Prologis, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the ProLogis fourth quarter 2023 earnings 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 press star zero on your telephone keypad. And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce to you Jill Sawyer, SVP with Investor Relations. Thank you, Jill. You may begin.

Thanks, Sean. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter 2023 earnings 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. Actual operating results may 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 other SEC filings. Additionally, our fourth quarter earnings press release and supplemental do contain financial measures such as FFO and EBITDA that are non-GAAP, and in accordance with Reg G, we have provided a reconciliation to those measures. I'd like to welcome Tim Arndt, our CFO, who will cover results, real-time market conditions and guidance. Hamid Moghadam, our CEO, and our entire executive team are also with us today. With that, I'll hand the call over to Tim.

Thanks, Jill. I'd like to start our call by recognizing and thanking our team for the incredible effort given over 2023. While it was a turbulent year in many ways, we ended it by delivering nearly 11% earnings growth and driving our 12-year earnings CAGR since merger to 10.3%. We deployed over $7 billion into new investments, raised nearly $2 billion of strategic capital in a very challenging environment, and delivered excellent operating results while serving and growing customer relationships. We're also appreciative of the opportunity we had at our investor forum last month to share our vision and outlook for the company over the coming years. The environment is setting up in line or better than our expectations with development starts across the market continuing to decline by two-thirds from peak, and an improvement in customer sentiment that appears more constructive than just 90 days ago. That said, we still see challenges in some submarkets as near-term outside deliveries are met with still recovering demand. But our thesis remains the same as we've been describing for over a year, and detailed last month in New York, which is that the supply cliff will converge with normalized demand later this year, delivering an environment conducive to strong market rent growth. We believe that annual market rent growth will average between 4% and 6% over the next three years, with 2024 being modestly positive and ramping thereafter. Turning to our results, we finished the year strong with quarterly core FFO excluding promotes of $1.29 per share, bringing the full year to the top end of our guidance, $5.10 per share. While market occupancy declined by approximately 100 basis points, our portfolio gained 10 basis points to end the year at 97.6%. Net effective rent change over the quarter was 74%, bringing the full year to a record of 77%. With another impressive result out of Southern California at over 150%, a reminder that it remains the strongest market for cash flow growth despite near-term choppiness, given the large quantum of its lease mark to market. In the end, same store on a net effective basis was 7.8%, while cash was 8.5%. We started over $2 billion of new developments in the quarter across 46 projects in 27 markets, with nearly 50% of the activity in build disputes. In energy, and as seen in our new supplemental disclosure, we stand at year end with approximately 515 megawatts of solar and storage in operation, with an additional 70 currently under construction. We had a quiet quarter on the financing front, raising approximately $300 million, but our full year of activity closed out at over $12 billion at a weighted average rate of 4.5% and term of 10 years. Our total debt portfolio remains at an overall in-place rate of just 3%, with more than nine years of average remaining life. Turning to market conditions, the increase in fourth quarter market vacancy was in line with our expectations and driven by demand that remained moderate as customers exercised caution in their spending, while completions hit an all-time high. Development starts, however, have continued to fall across the U.S. and Europe, extending and deepening the future supply shortfall. On the ground, our teams are seeing revived customer interest with healthy showing activity to start the year. This includes bill-to-suit inquiries, which we expect to remain active for Prologis following a strong year in 2023. Our proprietary metrics point to normal levels of activity with proposals and gestation timing in line or a bit better than historical norms. Utilization declined in the quarter to approximately 83% in keeping with this morning's reported decrease in the inventory to sales ratio. We view this positively because utilization ought to increase from here as stronger-than-expected retail sales over the fourth quarter and holiday season drove lower inventories, which will need to be replenished. Turning to market rents, our global view is that rents declined this quarter by 90 basis points, but predominantly impacted by an estimated 7% decline in Southern California. Our full-year view is that global market rents grew by 6%, just below our expectations, ultimately driving our lease mark-to-market to end the quarter at 57%, after capturing approximately $100 million in realized NOI growth from leases rolling up to market. The outlier on rent growth is clearly Southern California. While our portfolio was only 2.6% vacant at year end, growing availability has made leasing very competitive. Combined with a 110% increase in rent since 2020, the rent retracement is understandable. Historically, there has never been a market where the delta between expiring and market rent has been so large that it provides ample room for property owners to deviate from market in order to attract customers. But looking ahead, the positive news is that we are watching two trends reverse. The first is that the supply pipeline is clearly emptying with little in the way of new starts. And the second is that the escalating issues in both the Suez and Panama canals together with the resolution of the West Coast labor negotiations, are moving shipment volumes back to the West. While this bodes well for SoCal and still early, we are watching East Coast port markets more closely. In any event, all of these disruptions are reiterating the underlying need for resiliency and the just-in-case approach to inventories. Summing this all up globally, We recognize the high volume of near-term deliveries that need to be absorbed into our markets over the next few quarters, but we are very pleased with our ability thus far to build occupancy, drive rents, and illustrate more differentiation in our portfolio as market vacancy grows. As for strategic capital and valuations, we saw U.S. values decline approximately 5.5% during the quarter, which was our expectation and the reason we paused our appraisal-based activity which includes calling and redeeming capital as well as asset contributions. We run an industry-leading franchise in which we aim to set the standard for governance, including timely, accurate, and independent valuations. Calling out when pronounced lags in valuations emerge has protected investors and demonstrated how we stand apart as a responsible partner. With this quarter's value declines and a more stabilized rate environment, will resume activity in USLF, including the funding of our $250 million commitment announced in the second half of 23. Turning to guidance and all at our share, in terms of operating metrics, we are guiding average occupancy to range between 96.5% and 97.5%, with occupancy likely to step down in the first quarter and rebuild over the course of the year. Cash same store will range between 8% and 9%, and net effective same store growth will range from 7% to 8%. We're forecasting net G&A to range between $420 and $440 million, and strategic capital income to range from $530 to $550 million. We have a very big year of stabilization activity ahead of us with a range of $3.6 to $4 billion at expected yields of approximately 6.25%. On the new deployment front, we are guiding development starts to range between $3 billion and $3.5 billion with estimated build-to-suit mix of 40%. And we plan to take sale portfolios to the market over the year with expected proceeds to range between $800 million and $1.2 billion, and additionally forecast $1.75 to $2.25 billion in contributions to our strategic capital vehicles. In the end, we are forecasting gap earnings to range between $3.20 and $3.45 per share, Core FFO excluding promotes will range from 550 to 564 per share, while Core FFO including net promote expense will range between 542 and 556 per share, each a bit higher than our preliminary guidance at the investor forum. While we do not forecast any promote revenue at this time, there are some small opportunities that do exist in FIBA Prologis and our new PJLF vehicle in Japan. In closing, we know that the market is not yet out of the woods with regards to incoming supply, but the combination of a stronger backdrop, continued low level of starts, and a calmer capital markets environment has us optimistic that 2024 will be another great year. As you know from our Investor Day, we have many initiatives in flight designed to add value beyond our real estate and because of our real estate. We look forward to continuing to execute on our plan and providing you updates throughout the year. And before we move to Q&A, I'd like to get ahead of questions which have grown a little more frequent in recent quarters surrounding market rent growth. Unintentionally, we set an expectation that we could forecast market rents to a single point of accuracy in increasingly short time periods, and honestly, we're just not that good. We've gotten away from a practice that was originally aimed at being high-level and directional. So what we've elected to do in order to help investors without perpetuating the issue is is to simply provide high-level rent growth expectations on a rolling 12-month forward view. As mentioned earlier, in terms of our three-year CAGR of 4% to 6%, we believe we'll see modestly positive rent growth aligned with inflation over the next 12 months, and we'll continue to update this rolling view on our future calls. With that, we will now take your questions. Operator?