Yahoo Finance Investing In Hansteen Holdings PLC (LON:HSTN): What You Need To Know
Hansteen Holdings PLC is a UK£396m small-cap, real estate investment trust (REIT) based in London, United Kingdom. REIT shares give you ownership of the company than owns and manages various income-producing property, whether it be commercial, industrial or residential. The structure of HSTN is unique and it has to adhere to different requirements compared to other non-REIT stocks. In this commentary, I’ll take you through some of the things I look at when assessing HSTN.
Check out our latest analysis for Hansteen Holdings
REIT investors should be familiar with the term Fund from Operations (FFO) – a REIT’s main source of cash flow from its day-to-day business activities. FFO is a higher quality measure of earnings because it takes out the impact of non-recurring sales and non-cash items such as depreciation. These items can distort the bottom line and not necessarily reflective of HSTN’s daily operations. For HSTN, its FFO of UK£151m makes up 281% of its gross profit, which means the majority of its earnings are high-quality and recurring.
HSTN’s financial stability can be gauged by seeing how much its FFO generated each year can cover its total amount of debt. The higher the coverage, the less risky HSTN is, broadly speaking, to have debt on its books. The metric I’ll be using, FFO-to-debt, also estimates the time it will take for the company to repay its debt with its FFO. With a ratio of 51%, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor would consider this as modest risk. This would take HSTN around 2 years to pay off using operating income alone, which is reasonable, given that long term debt is a multi-year commitment.
Next, interest coverage ratio shows how many times HSTN’s earnings can cover its annual interest payments. Usually the ratio is calculated using EBIT, but for REITs, it’s better to use FFO divided by net interest. This is similar to the above concept, but looks at the nearer-term obligations. With an interest coverage ratio of 13.47x, its safe to say HSTN is producing more than enough funds to cover its upcoming payments.
I also use FFO to look at HSTN’s valuation relative to other REITs in United Kingdom by using the price-to-FFO metric. This is conceptually the same as the price-to-earnings (PE) ratio, but as previously mentioned, FFO is more suitable. In HSTN’s case its P/FFO is 2.62x, compared to the long-term industry average of 16.5x, meaning that it is highly undervalued
Next Steps:
In this article, I’ve taken a look at Funds from Operations using various metrics, but it is certainly not sufficient to derive an investment decision based on this value alone. Hansteen Holdings can bring about diversification for your portfolio, but before you decide to invest, take a look at the other aspects you must consider before investing:
Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for HSTN’s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for HSTN’s outlook.
Valuation: What is HSTN worth today? Is the stock undervalued, even when its growth outlook is factored into its intrinsic value? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether HSTN is currently mispriced by the market.
Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.
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If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading.
