W. P. Carey, Inc. (WPC) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending September 30, 2022

November 4, 2022 10:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Hello, and welcome to the W. P. Carey Third Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Peter Sands, Director of Institutional Investor Relations. Peter, please go ahead.

Peter Sands

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning for our 2022 third quarter earnings call. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that some of the statements made on this call are not historic facts and may be deemed forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results differ materially from W. P. Carey's expectations are provided in our SEC filings. An online replay of this conference call will be made available in the Investor Relations section of our website at wpcarey.com, where it will be archived for approximately 1 year and where you can also find copies of our investor presentations and other related materials. And with that, I'll hand the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Jason Fox.

Jason Fox

Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to say we generated strong third quarter results across several areas of our business, raising our expectations for full year AFFO per share with real estate AFFO per share on track for year-over-year growth of just over 6%. Despite the unsettled market backdrop, we're in a position of strength, armed with significant liquidity and the ability to invest across property types over 2 continents, ready to capitalize on attractive opportunities as they arise.

The critical question is when is the right time to utilize our dry powder. Accordingly, I'll focus my remarks this morning on our recent investment activity and how we're approaching new opportunities in the current climate, which is evolving quickly.

But before I do that, I would outline 3 key reasons why W. P. Carey remains uniquely positioned within net lease. First, in a more challenging investment environment, we have the ability to drive higher AFFO growth through our best-in-class contractual same-store rent growth, which reached 3.4% for the third quarter. As current inflation flows through to rents, we expect our contractual same-store rent growth to move even higher in 2023 to between 4% and 4.5% and to continue seeing the benefits into 2024.