Chatham Lodging Trust Q2 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the Chatham Lodging Trust's financial results conference call for the second quarter of 2025. Please note that this conference is being recorded. It is my pleasure to welcome your host, Chris Daly, President of DG Public Relations.

Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Chatham Lodging Trust Second Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. Please note that many of our comments today are considered forward-looking statements as defined by federal securities laws. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, both known and unknown, as described in our most recent Form 10-K and other SEC filings. All information in this call is as of August 6, 2025, unless otherwise noted, and the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to conform the statement to actual results or changes in the company's expectations. You can find copies of our SEC filings and earnings release, which contain reconciliations to non-GAAP financial measures referenced on this call on our website at chathamlodgingtrust.com. Now to provide you with some insight into Chatham's 2025 second quarter results, allow me to introduce Jeff Fisher, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer; Dennis Craven, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer; and Jeremy Wegner, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Let me turn the session over to Jeff Fisher. Jeff?

Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone. I appreciate you all joining our call today. Before discussing our second quarter, I want to update you on some of our key corporate initiatives. We have successfully sold all five hotels we had listed in the fourth quarter and are pleased with the outcomes. We sold the five hotels, which are around 25 years old, at about a 6% capitalization rate based on our projected 2024 NOI, generating proceeds of $83 million. These hotels were among the six lowest performing in terms of RevPAR in our portfolio and had cap rates lower than our debt costs, making them value-enhancing. Currently, we have two additional hotels listed for sale. Although it's too early to discuss specifics for each transaction, these will be further opportunistic sales. We plan to use proceeds from the five hotel sales, along with any from the current listings if sold, to fund our Home2 Portland development, acquire more hotels, and repurchase shares of our stock. We look forward to seizing opportunities to enhance shareholder value in these areas. Our Board of Trustees approved a $25 million share repurchase plan in May, and during the last quarter, we bought back about 20,000 shares at an average price of $7.02. We plan to be somewhat more active in the third quarter considering the current share price levels. Our balance sheet continues to strengthen, with our leverage now down to 21%, and we anticipate generating nearly $20 million of free cash flow in 2025 after dividends. We have positioned ourselves to create value in various ways. In the third quarter, we intend to launch a larger and recast syndication of our credit facility and term loan, which will further improve our financial condition and reduce overall borrowing costs. We hope to have this process completed by our next call in November. Operationally, we are pleased with our second quarter results, achieving RevPAR and FFO per share at the upper end of our guidance range. Our second quarter occupancy rate of 82% matched last year’s second-quarter occupancy and represents a post-pandemic high. In addition, we reached all-time highs in ADR and RevPAR in May. We improved our operating margins this year, and while we benefited from one-time refunds, even without those, margins would have declined by less than 1%, which is quite reasonable given the quarter's RevPAR results. I expect our Island operating team to perform even better in the third and fourth quarters. After a tough start to the quarter with April RevPAR down 4%, we experienced growth in May and June, effectively finishing the quarter with flat RevPAR. Our core business segment for business travelers remains robust, with our highest occupancies observed during the week. I want to reiterate that we have outperformed the industry in terms of RevPAR growth for 14 consecutive quarters or three and a half years. In our largest market, Silicon Valley, the recovery to pre-pandemic levels is ongoing, and it was encouraging to see occupancy rates of 80% across all four of our hotels in the region this quarter, an important benchmark. The level of investment from tech companies, alongside the expansions of Applied Materials and the NVIDIA Innovation Center, will certainly foster additional demand growth in the valley, close to our two large hotels in Sunnyvale. Another positive sign of the underlying momentum in Silicon Valley is the acceleration of multifamily rental growth rates. Recently, Essex Property Trust noted in their quarterly report that their strongest growth rates are in Northern California. Our press release detailed the performance of our largest market, and Dennis will provide further insights on that, but I want to highlight some noteworthy points from other markets. Our Sun Belt markets are performing well, with our two hotels in Charleston showing significant growth. Encouragingly, our two hotels in Florida experienced RevPAR growth this quarter after facing declines last year and in the first quarter. In Texas, it's important to remember that three of our five hotels are adversely affected due to the closures of their respective convention centers, particularly in Downtown Dallas and Austin. The RevPAR for the entire Austin market is down 6% year-to-date and declined by 14% in this last quarter, with the only silver lining being that the domain market fared better, down 5% in the quarter and 11% year-to-date. Seattle's overall market, including Bellevue, remains soft, impacted by reduced Canadian travel, with RevPAR down 2% year-to-date and 4% in the second quarter. Border crossings in the region decreased by 47% this quarter. Finally, driven by several significant events, our second quarter in Pittsburgh was exceptional, showing a 23% growth, and a second-quarter RevPAR of $161, the highest on record for this quarter. Notable events included its first Motocross Championship in April, three concerts, and the Monster Jam in May, along with the U.S. Open in June. Next year, we also have the NFL draft taking place close to our hotel during the second quarter, which should be beneficial. As we look towards the rest of the year, we are keeping our guidance largely unchanged. Growing business travel demand across much of our portfolio is encouraging. However, we do see weaknesses in convention demand in cities like Austin, Dallas, and San Diego, which had an outstanding year in 2024. Leisure demand remains stable for us, but the drop in travel from Canada and Europe is certainly affecting the industry overall. Our government travel bounced back after Liberation Day, following a 9% decline in RevPAR for our three D.C. hotels in April, with RevPAR increasing by about 2% for the remainder of the quarter. As an industry, I genuinely believe we are set up for better performance in the years ahead. The balance of supply and demand is crucial. We all understand that new supply should remain limited for some time going forward. Construction is costly, and I believe that new development only makes sense in certain exceptional U.S. markets. Looking beyond 2025, the current GDP growth rates are promising, and the outlook is even brighter given the significant investments being made by companies across the U.S., including substantial commitments to technology and AI advancements. Additionally, there is considerable foreign investment planned in the U.S. in the coming years. Historically, there has been a strong link between GDP growth and RevPAR growth. From an operational standpoint, we have good internal growth potential with the ongoing recovery of our Silicon Valley hotels. There is much happening in the market, especially with the largest companies that are based there, indicating a bright future. Silicon Valley has again secured its top ranking for start-ups and as the global hub of innovation, backed by abundant capital and a continuous stream of groundbreaking technologies. In summary, I am excited about our future prospects. We have executed on nearly all strategic fronts and are well positioned to grow and add value with a solid balance sheet. With that, I will hand it over to Dennis.

Thanks, Jeff. Good morning, everyone. Some additional RevPAR color. RevPAR growth at our 4 Silicon Valley hotels, like Jeff said, was up 3%, and we are able to grow hotel EBITDA an additional 3% to almost $5 million. Our Silicon Valley hotels were really no different than our portfolio and that April was quite soft due to the consecutive Easter and Passover holidays, along with the initial reactions from Liberation Day. Within the quarter, RevPAR at our 4 Silicon Valley hotels was down 2% in April, then up 3% in May and a strong 6% in June. At our Home2 in Phoenix, as a reminder, it opened in early 2024. We acquired the hotel in late May of 2024, and RevPAR was up over 60% in the quarter. As we enter the fall, we are encouraged with our sales efforts there, especially related to the convention center and other group-related businesses that often have to be targeted at least a year in advance. L.A. RevPAR was up 1% in the quarter as demand related to the California wildfires pretty much left the market and especially our Woodland Hills Hotel, where we had a significant amount of business there in the quarter. Within our L.A. market, our 3 hotels, our Residence Inn Anaheim was up 6% and our Marina del Rey Hilton Garden Inn was up 3% with our Home2 Woodland Hills down 5%. Our 6 predominantly leisure hotels account for about 20% of our EBITDA and they had a great quarter with RevPAR surging 4% when you exclude our Portsmouth Hilton Garden Inn that was under renovation during the quarter. Our top 5 RevPAR hotels in the quarter were our Residence Inn Washington, D.C. with RevPAR of $239, followed by our Gaslamp Residence Inn, and both of those RevPARs were the highest second quarter RevPARs in each of their respective histories. Rounding out our top 5 were our Hilton Garden Inn, Marina del Rey, our Residence Inn White Plains, New York, and our Hampton Portland, all 3 with RevPAR over $200 in the quarter. On the operations front, for the third consecutive quarter, we drove our gross operating profit margins higher, 30 basis points above last year's levels. Although we benefited from about $800,000 workers' compensation-related refund, it was really attributable to very good claims experiences, and kudos to our operating team for minimizing those costs. As we all know, labor and benefits are by far our largest expense, and on a per occupied room basis, these costs were down 7%. But when you take out the impact of that refund, labor and benefits, we're still down year-over-year on a per occupied room basis. We continue to allocate meaningful energy closely monitoring our productivity at that level. Most other operating line items were relatively stable year-over-year, though guest acquisition-related commission costs were up approximately 15% as our exposure has increased primarily due to different channels of booking business in the quarter. That increase impacted margins by approximately 30 basis points in the quarter. We had 17 hotels produce over $1 million of GOP in the quarter. And for the 14th consecutive quarter, our Gaslamp Residence Inn led the way with GOP of almost $3 million. Our 2 Sunnyvale Residence Inns made the top 5 for the first time since the heavy intern summer of 2021, coming in second and fifth respectively. And not to be outdone, our Embassy Suites Springfield, Virginia delivered GOP of $2 million in the quarter, and coming in fourth despite a tough market was our Bellevue Residence Inn with GOP of $1.6 million. On the CapEx front, we spent approximately $9 million in the quarter. And importantly, so far in 2025, we've added 8 rooms to our existing portfolio, converting meeting and other spaces into more profitable guest rooms. Those rooms include 5 rooms at the Hilton Garden Inn, Portsmouth, 2 rooms at the Residence Inn White Plains, and a suite at the Hampton Inn Exeter. Within these locations, at any reasonable valuation, we've added probably $3 million to $4 million in value to our portfolio at a fraction of the cost. Our last 2 renovations of 2025 are to commence later this year in the fourth quarter, with those being at the Residence Inn Austin and the Residence Inn Mountain View, California. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeremy.

Thanks, Dennis. Good morning, everyone. Our Q2 2025 hotel EBITDA was $30.9 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $28.5 million, and adjusted FFO was $0.36 per share. Our GOP margin for the quarter of 46.3% was up 30 basis points from Q2 2024 despite the flattish RevPAR environment due to continued strong expense control, moderating inflationary cost pressures, and the benefit of approximately $1.3 million of workers' compensation insurance and tax refunds. In Q2, we continued our asset recycling by completing the sale of the Courtyard Houston for $23.5 million, which represents an LTM cap rate of 5.8%, including $3.6 million of required capital expenditures. Our successful asset recycling over the past few years has reduced the age and improved the quality of our hotel portfolio and significantly reduced our leverage. The reduction in leverage along with the successful refinancing of our material debt maturities over the last couple of years has significantly enhanced our financial flexibility. This added flexibility gave us the confidence to announce our first-ever share repurchase program in Q2, which we started utilizing in June. With leverage of 3.5x net debt to EBITDA as of June 30, we have significant capacity to pursue attractive investment opportunities, whether in the form of acquisitions or share repurchases. Turning to our Q3 and full year 2025 guidance. We expect RevPAR of minus 1.5% to plus 0.5%, adjusted EBITDA of $24.7 million to $26.8 million, and adjusted FFO of $0.29 to $0.33 per share in Q3 and RevPAR growth of flat to plus 1%, adjusted EBITDA of $89 million to $93 million, and adjusted FFO per share of $0.95 to $1.03 per share for the full year. This guidance assumes no further asset sales, capital markets activity, or changes in floating interest rates. This concludes my portion of the call. Operator, please open the line for questions.

The first question comes from Gaurav Mehta from Alliance Global Partners.

I wanted to go back to your comments around asset recycling. I think in the prepared remarks, you mentioned that you're looking to sell 2 more assets in addition to 5 that have been sold. For the 2 additional hotels that you're looking to sell, are they going to be similar, lower CapEx, lower RevPAR order hotels?

Gaurav, this is Dennis. I think in one of the two instances, yes, it's kind of one of the older lower RevPAR assets, another one is really just an opportunistic transaction we're looking at that I think would minimize some capital requirements here in the next few years. But we're certainly just in the early phases of that process and hope to have something to talk about a little bit more on our next earnings call.

Okay. And then maybe in terms of deploying the capital, I think you mentioned development in Portland and then acquisitions. Can you maybe remind us the timeline for development in Portland? And then what kind of opportunities are you seeing in the acquisition market?

Yes. I'll start on the development side on the timing, then I'll let Jeff chime in on acquisitions. But generally speaking, it's going to be around the 21- to 24-month construction timeline. We still have some work to do there with respect to just understanding soils and all that kind of good stuff. So ideally, we'd like to get started on that sometime within the next 6 months or so. But again, probably as we kind of get to the next call, we'll have a little more information on the kickoff and all that kind of stuff.

Regarding acquisitions, we are consistently on the lookout and actively assessing opportunities. We are maintaining discussions with previous owners and the brokerage community. There is still a noticeable disparity between bids and asks, but I believe that this gap will narrow over time. In the meantime, we are proceeding with our stock buyback program and, as mentioned earlier, we plan to increase our activity slightly given the current stock price.

As there are no further questions, I would now hand the conference over to Jeff Fisher for his closing comments. Jeff?

Thank you very much. Well, it was a short call there. Maybe there's a little vacation time involved. But nonetheless, we will continue on our course and look forward to talking to you for the next call. Thanks.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference of Chatham Lodging Trust has now concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.