Joshua Dicker - Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary David Driscoll - President, Chief Executive Officer, Director.

Anthony Paolone - J.P. Morgan.

Good day and welcome to the Getty Realty Corp Second Quarter 2015 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Joshua Dicker, Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. Please go ahead, sir..

Thank you. I would like to thank you all for joining us for Getty Realty's quarterly earnings conference call. This afternoon, the Company released its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2015. The Form 8-K and earnings release is available in the Investor Relations section of our website at gettyrealty.com.

Certain statements made in the course of this call are not based on historical information and may constitute forward-looking statements.

These statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and are subject to trends, events, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include our 2015 guidance and may also include statements made by Mr.

Driscoll in his remarks and in response to questions, including those regarding lease restructuring, future financial performance, future financial performance and the Company's acquisition or redevelopment opportunities.

We caution you that such statements reflect our best judgment based on factors currently known to us and that actual events or results could differ materially.

I refer you to the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2014, as well as our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and our other filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made today.

You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which reflect our view only as of the date hereof. The Company undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements that maybe made in the course of this call.

Also, please refer to our earnings release for a discussion of our use of non-GAAP financial measures, including our revision to AFFO and our reconciliation of those measures to net earnings. With that, let me turn the call over to David Driscoll, our Chief Executive Officer..

Thank you, Josh, and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our call for the second quarter of 2015. This was an extremely busy and productive quarter for Getty. And underlying it all was another quarter that showed consistent improvement in our operating results demonstrated by growth in FFO and AFFO per share. There were four big headlines this quarter.

First, our previously announced $214 million acquisition of 77 convenience and gas stations leased to United Oil. Second, the refinance of our credit facility that was lengthened maturities and lock in attractive long-term interest rates.

Third, collection of an additional approximately $7 million, which works up to $0.22 per share from a liquidating GPMI estate and our announcement this afternoon, that our board approved 9% increase in our annual dividend rate to $0.96 per share.

Let me touch on a few highlights from our quarter, which represented another period of strong growth marked by stable operating results. Our portfolio of 875 properties along with improved cost controls resulted in another quarter of strong AFFO at $0.33 per share, which represented year-over-year growth of 10%.

Importantly, we exclude the one-time benefits of the $0.22 per share we received from the liquidating trust, and I spoke about earlier, when we talk about recurring AFFO and growth from last year's quarter.

Even more exciting is the fact that we achieved these results having received only a partial contribution from our acquisition of the 77 properties in the United portfolio that closed in May. To that point, we are well positioned to continue producing improvement in our cash flow and earnings as we move ahead in the third quarter and beyond.

Turning to expenses, rental property expenses were consistent with the prior quarter. While G&A [ph] increased by approximately $1 million in the quarter. Substantially, all this increase was related to acquisition cost and other one-time costs pending from our systems upgrades.

Our environment expense of $1.8 million was also inline with our prior quarter, but I want to be clear that this expense does not reflect our actual spend, which was a different amount this quarter.

Turning to our most recent acquisition the 77 store United acquisition accomplished a number of things for us including expanding our geographic reach into the fastest growing regions of the country. Adding an additional institutional quality major tenant, while generating significant accretion on a per share basis.

That said, the market for convenience and gas stations is not divorced [ph] from global capital markets, which are being impacted by increased rate expectations, increased volatility illustrated by the Greek and Chinese and commodity markets meltdowns and what appears to be an abundance capital chasing acquisitions and yield.

We believe, this demand is distorting prices by holding cap rates below reasonable levels. As a result, while we continue to review opportunities and remain highly diligent and even more disciplined with respect to opportunities that we're willing to pursue.

Beyond external growth, we continue to have very attractive opportunities for growth from our own portfolio, that can be achieved through additional repositioning, redeveloping, repurposing and otherwise optimizing the yield on that existing portfolio.

We are definitely focused on unlocking, the embedded growth from these opportunities and expect them to generate a steady tailwind of growth, as we begin to execute on our plans and bring them online in the future. At this point, our leverage levels are inline our peers.

We had no ongoing principal repayment obligations and our nearest maturities is five years away. Furthermore, approximately 50% of our borrowings are fixed rate, as we're not subject to risk from increases in short-term rates. In summary, we remain energised by both the organic and growth opportunities, we continue to pursue.

We are well capitalized and have flexibility on a great management team and will continue to work to enhance value for our shareholders in 2015 and beyond. That concludes my prepared remarks, so let me ask the operator to open the call for questions..

[Operator Instructions] we'll take a question from Anthony Paolone with JPMorgan.

Thanks. Good afternoon.

Hello..

Dave, can you talk about just exactly where returns are on the product that you're seeing as you articulated the desire to be disciplined, but you did get a big transaction done.

And so just maybe bucket kind of returns, cap rates to economics on what you're working at are?.

It's a pretty wide spread Tony, ranging from single unit properties that take good pictures and have perceived credit with long-term leases behind them. You can see those trading at sub 5 cap rates, mostly in a 1031 market, but certainly sub 5. There is, I think significantly more demand starts to come in at the 6.5 plus or minus range.

We're perceiving that more from private entities, but again what they're looking for is longer term lease terms and perceived credit quality. You can get into the mid 7s or certainly low 7s, if you're willing to deal with something that's only 4 years to 5 years left on a lease term and maybe a lesser known credit quality.

But still, all of those numbers are pretty aggressive for what we think, those things should trade at a normalized capital markets kind of place..

Where would you guys like to play in that spectrum, like would you want to take leasing risk or credit or where do you think your sweet spot is in terms of where you'd like to be?.

We're prepared to take short-term tenant or short-term lease risk because we think we can understand the operating parameters at the unit level. So where we see opportunity for those kinds of properties that's a place, we would be intrigued to go in.

I think, the other thing is certainly with respect to credit, since we're primarily driven on a unit level operating or unit level underwriting basis. We also can step away, we don't need a Circle K or 7-11 credit.

We're happy to find those, but frankly you're finding people who are paying up for, what are not institutional quality credits and that's one of my caution flags, that I think you hear me throwing into the wind here about where we see this market today..

And in some of your assets, where you have your number of assets with one tenant or distributors exposure, do you have the ability to sell those one-off like you mentioned CapEx and some of the longer duration stuff being in the 5's.

Like can you, can you [indiscernible]?.

Virtually, all of our leases permitted they're visible, if you will by property. So they permit us to sell individual units out of them..

Okay, great. Thank you..

You're welcome..

[Operator Instructions] that will conclude our question-and-answer session for today. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. David Driscoll for any additional or closing remarks..

I don't have a lot of additional remarks. Other than to wish everyone, the best for the rest of the summer and we look forward to talking to you again in November with our next quarterly call. Thank you..

That will conclude today's conference. Thank you all once again for your participation..