Joshua Dicker - VP, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary David Driscoll - President, CEO, Director Chris Constant - CFO, VP, Treasurer.

Peter Cooke - Logan Capital.

Good day and welcome to the Getty Realty Corp Third 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..

Thank you very much. I would like to thank you all for joining us for Getty Realty's quarterly earnings conference call. Yesterday afternoon, the Company released its financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2015. The Form 8-K and earnings release are available in the Investor Relations section of our Web site 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 or Mr. Constant in their remarks and in response to questions, including regarding lease restructuring, future Company operations, future financial performance, and the Company's acquisition or redevelopment plans and 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 may be 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 revised definition of AFFO and our reconciliation of those measures to net earnings. With that said, let me turn the call over to David Driscoll, our Chief Executive Officer..

Thank you, Josh. Good morning everyone and welcome to our call for the third quarter of 2015. This was another active quarter for Getty that continued to show consistent improvement in our operating results represented by growth in FFO and AFFO per share.

The main headlines for the quarter was dispositions of 60 locations to $19 million, despite of our ongoing transitional activities, revenue increasing by 20% which contributed to an AFFO per share increase of almost 9% and our receipt of approximately $10.8 million as our final distribution from the GPMI estate.

This distribution brings our total receipt from the GPMI lawsuit to more than $50 million, but not the end of that chapter. In addition, yesterday afternoon, I announced that I will retire as Chief Executive Officer of Getty and from our Board of Directors effective December 31, 2015.

It has been both an honor and privilege to lead Getty through its transformation with challenging circumstances that we face. I want to thank the Board for giving me the opportunity, and our employees, for their dedication, hard work and support.

We also announced yesterday that our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Constant will succeed me as Chief Executive Officer. Chris and I have worked closely together for nearly 15 years. By now, he’s the capable and ready to take on this challenge.

And with that, to prove how confident I am in him, I want to turn this call over to him to let him walk you through the additional details of the quarter..

Thank you, David. First off I want to thank the Board for the opportunity to succeed David and leave the Company starting on January 1st. I also want to thank David for being an outstanding mentor and great friend during our five year together at Getty and many years before.

The Company has been through a tremendous transformation during Dave five plus years at the helm, and he is certainly leaving us in a better place. We wish him well on his future endeavors. I’ll now turn to an update on our portfolio.

We ended the quarter with a total of 866 properties with 771 properties as core net leased, meaning they are subject to long term triple net leasing. The 95 remaining properties are considered transitional, meaning that the properties are either in the process of being installed or being leased generally on a long term triple net basis.

There is a lot of activity in this part of our portfolio and I anticipate being able to report additional progress in the coming quarters. For the quarter ended September 30, 2015, we acquired one property in Connecticut for $1.4 million, bringing our year-to-date activities to 79 properties acquired for $218.3 million.

The majority of our acquisition activity this year stems from our Apro acquisition in Q2, which added 77 locations in key markets such as California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington D.C.

As part of the capital recycling efforts David touched on earlier, we sold 50 properties during the quarter for $19 million, bringing our year-to-date activity to 72 properties sold, or $22.3 million.

The bulk of the activity in Q3 was for sale of 48 sites located in the Southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which we’ve previously identified as transitions.

The cumulative result of our acquisition and leasing activities in recent years as well as for our year-to-date activity is that we ended the quarter with a weighted average lease term of 12.1 years. Turning to our results for the quarter. As David mentioned, we had another outstanding quarter.

We produced 20% revenue growth of $30 million as compared to $24.9 million for the quarter ended September 14th, rental income would exceed reimbursements from our tenants was also up 20% for the quarter, growing from $19.5 million to $23.5 million.

The growth in AFFO per share of 8.5% to $0.38 per share as well as the revenue and rental income growth was all largely driven by the Apro acquisition into a lesser extent the growth in the core net lease portfolio. On the expense front, rental property expenses increased slightly this quarter exceeding increases in tenant reimbursements.

Our environmental expense was up about $400,000 quarter-to-quarter due primarily to excess non-cash accretion expense, which we received our AFFO. Reported G&A was relatively flat as compared to last year, excluding a $600,000 one-time employee related expense in the quarter. Turning to our balance sheet.

As we ended the quarter with $331 million in borrowings, $156 million on our credit agreement and $175 million of long term fixed rate indebtedness. Our debt to total capitalization stands at approximately 37% and our net debt to EBITDA at quarter end was a healthy 5 times.

Our [indiscernible] refinancing transaction in the prior quarter, our weighted average borrowing cost is $4.6 million at quarter and our weighted average maturities of approximately five years. More importantly, we ended the quarter with less than 50% of our debt being floating rate.

Our environmental liabilities ended the quarter at $91.3 million, slightly close to our 2014 year end figure of $91.6 million. For the quarter ended September 30, 2015, the Company spent approximately $4 million to reduce its liability, bringing our year-to-date net spend to $10.6 million.

It’s important to note that the net number on our balance sheet is also impacted by additions to the overall liability and accretion since GAAP requires us to book the liability on a present value basis. As we look forward, the team is excited about the Company’s current position and its prospects.

We have strong core portfolio with contractual rent escalations and credit quality, which provides us with stable base for growth. We continue to make progress on our transitional property repositioning and we’ll provide an update on future calls.

However, I think it’s important to note that with a portfolio of more than 850 properties, there will always be leasing and disposition activity. We are also focused on using our available capital to generate the best possible returns for the Company.

Given current pricing for quality assets in the conveniently GAAP sector and increased competition, for attractive assets, we will remain disciplined first and opportunistic with the returns to meet our investment threshold. We will also place renewed emphasis on redeveloping our existing assets for higher and better uses.

We are in a process of assembling a pipeline of attractive opportunities for growth from our own portfolio that can be harvested through additional repositioning, redeveloping or republishing and in order to optimize deals in our existing portfolio.

We are committed to unlocking the embedded growth from these assets, and expect them to generate additional growth as we execute on our plans and bring them online in the future. Lastly, we will continue to be mindful of optimizing our operating cost structure.

Now let me turn to our guidance for the full year 2015 as we alluded reiterating our AFFO per share guidance at a range of $1.25 to $1.30 per share. In summary, we are excited about our current position and our opportunities to grow the business, and we’ll continue to work to further 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..

Thank you [Operator Instructions]. And we will take our first question from Gene Nussbaum [ph] with JP Morgan..

Chris congratulations again on your promotion. I have a question on the guidance that you provided from the press release that year-to-date AFFO is up [indiscernible].

Can you just bridge what’s been year-to-date and we should expect in 4Q?.

The year-to-date number has $0.22 of income from the GPMI estate. So when we did our guidance range, we backed that number out..

And we should be looking at like about 7 for the first nine months?.

I think it’s $1.03..

Just switching over to new rules, are there any changes that you want to make right away?.

Other than finding a replacement for myself, not at this time, no..

Okay..

Well, I am going to jump in on this one and say that I can tell looking around the table that we might lose time as part of the core and the office..

Last, one more question, and I’ll get back into the queue.

Just so, what kind of growth opportunities are you seeing? And then what are you planning to use the source of funding for growth that you’re cancelling [ph] in?.

On the growth front, I think I used the word opportunistic on the call. So from both and external acquisition and from a redevelopment perspective, we’ll look to see are we going to achieve the highest return. And at this point I think we’re pretty comfortable with our current capital structure.

So we’ll look to fund from either our current facility or our operations..

Thank you [Operator Instructions]. And there are no other questions at this time. Actually we just have another question coming from Gene with JP Morgan..

Can you quantify the development opportunities that you alluded to earlier?.

Not right now, I think what you’ll see is our strategy more transparent on that as we go forward..

And is there specific debt to EBITDA or leverage metric that you’re looking to manage the balance sheet?.

No, I think we’re very comfortable with where it is right now. So, we’ll monitor that as we go forward. I don’t think anyone around the table wants to run the business at a leverage level and that’s above what our stock base is, even no one for our sector..

Okay, thank you..

And we’ll go next to Peter Cooke with Logan Capital..

I have one question, are there any properties that are still to be disclosed of, or from the marketing once you gotten the marketing as they’ve all been taken care of at this point? I know you have some of the Connecticut where there is some lawsuits involved or they didn’t go along with the settlement, I was just curious.

Has that all been pretty much taken care of now?.

We still have 95 transitional properties the majority of those are from the GPMI and marketing portfolio, and a portion of those we expect to sell..

Are you getting revenues out of those, some of those, or are they….

Yes..

And there are no other questions at this time. And I’d like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Driscoll for any closing remarks..

I just want to thank everybody for listening in on the call and for all of the confidence and support over the years. And I am sure that Chris will be more than up to the task of leading this Company going forward. Thank you, and have a great day..

Thank you everyone. That does conclude today’s conference. We thank you for your participation..