Plymouth Industrial REIT, Inc. (NYSE:PLYM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Plymouth Industrial REIT, Inc. (NYSE:PLYM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 22, 2024
Plymouth Industrial REIT, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.2 EPS, expectations were $0.47. Plymouth Industrial REIT, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good day, and welcome to the Plymouth Industrial REIT Fourth Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tripp Sullivan. Please go ahead.
Tripp Sullivan: Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the Plymouth Industrial REIT conference call to review the company's results for the fourth quarter of 2023. Yesterday afternoon, we issued our earnings release and posted a copy of our prepared commentary and a supplemental deck on the Quarterly Results section of our Investor Relations page. In addition to these earnings documents, a copy of prior Form 10-K when filed can be found on the SEC filings page of the IR site. The change in timing of our disclosures to yesterday afternoon was in response to previous feedback we received to allow more time to digest the earnings results and supplemental. We also thought it might be even more beneficial for you to read through our prepared commentary ahead of time.
Our supplemental deck includes our full-year 2024 guidance assumptions, detailed information on our operations, portfolio and balance sheet, and 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 Witherell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Anthony Saladino, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Jim Connolly, Executive Vice President of Asset Management; and Anne Hayward, General Counsel. I would like to point everyone to our forward-looking statements on Page 1 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.
Jeff Witherell: Thanks, Tripp. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I hope that everyone had a chance to review the commentary and supplemental information we posted last night. We believe this will provide for an efficient use of time during a busy earnings week. Our intent is to adopt this practice going forward. And as always, we're open to input on how we can improve. There are several themes I want to highlight this morning from our reported results and 2024 outlook. First, the Golden Triangle is a region that we believe can continue to benefit from onshoring and near-shoring of manufacturing to the U.S., Mexico and Canada as well as the complementary wave of suppliers and distributors. The data we've gleaned from a number of independent sources indicates that our markets are in front of a trend that could be measured in terms of decades, not years.
Second, our balance sheet is the strongest it's been in the history of the company, that's 7 straight quarters of reducing leverage to 6.5x and a half turn ahead of where we thought we could be at year-end. With a long-term target of 5 to 7x net debt to EBITDA, we anticipate operating in the 6x range during 2024. Third, we're focused on accretive growth in 2024 that translates into FFO growth. We're projecting a 3-plus percent increase in FFO per share at the midpoint, primarily driven by improved portfolio operations, leasing and same-store NOI growth. With the transaction market starting to come to life, we will look to be more active as the year progresses. We expect to fund growth with a combination of asset sales, use of the credit facility, potentially tapping the investment-grade unsecured notes market and/or selective ATM usage.
And lastly, I'd like to highlight the Board's decision to increase our dividend by 6.7% effective with the first quarter. Together with a better recognition of the value we've created in our portfolio, we anticipate this could help provide an attractive total return to our investors while maintaining an FFO payout ratio of 50% to 51% based on our 2024 guidance. I would now like to turn it over to the operator for questions.
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