Nnn REIT, Inc. (NNN) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Greetings. Welcome to the NNN REIT, Inc. Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Steve Horn, CEO at NNN Re-Inc. You may begin.

Thanks, Holly. Good morning, and welcome to NNN's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Stay with me, Chief Financial Officer, Vin Chow. As this morning's press release reflects, NNN's performance in 2026 continues to produce strong results, including high occupancy, impressive rent collections with under five basis points of uncollected rent. and solid acquisitions driven by our deep tenant. We're well positioned to continue enhancing shareholder value as we move into the second half of the year and beyond. In July, we announced just over a 3% increase in our common stock dividend, marking 2026 as our 37th consecutive year of annual dividend increases. That places NNN among 70 U.S. public companies and just three REITs to achieve that track record. Given our continued, consistent performance of the portfolio and the acquisition pipeline, we're updating our 2026 guidance for AFF per share to a range of $3.55 to $3.59, our second guidance increase of the year. This reflects our discipline of long-standing multi-year strategy for consistent per share growth. As far as the portfolio performance, the 3,774 freestanding single-tenant properties continue to perform exceedingly well during the second quarter. Occupancy is up 50 basis points from the first quarter to 99.1, which is an increase of 110 basis points from last year. We see positive momentum across our tenant base, highlighted by two significant M&A transactions announced in mid-July involving tenants in the portfolio. Mavis Tire announced the agreement to acquire Pet Boys for approximately $700 million of cash, further strengthening its position as one of the nation's leading automotive service providers. Additionally, Big Brand Tire announced an agreement to acquire Bell Tire. The combination creates a network of more than 530 stores with over $1.5 billion in annual revenue. Acquisitions for the quarter, we invested just north of $290 million in 89 new properties at an initial cash cap rate of 7.3. More importantly, an average of lease duration of just shy of 18 years. The product mix is primarily auto service, discount retail, and early childhood education, with a median purchase price. Half of 2026, we invested $430 million in 130 new properties at an initial cash cap rate of 7.4, average lease duration just over 18 years. Cap rates range have been fairly stable over the past six quarters, reflecting competitive investment environment. But looking ahead, we believe modest cap rate compression is possible during the second half of the year, supported by the composition of our active acquisition pipeline and the portfolios that are currently in the market. Our investment approach remains unchanged. We continue to apply disciplined underwriting standards and focus on originating direct sale leaseback transactions where we can negotiate favorable economics and structure investments utilizing our landlord-friendly long-term duration triple net lease. This strategy continues to provide the most attractive risk-adjusted opportunities that broadly mark 1031-driven transactions. Given the visibility provided by our pipeline and our ongoing discussions with transaction partners, we are increasing the midpoint of our 2026 acquisition guidance to $750 million from $600 million. We expect most of the acquisition volume to be sourced through direct original sale-leaseback transactions, reinforcing deal flow, discipline capital deployment, and long-term value creation. As far as dispositions, during the quarter, we sold 26 properties, including 19 vacant assets, generating approximately $37 million in proceeds. The income-producing assets were primarily non-core properties that were sold at cap rates of price. As we previously discussed, we expect them to be more active on the disposition front. Strategy remains focused on acquiring durable, income-producing real estate. Disciplined capital recycling is an important component of our lifting disposition range to a midpoint of $140 million. Active portfolio management is essential to maintain the high-quality portfolio that is positioned to generate stable and growing cash flows. We believe selectively recycling capital from non-core assets into higher conviction investment opportunities will strengthen the portfolio and improve its long-term earnings. As far as the balance sheet, I don't want to take all of Vince's thunder, but the balance sheet remains among the strongest in the net lease sector and continues to provide significant financial flexibility. We ended the quarter with a weighted average debt maturity of approximately 10.1 years, which is nearly double the nearest net lease peer. and we also maintain $1.4 billion of liquidity. This conservative capital structure positions us well to fund the remainder of the 2026 pipeline while maintaining ample capacity for a robust acquisition pipeline strategy, disciplined capital allocation, differentiated our platform. We believe this approach will continue to support sustainable earnings growth and long-term value creation for our shareholders. We're focused on finishing 2026 strong and positioning NNN for continued success over years ahead. With that, I'll pass it over to Vin. He can go through our quarterly numbers in detail.

Let's start with our customary cautionary statements. During this call, we will make certain statements that may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities law. The company's actual future results may differ significantly from the matters discussed in these forward-looking statements, and we may not release revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect changes after the statements are made. Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ from expectations are disclosed in greater detail in the company's filings with the SEC and in this morning's press release. Turning to results, this morning we reported AFFO of $0.90 per share and core FFO of $0.89 per share, up 5.9% and 6.0% respectively over the prior year. Results were ahead of our internal projections, with upside driven primarily by lower-than-expected bad debt, which totaled about two basis points of quarterly ABR. 96.6% in the second quarter was up 70 basis points versus last quarter, as we further drove portfolio occupancy above our long-run average, thereby reducing net real estate expenses. G&A as a percentage of total revenue was 5.8%, while our cash G&A margin was 4.4%. Annualized base rent grew by over 7% year-over-year to $959 million on the back of our strong acquisition volumes. Free cash flow after dividend was about $56 million in the second quarter. Our last list of near-term credit concerns remains immaterial at this time, which has led to better-than-budgeted credit loss year-to-date. That said, our portfolio management team remains focused on identifying and proactively mitigating potential future credit risks through asset sales, targeted lease terminations, and leasing. From a capital markets perspective, we recorded an option on our term loan, issuing an additional $200 million to bring the total term loan size to $500 million. Of this total, $400 million has been swapped to an attractive all-in fixed rate of 4.1%. In addition, we lowered the spread on our term loan and Revolver by five basis points. Of our improving cost of equity, we were active on the ATM in the second quarter, selling roughly $6 million common shares on a forward basis at just under $46 per share. We also settled 1.7 million forward shares, generating net proceeds of about 73 million, which were used to pay down our revolver. From a modeling perspective, these shares were settled on 630 and therefore are not included in the reported weighted average share count. As of June 30th, we had roughly 272 million of unsettled forward equity, which combined with our 215 million of expected free cash flow and 140 million of expected dispositions for the year, provides us with ample liquidity with which to execute our strategic objectives for 2026, $2.4 billion of available liquidity, and just 2.5% of our debt tied to floating rates. Net debt to EBITDA of 5.7 times was unchanged from last quarter, but including the impact of unsettled forward equity, pro forma net debt to EBITDA was 5.4 times, down from 5.6 times last quarter. Our sector-leading debt duration of 10.1 years was well-matched with our lease duration. On July 15th, we announced the $0.62 quarterly dividend, which is a 3.3% increase in the quarterly rate, and represented our 37th consecutive annual dividend increase. Extremely proud of, and one that reflects the sustainability of the new dividend rate, equates to a 5.3% annualized dividend yield and a healthy 69%. AFO comments with some additional color regarding our updated 2026 guidance and AFO per share guidance for 2026 by $0.05 to $3.59 implies about 3.8% year-over-year growth at the midpoint and acceleration from 2.7% growth. The primary drivers of our improved earnings outlook are better-than-planned second quarter performance, a $150 million increase in expected acquisition volume, and a half-a-million-dollar decrease in expected net real estate expenses, resulting resulting from a faster-than-planned reduction in vacancies. We also rate the midpoint of our annual disposition guidance by $10 million, and from a credit loss perspective, we are leaving our second-half assumptions unchanged, but given the year-to-date outperformance versus plan, we now expect full-year bad debt to be about 40 basis points. More details regarding line-item guidance can be found on page 3 of our earnings release. While our guidance reflects our near-term outlook, over the longer term, we continue to target sustainable mid-single-digit growth driven by disciplined capital allocation, proactive portfolio management, and a largely self-funded growth model supported by our conservatively managed balance sheet. With that, I'll turn the call over.

Certainly. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Once again, that is star 1 to ask a question. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Your first question for today is from Ronald Camden with Morgan Stanley.

Great. Maybe we could start with the acquisitions. Obviously, the guide raise in the quarter. If you could talk a little bit about just what kind of activity that you're seeing. We did see sort of cap rates, you know, I think down 20 basis points from the cap rates in the first quarter. So we'd love to hear some what you're seeing on the trend in the competition as well, in addition to the volume.

Yeah, I mean, just us lifting the acquisition volume from the original guide opportunities. opportunities. You know, the summertime things slowed down a little bit, but going into the summer and had a great second quarter because we were able to stack the pipeline. And then the remainder of the year, we have a good pipeline. There's a fair amount of activity. You know, hopefully we can end up on the higher side. And there's a few portfolio usual suspects, you know, the other public reads. We're not running into much of the prime change the second half of the year, but competition is always robust in the net lease sector. I'm not seeing it go up or down the remainder of the year. That being said, knowing what's in my pipeline, that's why we're kind of speculating that there'll be a little cap rate compression.

Got it. That's helpful. And I think my second question is just on the portfolio health and sort of asset management. Seems like the bad death has been trending well below your expectations or even historical. this year. So at this sort of juncture, what other sort of industries, what are you guys sort of watching out for? And is it fair to say at 99-plus percent occupancy is the best shape the portfolio has been in?

I'll let Steve handle that historical perspective because he has more of it than I do. But from my perspective, yes, it's the best shape that the company has. But as far as watch list tenants, as I mentioned on my preparative march, We don't really have any material tenants that are on the watch list, you know, from a near-term perspective. You know, we do talk about some tenants that, you know, have historically had some, you know, have been on the watch list for a long time, like AMC. Again, that's more of a movie theater thing. Well, this year, box office is up pretty strongly and upgrade from S&P. And so, you know, at least in the near term, things are fairly calm on that front. From a line of trade perspective, there's really, you know, we've never really had...

The size of the portfolio, you know, we do deal with retailers, so retailers do come and go throughout the years, but that's why we focus really hard on the asset level, financial performance, and real estate quality. But, yeah, I mean, overall, the portfolio today is as good as it's ever been, but, you know, they're giving us any heartburn. But more importantly, the asset level financial performance seems to be pretty robust the last, you know, 18 months.

Thanks so much.

Your next question is from Jana Gallen with Bank of America.

Thank you. Good morning and congrats on the quarter. Can you walk us through how you're thinking about your marginal cost of capital as you accelerate acquisitions and then following up on the higher dispositions?

Are those mostly vacant or opportunistically low cap rates or kind of what is targeted for disposition? i'll let uh vin talk about the uh you know we have seen an improvement on our cost of equity which was nice to see and so we were active on the atm during quarter and so i think we're in good shape from a liquidity perspective uh from a cost of capital you know our debt cost of capital is one we always think about things on a long-term basis so you know thinking 10-year debt uh you know cost of equity you know we have a an absolute hurdle that we think about uh sort of in the eight plus percent range, which is sort of a long-term view. And then, you know, from an earnings accretion perspective, dilution perspective, you know, we look at the AFO yield. And so, if you take our typical 60-40, you know, we blend probably around a 60-40.

The majority of it is come producing warmers and the retailer was probably going to not renew the lease. 0.6 cap rate that we sold, that was a pretty tight band in the remainder.

Thank you.

Your next question for today is from Brad Heffern with RBC Capital Markets.

Hey, everybody. Thanks for the questions. Just following up on AMC, you know, the yields on the debt have improved a lot. As you said, it was upgraded by S&P. Do you see theaters trade at all right now, and might there be an opportunity to reduce exposure there just given, you know, it seems like the credit profile's improved?

We sold, if you recall, we sold one actually in the first quarter. We're always looking to reduce our exposure. on the movie theaters.

We're not seeing them personally, you know, many of them on the market.

But yeah, we are always going through every industry, not just movie theaters, and looking at our exposure and the real estate risk associated with those certain tenants. I'm looking. Okay, got it.

And then then on the guidance, the FFO guidance, all the underlying assumptions look like they moved in a positive direction, you know, from acquisition volumes to, you know, taxes to, well, everything. So what was the offset that kept the high end of the guidance from increasing along with the low end?

Well, like given where we are in the year, we wanted to narrow the range, but we did feel a one penny increase at the midpoint was appropriate. And so that's just kind of how the numbers check out. But, you know, there's nothing really.

Your next question is from Smeeds Rose with Citi.

Hi, thanks. You mentioned M&A activity that took place across the quarter. And I was just wondering, you know, when you've seen this in the past, do you have any sort of concerns around potential closings, just as maybe, you know, competing stores overlap? And just sort of on that, there were some headline news, you know, earlier in the year around 7-Eleven looking to close some stores and leaning into a slightly different format. I'm just wondering if you've heard anything relative to your portfolio on that front.

No, as far as 7-Eleven, in 2025, we did a full, you know, a big renegotiation with 7-Eleven that renewed a lot of their leases. We have long-term leases, and then we'll manage the portfolio.

On the renegotiations that Steve just mentioned on 7-Eleven, you know, these were, you know, they could have just taken an option, a five-year option, but we did renegotiate, I think it was 15-year leases with them. So, I mean, they wanted to stay.

Very good.

Your next question is from Michael Goldsmith with UBS.

Good morning. Thanks a lot for taking my question. Just on the dispositions, I know you touched on a little bit on some were vacant, some was active portfolio management. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, more specifically what restaurants you were selling And then also, are there more dispositions to be coming in the future quarters?

Yeah, good question. As far as the dispositions, we lifted our midpoint. We have more dispositions. 26 would be elevated. As far as the restaurants, we dispose.

Thanks, Finn. And as a follow-up, it looks like you increased your exposure to early childhood education. That's a category that some of the other TripleNet leads have played in. So can you give a little bit more color on those acquisitions? maybe the opportunity set that you're seeing, and then any sort of, you know, has there been any cap rate compression in that space specifically?

As far as we've, the last 15 years, we've seen our fair share of volume opportunities in the early childhood. This year, we did a little bit more than we have historically. We have played in that space as far as the initial cap rate and the real estate metrics and the right management team, then that's when we'll lean in and do it. So as far as a risk-adjusted return, we feel pretty good at the tenants that we're doing business with within that segment.

Yeah, and just a little, this quarter we did do with a new relationship tenant, very strong management team, low-levered balance sheet.

Thank you very much. Good luck in the back half.

Your next question for today is from Spencer Glimcher with Green Street.

Thank you. Sorry if I missed this, but just going back to the acquisition pipeline, you mentioned a few portfolios out in the market. Just curious if these would be new tenants, assuming you would land one or two of these pair deals?

Yeah, the portfolios we're currently evaluating would be new tenants.

Great. And then just on the relationship-driven deals, which of your tenant segments are looking to grow the most aggressively right now. Is it still largely in the auto space, or is there any update there?

Yeah, it's primarily the auto space, convenience stores. We're seeing some opportunities. You know, where we're not seeing opportunities, the limited service restaurants, we're not seeing much M&A or growth in that sector. Seem to be, and then also, you know, the early childhood.

Okay, great. That's all for me.

Your next question is from Rob Stevenson. with Huntington.

Good morning. Vin, back to the sort of guidance question, any other major levers other than transaction volume that pushes you to the bottom of the range versus the top of the range at this point of the year?

I mean, the biggest drivers, hey, Rob, how you doing? Welcome back. Yeah, biggest drivers really are kind of always the same. I mean, bad debt is a big swing factor. And so things are pretty calm right now. But if that ticked higher, that could move us a little lower, although I think we have a pretty healthy cushion in our back half assumptions. Timing and volume of acquisitions is definitely a big driver. And then I guess to some degree, timing of our capital markets activities, we do have a $350 million debt maturity in December of this year. And so how we deal with that and timing of when we deal with that could influence the numbers a bit.

What's the best source of debt for you today, and where's pricing if you wanted to do something to fix that?

Yeah, look, I think we look at all opportunities, and we're evaluating a lot of different options, and we do have plenty of liquidity to deal with it on the line of credit. We have the $272 million of forward equity that we could draw down on, but in all likelihood, we are thinking about, you know, some kind of debt offering later in the year. Ten-year debt today, you know, it moves around way more rapidly than ever before, but I'd say we're probably in mid-five to 5.6% on a ten-year debt. And if we want to do something shorter, you know, we could be, you know, inside of 5%. But, you know, just given what we've done in the last couple of bond offerings. And with the term loan, I'm probably thinking more of a longer term.

Okay, that's helpful. And then last one for me, Steve, you guys have sold 35 vacant assets here to date. You know, in terms of what's still vacant in the portfolio, is the majority of that likely to be sales going forward? Or is there a significant retenanting operation that's happening and that'll start to, you know, modestly impact earnings going forward? How should we be thinking about the remaining vacancy in the portfolio and how you guys are sort of addressing that in the near term?

Yeah, good question. Yeah, we, for the most part, have gone through permitting and negotiations. For the most part, I think our vacant asset sales will be limited moving forward.

Okay. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the time.

Your next question for today is from Wes Galladay with Baird.

Hey, good morning, everyone. I just want to go back to the comment about cap rate compression. Is that primarily due to mix or competition?

Barbelling it, doing the high cap rate and the low cap rate, or actually the high-risk deal and the low-risk deal, and combined it. Ours are pretty narrowed.

Okay, and then you did mention a few new tenants that you're looking at, and I know that's a big part of the growth engine for the out years. Are you finding a lot more tenants this year relative to last year?

A lot more, but exactly right. It's for the out years. You know, one of the mandates we give our acquisition team is, you know, go find a half a dozen new tenants. You know, case in point, the M&A activity that happened, you know, big brands buying Bell Tire. Bell Tire, we did a fair amount of deals with over the years. You know, it's always kind of that $15, $20 million range. Well, that's going to dry up, so the new relationships for the out years have to backfill it. So that is a conscious effort that our guys and gals are always looking at.

And just one last one. I apologize for this. But when a company is acquired, is there any chance you can retain the relationship or they just typically go find another source going forward?

We do everything we can to maintain that relationship. Usually the target gives good words for NNN that we've done business with. But a lot of times the new, the acquirer, the consolidator has a cheaper form of capital than NNN is willing to provide them. so they do business else. They bring in their own relationships, and we do everything we can to break it.

Thanks for the time.

Your next question is from Amateo Sanya with Deutsche Bank.

Yes, good morning, everyone. Congrats on the quarter and the solid outlook. Why don't you focus a little bit more on the dispositions and the guidance raised on that front. Obviously, you're getting great cap rates on this stuff, you know, well inside where you're acquiring assets And, you know, clearly a win for you, but I'm still trying to understand how that pricing is coming about and why the buyer is kind of comfortable paying those prices, especially when you were talking about, again, some of these assets being underperformers, some of them being non-strategic. Just trying to understand how that pipeline is existing against that kind of backdrop.

Yeah, good question. I mean, we have 3,000, you know, one's our defensive sale, where our relationships will kind of give us the wink, wink, nod, nod, changing markets. So they give us plenty of opportunity where there's lease term, where we can maximize the proceeds for that asset. There's some times that like the real estate a lot more than we do, or they have other opportunities that we don't know or can't do. So they overpay for the asset. 31 buyers, so we're willing to part ways. And that's where we're getting a lot of our low cap rates. Pieces within dispositions is the vacant assets, which obviously your recovery rate's a little bit lower. But we've had a good recovery rate recently because of the inflation. And we've been around in business for a long time. The cost base is fairly low in a lot of those assets. So we've had decent recovery rates.

That's helpful. And then for the increase in the acquisition guidance, could you kind of help us in regards to back half of 26 and kind of weighted average when, you know, you kind of think some of those deals could happen just to help us for modeling purposes?

In terms of our guidance for back half, I mean, we typically take a pretty conservative approach. So, you know, when we're dealing with deals that we are in on the, you know, our live deals, you know, we have decent visibility for the next 90 days, we can kind of plan those out. Beyond that, we tend to be a little bit more conservative on more speculative deal activities, so we push those out usually towards the tail end of the quarters. But I'd say there's nothing really overly skewing or mid-half.

Great. All right. We look forward to you guys raising the high end of guidance and getting the stock back to $50.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1. Your next question is from John Masaka with B. Riley.

Good morning. Kind of a blue sky one, given we're kind of in the back half of the call here. How are you kind of thinking about leverage? It's not just unique to NNN, but you're kind of in an environment where your cost of equity capital has become a little bit decoupled from your cost of debt capital. Does that create an opportunity to maybe lean more on that equity capital rather than going to the debt markets, especially given you have kind of a successive series of maturities here over the next couple of years. Just kind of curious your philosophy on that, given maybe where we are in the interest rate cycle and, as I said, kind of the decoupling of not just you, but kind of a lot of re-equity valuations from interest rates.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the way we think about it is we look at our overall leverage and we try to balance that. We are, you know, shooting for something plus or minus five and a half times is where we're shooting for. And we're comfortable going a little bit higher than that for a temporary period of time. But generally speaking, we try to manage right around five and a half. And so, you know, that's going to kind of dictate the mix between equity and debt more so than the cost of equity and debt. But, you know, because we, you know, we can do things on a forward basis, you know, that gives us a really powerful tool to be able to issue equity, you know, when the price is right and, you know, decide when to draw it down as we need to to manage the overall leverage level. So, you know, I don't know that we just sit here and say, well, you know, the cost of equity is much better. I mean, to some degree, depending on how high the cost of equity or how much it improves, we could use that to delever, but, you know, we're at roughly 13, 8 times multiple.

Okay. And then splitting hairs a little bit, but any thoughts on kind of swapping out the remainder of the term loan, you know, what would kind of drive you to do that? What kind of, you know, made it attractive to leave it floating for a period of time I know we're talking about a very small percentage of the overall debt stack, but maybe kind of also within that, what's your kind of view on a little bit more floating rate debt in the debt stack going forward?

Yeah, I mean, we have $100 million out of $500, so whatever we do on that last piece isn't going to really move the needle on the total for the full $500. So I think our decision to leave the last $100 million floating was more driven by the fact that there's been so much volatility around rates, just given a lot of the macro and geopolitical news that's been out there. And so we're just waiting for things to settle down a bit before we lock in that last piece. And I think the same goes for how we're thinking about a potential offering in the back half of the year on the debt side. You know, we are actively looking at, you know, hedging opportunities. And so, again, it's a little volatile right now, but as things settle down, you know, we are looking for opportunities to lock rate.

I appreciate that, Collar. That's it for me.

We've reached the end of the question and answer session, and I will now turn the call over to Steve for closing remarks.

No, guys. Thanks for taking the time and joining the call. And it ends in really good shape here. We're looking forward to closing out 2026 strong, solid pipeline, and I look forward to running into you guys in the halls of the conference season coming up. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.