 20% to 360 million square feet and deliveries by 8% to 325 million square feet. Looking forward, we perceive continued supply balanced by demand with historic low vacancy of 4.5% carrying into 2022. With balanced demand and supply, acute scarcity in our markets is driving record rent and value growth. Our operating portfolio lease percentage rose by 80 basis points and 97.2% at quarter end. customers continue to compete for space and are making decisions faster, with least gestation in the quarter of just 44 days. When we look at the factors impacting supply, significant barriers exist in our markets and include a lack of viable land, increasingly difficult and expensive permitting and entitlement processes, and rapidly escalating replacement costs. Our research team released an excellent paper on this last month, which you can find on our website. Our supply watch list remains quite small. We reviewed Houston in the quarter, leaving just Spain and Poland. Accelerating demand in the quarter, combined with ultra-low vacancies, translated to very strong rank growth of 4.1% in our U.S. markets, exceeding our expectations. As a result, we are raising our 2021 rent forecast to an all-time high of 10.3% for the U.S., up approximately 40 basis points from our prior estimate, and 8% globally, which is up 300 basis points. Our in-place-to-market rent spread is now the widest in our history, at 16.9%, up 330 basis points significantly. This represents future gas in the tank of nearly $700 million in NOI, or $0.90 per share. Turning to valuations, our assets have strongest quarterly uplift in our history, rising 8% in the second quarter alone, with the U.S. up more than 10%, and Europe up 5.6%. On the topic of valuation, I want to point out that we enhanced the NAV disclosure in our supplemental related to property management fees. Given the size and scale of our portfolio, we created substantial value through our operational advantages. As a result, we know that real estate is worth more in our hands. Importantly, we are now including net property management fee income as a component of adjusted NOI in our NAB disclosure. Switching gears to results for the quarter, our team and portfolio continue to deliver excellent financial results. Core FFO was $1.01 per share, with net promote earnings effectively zero. Rent change on rollover was 32%. Occupied quarter end was 96.8%, up 110 basis points sequentially. Cash seems to have a high growth accelerated to 5.8%, 290 basis points year-over-year. We tapped into favorable market conditions and disposed of $880 million of non-strategic assets across our portfolio. In addition, just last week, we completed the sale of a $920 million owned and managed portfolio, including all of the non-strategic IPT assets. It's worth noting that to date, we have sold $2 billion of non-strategic assets from our IPT and LPT acquisitions, at pricing more than 23% above underwriting. Turning to strategic capital, our team raised almost $600 million in the second quarter. Equity cues from our open-ended vehicles increased by $3.3 billion at quarter end, hitting another all-time high. Robust investor interest has prompted private equity limited partners to shift away from diversified to more sector-specific funds, particularly for the logistics sector. In light of recent asset management transactions and public comps, the value being ascribed to our strategic capital business is meaningfully understated. For the balance sheet, we continue to maintain excellent financial strength with liquidity and combined leverage capacity between Prologis and our open-ended vehicles totaling $14 billion. Moving to guidance for 2021, our outlook has further improved given higher rent growth, higher valuations, and robust demand. Here are the key updates on our share basis. We're increasing our cash seems to analyze growth midpoint by 75 basis points that now range between 5.25 and 5.75%. We expect that debt expense to be approximately 10 basis points of gross revenues down from our prior guidance midpoint of 20 basis points and well below our historical average. We are increasing the midpoint for strategic capital revenue, excluding promotes, to $470 million, up $15 million from prior guidance. This upward revision is due to increased asset management fees resulting from higher property values. Faster development leases and higher asset values are also leading to an increase in promotes. We now expect net promote income of $0.02 for this year, an increase of $0.04 from our prior guidance. We're also increasing development starts by $300 million and now expect a big point of $3.2 billion. Build-A-Suits will comprise more than 40% of development volume. Our owned and managed land portfolio, which is composed of land, options, and covered land plays, supports $18 billion of future development over the next several years. We are also increasing the midpoint for dispositions and contributions by $650 million in total. This increase will have roughly a two-cent drag on earnings this year, given the timing to redeploy the incremental proceeds. We now expect to generate net deployment sources of $200 million at the midpoint, with leverage remaining effectively flat in 2021. Taking these assumptions into account, we're increasing our core FFO midpoint by seven cents, and they're in the range to $4.04 to $4.08 per share. 4FFO excluding promotes will range between $4.02 and $4.06 per share, representing year-over-year growth at the midpoint of almost 13%. We continue to maintain exceptional dividend coverage, and our 2021 guidance implies a payout ratio in the low 60% range and free cash flow after dividends of $1.3 billion. In closing, the first half of the year has been extraordinary, and our outlook is equally promising. Visibility into our strong future organic earnings potential is very clear. We have a significant embedded in place to market rent spread, a development-ready land portfolio, substantial balance sheet capacity, and ability to create value for our customers beyond their real estate. With that, I'll turn it back to Holly for your questions.