Good morning. Welcome to Bank of America's 2026 Global Real Estate Conference. I'm Jana Galan, BofA's net lease REIT analyst. We're pleased to have with us Realty Income CFO and Treasurer, Jonathan Pong, SVP of Corporate Finance, Ryan Shannon, and Investor Relations, Alex Waters. Jonathan will start with a few opening remarks, and then we'll jump into Q&A and welcome the group to ask their questions as well.
Thanks, Jana. Thanks for having us. For those of you that may not be as familiar with Realty Income, we are about a $90 billion enterprise value. We're an S&P 500 REIT, and importantly, and we take great pride in this, we are part of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index for having increased our dividend for now 31 consecutive years. We were founded in 1969, public since 1994. We view ourselves as the largest net lease company in the world. We own predominantly retail properties, so close to 80% of our annual base rent comes from retail, and this is essential retail properties. Our top tenant, for instance, includes Dollar General, and number two is close behind that at 7-Eleven. We own 15,600 properties in all 50 U.S. states. We're also in nine countries outside the U.S., predominantly in Western Europe.
Some of the recent news for Realty Income, we announced just Monday morning, a new joint venture with KKR. This follows on the heels of a joint venture that we announced in March with Apollo. Really the impetus of these joint ventures that we're doing, and it's part of a broader private capital strategy that we have established over the last two years, is to continue to diversify our sources of equity away from the public markets. We'll continue to utilize the public markets, but this is a very capital-intensive business, given how much we raise to finance new acquisitions to grow earnings per share or AFFO per share. These joint ventures really allow us to tap into institutional pools of capital. They're really looking to provide their beneficiaries the same type of income that we have provided our investors since 1969.
I'm sure we'll go into that in more detail. That's really where we've been spending a lot of our time over the last two days at various investor meetings. With that, I'll conclude the prepared remarks, and we can go right into some of the questions here.
Jana, before we start, I just want to make sure we're covered from a forward-looking statement position. As a reminder, we may make statements that may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities law. The company's actual future results may differ significantly from matters discussed in any forward-looking statements. We'll disclose in greater detail the factors that may cause such differences at the company's filings with the SEC.
Thank you, Alex. Big picture, Realty Income has evolved significantly over the last decade. How would you describe Realty Income today, and what makes the company unique amongst your net lease peer set?
I would summarize by saying we've got a lot of levers to grow. When you think about our business 10 years ago, we were not global. I think we weren't even in all 50 U.S. states. I know about 12 years ago, we were only about $15 billion enterprise value. To be at $90 billion today, to be in 10 different countries globally, and to now have multiple forms of capital to help finance our business beyond just the public equity markets, it really differentiates ourselves amongst our net lease peers. From our standpoint, we are much more diversified. We have the benefits of scale. We have a 95% EBITDA margin, and so this is a very efficient business, and it's one that gives us opportunities to invest across different property types, different transaction sizes that tend to be much larger.
Larger deals for us leads to wholesale discounts when we're competing against smaller peers who tend to invest in just smaller deals because they don't have the ability to diversify as much as we do. We have more liquidity. We're the only net lease REIT that has three A ratings really across the board, one of only four REITs that have one solid A rating. The other three are Prologis, Simon Property Group, and Public Storage. T here's a certain operational reputation that we also have that we've been using to really expand our business rather than just focusing on public capital. I think a lot of commercial real estate today that's held in private hands appreciates the track record, the performance, and really this specialty that we have in sourcing, underwriting, and managing net lease real estate, and we've done that very well, I think, for 57 years now.
Great.
As you think about the company today, I guess in 10 years from now, do you feel like some of these paths of growth, it is still early. Or is it more you feel like some of it you feel you are middle stage and a lot more experience, or?
Not quite the first inning. We have been at this now for the better part of 18 months or so, but you are starting to see the fruits of these efforts. Truth be told, we started working on this strategy and creating this vision, I would say five years ago. It has taken us a little bit of time to get rolling here. I think a lot of what we have announced, whether it is early this year with the GIC, the joint venture, which is a development joint venture, our U.S. Core Plus Fund, where we closed on a $1.7 billion cornerstone equity raise in March, the Apollo joint venture, which we announced in March, and now the KKR, which is a euro-denominated joint venture. We are now showing that we can expand that across borders.
For us, we think that net lease is going to be increasingly relevant, a property type, or it is not even a property type, it is really a sub-sector that can be any type of property. It is just a lease structure. T he demand for income, given the aging baby boomer that has all that wealth, that is looking to generate perpetual income until they die, effectively, as morbid as that sounds, it is a mega trend that I think we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of. T hat can lend itself to more private capital vehicles. Ultimately, what does this do for the Realty Income shareholder? It allows us to generate capital-like fee revenue. It allows us to minimize the amount of public equity that we need to raise.
That is a clear differentiator as we continue to grow globally and as we continue to invest in different property types that do require external capital. We want to diversify and not be beholden to just that one source of public equity capital that our peers have to rely on solely.
Can I ask a question? As you are a super lean structure, how do you financially think about this income generator? Are you thinking yield plus growth? How do you underwrite your yield? Is it a spread above whatever cost of capital you are assessing? I am asking you, how do you create your meal?
No, great question. I like how you put it. At the end of the day, we are thinking about a long-term cost of capital, and we are underwriting long-term IRRs on an unlevered basis. As a public company, we do have to think about day one or year one earnings accretion. For us, we think about cost of capital two different ways. We make investment decisions at the end of the day based off of that long-term IRR, which burdens every dollar of equity the same way, whether it is coming from free cash flow or whether it is coming from external capital. We think about our debt cost as our indicative cost of 10-year debt to match duration of asset and liability. We think about that cost of debt as a blended approach across all the currencies that we invest in, euro, sterling, and U.S. dollar .
That is really the long-term cost of capital. Every deal that we underwrite over the initial lease term has to meet or exceed what is effectively a long-term, unlevered, weighted average cost of capital that is in the 8% area. When we think about the short-term weighted average cost of capital, it is a very straightforward concept. For every U.S. dollar that we invest, the source of those funds, how much does that dilute our earnings? We have $1 billion, give or take, of free cash flow on an annual basis. Yes, we understand there is an opportunity cost to that, but as a cost that dilutes earnings over the next 12 months, there is no cost because that is just internally generated cash. We also have to raise external equity from the public markets. Let us put the private capital to the side.
That external cost of equity is really a function of our stock price, and so it is basically our AFFO yield. Obviously, as stock prices come down, that cost goes up and vice versa. The cost of debt is really the same. It is the cost of that 10-year cost of unsecured debt, which for us, is another differentiator, given that we have the highest credit ratings within our peer group. We do demand a meaningful spread on that short-term weighted average cost of capital because we obviously want to be accretive on a per-share basis as we are deploying that capital. When we are thinking about just the net leasing investment in general, day one yield is relevant for the public market and really for both the public and the private investors.
We're looking for long-term contractual growth in our leases that allow us to blend out to a very attractive long-term IRR. That growth piece is what private capital allows us to do more of because we are now able to invest in assets that maybe don't have that very high yield day one, but it has a modest yield, a decent yield. More importantly, it gives us 2% or 3% rent growth throughout a 15-year lease term, or in some cases, even 20 years. You're blending out now where a 15- 20 year hold with very good credit quality and with aggregate cash flows, that really every commercial real estate investor is looking to achieve, and we're doing with a fraction of the volatility that you see in other property types.
As the company has evolved, is your competition at this point really for the third-party capital? Let's just say, the Prologises, the PSAs, the Blackstones, or your triple-net peers. I think it's really both. These conferences that we have, there's obviously quite a bit of capital formation on the public side amongst other net lease peers and competitors, and that's led to a fairly competitive market that has put a lid on cap rates here in the U.S. When you think about investments abroad, especially in Europe, we do feel as though there's significantly less competition. It's very complicated. It's very resource intensive to build an international business, and we've been doing it for the last seven years. There's less public competitors that are operating in that market, and there's less private capital formation investing in net lease.
We feel like that's a very attractive region for us to continue investing. On the private capital side, we're not the incumbent. We're the new kid on the block. Truth be told, we have to prove ourselves in this market. With joint ventures, with key partners, we very much believe in showing that we can do what we've been capable of and what we've shown through our company's history, but we need to prove it in the context of these new joint ventures, and we fully intend to do that. For the Core Plus Fund, which is a perpetual open-end vehicle, performance in the early days of the first-time fund manager is extremely important, because we are competing against folks that have been doing this private capital fund model for a lot longer than we have.
We are very grateful and appreciative that we were able to raise $1.7 billion as a first-time fund manager in an environment where open-end perpetual capital in commercial real estate is not exactly a very significant volume of the market today. I think when people heard our track record, how we run the business, how we have a very unique mousetrap in this one single niche, we are very grateful for the support that we got, and now we just got to show that performance really over the first three years. That's really the key timeframe to show what kind of returns you can provide for investors on the private side.
Maybe turning to external growth, it's been a tremendous year, yet you've raised guidance once again for 2026. Curious where you're seeing the most opportunities today across asset classes and geographies.
Definitely Europe. I think this is a competitive advantage that we have because when you think about the competitive moat, especially as we're competing against European institutional capital. We do have access to the U.S. capital markets, which is extremely deep, extremely efficient, and gives us cost and access that many competitors in Europe don't have. We have a $5.5 billion revolver. That gives us immediate liquidity. We can do deals of significant size. We have a program available to us in the U.S. called an ATM, which is basically giving us immediate liquidity to equity proceeds, and we are a very liquid stock that trades between $300 million and $400 million a day in the stock exchange here, so we can leverage that to raise quite a bit of equity if we wanted to. We also have a significant platform of 580 odd individuals today globally.
We have a London team that is now pushing 70 individuals. I t's a real company with every function represented. We think all these competitive advantages that we've been able to benefit from in the U.S. are completely transportable across borders, and that's where we see, as a result, significant opportunities for us to deploy capital. I also think in a high- rate environment, the ability to invest across the capital stack, especially in debt investments that are strategic in nature, is where we're seeing a lot of good opportunities. T o be clear, we're investing in debt securities that are associated with tenants or partners where we would want to own the real estate. We're not a merchant lender. We're not a bank.
We're looking to strategically place capital to build a relationship, to invest in a more senior part of the capital stack for tenants and industries that we know very well and that we're very constructive on. And importantly, in many cases, we utilize that as a way to potentially convert that investment into common equity ownership into the real estate after a period of time. I f you can be more senior in the capital stack, if you can generate yields that are in the high single digits, and to do it in a strategic manner, that's something where we see a lot of opportunity in a high rate environment with the 10-year now north of 5%.
If you look at investment yields today, where are they with what you saw in the first half of the year, and what is your outlook for investment spreads going forward given this higher rate environment?
Sure. I think investment cap rates, and I will just share it as of 6/30, have been pretty stable. It remains to be seen with where we are today with the backup in yields on the long end of the curve, how quickly cap rates and investment yields can adjust.
What is your thinking about it? Because it looks to some investors that it is a kind of a credit agency syndrome at two point zero. If I am not doing it, someone else on the other side of the street will. You see what I mean? Well, you guys are the real market maker because you two invest tons of money, and that is real money. I t looks like there is a gap between book values and price you are ready to pay, or this famous question around what spread do you need and are you going to contract that spread or are you going to lower the price?
It really depends on the opportunity. Not all deals are created equal and not all cap rates and yields carry the same return per unit of risk dynamic. All things equal with a 5% 10-year yield and with a cost of capital that is higher today than it was three months ago. I think everyone investing in net lease is not going to be as active or will not have the ability to be as active unless they get more creative. F or us, one of the themes is that we have got multiple levers to pull. We do not have to just rely on the retail investment grade net lease market in the U.S., for instance. W e are seeing opportunities across the capital stack, across geographies, and importantly, the source of those funds. We are not just raising ATM equity here in the U.S.
We also have access to private forms of equity. We have $1 billion of annual free cash flow. As of the end of the second quarter, I believe we had $1.2 billion of unsettled forward equity that provided immediate liquidity at a known cost to us. We got ahead of a lot of our debt needs by doing a convertible debt offering that raised $1 billion at 3.75% recently. We've got a lot of ways to generate very meaningful spreads. T o be clear, if the cap rate environment continues to be pressured in certain areas, we have never felt like we should be buying for the sake of buying and posting numbers. We're focused on per share accretion, but we can do that in a multitude of ways, and we're going to continue to have that mentality.
It's all based off of, yes, long-term IRRs, but as a public company, we also are focused on year one earnings accretion.
How do you balance these investment opportunities, debt, equity, the funds, the JVs, with real estate investors wanting simplicity? The biggest pushback we've gotten on our third-party capital notes is the simplicity. How are you guys thinking about that today, and is it just really trying to deliver a clear message? Like I'll just say it, I think you're doing today. I don't know what the answer is, but how are you guys thinking about it?
At the end of the day, we want the outcomes and the results that we generate to be very simple for our investors. Let us deal with the complexity behind the scenes. A t the end of the day, what has Realty Income been known for? Total returns in the high single, low double digits. E quity-like returns with a fraction of the volatility. Nothing's changed. If anything, that central North Star remains as relevant and as important and as top of mind for us as ever. The complexity are things that we are mitigating behind the scenes. P art of that is when you think about private capital, there's this perception that there's conflicts of interest.
For us, we've designed our private capital strategies and the private capital products that we have to cater to the different needs in the marketplace, different return profiles, different currencies, different property types, different products, so that intentionally there is very little overlap between these strategies. Realty Income is also a meaningful co-investor in each of these strategies. W e have skin in the game. What that means for the public investor is that if we're getting some type of economic advantage by bringing in third parties that we're getting management fees from, and we're still investing in these products, we're just getting more return per dollar that we are investing of public equity capital.
There aren't these conflicts because we've created a matrix that effectively says, all right, for anything that is long duration, very granular, i.e., retail net leases in the U.S., that's what Apollo is getting. That's what they're looking for. That $2 billion JV that we announced had 500 individual retail properties. $4 million a copy. That's incredible granularity and diversification. It's a fairly low cost of long-term equity as well at 6.875%. Things that maybe have a significant growth profile contractually that may have a slightly lower initial yield. Industrial product, for instance, stabilized industrial product. We've been buying a lot of that into the U.S. Core Plus Fund because these investors, they're not as concerned about year one yield because they don't have a mandate to invest in stocks that are driven off of AFFO per share accretion. It's more of a long-term IRR play.
That's an expansion of the sandbox that the balance sheet wasn't really investing in anyway. These are all strategies in the U.S. that can then be extended abroad as we announced with KKR. The GIC joint venture is really focused on build-to-suit development, primarily for industrial properties. I think with that, what we want to show to the marketplace is that, yes, it's more work on our end, but we're designing it so that you're not going to see any difference in the lumpiness of earnings. If there is lumpiness, it's going to be upside lumpiness, which we think is a good thing.
Maybe turning to Realty Income recently announced a $6 billion data center joint venture with Cloud Capital. What's attracted you to the data center space? Can you walk us through the timeline of this particular JV and how investors should think about the longer-term opportunities in data centers?
We had our first data center investment back in 2023. It was a joint venture with Digital Realty, obviously, very well-known, very respected partner. This JV that we have announced is not our first foray into the data center space. In fact, we have been researching and looking into this property type well before we even announced the Digital JV. This is a $6 billion JV with Cloud Capital, very well-respected, tremendous developer, the principals that have been involved in data centers for decades. When we step into a new vertical, and I will use the same analogy for gaming, a new vertical where it is unique in terms of the drivers, the operational aspects of it, we tend to partner with what we believe are best-in-class operators and partners. We did that with the Wynn when we purchased the Wynn Encore in Boston.
Our other exposure in gaming includes a joint venture investment with Blackstone on the Bellagio, and obviously MGM is a tremendous operator. We have that same mentality as we get into some of these more unique asset classes. It is 45% equity interest that we have. In the joint venture, there is another institutional investor, and then there is skin in the game that Cloud Capital retains. These assets are in Northern Virginia. They are leased or pre-leased to hyperscalers. We feel as though, if we are going to be entering this new space that there are some longer-term views that people have about residual value and whatnot. We want to do it in a very straightforward, high-quality manner. I think that is what we have done so far with our two joint ventures. When we think about the broader opportunity set, it is very interesting.
As you all know, there is a lot of volume, there is a lot of opportunity. We are going to be very methodical about how we approach the market. I think people wondered, okay, you did this first JV in 2023, why have not you done anything else until now? Because we want to feel like we are getting compensated economics-wise for the highest quality product that we can get. As you think about a 15-year, 20-year hold, you want to be very cognizant about residual value. Even if you get a very good initial yield and very good growth, you cannot have a residual value that you do not have great confidence in. When you do see us think about growing potentially our exposure to data centers, that is the lens that we are going to have. That is the criteria that we are going to follow.
There is a lot of opportunity that we see. I want to be clear on that because just because we are doing new things does not mean that we are taking on more risk.
Can you just elaborate on how you economically read this data center business? Because the big question mark from the industry and the infrastructure or real estate industry right now is a big part of what you are buying is tech outside of the IT infrastructure, meaning generator, AC, and so on. Which is where the amortization is what, depreciation, sorry, is roughly 25 years, while the real estate is traditionally 100 years. T hat, in theory, have no impact on your cash flow, but do have an impact on your free cash flow at some point, because every 25 years, you need to replace entirely something which is between 30% and 40% of the value of what you bought.
How do you look at the effective pre-permit year return on those investments, where it looks like there is a significantly higher level of CapEx in data centers than anywhere else? That is first question. Second question is, those assets you created a JV with on are stabilized assets, and where the growth is coming from? Because I am not sure everyone does understand the type of contract, which are not exactly rental contract, you get with those hyperscalers, which can be on what, 15 years and maybe just CPI- related plus or minus, I do not know exactly. Can you just.
Yeah. O n the second part, the recent JV is one stabilized asset and two development [build-to- suit].
Okay.
And the kind of growth that.
That's where you get the value, that's true.
Correct. Very much acceptable initial yield, good growth. Depends on your view of CPI, but we tend to get fixed escalators that are fairly healthy. As we think about long-term underwriting, this is why the value of land is so important. If you can own land in Northern Virginia, what we call the equivalent of beachfront real estate for data centers, and you have all the interconnect, all the power infrastructure, all the users, all the activity that's happening in this piece of real estate or in this region, you can feel as though, whether it's 15 years from now, 20 years from now, even if you want to be very draconian and conservative on what you value the building at, you know the land is going to carry its weight, it's going to carry its value. You can take comfort in that.
We know not all assets are going to go full value is necessarily going to be exactly what you paid. More often than not, real estate appreciates. I n cases where we feel there may be a question, we're going to double down on what we view as irreplaceable land. For us, we think most of the obsolescence risk obviously is in the equipment that goes in the data center, but not the actual shell, not the actual building itself. That's really where our exposure is. You can kind of ring-fence conservative underwriting, especially if you're getting the kind of rent growth, and going back to how important that is, embedded in the lease, and it's compounding for 15 years or 20 years. It also means you got to start at acceptable basis year one, otherwise you're just compounding off a very low level.
It doesn't really get you where you need to be. That's why we look at a lot, we source a lot, we'll underwrite a lot, but everything that we do, not everything falls into that nice little sweet spot of checking all these boxes and then some.
Maybe if we can just touch on tenant credit trends. You maintain 40 basis point credit loss assumption for the year. Maybe just talk a little bit about your watch list and given such a breadth of your portfolio, any industry groups where you're feeling a little bit better or a little bit worse.
I am going to share the mic a little bit and let my colleagues Alex and Ryan maybe take that one.
Yeah. Thanks, Jana. I would say for our credit watch list, it stepped down a little bit quarter-on-quarter, still in the 5.8%-5.9% range of ABR. The main components of that are some casual dining, home furnishing, car wash. T he watch list itself is very vast, 130, 150 clients on it with a median ABR exposure around 2 basis points . It is a very well-diversified list across the board. You are right, for our credit loss for the year, our expectation is still around 40 basis points. That has stairstepped down throughout the year from around 50 basis points heading into 2026. As of right now, around three-fourths of that is identified, with the remainder being unidentified and conservative in some nature heading into the back half of the year here.
Thank you. We are almost out of time, so I have three rapid-fire questions for Jonathan. If long-term rates stay higher for longer, which has the biggest impact on your sector's earnings: higher refinancing costs, lower transaction activity, or less new supply?
Lower transaction activity.
Over the next three years, will third-party capital, I think I know the answer, become a more important source of growth for public REITs than balance sheet capital? Yes or no?
It's a tough one, but clearly yes.
For your sector, will 2027 same-store NOI growth be higher, the same, or lower than 2026?
Higher.
Thank you. Thank you, Realty Income.