Healthcare Realty Trust Incorporated (NYSE:HR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Hopefully, that’s helpful, Connor.

Connor Siversky: I appreciate the color there. And just maybe taking a longer-term view on the business, I appreciate the comments on responsible capital allocation for the next year or so. But when you look out past 2024, what does that opportunity set look like in outpatient medical. I mean, I would assume that we’re only really looking at on-campus assets maybe a smaller slice of the broader pie, but just any indication of what that addressable market looks like would be appreciated.

Todd Meredith: Sure. We actually touched a little bit on that on the Investor Day. At least one of the buses that I was on Ryan Crowley who heads up acquisitions and his team have a very specific analysis of the total addressable market. And it’s quite large, gives us a lot of runway. And that was certainly one of the compelling pieces to the merger is to put together the two companies and have as many clusters that are especially better hospital-centric as you mentioned, that we can go in and expand. So we’re very focused on 30 to 40 markets, where we can go in and expand our clusters, it’s much, much larger than our company as it exists today. So it gives us a long runway to grow. And yes, it would be hospital-centric, but certainly, we’re comfortable expanding our clusters even a little further away from the hospital, but they still are in sort of that two-mile radius of a hospital and complement our existing clusters.

So, we see that as a very addressable runway. We talked about during the merger. Obviously, we’re not doing this now, but really being able to elevate acquisition volume to $1 billion plus. And we were frankly on that path back on interest rates were lower and pre-merger and we see that ability and we just have a richer target total addressable market and target markets that we can do post-merger, given all the clusters and markets that we’re in.

Connor Siversky: Got it. I’ll leave it there. Thank you.

Todd Meredith: Sure.

Operator: Our next question today is from the line of Rich Anderson of Wedbush. Rich, your line is open. Please proceed.

Rich Anderson: Thanks. Good morning everyone. So on the bridge, what — why now, I guess is my question. Like this is something we’ve all talked about creating some more growth out of medical office. I think we’ve probably talked about it at nauseam for 20 years. And I’m curious, why you think that the opportunity set starts to happen now. Is it mainly you Healthcare Realty event? Or do you think the business in its entirety starts to grow as well along with you maybe you at a faster pace. I’m just curious if you could comment on that.

Todd Meredith : Sure, Rich. Good to hear from you. We would — I would say, the short answer is yes to both. I think as we discussed there are some secular trends going on that we think really do lift the broader MOB tide if you will. But certainly our opportunity is post merger improving occupancy at the HTA properties. And in short, we think that they lost a fair bit of occupancy with a lack of focus for a few years. COVID being part of that. And we really see a bright opportunity with our leasing model as well as our property management, asset management teams to really turn things around and get that occupancy up. It frankly — and I guess to your question of why now as it relates to us specifically, we certainly expected a little more gain here in the third quarter.

We didn’t quite get there. Our tenant retention wasn’t high enough, but we see that improving starting next quarter. So, frankly, it’s not just why now it should already be happening and we’re a little disappointed with the move-outs this quarter. So the leasing side is meeting our expectations. So putting that together in 2024 is the real story and really beginning next quarter. So I think it is us specifically and I think we have a sustained period where we can hit this run rate that’s sort of 4% to 5% and then try to move even beyond that into our broader range our target in 2025 as well. But I do think broadly speaking the MOB sector has a lot of tailwinds coming its way.