Plymouth Industrial REIT, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Plymouth Industrial REIT conference call to review the company's results for the third quarter of 2024. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tripp Sullivan of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the Plymouth Industry Conference call to review the company's results for the third quarter of 2024. Yesterday afternoon, we issued our earnings release. We posted a copy of our prepared commentary today. and a supplemental deck on the quarterly results section of our Investor Relations page. In addition to these earnings documents, a copy of our 10-Q, when filed, can be found on the SEC filings page of the IR site. Our supplemental deck includes our full year 2024 guidance assumptions, detailed information on our operations, portfolio and balance sheet, the definitions of non-GAAP measures, and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures. We will reference this information in our remarks. With me today is Jeff Witherall, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Saladino, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Jim Conley, Executive Vice President of Asset Management, and Ann Hayward, General Counsel. I'd like to point everyone to our forward-looking statements on page one of our supplemental presentation and encourage you to read them carefully. They apply to statements made in this call, our press release, our prepared commentary, and in our supplemental financial information. I'll now turn the call over to Jeff Witherall.

Thanks, Tripp. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I'll hit a few highlights first, and then we'll go to Q&A. We've made some big announcements the past few months relating to securing capital that can propel our growth. In late August, we announced the strategic transaction with Sixth Street. I view this as transformative for us in several respects. Most notably, we put a valuation marker on our largest portfolio with the Chicago recap JV and sourced capital for up to $500 million in acquisitions. We secured a tremendous partner in Sixth Street who has continued to build out their real estate platform. We also significantly enhanced our borrowing capacity with this month's refinancing and upsizing of our unsecured credit facilities to $1.5 billion. With this increase in the revolver in recasting of one of the term loans, we've extended our maturities and enhanced the ability to pursue other unsecured debt. The combination of Sixth Street and the additional borrowing capacity solves our current capital needs. Our focus for the balance of this year and throughout 2025 is on our leasing opportunities and putting the capital to work. That's what you can expect to hear from us the next several quarters. Our earnings release and prepared commentary outlined a few tenant challenges we faced during the quarter that we did not anticipate. We are confident that we will work through these and get the spaces leased. We've always done a great job of keeping our buildings well leased, and expect that Plymouth will have a greater exit velocity and momentum wrapping up this year. That will set us up for a strong 2025. We're off to a good start on the acquisitions front with the Memphis portfolio we completed during the quarter. We have another portfolio under contract in Cincinnati that we're excited about. Our pursuit pipeline is over 11 million square feet and over 1 billion in size, with nearly all of the opportunities located in our existing markets. We know these markets well, and we now have the capital to expand our scale. I look forward to providing more updates over the next several months on how we're progressing with the leasing and capital deployment. I would now like to turn it over to the operator for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you were using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Mitch Germain with CitizensJMB. Please go ahead.

Good morning. So, Jeff, maybe just talk about some of the issues that arrived. I mean, I know you have them in your prepared comments, but I think last quarter you mentioned an issue in Cleveland that was unanticipated, but it seems like now you have some other vacancies that were realized that, I guess, were they unanticipated or the lease was delayed? Can you just maybe describe a little bit more detail about those different situations?

Yeah, sure, Mitch. Jim Conley's here. As you know, he heads up asset management. So he's got all the detail on that. So we'll let him walk you through it.

So starting off with Cleveland, we had two issues in Cleveland, one at 2100 International Parkway where the tenant was up to date through a Q2 on rent, but abruptly laid off all its employees and they couldn't pay rent. So we evicted them, effective 930. and taking legal action against them for whatever rent they owe us and in future rent. At the end of Q2, we were pretty far along with a half-building user, but they put that deal on hold. However, now we're really far along with a full-building user that wants to take the building at the beginning of 2025. So, I mean, we acted pretty quickly and got a tenant identified. We also have a backup tenant for that building should that deal not go through. The other building in Cleveland is 1350 Moore Road. The tenant was current as a Q2. However, it became clear that their business was not going to be viable going forward, and we started the eviction process. This all happened very quickly. The tenant left a bunch of equipment and inventory behind that had to be cleared out, which cost us approximately $500,000 to clear up. We had a replacement tenant that was executed and is currently in dispute due to the prior tenant interference that we still need to resolve. We are pursuing legal action against the prior tenant and trying to rectify the situation with a new one. We are also pursuing new prospects that we have lined up for next year should our current lease not be rectified. And we do have a specific prospect in mind. I want to point out on vacancy that it's really It's not a bunch of new vacancies. The St. Louis property that we've talked about all year just went vacant in July. And there was the Chicago property that's been vacant. We're not going to get into detail about it in a second. But if you exclude those two, we only have 2.7% vacancy. So it's really just those two leases that drove the Q3 vacancy.

Okay. Thanks for the clarification. Thinking about some of these tenant issues, I know that it appears that they weren't exactly things that were on your watch list prior to identifying them, but are you spending a bit more time engaging with your clients to gain a better sense of their interests respective businesses to identify what other issues could arise?

Yes. We're constantly doing that. In this case, I think we moved swiftly to eliminate a long protracted problem. And we're working with all our tenants.

Mitch, I think, you know, we've been on this for seven years about this, right? We've built a vertically integrated platform. We manage about 75% of our own properties in-house. We engage with our tenants on a daily basis. This was something that came up very swift. It's not a portfolio-wide issue. And as Jim alluded to, we're backfilling both of these spaces very quickly.

Okay. Jeff, anything you could share about the Cincinnati portfolio?

Yeah. It is about $40 million. It's a multi-tenant. I think it's going to come in at a pretty good yield. I think we're going to like the yield on it, and it's got the growth that we're looking for, similar to Memphis. That's probably about it. We are under contract.

I was just going to say, is that going to close prior to year-end, or you anticipate it right around? I believe it will close before year-end. Okay. And then... maybe just provide some perspective on I think what you said about a billion-dollar pipeline, 11 million square feet was that?

That is correct.

Yeah. Can you – anything there that, you know – is it one-off? Is it portfolios? And then to the extent, you know, obviously you've got about – if we net out the – 40 million purchase, you've got about like 450 or so of dry powder, you know, from the recent transaction that's closing. So, I mean, you know, kind of what's, is there potential to grow Sixth Street as well to maybe unlock some additional growth?

Yes, to all that. It is, it certainly, there's three portfolios in there. Again, I don't know where these go. I mean, we're actively negotiating, so we'll see. One portfolio would be on balance sheet. We have another one that would work as a JV. And that's mostly a geographic concentration as well as, you know, if it's a value-add component that we don't want to bring on balance sheet, the same reasons we've done JVs in the past, right? So we have that identified. There's a lot more one-off deals that are popping up in our markets. And then just small portfolios, $15 million to $20 million portfolios. So it runs the gamut. Again, we look for some good starting yield, but we're also looking for growth. And so that's the mandate. So we're pretty excited about our existing footprint. We've got some growth. As I think you alluded to before, we have a couple deals in Texas we're looking at, so that would be a market that we've always wanted to get into. We'll see how that plays out. So, yeah, I mean, 6th Street is there with plenty of capital. It's really just putting the deals together. Thank you. Thank you.

The next question comes from Rich Anderson with Wedbush. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Good morning. Maybe just to put a finer point on Mitch's question around Cleveland, You mentioned abruptly laid off employees in the case of 2100 and business not viable in the case of 1350 Maybe I don't know what those businesses were and maybe I don't want to know but I'm curious is as to what the learning Event is from this in terms of just sort of monitoring credit, monitoring industries that you're exposed to. And if, if there's anything that you take from this, that you look throughout your portfolio and say, you know, we've got to give something here or there, you know, a second look, uh, and make sure that we're protected. Any, any comment around that topic?

Yeah. I mean, obviously, um, both of these industries were fairly new industries. One was, um, The one at 2100 was an online retailer that had some sort of new system that was going to improve everybody's online ordering, but it didn't really pan out. Everybody used different sources. They were in there for a couple years, and they were always current on rent, and we had You know, we made sure that all of our investment, our commissions and tenant improvements were paid back. We had a letter of credit that covered all that. So we didn't lose on that investment. We lost on the future part of it. And the other tenant is refurbishing windmill furniture. So it's a business that is a viable plan, but it just – It's in its infancy, and they were current for a couple years as well. So I would say moving forward, we would definitely not pursue these new type of transactions without a larger backing financial support.

Okay. Okay. I guess I never thought of sitting on a windmill. I guess now I am thinking about it. The second question is the marker on the Chicago cap rate was 6.3 to 6.2%. Would you agree, not to be a cynic here, but would you agree that that number was influenced by the fact that there was also the preferred and there was also the warrants? Like in the absence of those other elements of the transaction, would that 6.2 really have been 6.2 or would it have been something greater?

Well, Rich, this is Jeff. I think it's, I mean, Six Feet wouldn't have done one without the other, right? I mean, I think this is a transformative transaction. They underwrote the entire company. They physically looked at over 75% of our assets. So they're backing Plymouth, if you will. But as far as the portfolio is concerned, and this is where I'll go back to this and continue to pound the table, as I've done for the last six months, There have been a number of trades out there of like-kind properties to Plymouth, portfolios of anywhere from 5 million square feet to 14 million square feet that have traded between six and six and a half cap. That's the marker. So again, we have 35 million square feet of property at a great basis. And we're going to get all this product leased as we always do. All of us in this room have been in the business for at least 20, 25 years. And I think When you cap our NOI next year, you're going to be right back into, you know, a great NAV calc based on those comps. I mean, we're in the market every day looking at portfolios, and we're getting outbid because people are paying, you know, six, six-and-a-quarter caps for this stuff. So I stand by that.

And then, Rich, can I just – Rich, one follow-up to – Jim's commentary with respect to 1350 Moore, this tenant was on the watch list. We were working closely with them to potentially recapitalize their business. And as a contingency plan, we sourced, identified, and fully negotiated with a new tenant at a 27% positive spread to expiring rents. That's the tenant that Jim mentioned with respect to the lease up, and now there is some legal contention. But ultimately, that will be sorted out here in the near future. So I don't want the takeaway to be that we haven't been acutely focused on tenant health. We have been. These tenants in particular were closely watched. I think what we were surprised by was the velocity of change. But to Jim's point, we've moved quickly to vacate a tenant that wasn't going to pay rent, sourced, identified, and prepared the space to accommodate a new tenant at a substantially improved rental rate.

Very good. Thanks for that. And then last question for me. You mentioned NOI next year. I don't think you're going to give guidance, but there's a lot of movement here, right? You have Chicago. You have Cleveland, Memphis, the joint venture, and St. Louis, of course. When you net all that up, is there growth next year from the company, or do you think that, you know, you've got to work some things out and sort of TBD that maybe the real number to look at would be the year following when everything is sort of, you know, addressed?

No, I do believe that there is significant growth ahead. You know, we will, I don't know if we'll get into it if we don't ask this question, but like in St. Louis, you know, we ran through a whole, I think we ran through over 10 prospects. We now have another group of prospects in there. I mean, I think if you look at the overall national vacancy rate, it's at 6.4%. Long-term average is 7. You know, all the brokerages are telling us that, you know, they feel that 2025 is going to be an uptick. You know, construction. Construction, I think we're delivering about 300 million square feet this year. That's the lowest since 2018. So, you know, there's still 96 million square feet of absorption so far year to date. Probably going to break 100 million. So there's still good things happening in industrial. And if you go to Memphis, we have a lot of opportunity to mark the market. I think we did tell people But I'll reiterate it that we started that out at an eight yield. Over the next two to three years, that probably gets us to a 10 yield. I think the Cincinnati portfolio is going to provide similar metrics. So I feel really confident that we get St. Louis leased up. As we've mentioned, these two properties in Cleveland have prospects there that we're working on. So I feel really confident that we're going to get some pretty good growth next year.

I agree. It's just a matter of timing, right? You get something leased up, but it doesn't necessarily cash flow immediately is the main point that I'm thinking about. And just think cadence between 25 and 26. That's all I got. Thanks very much.

Thanks, Rich.

The next question comes from John Kim with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you. On your Memphis acquisition, you mentioned Acredo Health is leaving some of their space by year end. Was that known previously? In the last call, you mentioned the 70% tenant retention rate on the portfolio.

Hey, John, this is Anthony. Yeah, that square footage was a known vacate. There's about 100,000 of that that was previously a call center that we're converting back to Acredo. more templated industrial space. We don't know if we're gonna deliver two 50,000 square foot suites or 100,000 square foot building. We're going through the diligence on that as we speak. And then there's another 33,000 square feet, again, previously occupied by Credo Health. It has a higher office space, It's an office-like building. We're likely to divest that. In fact, that is currently under contract.

Okay. And then communication test design, they renewed or extended for you, which is what you had indicated. What are the chances that they extend past that year? And would that be at market rents or is there a prearranged renewal rate?

There's not a prearranged rate. Obviously, it's a large space, so it would be at market or discount the market because they're taking up a lot of space. But their contract, the reason why they wanted a one-year deal was because their contract has a one-year out on it with DirecTV, I believe. And as soon as that extension date goes by, they will extend. Now, if for some reason that contract didn't extend, There's two buildings there. It's not one building. They would always need one of the two buildings, so they would extend one of them, not the other one. So it's not likely that they're going to move out.

In your prepared commentary, there was the mention of transitory vacancy, 487,000 square feet. Some of that was going to, it sounds like, start into 2025. But then there was wording about executing leases on 70% of that space. So I'm not really sure if those two sentences tie to each other. I was wondering if you could just elaborate on that.

Yeah, so there was some leases that we expected to start in Q4, start generating cash in Q4 that are likely going to start in 2025. Yeah, so the 70%...

reference, John, was for leases executed but not commenced. We'll see contribution from 70% of that transitory vacancy in early Q1.

Oh, so when you say executed, that means occupancy, not signing a lease.

No. Executed lease, they haven't taken occupancy nor has rent commenced as of yet. But we have a lease agreement that is drafted and signed.

And then on your pursuit pipeline, I think the first time you used that wording of 11 million square feet, how much of that do you expect to eventually close?

That's a tough question, John. We really don't know. I mean, we don't. We're so volatile when it comes to acquisitions and capital that we can't say 10% closure rate. And if it's on the pipeline, it's really something that we could execute on, right? So this is not product in California or somewhere like that. This is product that's in our markets. I don't have a great answer for you to say that, but I will say that, I mean, we're actively negotiating – you know, over $300 million of acquisitions as we sit here today with LOIs.

Yeah, John, I think the way to look at that is that that pursuit pipeline is a subset of the larger pipeline. And so there is a higher kind of confidence level around execution. But to Jeff's point, that's a difficult thing to specifically handicap.

Yeah, because, I mean, last quarter it was less than a million square feet. Now it's 11. It's a pretty big jump. So I'm just wondering if

Well, I mean, we closed a six-feet transaction, right, which you never know a deal like that's going to close until you get to the table and sign the docs, which we did. And so with that capital, you know, we now can put LOIs out and stuff like that. So, you know, capital is always the question. If you have it, you can be aggressive, and if you don't, You can't be. So that's the catalyst. The six-street capital is the catalyst for us to have a much bigger pipeline that's actionable, not just to talk about it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Todd Thomas with QBank Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks. Good morning. I wanted to... ask about the NOI bridge or the FFO bridge that was provided in the prepared commentary, which was really helpful. Thank you for that. And sort of going back to Rich's question about earnings or NOI growth going forward, maybe just to confirm around the fourth quarter, looks like the three cent noi shortfall um that's the piece that's not recurring um so your 4q implied guidance is 48 cents at the midpoint 47 at the lower bound is that right and is that how we should think about the exit rate into 2025 or when we think about um you know some of the moving pieces around the sixth street transaction and other leasing and so forth. Is there anything else that would weigh on FFO as we do think about, you know, sort of the run rate into 25?

No, I think your interpretation of the articulation of that bridge is accurate. You know, I think Jim mentioned we did have some one-time impacts, the most meaningful of which was, you know, $500,000 cleanup fee essentially related to the tenancy at 1350 Moore.

Got it. So that includes now everything that's been announced, everything you know, and then some of the lease-ups, some of the commencements, and, you know, some of the capital deployment. All of that should build off of the fourth quarter FFO run rate. Correct. Okay. Okay. And then I just had a question about leasing in general and sort of the leasing pipeline and some of the discussions that you're having with tenants. You know, we've heard about longer decision-making timeframes, and I'm just curious to get your take, you know, with the election being behind us. Does that improve leasing activity at all at the margin, or is there, you know, still a bit of uncertainty or maybe more uncertainty and hesitation around you know, maybe certain policies that might, you know, prohibit leasing activity from picking up a bit. What's your thought process there? What are you hearing?

So, Jim will jump in here in a minute, Todd, but this is Jeff. You know, I think, you know, we were together, what, four or five weeks ago, and, you know, after that, you know, the velocity of leasing really, really slowed down, again, whether it's the election or whatever, but I think we were out four or five weeks ago talking to investors, and we actually felt a pickup in activity, but the last three or four weeks, there's been a real slowdown. Personally, I would think that is leading up to the election and possible rate cut today and so on and so forth. Jim, you want to add some color?

Yeah. Specifically on St. Louis, we had a couple of tenants that said they weren't going to make a decision until after the election. Hopefully they get back to us in the very near future.

Okay. Thank you.

The next question comes from Brendan Lynch with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you for taking my question. On the St. Louis asset, Jeff, you mentioned that you have about 10 prospects. and now you have different prospects. Can you give any color on how that process is evolving and the new lease proposals?

Sure. Jim, St. Louis.

Yeah, sure. So a little recap of the St. Louis market. So there's approximately $3.8 million of space available in Edwardsville sub-market and seven buildings, including ours. There are four leasing transactions that are nearing completion that would effectively take half of the space off the market. These are deals for various reasons are not ideal for us. Pricing was low and there's some hazard issues on what's being stored. So we're not expecting to close on these. However, we're still in the RFP process on those. However, if we don't ultimately close on one of them and leave only three buildings with space over 325,000 square feet in the market, One of these is only 326,000 square feet, so we are one of two buildings that can afford to use over 500,000 square feet. So what I'm getting at is we're really the only game in the market, and our building is new, and that other building is 30 years old. So with all this pickup in the market and activity, I'm really confident that we're going to land a prospect very soon.

Okay, thank you. That's helpful. Some of your peers are also leaning more into occupancy over rate at present. Given the uptick in vacancy in the portfolio, can you talk about how you're trying to balance those two things as we go into 2025?

So specifically in Q2, our rent growth was a little lower, and partially to do because we had two renewals in Indianapolis on large tenants that took up additional space. Because they took on additional space, the rent increase wasn't quite as high, so they drove it down. From where we were at, you know, normally like 18% down to like the 12.2% that you see. So really, you know, we are factoring that into our deals. And in this case, we're working with tenants to expand and, of course, give them a little rate discount if they do.

Great. Thank you for taking my question.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Anthony Howe with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. Can you guys provide any progress update on the remaining lead space at Letty in St. Louis and the 16801 Exchange in Chicago? And what's the interest level for these spaces right now?

Yeah, we're really confident that the existing tenants are going to expand into either all of the 40,000 square feet left at LATI or at least half, probably by the end of the year. That's our timeframe. And on exchange, that building, there's been a lot of interest, but the deal hasn't come through. What we're doing is we've managed to get the taxes down quite a bit during the year to our appeal process, but we're also applying for a 6B status, which requires the building to be vacant for one year, which it will be at the end of this year, and that will get us an additional 60% savings on taxes and make the building much more attractive going forward.

And then for the St. Louis building, if you guys can't find an attractive deal, at what point do you decide to redevelop it into a multi-tenant building? And what would the incremental return be?

Yeah, so, I mean, ideally we want to not go – We really want two tenants in there, one or two. We don't really want to go beyond that. It's easily divided into two. You get into three, you're going to have to put in more offices. So that's our objective is to keep it to one or two at this point.

And that particular building?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's the case with every building, Anthony, right? This is Jeff. Some buildings are conducive to multi-tenant and some are not. So when you have a million square feet, you don't just break it up into 10 bays or something like that. I mean, how are your doors? How is it sprinklered? Where are the wastewater? I mean, all these things come into play. If you have to start jackhammering concrete floors to put in pipes, that costs a fortune. So we're on that. That's something we're specialists at.

Okay. And just one last question for me. For the Cleveland spaces, are you guys expecting to receive rent payments through the eviction court?

We haven't factored it in, but we are expecting to get some compensation.

And how much would that be? And would you guys receive it year-end or in 2025?

I would not count on that, Anthony. Let us work the process, but from a modeling perspective and certainly from an accounting perspective, I would expect zero return.

Yeah, and we don't want to be talking on an open call, our legal strategies. All right, we're on it. This isn't our first rodeo. All set?

This is the end of the question and answer session, and the conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.