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spk03: Good day, and welcome to Sonita Senior Living First Quarter 2022 Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. All statements today, which are not historical facts, may be deemed to be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are made as of today's date, and the company expressly disclaims any obligation to update these statements in the future. Actual results and performance may differ materially from forward-looking statements. Certain of these factors that could cause actual results to differ are detailed in the earnings release the company issued earlier today, as well as in the reports the company files with the SEC from time to time, including the risk factors contained in the annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Please see today's press release for the full Safe Harbor Statement, which may be found at www.sonitaseniorliving.com. forward slash invest dash relations, and was furnished in the 8K filings this morning. Also, please note that during this call, the company will present non-GAAP financial measures. For reconciliations of each non-GAAP measure from the most comparable GAAP measure, please also see today's press release. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Sonita Senior Living President and CEO, Ms. Kimberly Lodi.
spk05: Thank you, Doug. Good afternoon, or good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our conference call to discuss Anita Senior Living's first quarter 2022 results. Joining me today are Brandon Rebar, our Chief Operating Officer, and our new Chief Financial Officer, Kevin Dietz. There is a lot of good news this quarter. Most importantly, we've now delivered four consecutive quarters of occupancy and revenue growth, clearly demonstrating that our COVID-19 recovery and growth strategy is succeeding. Same store occupancy for the quarter is 82.3%, a 680 basis point improvement compared to 75.5% during the same quarter last year. Same store resident revenue increased 12% compared to the same quarter last year due to the strong occupancy increase as well as solid performance on rate growth. Revenue per occupied unit increased 3.2% compared to the first quarter of 2021. Keep in mind that Sonita's in-place rent increases occur throughout the year on a rolling basis as resident leases renew. This provides us with ongoing flexibility to consider community and market situations in the level of rent increases at renewal time. Breaking down the Rev4 increase a bit more, our in-place rent increases are pacing at about 5% through the first quarter. In addition, market rates for new move-ins during the same period are also about 5% higher than the corresponding rate for the exact same apartment recently vacated. So we feel good about our execution on rate increases through the first three months of the year, both in terms of in-place renewals, as well as market rents for new move-ins. Importantly, our same store portfolio has begun to deliver margin expansion. Same store net operating income increased 13% sequentially from the fourth quarter of 2021 An NOI margin increased 200 basis points from the low point of 18.2% in the fourth quarter of 21 to 20.2% in the first quarter of 2022. Our COVID recovery strategy was to focus heavily on occupancy and revenue growth, knowing that NOI would follow. As I mentioned earlier, we've now delivered four consecutive quarters of occupancy and revenue growth. We believe that our performance in the first quarter of 2022 marks the beginning of incremental NOI expansion as we continue to grow occupancy and revenue while also managing costs, especially contract labor costs that have been very elevated in recent months. Our community leadership teams have been working hard to reduce the need for contract agency staffing by focusing intense effort on recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining new team members. As a result, net hires have been strongly positive in both of the most recent two quarters. This indicates not only further reductions in utilization of costly premium labor, but also, most importantly, stability and consistency in our workforce. Speaking of the amazing team members we have at Sunita, I'd like to highlight a couple of results from a recent company-wide resident satisfaction survey conducted by an independent third-party organization. For all levels of care across our organization, 92% of respondents agree or strongly agree that their community feels like home. For communities with our unique Magnolia Trails memory care program, our satisfaction scores surpass the 2022 industry memory care benchmarks in activities, caregiving, and safety. We are very proud of these results and even more proud of the people working in our communities because the satisfaction scores directly reflect our unrelenting commitment to excellence. We believe that by continuing to focus on three major priorities, we will provide short- and long-term incremental value for our investors, employees, and residents. Our top priority is the health, wellness, and engagement of our residents and team members with continued development of our people-centered culture and differentiated resident programming. Second is delivering occupancy recovery to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022. And third is NOI expansion. We expect to improve our net operating income sequentially throughout the year by growing occupancy, increasing rates responsibly, deploying innovative staffing solutions, and diligently managing expenses. Lastly, I'm delighted to welcome Kevin Dietz as Sonita's Chief Financial Officer. Kevin joined the company on May 1st, and he, along with existing and new team members, are already providing significant value to the business. I'll now turn the call over to Kevin for a couple of introductory comments, and then we'll go to Brandon for more insight on our operations.
spk00: Thank you for those kind words, Kim. To pick up where Kim left off, the first quarter results are proving out that the company is continuing to progress from the inflection point caused by the pandemic. This, along with the recapitalization late last year and great work to provide debt maturity runway, has me equally excited to join the company in this pivotal and exciting time. Having spent the last eight years in hospitality management, I've been extremely impressed with the breadth and depth of talent in our community teams. I'm looking forward to working with Kim, Brandon, and the entire leadership team to execute on the company's growth strategy. Part of this growth strategy includes a keen focus on our cost to serve Corporate G&A maximizing our incremental margins on growth while rate and occupancy push up. At this time, I will turn it over to our Chief Operating Officer, Brandon Rebar.
spk01: Thank you, Kevin, and good afternoon. While we are all hopeful the first quarter marks the end of the most impactful stages of the pandemic, I'm so pleased with the resilience of our local and regional operating teams through yet another period of operating headwinds. The challenges of the labor market driven by accelerated COVID cases could easily have stalled the ongoing improvement in our operating metrics. However, we not only achieved occupancy improvement over Q4 2021 in a traditionally down quarter for senior living, but also delivered sequential improvement in rev pour and operating margin in the face of the operating headwinds. Even more encouraging, performance trends within rate, volume, and key labor metrics all moved favorably during March and April. positioning us well for sequential improvement as Kim referenced. In Q1, we also completed and integrated our first acquisition in nearly five years with the purchase of 157 independent living units across two communities in the Indianapolis MSA. With both an expected yield on cost exceeding 10% at stabilization and AFFO contribution in the low teens, we are confident this acquisition will return value to our shareholders. We are encouraged by early results from our sales and marketing efforts as the communities were able to improve nine percentage points of occupancy in the first two months as part of the Sunita team. Our goal is to continue to identify similar acquisition opportunities in markets where we operate today or markets where we don't currently operate that have similar characteristics to our current portfolio. As Kim referenced, we are pleased with both sequential revenue growth of 2.2% as well as year-over-year revenue improvement of more than $5 million, or 12%, for the first quarter of 2022. Portfolio occupancy improved in each of the first four months of 2022, and we are pleased that 30 of the 76 communities we own or manage have achieved or exceeded the 90% occupancy mark in May. In comparison, just 16 of our communities were at or above 90% at the end of Q1 2021. Ongoing sales and marketing support and capital investment in our communities with occupancy upside continues to be the focus for 2022. Key indicators related to demand remain encouraging as lead and tour volume for Q1 increased 18% and 11% respectively over the same period in 2021 and generated a 13% year-over-year increase in total move-ins. Our strategic focus on increased generation of move-ins through market outreach and digitally generated leads led to a year-over-year increase in move-ins generated from our own efforts and less reliance on third-party aggregators. One of our 2022 goals is to invest capital in several of our communities to continue to enhance our competitive position. These projects began in late 2021, and we now have nearly $8 million in revenue-enhancing capital projects either completed or underway with completion dates in Q2 and Q3. We are pleased that our projects have been only minimally impacted by various supply chain issues in the marketplace. During our recent discussion of year-end results, we referenced positive movement in key labor metrics over the last six months. Year-over-year for Q1, total labor costs increased $3.2 million, and more than 65% of the increase was related to contract labor and overtimes. After another difficult quarter on the labor front, we are cautiously optimistic that Q2 is showing signs of overall improvement. Net hires remain positive and third-party contract agency dollars are expected to decrease sequentially throughout the year. Further implementation of flexible, employee-friendly staffing models that improve resident service and reduce the cost of premium labor are underway across additional CENITA communities in Q2. We have experienced accelerated candidate flow and stability in communities previously requiring use of the third party agency. Our internal recruiting and retention strategies have also increased retention of existing employees in early 2022. Early trends for Q2 show a favorable reduction in year over year employee turnover. Finally, Non-labor related expenses consisting primarily of food, marketing, facility maintenance, and supply related items decreased just under 1% sequentially, with overall food costs declining 8% from the fourth quarter of 2021. In early 2022, we completed implementation of an updated menu management and meal costing technology to further enhance our resident experience and expense management processes. While labor pressure continued to impact margin recovery in the current operating environment, our team is pleased with sequential margin expansion and 13% growth, both sequentially and year over year. Our goals for 2022 remain consistent across all communities, deliver excellent resident care and services through a dedicated, stable team of employees, achieve revenue growth driven by continued occupancy improvement and ongoing REVPOR increase, and improve margin through creative, stable staffing models and strong expense management practices in this high inflation environment. We will now move to the question and answer portion of the call. Operator, please open the line for questions at this time. Thank you.
spk03: Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 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 key. Our first question comes from the line of Stephen Vallecat with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.
spk02: Yeah, thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Hi, Steve. Hey, Steve. Hi. I guess just to start off, you guys had that footnote that in April of 22, you received another $9 million in relief funds, which is obviously pretty positive. Would you expect any additional funds beyond that in the rest of 22, or do you think that's it? And also, if you can just remind us, as the public health emergency potentially ends at some point this year, does that just remind us around the material impact on the company one way or the other, or if that's just kind of a non-event from your perspective, the way you're thinking about that right now? Thanks.
spk04: Yeah, so at this point, we don't expect additional funds. funds from the CARES Act from the federal level.
spk05: There are state programs that are currently underway that we have applied for and we would expect to receive some funding from those state programs. In fact, we received some in in the second quarter so you know we would see that sort of spread out through the rest of the year. But in terms of a big you know nearly $10 million, you know, disbursement to us for the remainder of this year. I don't see that happening. And then in terms of the public health emergency, you know, ending by the end of the year, I think it's really a non-event for us. The one thing that we did do during the pandemic is we did participate in the deferral of certain income taxes related to, you know, employee wages. And we do need to repay $3.7 million of that by the end of this year.
spk04: We've already repaid the first $3.7 million. We made that payment at the end of last year.
spk02: Yeah. Okay. You guys, I think, addressed the labor expense trends for next quarter to kind of where you're leaving off in the first quarter. So I think we'll leave that topic alone for now. Maybe the other one just to touch on quickly would just be around some of your property acquisitions. You obviously had a couple in Indiana and a few in Arkansas. Should investors expect any additional property acquisitions between now and the end of the year? Or do you think what you've completed will keep you guys fairly busy for now as far as the integration process, etc.?
spk05: Well, we're continuing to look for acquisition opportunities. We have pretty specific criteria in terms of what we're looking for. We want to make sure that if we do acquire another community or communities that the fundamentals are there that we can layer on our platform that we've developed here over the last couple of years and really see that improvement in the operations similar to what Brandon referenced for the Indiana communities. with their nine percentage point increase in occupancy just in the first couple of months that they've been with us and on our platform. And then just a note of clarification, the Arkansas communities are Ventas communities that we added to our portfolio of managed communities back in December. So from a managed perspective, we're also interested in continuing to grow that portfolio. But our primary focus is on looking for good acquisition candidates, either in markets where we currently operate and we feel like additional footprint would be helpful, or in markets where we don't operate today, but that the market has characteristics similar to our overall portfolio, meaning their middle market, the same general characteristics that we have in the portfolio. Just to add a couple of additional comments or color to that, you know, we are looking to reduce the average age of the portfolio through those acquisitions, so over time, and we're also looking to deliver as we add to the portfolio and to do that over time as well.
spk02: Got it. Okay. All right. That's it for me. Thanks.
spk04: All right. Great. Thanks, Steve.
spk03: There are no further questions in the queue. I'd like to hand the call back over to Kim Lodi for closing remarks.
spk05: All right, great. Well, this concludes today's conference. I want to thank everyone for attending and have a great day.
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