Okay, good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming. We're going to run through a presentation, and then we're going to open it up to Q&A, so feel free to make it pretty dynamic, any questions that you guys might have. And with that, we're pleased to have Realty Income. And Sumit, thank you.
Thank you, RJ. Good morning, everyone. My name is Sumit Roy. I'm the President and CEO of Realty Income Corporation, and we pride ourselves on being real estate partners to the world's leading organization. As a reminder, certain comments I'm about to make may be forward-looking, and I refer you to our filings with the SEC as to how they can differ. So who are we? We are a net lease business, and our founders, who started this business in 1969, started the business by having a conversation with Glen Bell, and Glen Bell is the founder of Taco Bell. He was having a difficult time trying to gain financing to build a store so he could sell tacos. He reached out to our founders, Bill and Joan Clark, in the suburbs of San Diego, and that's where Realty Income was founded.
Our founders decided to build the first Taco Bell in California, and the rest was history. The ethos based on which this company was founded was to have exposure to operators who are willing to enter into long-term leases and create a revenue stream that was very dependable. And that ethos has essentially led us to where we are today. The kind of lease that lends itself to that predictable long-term duration is what we call a net lease business. And what that means primarily is that the operator of that particular real estate, in this case it was Taco Bell, would have full control of the real estate for a very long duration. These leases tended to be 10 to even 30 years in length. They had internal growth, and the responsibility of maintaining that real estate resided with the operator. What does that mean?
Property taxes, insurance, any operating CapEx that was required to keep that building up and running was the responsibility of the operator. As a landlord, we basically collected a rent check and hopefully never had to step into that location for the next 20 years, the duration of the lease, and even beyond, for that matter. That is what led to trademarking what our founders did, which is The Monthly Dividend Company, where they said, "We are going to be collecting rent on a monthly basis, and we are going to distribute out the excess cash flow to our investors," and that's how Realty Income was founded. So what has all of that led to? Like I said, we are The Monthly Dividend Company. We've grown our dividend since our listing in 1994, every quarter since our listing.
That's translated to about 4.3% growth per year for the last 31 years. We are very proud to say we are part of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index. We are one of two real estate companies that's part of this index. There are 66 companies in all. The way you qualify is to have raised your dividends every year for at least 25 consecutive years. You can see the numbers. We've given out monthly dividends for 656 months in a row, and we've raised our dividends 110 consecutive quarters. Today, Realty Income is close to an $80 billion business. We have over 15,600 assets. We have more than 1,500 clients, tenants, we call them clients. We have exposure to more than 89 different industries. Like I said, we have a 56-year operating history.
Geographically, we are in every state here in the United States, all 50. We also have a big presence in the U.K. and six other Western European countries. Our investment strategy is a simple one. We want to partner with world's leading operators. What does that mean? We underwrite the industry, we underwrite the operator, and we try to forecast out the ability of that operator to satisfy these long-term leases. And from a real estate angle, we look at locations that have primary real estate characteristics: good location, rents that are well below market, paying a price that is below replacement cost, et cetera. And on the retail side of the equation, we also try to make sure that the locations that we are exposing ourselves to have good four-wall coverages, i.e., it's a profitable store.
On the distribution centers, which is industrial, we try to make sure that those locations are mission-critical to the clients that we are exposed to. Who are our top 15 clients? I think most of these names are very familiar to you. 7-Eleven happens to be our biggest client at 3.5% of the rent. And we've got Walgreens, FedEx, Sainsbury's, Tescos. These are all very well-known household names. Most of them are retail clients, but we also have FedEx in the top 15. That's obviously an industrial client for us. If you look at the top five, they represent 15% of the portfolio in terms of rent. If you look at the top 15 that's listed on this sheet, they represent 30%. And the point I'm trying to make here is we are very diversified across our portfolio.
From an industry diversification perspective, I said we are exposed to about 89 different industries. The top two industries that we are exposed to are convenience stores and grocery. And the common thread that you're going to find is most of our retail exposures is with what we deem as essential retail: non-discretionary in nature, low price points, service-oriented businesses. Over 90% of our retail clients have one or more of these characteristics, and you can sort of see that from the previous page. We also have property-type diversification. We are about 80% retail, 15% industrial. By industrial, we're talking about these big distribution boxes. Amazon, FedEx are our clients in those boxes. We also have 3% exposure to gaming. We own two gaming assets, one 100%, the Encore Boston Harbor in Boston. It's operated by Wynn and the Bellagio in Vegas.
We have a partial interest in there, and that represents 3% of the portfolio, and then the other bucket is a data center investment that we've made, plus some Napa Valley land that we own that's leased to Treasury Wine Estates on a very long-term lease. We are very proud of the team that we have. We have about 500 people that have been curated over a 56-year history, and the asset management, property management team that is required to manage these 15,600 assets, discrete assets, I might add, across multiple geographies, that requires a team that is very efficient and knows what they're doing, and this curation has led to a 98.7% occupancy, and our occupancy has never fallen below 96% throughout our public history, which is 31 years. We have recaptured 103% of the expiring rent.
The new rent, when a lease expires, is + 3% on all leases that have gone through renewals, and we've gone through 5,600 lease renewals. We have also complemented this team with making investments in a predictive analytic tool that started in 2018. Fast forward six years, this tool pretty much real-time gives us a feel for the inherent risk in our portfolio, and we define risk as our ability to recapture expiring rent. There are other elements of risk that are also introduced that this particular tool that we've created in-house that helps us define, which is the fungibility risk, the business risk, highest and best use for a given location, all of which contribute to the success of the results that we've been able to achieve.
Our total addressable market is approximately $14 trillion, and we have continued to expand the sandbox to come up with these numbers, and we'll get into that in a bit, but if you look at the U.S. market of viable net leasable assets, that's about $5.5 trillion. If you look at Europe, it's closer to $8.5 trillion, and this total is about $14 trillion. You look at how much of this product has been institutionalized, and we are defining institutionalized as real estate landlords owning this real estate. There are only two public companies in Europe that play in this space, and there are about 12 here in the U.S. that play in this space. The total capitalization of these 12 net lease companies is about $260 billion, of which we represent $80 billion.
The two peers, it's minuscule, that participate in Europe. It's about $11 billion-$12 billion of total capitalization. How did we create this total addressable market? Initially, we were 100% retail-oriented landlords. We added industrial in 2010, where we did our first large-scale transaction. We added international because we felt like some of the advantages that we had and the core competencies that we had here in the U.S. transported well across the pond. We added gaming more recently, two years ago, three years ago now, 2022. We did our first sale-leaseback on the Encore Boston Harbor. Subsequently, we've done another transaction that adds another $300 billion of product. More recently, data centers, and I suspect that $500 billion number is probably underrepresenting the total demand in that particular space. Europe's a very interesting story for us.
April 1st, 2019, we had $0 of investments in Europe. We believe that our cost of capital, our A-/ A3 balance sheet, transported very well across the pond. There was lack of competition. Sale- leaseback as a product was in the early stages of its evolution, and we felt like we could go there and consolidate this space. Fast forward six years, we owned $12 billion of product. We did our first Sainsbury's transaction. That's how we initiated our advent into the U.K., which was $500 million. And more recently, we've done a $550 million deal with Decathlon, a multi-jurisdictional sale- leaseback, which is the strong suit that we bring to the table. The more complicated a transaction, the bigger the check, that's where we shine best. Today, Europe represents 14% of our overall portfolio and contributes about $700 million in rent.
Gaming is yet another similar story. We are hyper-selective in this particular sector, but when you get an opportunity to buy, coming out of the pandemic, a prized asset like the Encore Boston Harbor in Boston at well below replacement cost, that was the way we got into the gaming business, and we created a very deep relationship with Wynn that we view as one of the premier operators in the gaming space. More recently, we bought a stake from Blackstone on Bellagio, and this was about a year and a half ago, and those are our two investments in the gaming business. We hope to keep expanding this, but like I said, this is a very selective area of expansion for us. Data centers is the newest vertical that we are creating for ourselves.
As you can see from some of the indexed graphs that you have out there, the growth demand for data centers is exploding. Like I said, we are probably underestimating the demand for data centers in this space. What is the value proposition we bring to the table? We did our first investment. We partnered with Digital Realty. That's a developer of data centers in Northern Virginia, which is the epicenter of the data center space. What we bring to the table is our desire to hold these 20-year leases with hyperscalers for the duration of the lease, which is very unlike other pockets of capital that want to come in. Even though they will say that they are long-term, they define long-term as 5- 10 years. That's the biggest difference that I think we bring to the table.
It's the quantum of capital and our willingness to hold these assets for the long term and create value through a long-term hold strategy. So one of the biggest strengths that we have is our ability to source transactions. Since 2010, we have sourced close to $625 billion worth of transactions, and we've closed on about 8%. When I joined the company 15 years ago, we were a $6.5 billion company. Fast forward to today, we are an $80 billion company, $50 billion of which we've invested in the last 15 years. Plus, there's been compression on the overall valuation, actually multiple, has expanded. Cap rates have compressed, and that's contributed to the success of this business. I've already mentioned some of this. These are some examples of very large-scale transactions we've done. We did a $1.3 billion sale- leaseback with ASDA. It's the number three grocer in the U.K.
We've done a $550 million sale- leaseback with Decathlon. We did $1.5 billion with EG Group on convenience stores. You may be familiar with Cumberland Farms if you're from the northeast. Those are the assets that we now own, and it's operated by EG Group. We did a $900 million portfolio deal with CIM Group. They're based in Los Angeles. We talked about the two gaming assets and the $800 million data center transaction that we did in Northern Virginia, and the client happens to be an S&P 100 financial institution. All of this results in a very stable business, an A3, A- credit rating from Moody's and S&P 500, and a debt maturity that is well laddered, as you can see. One of the things that we've been able to do is to diversify on the fixed income side our sources of capital.
Given our geographical footprint, we are obviously able to raise 10-year unsecured bonds in the European market at 140 basis points inside of what we can do here in the U.S. U.S. 10-year unsecured bonds are right around 5.2%. In Europe, it's 3.8%. In the U.K., it's close to 5.4%, but what we hadn't done was to diversify away from public sources of equity. This is our newest evolution of Realty Income, which is the private fund business. We announced that we were going to do this in the third quarter earnings last year, towards the end of last year. Fast forward today, we are in the midst of our marketing process and have launched a private fund business. The characteristics of this fund will be very similar to or is an open-ended, evergreen, perpetual life vehicle.
The form of capital that will be attracted to this long-term, steady state income stream will be endowments, insurance money, and pension funds. That's the capital source that we want to tap into. That particular capital is 10 times the size of the public markets that chooses to invest in commercial real estate. This is our way of alleviating a single source of equity capital that we have used traditionally to finance our business. This is going to be the next leg up in the evolution of Realty Income. What does all of this mean? I've touched on a few things in terms of returns. We have a dividend yield of right around 6%. We have, on average, over our 31-year history, grown our business at right around 5%. On average, we have delivered 11% total operating return to shareholders.
If you look at the history of our company, not one year have we had a negative total operating return. We've had one year of negative earnings growth, which was in 2010, and that was 1.5%. We have delivered 13.5% total shareholder return on an annual basis since our inception. That is Realty Income in a nutshell. One of the things that you will see is that the bigger we've grown, our ability to source has grown, and our ability to grow faster has actually grown. Today, this is our track record. It speaks for itself, and I've touched on a lot of these points. With that, I'll open it up for questions.
Thanks, Sumit. And we will open it up to questions. Feel free.
Sure. Very interesting presentation. Thank you. The long-term history of it all. When you look at the outlook in terms of FFO growth or dividend growth, I mean, what do you think the business can produce in terms of growth if you're trying to go in the right space?
Yeah. What we say is, given the model that we currently have, the dividend is going to be in that 5%-6% zip code. We literally, two weeks ago, raised our dividend 4% year- over- year. And the earnings will be anywhere between 1%-5%. 1% in an environment like today, where there's a lot of uncertainty, there are a lot of policies that are being effectuated, which will have downstream impact. And last year, 2024, we delivered 4.5%, 4.8% earnings growth, and delivered a total return of 10.5%. So that's the profile of this business. With the private fund business, could that help? We believe so, but those are the ranges that we feel comfortable sharing today.
Additional questions?
Sure. Talk more about how you get to the 5% organic growth. What are the building blocks to get there?
It's a function of how much acquisitions we are able to conduct. So in 2023, we did $9.5 billion. In 2022, we did $9 billion. In 2022, we grew our business at 9.5%. Part of the reason for that was not just the $9 billion that we acquired, but we had also done an M&A transaction. But it is a function of what is your cost of capital at that given point in time, and what are you locking in those spreads? And the wider the spread, the more the growth. So in an environment where the backdrop is benign, more stable, being able to get to that 5% is not difficult.
But in an environment where there's a tremendous amount of volatility and it's reflected in your cost of capital, and you're trying to do a steady stream business, that's where you get to the lower end of that growth range.
So given the current macroeconomic environment, how are you evaluating tenant quality? Do you see any stress among your tenants?
Yeah. That's a great question. Look, with tariffs and retail consumers and the ability of retailers to pass through the higher cost, it's going to have a long-term impact on the consumer base. But if you look at the profile of the retailers that we are exposed to, they do have this non-discretionary, i.e., grocery business, convenience store business, lower price point businesses like quick service restaurants that tend to be the last dollar that is withdrawn by the consumers when they are under distress. Apparel, shoe stores, those are the ones that are going to experience the distress first. We don't have a lot of exposure to those types of clients. So there is a fair amount of uncertainty. The consumer base is going to experience, especially if these are long-term tariffs that are put in place, will experience some of the flow-through.
Every retailer has a different exposure to what's going to happen in the tariff environment. So for instance, you might not know this, Amazon, on the retail business, has 70% of their product coming from China. But am I worried about Amazon's ability to either pass through or absorb this additional cost? No, because most of the profitability for them is through their AWS business. However, if you have a 50% franchisee running a furniture business where a lot of the product does come from overseas and it is now going to experience this higher cost, and the housing market is not where it should be, those are clients that we are going to be very focused on. And if you look at the portfolio that we've created, there's a massively defensive element to it.
That was one of the reasons why we showed you the top 15 that we are exposed to. But we are underwriting to a higher rent loss number this year than what has been our average over the many years. It's 75 basis points. It is largely a function of representing what we are experiencing in the market today.
I think we have time for just one more question before our breakout session.
How do you decide between the private fund vehicle and the public vehicle on who buys what? Or deal?
That's a great question. Yeah. That's a great question. So let me take you back to 2024. We just recently concluded the year. We sourced about $43 billion of product. We chose to close on $3.9 billion. But there was $3.6 billion of product that we could have done if we had had the fund business up and running. And why is that? The $3.6 billion that we chose to pass on did not meet the first-year spread requirement that our public shareholders require of us. The private shareholders don't care about first-year spreads as much. They are very focused on what is the total return profile of these investments, as are the public. But the public have a dual remit for us. They want that overall return. They want that initial spread. Understandably so.
This is the reason why we feel like this is going to be a complementary form of capital that we are raising, especially at times like this. The second element that we've heard from our public shareholders is you're constantly in the market. Even though you're doing accretive deals, there's a lot of capital that you're raising. And so we want to alleviate that pressure. And that's another reason why we are tapping into an even larger source of capital that we haven't traditionally tapped into.
Okay, great. We will wrap it up and conclude here. Sumit, thank you so much. We appreciate your participation, and we will have a breakout session after this. Thank you so much.
Thank you.