Prologis, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Brent and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Prologis Q4 2021 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star 1. It is now my pleasure to turn today's call over to Jill Sawyer, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Brent, and good morning, everyone. I'm standing in for Tracy today. Welcome to our fourth 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 guarantees of performance, and actual operating results may be affected by a variety of factors. For a list of those factors, please refer to the forward-looking statements notice in our 10-K or SEC filings. Additionally, our fourth 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 Caton, Mike Curliss, Dan Lutter, Ed Neckritz, Jean Riley, and Colleen McEwen are also with us today. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom. Tom, will you please begin?

Thanks, Jill. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. The fourth quarter closed out a year of record-setting activity across our business. Core FFO was $1.12 per share with net promote earnings of $0.05. For the full year, Core FFO was $4.15 per share with net promote earnings of $0.06. Excluding promotes, Core FFO grew 14% year over year. Net effective rent change on rollover accelerated to 33%, up 510 basis points sequentially, and was led by the U.S. at over 37%. Average occupancy was 97.4%, up 80 basis points sequentially. Cash seems to know life growth remained strong at 7.5% for the quarter and 6.1% for the full year. I want to point out that we're modifying our in place to market rent disclosure to standardize this metric among logistics REITs. This collaboration is an extension of the work we've done to harmonize other property operating metrics. We have a collectively defined net effective lease mark to market of our operating portfolio as the growth rate from in place rents to market rents. This now aligns with how rent change on rollover is expressed. Using this new definition consistently applied, our net effective lease mark to market at year end jumped almost 800 basis points sequentially to 36%. This current rent spread represents embedded organic NOI of more than $1.2 billion, or $1.55 per share, that we will capture without any further market rent growth. Turning to strategic capital, this business continues to drive tremendous growth and value. In Q4, we completed the early windup of our highly successful UKLV venture. UKLV's $1.7 billion of operating assets were contributed to our PELP and PELP ventures. We earned net promote income of $0.05 in connection with the closeout of this venture, and our percentage of infinite life vehicles has consequently grown to 95% of our $66 billion of third-party assets under management. For the year, our team raised $4.4 billion of third-party equity. After drawing down $1.9 billion in our open-ended funds for acquisitions during the year, equity queues stood at a record $4 billion at year end. On the deployment front, we had a very productive and profitable year. Development starts totaled $3.6 billion with margins of 32%. We continue to maintain a long development runway with a land portfolio able to support $26 billion of future starts. Stabilizations totaled $2.5 billion with estimated value creation of $1.3 billion and average margin of 53%, both all-time highs. Realized development gains were $817 million for the year, also an all-time high. These results are the product of our highly disciplined team, and an incredibly strong operating environment. For our customers, the importance of the health of their supply chain and the real estate that underpins it has never been so critical. We believe the current global supply chain challenges will continue well beyond this year. Fortunately, the scale of our 1 billion square foot portfolio puts us in a unique position to help our customers address these current supply chain challenges. This includes shortening construction delivery times by navigating raw material shortages and leveraging our essentials platform to procure warehouse equipment and services so our customers can focus on their core operations. We're also investing in technology and talent to support our industry leading sustainability objectives, including our efforts around renewable energy. Market dynamics today are highly favorable and demand has never been stronger. During the quarter, we signed 62 million square feet of leases and issued proposals on 90 million square feet. Demand is diverse across a range of industry and customers. E-commerce made up 19% of our new leasing this quarter with further broadening of customer diversity. We signed 357 new leases with 265 unique e-commerce customers in 2021, both of which are high watermarks. Demand is fueled by three forces. First, overall consumption and demographic growth require our customers to expand. Second, customer supply chains are still repositioning to address the massive shift to e-commerce, as well as preparing for higher growth and service expectations. And third, the need to create more resiliency in supply chains. Inventory to sales ratios are more than 10% below pre-pandemic levels. our customers not only need to restock at this 10% shortfall, but build additional safety stock of 10% or greater. This combination has the potential to produce 800 million square feet or more of future demand in the U.S. alone. Collectively, these forces have placed a premium on speed to market and flexibility, driving demand for years to come. From a supply perspective, construction underway in the U.S. is approximately 70% pre-leased which is well above the historical average. We believe demand will balance out with supply in 2022 and vacancy rates will remain at record lows in both our U.S. and international markets. Competition for limited availabilities produced yet another quarter of record rent and value growth. In the fourth quarter, rents in our portfolio grew 5.7% globally and 6.5% in the U.S. bringing full year growth to records 18% and 20% respectively, far exceeding our initial forecasts. This growth, paired with continued compression in cap rates, is translating to record valuation increases. Our portfolio posted its highest quarterly value increase, rising more than 12.5% globally, bringing the full year increase to a remarkable 39%. Now moving to guidance for 2022, Here are the components on an R-share basis. We expect cash, same-star NOI growth to range between 6% and 7%, and average occupancy to range between 96.5% to 97.5%. We are forecasting rent growth in our markets to be 11% in the U.S. and 10% globally. For strategic capital, we expect revenue excluding promotes to range between $540 and $560 million. We expect net promote income of $0.55 per share for the year, almost all of which will occur in the third quarter and is driven by our PELF venture. While a record, given the significant increase in rents and valuations, we would expect to see similar or higher promote levels in 2023. In response to continued strong demand, we are forecasting development starts of $4.5 to $5 billion with approximately 35% build-a-suits. Dispositions will range between $1.5 and $1.8 billion, two-thirds of which we expect to close this quarter. We're forecasting net deployment uses of $2.3 billion at the midpoint, which we plan to fund with $1.6 billion of free cash flow after dividends and a modest increase in leverage. We project core FFO, including the 55 cents of net promote income, to range between $5 and $5.10 per share, representing 22% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Core FFO excluding promotes will range between $4.45 and $4.55 per share, or year-over-year growth of 10% at the midpoint. Since our investor forum in 2019, our three-year earnings CAGR has been 13% excluding promotes, well ahead of the 8% to 9% CAGR forecast we originally provided. Before closing out, I want to spend a minute on the quality of our earnings drivers and differentiators, which set Prologis apart from other real estate companies. We continue to drive strong organic growth and aren't reliant upon external growth to achieve sector-leading results. In fact, approximately 75% of the increase to our core FFO for 2022, excluding promotes, is derived from organic growth, principally same-store NOI, and strategic capital fee-related earnings. It's important to point out that in 2022, our strategic capital revenue, including promotes, will be over $1 billion, a new milestone. This high margin business generates very durable fee streams with asset management fees marked to fair values each quarter, all while requiring minimal capital. In addition, we see growing earnings from our essentials business, which allows us to expand our services and solutions beyond rent. When we introduced this business back in 2018, we set a target of $300 million from procurement savings and essentials revenue. We will hit that target this year with more than $225 million from procurement and $75 million from essentials. In light of our success with procurement and the fact that we have embedded this initiative into our platform, we will not provide specific procurement reporting going forward, instead focusing on essentials. We also have a long development runway of $26 billion. much of which comes from our international opportunity set, positioning us for continued strong value creation well into the future. Lastly, these differentiators are all underpinned by the lowest cost of capital among REITs and unmatched scale that minimizes operating costs. In closing, while 2021 was a year of many records, the bulk of the benefit from the current environment will be realized in the future. providing a clear, tangible runway for sector-leading growth for many years to come. We are confident our best years are still ahead of us. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for your questions.