Full Transcript: Four Corners Property Tr Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Four Corners Property Tr (NYSE:FCPT) reported first-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company's first-quarter earnings call has been provided below. This content is powered by Benzinga APIs. For comprehensive financial data and transcripts, visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/. The full earnings call is available at https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/865913566 Summary Four Corners Property Tr reported a 3.4% growth in AFFO per share for Q1 2026, continuing positive momentum from 2025. The company acquired $26 million in net lease properties at a 6.8% blended cash cap rate, with a strong pipeline expected for Q2. A new $200 million term loan with a 4.9% rate was announced, aimed at funding acquisitions through Q3. Rent coverage remains strong at 5.1 times, with major brands like Olive Garden and Longhorn showing impressive same-store sales growth. The company is diversifying its portfolio beyond casual dining, expanding into automotive service, medical retail, and QSR sectors. Portfolio occupancy is high at 99.6%, with minimal bad debt and strong performance across tenants. The company reaffirmed its guidance for 2026 cash GNA and highlighted the strategic importance of portfolio construction. Michael Friedland joined the board, bringing extensive experience from JP Morgan. Management expressed confidence in the ability to exceed acquisition targets and highlighted the competitive strength of their tenant roster. Full Transcript OPERATOR A question, please press Star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press Star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Patrick Wernig, CFO. Patrick, please go ahead. Patrick Wernig (Chief Financial Officer) Thank you. During the course of this call we will make forward looking statements which are based on our beliefs and assumptions. Actual results will be affected by known and unknown factors that are beyond our control or ability to predict. Our assumptions are not a guarantee of future performance and some will prove to be incorrect. For a more detailed description of some potential risks, please refer to our SEC filings which can be found@fcpt.com. all the information presented on this call is current as of today, April 30, 2026. In addition, reconciliation to non GAAP financial measures presented on this call such as FFO and AFFO can be found in the Company's supplemental report. Please note that if you are a Research Analyst, you have been emailed a meeting ID which is 865-913-566.. We'll repeat that at the end of our prepared remarks. That PIN will allow you to ask questions during the Q&A session. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bill. Bill Good morning. Following my initial remarks, Josh will comment on our investment activity and Patrick will discuss financial results and capital position Q1 marked a continuation of the momentum from 2025 and a strong start to 2026. AFFO per share grew by 3.4% versus the prior year period. Continuing our focus on steady risk adjusted growth during Q1 we acquired 26 million of net lease properties at a 6.8 blended cash cap rate equivalent to a 7.3 GAAP cap rate. This is marginally lower volume versus the start of 2025, but I'd emphasize we're seeing a lot of attractive opportunities and feel good about the strength of our pipeline. Seasonally we tend to see fewer deals close in Q1 versus later in the year and Q2 is shaping out that way. So far over the last 12 months we've acquired 288 million of properties. We're also excited to have closed on a new $200 million term loan with seven year tenor earlier this month. The term loan all in rate is 4.9% which represents 200 basis points of spread to historical acquisition yields. We will be able to invest that money accretively. Our rent coverage in Q1 was 5.1 times for the majority of our portfolio that reports this figure. This remains amongst the strongest coverage within the net lease industry. The rent coverage figure for our Darden properties specifically is 5.8 times been very consistent, remaining very lofty 5 times for the past 3 years. As a reminder, the first tranche of lease maturities due to send us extension notices by October of this year. While we can't know the outcome with certainty, barring a material change in the operating performance of these stores, we would expect a very high renewal percentage for the spinoff portfolio in the coming years. To that end, our largest brands, Olive Garden, Longhorn, Chili's continue to be leaders within the net lease tenant universe. Most recently, Brinker reported Chili's Same Store growth of 4% for the quarter ended March 2026 after a 31% increase. A year ago, Olive Garden and Longhorn reported same store sales growth of 3% and 7% respectively for the quarter. Remarkable results for the three brands that represent 40% 47% of our portfolio rent combined. Bring that point home. I'll call it a new slide on page seven of our investor deck that shows the strong outperformance of our publicly traded tenants versus the generic All Restaurant Index. The key takeaway is portfolio construction is extremely important and by being selective with our tenant partners, we're building what we believe is a fortress portfolio brick by brick. Our lead restaurant tenants appear to be taking market share, have not shown signs of slowing down. To that end, our portfolio has avoided some of the more problematic lease sectors experiencing long term macro headwinds. This includes theaters, pharmacies and experience until retail. More generally, we benefit from our strong portfolio construction with low basis fungible buildings operated by tenants and sectors that are e commerce and recession resistant. We have had no major tenant credit issues leading to very low bad debt expense and very little vacancy in our portfolio. On this topic, we would like to provide a brief update on our Bahama Breeze properties. As a point of clarification, we own 10 Bahama Breeze properties which is 1.3% of our ABR. That said, Darden is planning to convert six of these locations to other brands they operate Yard House, Olive Garden, Longhorn, Chewies, etc. They'd like to convert more but they're limited by already having nearby existing locations and in some cases co tenancy restrictions. So the remaining four properties are 50 basis points of ABR and we already have actively negotiating letters of intent with new tenants to backfill these locations. Based on the figures we're negotiating, we expect to recover or possibly even exceed the prior rent paid by Darden, although the timing and final economics will ultimately depend on the outcome of these negotiations. It takes a few months to negotiate a lease and we should have further updates on timing at the Q2 earnings call, but overall very good shape. Remarkably, I'd like to point out that it's been less than three months since Darby announced the brand closure. For us to have potential solutions across the board for all time locations so quickly just highlights how our focus strategy is strong. Underlying real estate and replaceable rent levels will benefit us long term. In any case, we'll continue to collect rent throughout the backfill process as Darden is still obligated to make rent payments on these leases for all 10 locations for at least one and a half years and in some cases up to four. That provides us flexibility as we work through the preferred backfill tenant options. Shifting gears we continue to diversify our portfolio. 37% of our rent now comes from tenants outside the casual dining subsector including Automotive service at 13%, medical retail 11% and QSR restaurants at 11%. We are actively exploring new retail categories and property types as we look to expand the top of our funnel for investments as when we developed our automotive service and medical retail property strategies prior to investing in a new sector, we evaluate the business resiliency and AI disruption risk availability of credit worthy tenants, real estate quality and pricing attractiveness. That said, for us the limiting factor on these sectors and deals is typically sellers lofty pricing expectations. Finally, and this is a very exciting point, I'd like to mention that Michael Friedland has joined our board. Michael recently retired from JP Morgan and brings 30 years of Wall street experience in real estate finance and corporate credit to fcpt. We've known Michael a long time and we're really impressed and glad he's joined our board. Welcome Michael. Over to you Josh. Josh Thanks Bill. I'll start with a review of Q1 activity and then touch on our investment pipeline. In Q1 we acquired 10 properties with a weighted average lease term of 10 years for $26 million at a blended 6.8% cash cap rate or a 7.3% gap cap rate. This represents an average basis of $2.6 million per property. Extending our strategy of partnering with credit worthy operators and while focusing on fungible low cost basis assets to help mitigate downside risk. We are really happy with the asset selection this quarter and as Bill noted, Q1 is a typically a lower volume period for us and the ending volume for the period lined up well with our internal expectations. That said, Q2 is shaping up to be consistent with our typical seasonal volume ramp. Our Q1 acquisitions were composed of 46% restaurant, 28% auto service and 26% medical retail properties on the credit side, all of our properties acquired in Q1 were leased to corporate operators, the only exception being our McAllister's Deli in Michigan which is leased to Southern Rock, the largest McAlister's franchisee with 178 locations across 13 states. Our team continues to partner with leading operators in each of our chosen retail subsectors. Coupled with our low basis rent filtering, we have a proven track record of building a resilient and long standing portfolio. In the meantime, our team continues to actively explore all avenues for investment, both large portfolios and small granular deals in addition to assets in new subsectors as evidence in Q4.25 while we are expanding the top of our investment funnel, we will continue to maintain our discipline in acquiring low basis investments based at best in class operators at pricing accretive to our cost of capital. Patrick Bestier Thanks Josh. Patrick Bestier I'll start by talking about the state of our balance sheet and an update on our capital sourcing, including our recently closed term loan. We funded $50 million of new incremental of the new incremental $200 million term loan in April and the balance will be used to fund acquisitions in Q2 and Q3. The term loan credit margin is 125 basis points over SOFR or an all in rate of approximately 4.9%. We fully hedged our current outstanding term loan balance of $640 million as of April 30 at a blended SOFR rate of 3.1% or approximately 4% all in, with that rate steady through November 2027. Our supplemental disclosure includes a detailed pro forma hedge schedule. We also continue to benefit from full capacity under our $350 million revolver with respect to leverage. At the end of Q1, our net debt to adjusted EBITDA was just 5 times. This is our seventh consecutive quarter of leverage below 5.5 times and at the bottom end of our stated leverage range of five to six times. Noting that our term loan closed after quarter end, but after fully funding and investing the proceeds, estimated run rate leverage will be 5.4 times. Our fixed charge coverage ratio remains a very healthy 4.8 times as of quarter end donated debt maturities. Once factoring in the extension options for our existing term loan, we have no debt maturities until December when just $50 million of private notes come due. We plan to address this in due course closer to the maturity date. Our staggered maturity schedule will ensure we do not face a significant maturity wall at any point thereafter. Turning to some of our Earnings highlights for Q1 FFO per share was 45 cents representing 3.4% growth versus prior year. Cash rental income was $70 million representing 10% growth versus prior year. Annualized cash based rent for leases in place as a quarter end was 266 million and our weighted average 5 year annual cash rent escalator is 1.5%. Cash G&A expense was $4.9 million for the quarter representing 7% of cash rental income compared to 7.7% for the prior year. The 70 basis point improvement in operating leverage and flat cash G and A compared to the prior year illustrates our continued efforts at achieving efficient growth and the benefits of our rising scale. Following our Q1 results, we are reaffirming our guidance range for 2026 cash GNA of 19.2 to $19.7 million. We've also continued to make progress with 27 of the 42 leases originally expiring in 2026. Extended recapture rate on these locations is 6% above prior year rent. We're currently negotiating to retented two of those properties and the remaining 13 now represent just 1% of ABR down from 2.6% at the beginning of 2025. Our portfolio occupancy remains very strong and 99.6% today which benefits from releasing some of our very limited number of vacant sites. We collected 99.7% of base rate in Q1 last quarter, did not see any material changes to our collectability or credit reserves. As an aside, during this call we've referenced two of our new disclosure updates which I'll highlight again now. First, going forward we plan to disclose GAAP cap rates along with the cash cap rate figure we've always done. We have very low default rates historically and our intention is to hold our properties long term. Therefore, the data related to those expected long term returns is another helpful metric for our investors. Our presentation includes a new slide on page eight that had GAAP gap rates going back to 2023 and shows that historically they have averaged about 70 basis points higher than our initial cash cap rates. Second, we are updating the way we disclose AFFO per share growth by calculating without the impact of two decimal rounding based on our share count. Rounding can be impactful in this figure, particularly for quarterly comparisons. Our updated approach will allow us to quote a more accurate growth figure. We continue to aim for ways to improve transparency with the investor community and believe that these changes are aligned with value to us. With that, we'll turn over to questions for the Q and A session. And just a reminder, the meeting ID is 865-913-566. If you would like to ask a question. Thank you. OPERATOR We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one. Again, we ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality if you are muted locally. Please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q and A roster. Your first question comes from Michael Goodsmith from the line of UVs. Michael, go ahead. Michael Goldsmith (Equity Analyst) Thank you. It's Michael Goldsmith from UBS. Thanks for taking the question first. First question is, I know you guys don't provide discrete guidance, but maybe this $200 million term loan is shadow guidance in that you've talked about fully drawing that down to the second and the third quarter. So is that, you know, as we think about just the acquisition activity, you've got the 200 million there. Consensus at 275 million on acquisitions for the year. And that's stepping down to 250 million next year. So just trying to get a sense of, you know, your liquidity, the acquisition market. And now, you know, you kind of have clear line of sight into acquisitions of, let's say, 200 million through the third quarter. You know, should you be able to exceed that and continue to acquire healthily into next year. Bill Thanks. So, Michael, you know our business well, I think the answer might be hidden in your question. But yeah, if we, you know, are very particular about how our press releases are drafted. And I think we gave more specific timing guidance than we have in the past. I would say it's always curious that analysts seem to have declining acquisitions for us, which is unusual in the space. I don't think there are other companies that's the case. I'm not sure why it's not what has been a historical record. Michael Goldsmith (Equity Analyst) Got it. And then as a follow up, appreciate the new slides in the presentation. I think pages seven and eight. Can you just kind of walk through what you're trying to show here? I think you're indicating that the Four Corners Property Trust portfolio or the tenants and the tenants that you guys are. How your tenants are outperforming, maybe the general overall restaurant industry. And then separately. Right, like your, your GAAP cash rate, GAAP cap rates are exceeding your cash. But maybe you could just provide a little bit more detail about what, what the point that you're trying to make Bill with both of these things. Yeah, absolutely. Great question. We had an investor show us our stock price versus a some generic index. I think it might have been MSCI or Morgan Stanley, some generic restaurant index. And you had to be a little cute with the start date to get it to line up. But there was a pretty high correlation. And so they were sort of making the point, do you trade like a restaurant index? And we think that that's a silly concept on its face, but if we were going to trade like in a restaurant index, at a minimum, you should weight the index by our rent and look at the stock performance of our tenants weighted by our rent. And if you do that, you get the yellow line, which is a. You know, shows how strong Darden and Chili's have been and that we don't have, you know, because we weighted it basically down as far as we could with public companies. We don't have, you know, companies that have fallen into distress. Our tenant roster is really strong. The GAAP cap rate. We have a competitor agree that we admire. It's a great company. They have historically used gap cap rates. We have gotten questions about where our cap rates are versus theirs. There seemed to be some investor confusion that they're quoting two different things. Both numbers are perfectly legitimate ways of looking at it, but sometimes we felt our cash cap rates were being compared against their gap cap rates. And so we just did the math and showed you the data. So you can pick and choose the way you want to do it. I'll handle the last new disclosure. You didn't ask about it, Michael, but I'll just handle it. Now, about rounding, which is, you know, we just thought this is a more accurate way of doing it. We went back, you know, not surprisingly, some of the times the rounding would. Would comparing rounded to rounded versus more closely actual actual would, you know, have a higher growth rate some of the time. A lower growth rate some of the time. We just thought this was a better way of showing it. There seems to be a lot of focus on growth today, and we wanted to give you the most accurate number you can. Do you have more questions about that? It's a pretty technical calculation. I'd probably recommend you reach back out to Pat after the call on the. On the rounding issue. Thanks so much, guys. Good luck in the second quarter. Appreciate it. Thanks, Michael. OPERATOR Your next question comes from the line of Eric Borden from BMO Capital Markets. Eric, go ahead. Eric Borden (Equity Analyst) Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just given your strong relationship with Yum and Brinker, you know, are there any identical acquisition opportunities as Yum expands on its Taco Bell platform and Brinker expands on its Chili platform? Just given the strength in same store sales there, whether it's on the acquisition front or potentially, you know, a development opportunity. Bill Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we're always working on. On those. You know, we. The one comment I'd make is Taco Bells tend to trade for very, very tight cap rates, but we're always working on. On things like that. Being aligned with strong brands where we can play offense and not have to be licking the wounds of prior investment mistakes is a huge advantage. But I would say that both of the brands you mentioned, they traded very, very competitive cap rates on the secondary market. Eric Borden (Equity Analyst) Okay, that's helpful. And then just on the bad debt side of things, you just talk about anything that's been realized year to date and, you know, how are you thinking about bad debt for the remainder of 2026? Thank you. Bill Yeah, so the number is zero for. For the year to date. You know, we have over 1300 leases, so we're always kind of monitoring, you know, something in the portfolio. But we have not had any bad debt this year. And the portfolio continues to perform really strong. Say, like, you know, you probably saw Brinker's results yesterday. Recent print by Darden as well. You know, the brands we've aligned with are weathering any sort of macro headwinds very well. There's going to be some brands that don't, but, you know, we. We tried to pick our horses very carefully so that we avoid that. All right. Thank you for the time. Appreciate it. Yeah, of course. OPERATOR Your next question comes from the line of Wes Golladay with Baird. Wes, please go ahead. Wes Golladay (Equity Analyst) Thank you. Good morning to everyone. Can you go back to that comment on the expirations? I think you said 27 of 42 have been renewed. I believe you said 6%. So I would have thought maybe it had been a little bit lower with the contractual rent extensions, but maybe. How should we think about that going forward? Bill I wouldn't overemphasize it. I think we had a positive quarter. You know, our typical rent growth is one and a half percent. If you're modeling our company, I think that's a good place to go. Probably quarter towards better. There might be a quarter where it isn't as good, but one and a half, I think, is a good place to start and finish. Okay, thanks for that. I would also. I would also. Just. Just real quick, Wes, I would just like to, you know, emphasize that Justin and his team have done just a terrific job on property management and asset management and releasing, and that's a new capability for us. Frankly, in the last couple of years, Justin has really aggressively restructured his team and done a terrific job. We are more on top of that as a company than we've ever been by far. Okay, thanks for the additional color there. When we look at the pipeline going forward, is there a bigger percentage of that in the new categories that you're evaluating or are you looking to enter those new categories a little bit more methodically? Yeah, we're really score focused, so we're not really putting emphasis on one category over the other. We're trying to find the assets that score the best and make sure that those rise to the top with appropriate pricing. Okay. But we, you know, we are looking at some new, some new sectors as we talked about last quarter, and really leading into building relationships, finding what tenants we want to emphasize, etc. So the aperture is bigger than it's ever been. Okay. I appreciate the color. OPERATOR Your next question comes from the line of John Kilachowski with Wells Fargo. John, please go ahead. John Kilachowski (Equity Analyst) Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. First one for me, Bill. Thanks for the color on Bahama Breeze. I guess just to expand on that, you know, you mentioned the positive mark on the other asset that weren't being converted. Is there going to be downtime there? Will there be rent loss before the mark or do you think there'll be no net credit loss there? Bill No, I don't think there'll be downtime. The, the Darden is responsible for a year and a half up at the minimum up to four years for the handful that we're converting to other tenants. You know, but to the extent that there's rent growth or capital, provided, you know, all that's in baked into our comments. We, we feel really good about being able to release these two strong tenants and Darden is taking, you know, a lot of them, too, so a good diversification move. I think it shines a light on the Bahama Breezes that we sold a number of years ago for really, really high prices, that we did a good job managing our value at risk with any one particular tenant, but could be a good result. I would just add to that. I mean, Bill said in his comments, but we're talking about four stores and 50 basis points of ABR. It's a small amount. John Kilachowski (Equity Analyst) Yeah, understood. And then just quarter to date, if we kind of run the numbers here, it looks like the average blend is about 20 bits higher than what you close in 1Q. I know that's early. Based on what you've released, is there any sort of upward creep in yields that you're seeing, anything driving that or is that just, you know, small sample size there that's driving that move? OPERATOR Small sample size. Okay, got it. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Mitch Germain from Citizens Bank. Mitch, please go ahead. Mitch Germain (Equity Analyst) Yeah, thank you. Bill. Just you mentioned just a second ago, you know, obviously looking at a couple new industries, I think it was capital that you allocated to a rental company and, and so rental operator and a grocer. What. How do you, you know, what sort of education do you and your team take in reviewing the sector, you know, kind of what are the attributes that they. Those sort of assets or sectors. Interesting for you. And does that really, obviously it clearly changes the TAM in terms of how you're allocating capital. Is that the way we should be thinking about this now? Bill Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. You know, I guess we use what we call the triple filter, which is, is this something that we know enough to buy? And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. Do we have our permission from our investors to buy it and would we buy it with our own money? And so while those sound very high level, that is a very challenging gauntlet for an asset class to get through. So, you know, I personally wouldn't buy a pickleball facility with my own money, so that makes it pretty easy to, you know, not by pickleball facilities. I wouldn't buy a Carvana with my own money, so that makes it pretty easy. Do we have permission from our investors? That's a harder one. And I think we tend to take it pretty gradually to make sure that we're bringing our investors along with us. But pretty clearly, you know, our investors don't need four corners to buy class A office in New York City. They have other ways to get that exposure. Do we know enough to know is manifest in writing white papers for our board, going to conferences, meeting and talking with tenants, walking the floors. And then I would say humbly that a lot of these sectors are things that I have experienced within the past. It just proceeded four corners. So when I was at Fair Lawn, when I was a grant on Gramercy's investment committee, you know, in other things I worked on, you know, we bought outdoor industrial storage, we bought grocery. So I have a familiarity with this, making sure we bring the team along with me. Mitch Germain (Equity Analyst) Great. Last One for me asked this a couple times this quarter. But I'm just curious, are you seeing any real changes in the competitive landscape within the investment sales market? You know, I mean, obviously for quite some time there was a lot of competition that was sitting on the sidelines and, and some of that appears to be back. But is that, you know, shifting, you know, kind of any way that you're approaching underwriting and bidding on properties? Bill You know, where we are buying these onesies and twos, these, you know, we obviously look at portfolios and have closed on several in our existence. I think we're really well competitively positioned. We can build a portfolio throughout a year that we're proud of doing onesies and twosies, but we have the scale to do bigger things as well. You know, you read a lot in the news about private credit and the private credit firms, you know, trading at discounts to nav questioning of their marks, you know, will that cause them to pull back? I don't think we have evidence of that yet. And certainly there have been recently, you know, there's been a lot of corporate M and A activity. I think there's a lot of shadow corporate M and A activity. So there's a lot of things to work on now. OPERATOR Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Bill Lenahan CEO for closing remarks. Bill, go ahead. Bill Lenahan (Chief Executive Officer) Great. Terrific. And glad to land the plane on the 30 minute mark. Ultimately, our existing portfolio strength is compelling for us to focus on offense where many of our peers are playing defense. Our $200 million term loan gives us a direct line of sight for funding between now and Q3. The attractive pricing we're seeing in the debt markets give us even more access to low cost funding later this year. At scale, the acquisition market is stable. And with a bit larger aperture for property types, we expect another successful year of building our portfolio brick by brick. Our team will be at ICSC the week of May 18 and Nairi in New York the week of June 1. As many of you know, we host a cocktail party in conjunction with icsc. We'd love to meet with you in person at either of these events, so please reach out Patrick or myself to coordinate schedules. Thank you all and look forward to continuing to see many of you in person this year. Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.