Good morning. My name is Tom, and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to the Strawberry Fields REIT Year-End 2024 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, you have to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jeffrey Bajtner, Chief Investment Officer. Sir, please go ahead.
Thank you and welcome to Strawberry Fields REIT's Year-End 2024 Earnings Call. I am the Chief Investment Officer of the company, and I focus on acquisitions, growing the company's operator base, and investor relations. On the call with me today are Moishe Gubin, our Chairman and CEO, and Greg Flamion, our CFO. On Thursday, the company issued its year-end 2024 results, which is available on the company's investor relations website. Participants should be aware that this call is being recorded and listeners are advised that any forward-looking statements made on today's call are based on management's current expectations, assumptions, and beliefs about Strawberry Fields REIT's business and the environment in which it operates.
These statements may include projections regarding future financial performance, dividends, acquisitions, investments, returns, financings, and may or may not reference other matters affecting the company's business or the businesses of its tenants, including factors that are beyond its control. Additionally, references will be made during this call to non-GAAP financial results. Investors are encouraged to review these non-GAAP financial measures as well as the explanation and reconciliation of these measures to the comparable GAAP results included on the Non-GAAP Measure Reconciliation page in our investor presentation. I now want to discuss Strawberry Fields REIT and our 2024 performance. As we look back at 2024, the big takeaway is the work the team completed on growing the portfolio. This growth was not just through acquisition of new facilities, but also working with existing tenants on renewing existing leases so the company has stable cash flows into the foreseeable future.
I'd like to point out some of the numbers which detail this growth. During the year, the company acquired $130.3 million of real estate, growing the portfolio from 109 facilities in nine states to 124 facilities in 10 states. Bed-wise, this translates from 12,449 beds to 14,186 beds, which is approximately a 14% increase. Through these acquisitions, the company has grown its tenant base from 10 operators to 14. Additionally, the company's base rents increased from $84 million in 2023 to $104 million in 2024. We expect that number to be around $130 million in 2025. As it relates to our existing tenants' leases, both of our Indiana master leases were renegotiated for new 10-year terms, which will ensure rent into 2034. We also had a few individual leases that matured and were re-tenanted by an existing tenant into their master lease.
Currently, 88% of our facilities are tied to master leases. For 2025, the company has six leases that mature, four in Ohio and two in Illinois. We are pleased to announce that the tenant for the Ohio facilities has exercised the renewal option for the next five years. With these renewed leases and new acquisitions, our average lease term has increased from 4.6 years at the beginning of 2024 to a healthy 7.4 years at the end of the year. It is important to note that this average lease term is based on the initial 10-year lease term of the lease. Almost all of our leases include at least two five-year options to extend. As it relates to the past year, I want to share some key highlights. During the year, the company collected 100% of its contractual rents.
As we discussed in last quarter's earnings call, in July, the company filed a registration statement on Form S-3 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In August, the company established an ATM program. Through this program, the company began selling shares to the public for the first time as we initiated went public through a direct listing. In December, the company followed up to the ATM program with our first underwritten public offering of approximately 3.34 million shares of common stock for total gross proceeds of $35 million. In December, the company completed an acquisition with an unaffiliated seller with respect to eight healthcare facilities located in Missouri and Kansas. The purchase price for the facilities was $87.5 million. The facilities are currently leased under a master lease agreement to a group of third-party tenants.
Under the master lease, the tenants currently pay annual rent on a triple net basis. The eight facilities are comprised of 1,111 beds. In December, the company entered into a purchase agreement for six healthcare facilities with 354 licensed beds located in Kansas. The purchase price for the facilities was $24 million. The facilities are leased under a triple net master lease agreement to a group of third-party tenants. The initial lease term is for 10 years and includes two five-year options. The company closed the acquisition on January 2nd, 2025. This acquisition brought the company into its 11th state and increased the overall portfolio to 130 facilities and 14,540 beds. Subsequent to quarter end, our board of directors authorized a cash dividend of $0.14 a share. The dividend will be payable on March 31st, 2025, to shareholders of record on Monday, March 17th, 2025.
This dividend will be our 10th consecutive quarter of paying dividends and continues to represent the company's philosophy of showing the market that our dividends can be relied upon. I would now like to have Greg Flamion, our Chief Financial Officer, discuss the year-end financials.
Hello, and thank you for attending our end-of-year earnings call. 2024 has been a year of significant portfolio expansion for Strawberry Fields REIT. Including the acquisition of our Kansas properties on January 2nd, 2025, we have increased our portfolio by 19.3%, bringing the overall facility count to 130 facilities. This expansion has strengthened our financial position, driving substantial growth in net fixed asset related accounts and increasing total assets by 27.7% to $170 million. In addition to the financial growth, this expansion has enhanced our risk diversification across states and operators as we have entered into two new states and established partnerships with new operators. Additionally, cash and cash equivalents, both restricted and unrestricted, increased due to the financing of the Kansas acquisition and higher reserves associated with financing activities.
Our 2024 year growth was supported by multiple funding sources, including $118 million in bond issuances, a new $59 million mortgage facility with Popular Bank, a $33 million equity raise, and proceeds from our after-the-market program, as well as rental income. The company also strategically reduced debt by paying down $24 million on a higher interest loan. Collectively, these financing activities led to a 23.6% increase in total liabilities or $134.5 million. While equity rose $36 million, representing a 76.8% year-over-year increase. Moving to the profit and loss statement. 2024 was also a year of strong profit growth for Strawberry Fields REIT. Revenue increased by $17.3 million or 17.3%, driven by full year contributions of the Indiana master lease, which was acquired in Q3 2023, as well as revenue from additional acquisitions completed throughout 2024.
Total expenses rose by $3.4 million or 6.5%, primarily due to higher depreciation and amortization costs, along with increased general and administrative expenses. Interest expense also grew by $8.2 million or 33.4%, reflecting the additional expenses incurred to finance the company's portfolio growth. Despite these increases, revenue growth outpaced expenses, resulting in a net income of $26.5 million. This is an increase of $6.3 million or 30.9% compared to the prior year. Moving to the financial highlights slide. Our strong operational performance resulted in an adjusted AFFO of $55.8 million and an adjusted EBITDA of $90.6 million. These metrics demonstrated year-over-year growth with a compound annual growth rate of 12.6% and 8.2% respectively. Despite our strategic emphasis on portfolio expansion, we remain committed to delivering value to our shareholders.
In 2024, the company increased its dividend from $0.12 per share at the beginning of the year to $0.14 per share by year end. This represents a 16.6% increase in the annual dividend distribution per share and a 5.3% dividend yield with an AFFO payout of 49.5%. Moishe Gubin will continue the presentation with additional 2024 portfolio highlights.
Thank you. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Jeff. As we go through the slides, for me, the underlying conversation is the maturity of our company and how it continues to go from originally a mom and pop, founded by Michael and I company to turning into a publicly traded company and heading our way towards getting widely held, adding liquidity to the stock. I guess for me, the biggest highlight of the year was actually doing our first real public offering, bringing in some institutional shareholders and getting admitted into the Russell Global REIT Index. For us to grow on that and build on that is what we're looking to do. Currently, the portfolio is 130 facilities in 11 states. You know, as I mentioned earlier, about 14,540 beds. We currently are leasing to about 15 different groups.
Like also Jeff said, our WALT went up to 7.2. All of our leases are built that same exact way, which are 10-year leases with two five-year renewals. That WALT up to 7.2 is towards the high end because people are not going to renew leases when there's six, seven years left for me. We're going to keep working on that and growing that. Our trade on 12 month EBITDA is a good number. They're on the chart, some of you probably saw that. That's out years. We're basically in the same neighborhood as everybody else. Our base rent growth rate, 7.5%, which is pretty good. 5% rents, as Jeff said earlier. Really proud of this ramp, particularly from six years ago, AFFO of $31 almost doubling in six years. Very proud of that.
The growth rate on the base rent, like we said earlier, we expect that number to close at $130 million in 2025. AFFO, we expect the growth probably closer to $75 by the end of the year. We'll see how well we're doing getting there. Our stock price, this is really for me the highlight. We were relatively unknown and trading few shares By appointment at the beginning of 2024. As the year went on, our volume increased, our stock started to grow. Then we did an offering, the stock went down. Today, our stock price, I believe, is trading over $12 a share, hopefully it'll continue its rise. Our real goal for today's purpose is for us to be treated like all of our peers, that's being traded at a multiple of 13, 14 times our FFO.
We hope to get there, God willing. Our year-over-year return versus our peers, as you can tell, this is the front of the graph, but the dynamic is us, I'm proud of that. Our FFO trading multiple is at the lowest from our peers. Again, we hope to improve. Part of that is us going to conferences on a regular basis, going out there, meeting investors, meeting with analysts, getting the story out there so that the stock could trade. We'd like to continue to sell shares through the ATM. Our real range of our debt is we want to be between 45% and 55%. Right now we're at 51%, 52%, which is higher than we want to be, but it's in our range. God willing, we'll have a successful new year in raising equity and finding deals, that number should hopefully drop throughout.
Our payout ratio, again, we're beating everybody as far as we're only growing, paying out 50%, using the rest of the money, of course, to fund our growth. Our dividend yield is right around 5%, and we're happy with that as well. I know there's people out there having a hard time hearing us. We're doing the best we can over here. Hopefully, whatever I miss, you'll ask in the question, and we'll be able to answer it. We're proud of the fact that we're really the only pure-play, skilled nursing, healthcare REIT out there. At this graph, you're able to see that we're close to 91% of our portfolio is skilled nursing. We generally do not look at deals for assisted livings. That's going to be from the current portfolio. We're going to continue doing exactly what we've been doing all along.
I mean, very disciplined, like we've told people over and over. We expect that number to improve. It's been improving since Corona ended. We see our tenants doing well, and hopefully they'll continue to thrive. Our FFO per share growth over the last five years is a really good number. That number, of course, may shrink, but it's going to continue to grow with us being active in the marketplace. These graphs are two of our progress graphs. You look at it grossly of our shares. I think our expectation this year, and at $1.11 as of the FFO per share, I think we're hoping this year to end close around $1.25. Something like that. That should be another 10% clip or 12% clip.
That together with our 5% dividend yield provides a good double-digit return for our investors. We expect that we should be able to continue to do that. Our business is so solid and stable that really, if we just stop doing what we're doing, we'd be able to just dividend out twice as much as we have, as we're doing now. We feel to continue to collect all of our rents and run a really strong company. Of course, our objective is to keep growing as long as we can grow the way we want to grow. We're doing it on our terms. We've told the marketplace exactly how we buy, and we remain committed to buying exactly that way. That's what we're doing, and hopefully, we'll be able to continue to do that.
Just for informational purposes, our debt maturities, we don't have anything we're owing in 2025. We do expect to clean out some of our debt by bringing in less expensive debt. If our shares continue to trade well, to sell shares through the ATM to pay down debt, that should be good for all of us shareholders. We still look hard at our exit on the debt side of things, though the interest environment has become very difficult. We'll see where that lands. This is really what I'm proud of. This progress here shows you that we've diversified our portfolio by state and by operator, where nobody is higher than 28% of our portfolio, that's going to continue to shrink as we continue to grow.
This is, for me, this is really good because when we started years ago, it was one operator in one state, then it became one operator in two states, then as we started getting more folks in. Related party leases are probably 50% or still shrinking. Folks that like the related party leases, I'm sorry, but we're going to continue to diminish those, to shrink those down. Of course, they don't like that as much. You should be happy to know that we're continuing to meet and ask new tenants not related to our portfolio. With that, this is what our map looks like. There's still plenty to fill in in Missouri and Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio. We have what to do in the Midwest, but that's really where we are now.
If we found a deal tomorrow for 20 facilities in Colorado, if the deal makes sense and it fits our box, we would buy. The reality is really we're Midwest and we're going to keep growing in circle and as it relates to be able to keep us moving along nicely. That's about it. Let me open the floor for questions.
Certainly. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We do ask, if listening on speaker phone this morning, that you pick up your handset while asking your question to provide optimal sound quality. Once again, please press star one on your telephone keypad at this time if you wish to join the queue to ask a question. Please hold a moment while we poll for questions. The first question this morning is coming from Gaurav Mehta from Alliance Global Partners. Gaurav, your line is live. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning.
Morning.
I wanted to ask you more details on the transaction market. Want to get some color on what you are seeing as far as deal flow and pricing.
Well, I'll let Jeff answer that, but I would just tell you pricing-wise, we buy things exactly the same way. If it doesn't fit our box, we don't buy it. We haven't bent on that or bended, if that's the right English word, on our philosophy and our execution strategy. I'll let Jeff answer what the pipeline looks like.
As Moish said, the investment approach hasn't changed for years. We have a time-tested, street-tested approach that we've used for a long, long time. We're looking for deals. For us, deals are coming in consistently from all corners of the country. As Moish said, we're only going to be growing in a new state if it makes sense, and there's a sizable approach or a sizable portfolio. As we just showed you in Missouri and Kansas, there are eight facilities in Missouri, six in Kansas. We had to go to eight. Our portfolio pipeline right now is about $350 million, and a big source of our deals has been Moish and I are constantly on the road looking at these assets. We went and saw a healthcare asset last month. There's a good asset coming out this week in San Diego.
Hey, we look forward to seeing more deals and obviously continue to grow the top line.
Yeah, I would say that as we get bigger and bigger, hopefully deal size will continue to grow. We've now two years in a row closed over $110 million-$125 million a year. We expect this year, hopefully I don't know if the marketplace wants me to sound like I'm certain that things are going to happen, but I don't have a crystal ball, so I'm telling it to you like how I feel. I expect that we should be able to close $150 million this year and hopefully more. We already have, I think, most likely lined up probably close to $80 million-$90 million. It's only the beginning of March, so hopefully this year will be a banner year as far as growth. Again, it's controlled growth because it has to fit our box, doing business the way we do business.
Okay, great. As a follow-up, as you look to grow your company in 2025, how should we think about your leverage expectations?
Again, our mandate has been between 45% and 55%, debt to equity, or debt to market cap at this point. I would expect to be towards the low end of that range. That was one of the things I'm proud of from 2024, was that it proved that we have an open market for selling equity. We have an open debt market, obviously, in Israel for us, and we have banks in the U.S. that are willing to lend to us. There's a lot of different choices, right? Every cash has a price to it depending on where things are. We're looking to take the best option for us. Most of the things that we do, it's flexible. Even if I close on where today it makes sense to take on debt, right?
Tomorrow equity goes up, I could take on equity and pay down debt or vice versa. Again, I have all the confidence today as a person, as a human being, and as a group, I have all the confidence in our ability to bring in the cash needed for a deal to get closed. Again, we want to be probably south of 50% of the weight of debt. Again, we have all the options available to us.
Okay. Lastly, I don't know if I missed in the prepared remarks, but did you guys provide a forecast for 2025 AFFO per share?
I think our range would be somewhere. It's going to be near that $1.11. I would say that we're probably I didn't want to be too aggressive to fail you. I would say that we're for $1.20 as our expected AFFO per share for the year. I expect to beat that.
Okay. Thank you.
I'm really undercutting myself because I want to, again, I think I said it last time, I'm looking for adulation. I want to beat what I tell you so that I look good. The reality is, it's probably $1.20, somewhere a little bit north of that.
Okay. Thank you. That's all I have.
You're welcome. Thank you, Gaurav.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Rob Stevenson from Janney. Rob, your line is live. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. The sound keeps cutting in and out. Did you say $1.20 of AFFO for 2025? Was that what the number was that you guys gave?
Yeah. I think that's a number that I can certainly hit. I would expect that that would do it.
Okay. Sorry if you guys covered this because the sound was fading in and out, through most of the call, but I think I heard you say that most of your 2025 lease expirations had renewed already. Can you talk about where you are with the ones that haven't yet renewed or both?
Yeah. We have two leases left for 2025 to renew. One of them renews, either August or September 1st, one of them renews in December. The one that renews in December, there's two five-years remaining on that deal, the tenant has already said that they're going to renew that lease. That's good. The second one, it doesn't renew. It's the end of the lease that's matured, the tenant's already said that they do not plan on staying in the property. We're actively pursuing a new tenant for that one asset. Other than that's just one asset out of 130 assets. It's one of the standalones. Most likely it'll end up not being in a master lease because I think it's going to be a new operator. It's not going to be somebody that we already lease to.
It'll stay a standalone, it'll be a new 10-year with two five years. I would expect that we should be able to be budget neutral, give or take, small money one way or the other. We'll lock them in for 10-year with two five years. We'll take our normal routine, which six months security deposit, full guarantee of the lease. God willing, we'll be able to get that done for August, September, we'll update you folks. It's only one lease. It's relatively immaterial, we'll update you, I guess, next quarter earnings call. Hopefully by then we'll already know.
Okay. On page 24 in the slide deck, you guys have the operator payer mix. The Medicaid percentage went up noticeably quarter-over-quarter. Is that just the acquisitions or is something else driving that, and is sort of 75%-76% where they should be going forward in your mind?
Our tenants don't have audited financials, we don't audit what they submit to us. We gather it, pass it along. For that specific metric, we're not really auditing that. It's not as important to us. I can try to go and dig into the numbers in the next couple days and get back to you, Rob. I don't know if it's just a reclass of before hospice or something that now they're coding as Medicaid. I'd have to get back to you because it's not something that we spend too much time in our asset management really. We spread the numbers, and we put it into a format, and we present it, but it's not something that we really know, and I don't want to BS you. That's not my style, as you know.
Okay. In terms of the shares and all outstanding, what were the diluted shares, and units outstanding for the fourth quarter, as well as for the full year? The release only had the share count, but not the units.
You want to answer that?
Our diluted shares at year-end were roughly 12.1 million shares, and our OP units were 43.4 million shares. We had a total of 55.5 million shares.
Okay. How significant was the ATM issuance in the fourth quarter?
In the fourth quarter, we only used the ATM at the end in October. We issued 71,000 shares, roughly $861,000.
Okay, guys. Thanks.
Yeah. You're welcome.
Thank you for your time this morning.
Pleasure. Thank you.
Sure. Thanks, Rob.
Thank you. As a reminder, should you wish to join queue to ask a question at this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Your next question is coming from Rich Anderson from Wedbush Securities. Rich, your line is live. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Can you just repeat those diluted share numbers? You faded out as you were getting to the OP Units. I heard 12.1 million shares and then 43 point something.
43.4 million OP Units.
Okay. OP Units.
No, it's 55.
For a total of 55.5, is that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, it's all 31.
Thank you. Okay, thank you. That was as of Okay, got you. When you think about financing future activity, do you give any thought to dispositions playing any kind of role at all? I'm looking at your map here and you have some assets that are a bit far afield from your core cluster. Is that something you're thinking about? Are those sort of planted there for a potential to grow in places like South Texas or New Mexico area or something like that?
Well, this is an interesting question. The thing about our map is what we own is not what our tenants operate. Some of our tenants fill in the map pretty good with stuff that they're leasing from other vendors. You don't see their whole portfolio and how they're operating. Like Missouri, as an example. Our tenant in Missouri has 35 facilities. We're only leasing them 8 out of the 35, and the map fills in pretty good for him. As far as we go, our growth currently is actually the deals that we have that are hot for the next quarter or so are actually in Texas, Oklahoma, and in Missouri. That'll help fill in the map. Yeah.
Yeah. I think, I mean, just when I was presenting and you said we're out there a lot.
Yeah. I'm not catching that last part, but that's okay. That was a good point, Moishe, how your tenants themselves kind of fill in the gaps. My last question. You got a few on Medicaid and the government and budget and all that sort of stuff. Is it keeping you up at night or where do you land on all the politics behind skilled nursing these days?
Well, my background was as an operator. I haven't been involved with operations in probably 10 years or 11 years, but I'm still really in tune with what's going on. I'm still in a bunch of groups, and I get a lot of data. Most of, I mean, at least in the last few days, I think Trump just announced that they're going to be now eliminating or working on eliminating all the civil money penalties that are It doesn't really police the facilities just by charging them money. That doesn't make them somehow improve their operation. That being said, most of the conversation in the marketplace that I hear of, the conversation that people still are most concerned about is the reimbursement. It's not. It's the gnat that flies around that causes the biggest trouble is the regulations. You have to be regulated.
It's that kind of business that you need someone to be policing, making sure people are taken care of. This is our most precious commodity is our ancestry, our parents, our grandparents. That being said, I think the biggest worry out there is still the funding, not really the regulation, even though regulation is a gnat flying around. I think most people are optimistic that on the downside protection, most people are not expecting any negative sort of reimbursements to occur. Hopeful on the upside that the states will find the money in their budgets to be able to keep increasing funding to make sure that the operators have the wherewithal they need to be able to keep operating effectively and profitably. That's my thought. I'm not too worried about it, but my personality is anyway that of a worrier.
It's definitely a little uneasy, but it's not I'm totally on the up, not on the down here.
Okay. Appreciate the honesty. Thanks, guys.
Always, Rich. Always.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Barry Oxford from Colliers. Barry, your line is live. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks, guys. Getting back to the tenants, the one that is moving out, it seems like you guys got a pretty good bead on re-leasing that. Are there any other tenants that you're looking out into 2026 that you're concerned about? I know you collected 100% of rents this quarter.
Overall, not really. The weak state from a reimbursement standpoint and has a lot to do with union strength and labor and the whole marketplace is really the Chicagoland market in our portfolio. The trouble began really post-COVID because of a lot of the rules. They didn't let up on a lot of the COVID rules till only maybe in the last six months. Most of us have felt that COVID's been gone already two years. With that, there's been a lot of inefficiency in operations, they've caused a lot of pain amongst people as far as
As far as operating and profitably. Our model has us, when we look for tenants, is we're not usually just leasing to people that don't have deep pockets. Most of our people have made money and ride the wave. When the market is down, marketing in this case, save a little money and reimburse it. Really, reimbursements aren't down, it's expenses are up. Is that they have the wherewithal and deep pockets to be able to withstand it and then ride the wave the opposite direction, which hopefully happens sooner than later. With that being said, I'm not really too worried. I'm more worried about that region, which is at this point, I think six, seven, maybe eight homes. Out of those eight homes, three of them are really profitable.
Then you got a couple of homes that are struggling. Again, I would expect that we'll have a change in one asset. We'll have change maybe in a second asset. Even though we're collecting 100% rent, we'll change out operators to somebody else that wants to make a go of it. Everything should be right way sooner than the end of the year.
Okay. Perfect. Then last question from me. Given the growth that you have in the portfolio for 2025 and maybe doing 150, maybe even more acquisitions, how should we think about the G&A as we're kind of modeling that out for 2025?
For G&A, I think I said this in last year's or last quarter's comments. At this point, our G&A is exactly what you see for fourth quarter G&A, is basically what our normal run rate should be going forward by quarter. The only thing that's still out there is my pay, where there's been a bunch of discussion amongst the board members and the compensation committee about compensating me more in line with the market. I'm not pushing it. I honestly don't care. I'm a large shareholder. This is a labor of love as much as it is a livelihood. I would say to you that if you wanted to model for, I'm going to call worst case, but that's not really worst case.
Assuming that you had me sign some kind of employment agreement and you want to model it out, you'd be adding to the G&A maybe $1 million, $2 million a year. It's not a huge number. It's bigger number than what we've been running. I think I would still be running leaner than all of our peers. That's the only thing else. There's no other expected cost increases anywhere in our cost profile of the G&A expense.
Perfect. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
You're welcome. Thank you, Barry.
Yep.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Mark Smith from Lake Street. Mark, your line is live. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. First question from me was just any update or thoughts on the integration of the newly acquired properties. You guys were acquiring at a little more rapid pace here recently.
No, it's seamless. We already had been there beforehand. From an asset management side, we already had our baseline on how the properties look. We already know the properties. The first time around before we ever buy the asset, we have a library full of pictures of every nook and cranny of every building that we bought. With that, our conversation and relationships with the operator has gone off great. Both Willie in Kansas and Rick and Nick in Missouri, they're model tenants and good guys, and we're spending a lot of time together. That's part of our routine, is we make friends with people we do business with. Yeah. It's relatively seamless.
The first month, just a little bit of coordination of the wire instructions of the ACH, everything's set up to get our rent on the first of the month or second of the month like every other tenant. We absorbed all the CapEx schedules and really it's seamless. There was no hiccup at all, and we don't expect there to be a hiccup at all. It actually causes a little bit more work for me because now I have to go and spend a little bit more time in St. Louis, Missouri, to cultivate the relationship even further. I'm happy to because I really like these guys, it's still a schlep for me because I live in Boca now. Other than that and I fly commercial, I sit in coach and it's okay.
There's no easy way to get to Lambert from FLL, it's an all-day event. That being said, really, absolutely. At this point, we have a real war machine here. When we make a deal from start to finish, getting through the deal, even on the diligence side, even on the legal side, which is always slow in my world. Regardless, everyone knows what they got to do, we just get it done. I'm quarterbacking to make sure that the money's in the right place and things are all lined up the way it's supposed to be. Really, I don't want to sound overconfident, reality is there's really nothing that we can't get done here.
I feel confident as far as raising money. If we need a lot of money, that's not even at this point something that would hold us back. As far as organization, we hired a third asset manager a bit ago, now we have three active full-time asset managers for a portfolio of 130, which is a good number. This year, most likely, we have to hire another asset manager at some point, it's not a material number. Same thing, accounting is strong, we're trying to look for a paralegal for the attorney. Other, it's immaterial numbers. For [VNA]. Yeah, thanks for the question.
Okay. The only other question from me is just you guys already talked about how you buy, no change in plans and structure there. I'm curious, though, as we think about the pipeline, are you seeing any changes in the deals that you're looking at, whether that be size or structure that maybe others are pushing for? Any changes in the pipeline?
Well, that's been our whole approach to this business, is that we haven't changed our approach, I guess, of the deals. I mentioned earlier with the 10-cap buyers, as long as we feel like we're going to make money. 2023, we bought $108 million of real estate. Last year, we bought $130 million of real estate. As long as the deals make sense and the deals that we've been seeing right now do make sense, we'll, as Michael said, as long as bring me the deals and we'll get them closed. Keep in mind, I would say just to add to what Jeff said, we have been seeing a lot more to me, more sale-leaseback opportunities, where before it was outright sales. The last two deals we did were sale-leasebacks.
In fact, the deals we're working on right now are all sale-leasebacks. That's been- Our argument to them, and what's helped us to get the 10-cap buy is number 1, the OP Units are class 3 loans in [inaudible] shares. There's that. The second side of that is we can control what their long-term rent is. Instead of them squeezing every penny out up to one and a quarter, they can take a little bit less, they can have a little bit more, a little bit less uneasy around the collar for them on the rent number. They get paid less, they have less rent. I guess that's the one variant that we've seen to answer your question.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions in queue at this time. I would now like to turn the floor back to management for closing remarks.
Yeah. I guess I'll close it out. I appreciate the interest from all the folks that joined today. We are working hard for our shareholders. Our objective has always been to bring shareholder returns and to run a nice clean shop that we could all be proud of. We're going to keep doing what we're doing, exactly how we've been doing it, which has been working so far. Hopefully, we will be providing a good return to our shareholders as expected. With that, again, thank you so much and have a very nice day. Any follow-up needed, you guys know we're transparent folks. Feel free to reach out to us, and we look forward to the interaction. Have a very good day, everybody. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you once again for your participation.