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Text: Listeners to any replay should understand that the passage of time by itself will diminish the quality of the statements made.
I hope you and your families are all well.
2020 will be a year not soon forgotten.
The health and economic impacts from COVID-19 have been unprecedented.
Add to this, the social and political unrest our country has experienced, and 2020 will no doubt go down as one of the most historic and difficult years in our lifetime.
While the issues facing an open-air shopping center REIT are small in comparison to 2020's broader challenges, I am proud of RPT's response and execution this past year.
From our tenant assistance program and charitable donations to our property-level safety and curbside pickup initiatives, RPT demonstrated its commitment to our purpose of turning commercial ground into common ground.
We also took swift and decisive actions to shore up our liquidity and preserve our access to capital with our first-time investment-grade credit rating from Fitch.
In addition, I was very pleased with the team's tireless effort in pursuit of rent collections, which improved to 91% in the fourth quarter.
Following the payoff of our remaining $100 million balance on our revolver, we have over $100 million of cash and a fully undrawn $350 million revolver and are now positioned to take full advantage of our unique and valuable partnership with GIC and opportunistically execute on our external growth plans.
We continue to track a healthy pipeline of acquisitions and have started to see some improvement in activity in recent weeks.
Let me just reemphasize that the underlying real estate is the primary driver of our acquisition strategy.
What we then look for is growth.
That could come in a variety of ways from under-market rents and mismanaged assets to redevelopment opportunities.
It could also come in a variety of different retail formats from grocery anchored, lifestyle centers, power centers to community centers.
As previously reported, we had five deals in our GIC venture either signed or in negotiations in February of 2020.
Once the pandemic hit, we and our partners made the decision to get out of all of them.
We are now fortunate to have the liquidity and the deep pipeline within our core markets and believe the widening value gap between property types, tenant categories and markets is creating differentiated opportunities that we hope to take advantage of in 2021.
One thing we pride ourselves on is skating to where the puck is going, not to where it's been.
Last year, we entered the Austin market with our off-market acquisitions of Lakehills Plaza.
Since our acquisition, Tesla announced a new $1.1 billion assembly plant.
Google, Oracle and Digital Realty, to name a few, each announced relocation or expansion plans to Austin.
And Barshop & Oles announced plans for a new $1 billion mixed-use development directly across the highway from our property.
It's been a little over a year since our acquisition.
And we are more convinced than ever about this dynamic market that truly represents where the puck is going.
From a leasing perspective, we continue to make good progress on our grocery negotiations and are also in negotiations with tenant categories such as home improvement, wholesale club stores, off-price, QSR and medical-use tenants.
This quarter, we signed a total of 120,000 square feet, up 10% year-over-year.
Notable signings this quarter included two new deals with a modern, tech-enabled healthcare provider.
These deals exemplify our enhanced focus on health and wellness tenants.
We also have good activity on the two Stein Mart boxes that we took back in the quarter, where we have an opportunity to significantly improve the tenancies of both boxes.
At under $11.50 of ABR per square foot, we also see a solid mark-to-market opportunity upon release of these spaces.
One Stein Mart box is already in lease and the other has multiple LOIs that are being negotiated with some very strong national brands.
We ended the fourth quarter with a signed but not open backlog of $3.2 million, up from $3 million last quarter.
We are currently tracking roughly $2 million of ABR that is currently in lease negotiation, up from about $1.5 million last quarter, giving us some visibility on offsets to potential future fallout.
The leasing pipeline is robust, and we are encouraged by the impact it will have on our future cash flows.
Additionally, we have a number of remerchandising opportunities that we are pursuing that are listed in our supplement.
These 11 projects consist of redemising, expanding or combining spaces similar to the 18 targeted remerchandising opportunities that we completed in 2019.
As we did on those projects, we expect to earn attractive returns on our capital of high single to low double digits on this next set of deals.
Despite the end of year increase in reported COVID cases, our suburban portfolio was less impacted by additional lockdown measures taken since this summer.
94% of our portfolio by ABR remains open, unchanged from last quarter, with 4% of our closures tied to our theaters.
The reopening of our theaters remains fluid.
Our exposure is almost entirely tied to Regal, whose parent company, Cineworld, recently obtained additional financing they expect to provide liquidity through 2021 and beyond, which is a positive milestone for this tenant.
While we continue to place a high premium on our cheapest source of capital, retained cash flows, we understand how important the dividend is as a component of our total return to shareholders.
With that in mind, we established a $0.075 per share common dividend for the first quarter of 2021.
The quarterly rate reflects a purposeful analysis of our expected taxable income and our liquidity needs.
We believe the new rate is sustainable and could be grown in conjunction with earnings while allowing us to preserve cash to support our growth opportunities and providing sufficient cushion to weather periodic future downturns.
Today, I will discuss our fourth quarter results, our strong balance sheet and liquidity position, and end with commentary to help everyone understand our expectations on how our business will trend in 2021.
For the fourth quarter, our bad debt and abatements were $4.4 million, about the same as the third quarter.
We reserved about 89% of our uncollected fourth quarter recurring billings, leaving limited downside from these categories relative to our fourth quarter run rate.
As of year-end, $18.1 million of recurring billings for the period of April through December 2020 remain outstanding, of which $11.9 million have been reserved.
We expect most of the unreserved amount of $6.2 million to be paid back over the course of 2021 and 2022.
We continue to be quite pleased with the resiliency of our portfolio and our limited bankruptcy exposure as our leased rate of 92.8% held up well in the quarter, down just 50 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by the recapture of our two Stein Mart leases that I noted last quarter.
Blended rent spreads for the quarter remained positive at 3.4%, impacted by a few flat strategic renewals.
Also, it's important to note that the releasing spread is just one factor in the organic growth profile.
The other factor that we heavily weigh in lease negotiations are the annual contractual rent increases.
The leases that we signed during the quarter, annual contractual rent increases, were about 150 basis points, which is a key contributor to creating a long-term sustainable NOI growth profile.
As we have noted consistently, we expect some volatility in our quarterly statistics given the size of our portfolio but see a continued mark-to-market opportunity as we cycle legacy leases over the next few years.
And as Brian noted in his remarks regarding dividend policy, we have placed a premium on free cash flow, allowing us to utilize our cheapest form of capital to take advantage of these opportunities as we restabilize our portfolio to pre-COVID leased rate levels of nearly 95%.
We were very pleased with our first-ever investment-grade credit rating from Fitch, highlighting our balance sheet strength and flexibility.
Couple this distinction with an increased confidence in our business and in our access to low-cost debt capital, we no longer felt the need to maintain an outsized cash balance and repaid the remaining revolver balance of $100 million last week.
We will also continue to mine our portfolio for additional capital-raising opportunities to further bolster our liquidity position and fuel our external growth plans.
We ended the fourth quarter with trailing 12-month net debt to pro forma adjusted EBITDA of 7.4 times, up slightly from 7.2 times last quarter as another COVID-impacted quarter entered the calculation.
We remain committed to bringing leverage into our long-term target range of 5.5 to 6.5 times and expect to see steady improvement in EBITDA as we return to more normalized reserve levels and as our signed leasing backlog begins to kick in over the course of 2021.
We are establishing 2021 operating FFO per share guidance of $0.77 to $0.87, which is an expected improvement over the annualized 2020 fourth quarter operating FFO per share of $0.72.
Key drivers from there are a favorable impact of $0.03 from interest expense, primarily due to the repayment of our revolving line of credit, and $0.02 from our signed not open backlog that we expect the vast majority to open ratably in 2021.
Further upside is based on favorable bad debt reserves, which we expect to be heavily influenced by the reopening of our theaters, which is a function of the trajectory of the vaccine rollout and movie productions.
While our assumption is that these circumstances will improve over the course of '21, we felt establishing a wider range was appropriate given the potential varying outcomes for our theater exposure, which represent about $0.10 per share of earnings.
If our theaters remain closed and do not pay their contractual rent, our operating FFO could be at the low end of the range.
And conversely, if they are open and paying, we should be near the high end, all else equal.
It is important to note that our guidance does not include the net impact of changes to 2020 estimates for bad debt and straight-line rent reserves.
Also, while acquisitions are not assumed in our guidance range, we intend to redeploy $100 million of cash on the balance sheet into opportunistic acquisitions that meet our strict underwriting standards, representing upside to our range.
While the near-term COVID trajectory remains uncertain, we are cautiously optimistic that the worst is now behind us.
As we move closer to a more normalized environment and given the conflicting impacts of permanent move-outs and rent collection statistics, we hope to return our focus to more traditional measures of REIT operating performance like occupancy, rent spreads and same-property NOI growth.
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our disclosures, this quarter we added a net asset value page to our supplemental on page 14 to help facilitate your analysis of our real estate value.

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rpt realty reinstates quarterly common dividend.
initiated 2021 operating ffo per diluted share guidance of $0.77 to $0.87.

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