Opinions
Andy Nasr
Granite REIT
GRT.UN-T
COMMENT
Oct 19, 2017
Stock price when the opinion was issued
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Benefiting from lower interest rates, rising 10% in the last 1.5 months. Industrial REITs were strong during the pandemic and are slightly softening now. Doesn't follow this name much anymore, but the rising tide of lower rates will lift REITs. Magna remains a key tenant, but GRT is slowly untethering from Magna.
Diversified industrial globally. High quality properties. 10-12% discount to NAV. Focused on larger part of the market (over 300k square feet), where there's more vacancy. It needs to work through that. Likes the sector, stock's interesting at this level, keep owning it if you do.
Sounds counterintuitive, but WFG and trees are going to be beneficiaries. US still needs them, just going to pay higher prices.
GRT.UN is a good name. PKI works well here. Materials sector, with a name like NTR.
There's even a part of the TSX that does well with a falling CAD, as earnings get amplified.
Canada's largest industrial REIT with properties in Canada, Europe and Asia. Increasing rents has helped the business, however, rents have appeared to plateaued lately. Concerns that large revenue stream from Magna will be at risk from tariffs. Would buy more shares upon stock price weakness. Strong business overall.
26% of net operating income is from MG, so being impacted by tariffs. He calls this a second-derivative target of tariffs. Shares are trading as though MG is going to move its operations to the US, but he doesn't think it's equipped to do so.
Unique feature of large bays and international tenants, rather than smaller businesses. Europe, US, and Canada. Under extra pressure because of leases to MG; he sees no real risk there, as MG is very well run with low debt, actual exposure is ~3%. Industrial market has been punished unreasonably, good value for future.
There was a strategic review by management for potentially selling the company, but nothing came of that. There was some turnover with the CEO. The big issue is when it initially came to the market, it had very significant exposure to Magna (MG-T), which was their largest tenant. However, it had a pristine balance sheet. When you think of the Debt to Growth Book Value, it had approximately 25%, and the theory was that if they increased the leverage and took that Debt to Growth Book Value to 40%, they would have $1 billion to play with, diversify tenant exposure, make acquisitions. However they haven’t done any of that. That is unfortunate, because real estate prices have gone up significantly. It pays a decent dividend of 5%. His concern is that you really do need the leadership in there.