CorePoint Lodging: Strategic Alternatives, Another Hotel REIT for Sale

CorePoint Lodging (CPLG) is an old friend of the blog that I've tried hard to forget, it is a hotel REIT that was spun from LaQuinta (LQ) in 2018 simultaneously with Wyndham's (WH) acquisition of the LQ franchise/management business.  It is a unique public lodging REIT in that it targets the economy and midscale select service segment (essentially all LaQuinta branded), most public REITs own upscale and luxury hotels.  Looking back at the spin, it was a garbage barge spin and performed like the moniker suggests.  

Hotel REITs are a tough asset class because as a common shareholder, you have a lot of mouths to feed ahead of you.  REITs can't be operating businesses so hotel REITs need management companies to run the hotels themselves which runs 5% of revenues, then you have the franchise fee which is another 5% of revenues, if you rely heavily on online travel agencies, that's another big hair cut. On top of that, you have a lot of fix costs and a heavy asset base with real depreciation, interest expense, etc., these aren't good businesses for public markets generally.  For those reasons, hotel REITs tend to avoid the economy and midscale segments because the average room rates are low and don't provide enough scale to justify all the overhead costs involved.  These hotels tend to be run by local mom and pop type operators who don't have the corporate costs and can avoid the management fee by operating the hotel themselves.  

CorePoint executives clearly understand this even if they don't say it explicitly and have been selling off their older, economy level hotels to individual operators at multiples that are way above where the common stock traded.  Which is sort of the opposite of what you'd expect, but if the buyer is purchasing the hotel unencumbered by the management fee, gets an SBA loan, and they get a tax depreciation shield, it starts to make some sense.  This week, CorePoint essentially put the rest of the company up for sale by announcing they are pursuing strategic alternatives.

Going back to the logic I used recently with Condor Hospitality (CDOR), another hotel REIT that is in the process of selling themselves, I came up with a very rough back of the envelope calculation for what CorePoint is currently valued at off of 2019 Hotel EBITDA (again, I understand the faults of that math, but it's what other comparable transactions are quoting as a valuation metric).  With Condor it was relatively simple because their hotel portfolio has remained constant since 2019, but CorePoint has sold a significant portion of their hotels in the last 18 months.

In CorePoint's 2019 10-K they gave us a "Comparable Hotel" EBITDA number which adjusted for those hotels that were sold or non-operational (CorePoint had some hotels hard hit by hurricanes a few years back) of $158MM.  From there, I attempt to back into what the comparable-"Comparable Hotel" 2019 EBITDA would be adjusted for all the asset sales that have taken place or are pending.  For the Q2 and pending sales, I'm using a 15x EBITDA multiple, I didn't see it directly in their filings but management mentioned 15x on their last earnings call.  From there I get about a $118MM "2019 Hotel EBITDA" number for the remaining hotels, please check my work if you're interested in the situation.  On an EV of about $1.1B, that's a 10.75% cap rate or 9.3x 2019 Hotel EBITDA, well below where the company has been selling its less attractive non-core assets and where other hotels have transacted recently.

Similar to the extended stay segment, economy and midscale hotels held up better through the pandemic and have recovered faster than urban or group oriented hotels.  Alongside their strategic alternatives announcement, CorePoint updated us on the performance of their hotels in the second quarter:

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison since CPLG has sold off a number of lower RevPAR hotels since 2019, but here's a snip from the Q2 2019 earnings release, so business is either back to 2019 levels or at least near it.

Blackstone owns 30% of CorePoint, a legacy of taking LaQuinta private in 2006 and public again in 2014.  Blackstone is obviously a big real estate investor and recently partnered with Starwood in a club deal to buy out Extended Stay America (STAY), maybe they'd do something similar here as CorePoint's hotels serve a similar segment (but clearly without the franchise business like STAY) and select-service hotels could over time look more like extended stay models with less than daily cleaning, etc., driving higher margins.

I'm a little gun-shy on putting a target price on CPLG, the stock price has run significantly and I still have mental scars from my last go around, but to a private buyer who can detach the management contract, it could be worth a decent amount more than where it is trading today at $13.75.  A 9% 2019 Hotel EBITDA (my number could be flawed) cap rate would be around $18 and would still be a lower valuation than where they've been selling their lower quality assets during a pandemic, maybe that's too high, but shouldn't be too far out of reasonableness.

Disclosure: I own shares of CPLG (and CDOR)

CorePoint Lodging: Form 10 Notes

Today I'm doing another update, this time on La Quinta's upcoming REIT spinoff, CorePoint Lodging (CPLG), based on the long awaited update (at least on my part) to their Form 10 and the merger agreement between La Quinta (LQ) and Wyndham Worldwide (WYN).  Quick recap, La Quinta announced last year their intention to separate the hotel management business from the real estate, initially that was a straight forward spinoff of the real estate into a REIT, but Wyndham came along and offered to buy the management company for $1.95B in cash.  Later in Q2, La Quinta shareholders will receive $8.40 per share from Wyndham for the management company and shares in the REIT spinoff, CPLG.

The setup for CPLG checks off a lot of boxes, it's likely to sold/trade cheaply as a taxable spinoff, plus it will have the dual benefits of EBITDA growth and a multiple that needs to come up.  When I've gotten in trouble with spinoffs or just special situations in general, its usually because the spinoff is a dressed up melting ice cube, I believe the opposite is true in CorePoint's case.

CorePoint will have 317 hotels with over 41,000 rooms across the United States (all of LQ's international hotels are franchised or managed) and is positioning itself as the "only public REIT focused on the midscale and upper midscale self-service lodging segment."  That's more happenstance than design, but self-service hotels feature more consistent and wider margins than their equivalent segment full-service competitors (fewer employees, 99% of revenues from room rentals).  On the negative side select-service hotels are viewed as easier to build, CorePoint pointed to the fact that midscale hotels are the fastest new build segment (its pitched as a positive), that's good for Wyndham has a management company but likely bad for operators like CorePoint as more suppy comes onto the market.  The majority of their hotels are located near suburban office parks, airports and along interstates, mostly avoiding urban and resort locations that could be more impacted by AirBnB and HomeAway like room sharing services (but again, easier to build new supply in suburban locations).  As a REIT, CorePoint technically can't operate the hotels under the typical franchise arrangement Wyndham uses and instead the hotels will be managed by Wyndham for a 5% of revenue fee (plus your typical royalty, reservation, and marketing fees you'd see in a franchise arrangement).

Quick screen shots from the Form 10, listing the locations and chain scale, much of the economy bucket is exterior corridor hotels that they've been selling off in recent years, but as you can see, a reasonably diversified hotel base for a one brand REIT.

At the time of my brief post on the idea in January, we didn't know the proforma capital structure at CorePoint and it muddied up the valuation a bit.  CorePoint is taking out $1.035B of CMBS financing that is secured by their hotel properties and then paying a dividend to LQ/WYN of $983.95MM subject to the adjustments listed below from the Separation and Distribution Agreement:

Section 3.6. Cash Payment. Upon the completion of the Financing Transactions and immediately prior to the Effective Time, CPLG shall transfer to LQ Parent or the applicable member of the LQ Parent Group, as directed by LQ Parent, an amount equal to $983,950,000, as such amount may be adjusted pursuant to this Section 3.6, such amount of which will, substantially concurrently with the Distribution and the Merger, be used by LQ Parent to satisfy a portion of the Liabilities outstanding under the Existing Debt Agreements; provided that:

(a) in the event the Closing Existing Net Indebtedness exceeds the Estimated Existing Net Indebtedness, the Cash Payment shall be increased on a dollar-for-dollar basis by the amount of such difference;

(b) in the event the Estimated Existing Net Indebtedness exceeds the Closing Existing Net Indebtedness, the Cash Payment shall be decreased on a dollar-for-dollar basis by the amount of such difference;

(c) in the event the amount of accrued but unpaid Transaction Expenses as of the Distribution Date exceeds the Estimated Transaction Expenses, the Cash Payment shall be increased on a dollar-for-dollar basis by the amount of such difference; and

(d) in the event the Estimated Transaction Expenses exceed the amount of accrued but unpaid Transaction Expenses as of the Distribution Date, the Cash Payment shall be decreased on a dollar-for-dollar basis by the amount of such difference.

The Estimated Existing Net Indebtness is listed as $1.665B in the agreement, as of 12/31/2017, LQ had net debt of $1.53B, reducing CPLG dividend payment down to ~$850MM.  The cash position at the time of the spinoff will then be something in neighborhood of ~$185MM ($1.035B - $850MM).  Proforma CorePoint earned $208MM in (adjusted) EBITDA for 2017, using my previous 12x multiple, gets me to about $14/share for CPLG.

$14 + $8.40 from WYN when the deal closes, gets you to $22.40 per share, or put another way, the market is currently valuing CPLG at a little under 10x EBITDA (no internally managed lodging REIT trades that cheap) at today's $18.84 share price.

Sources of Upside:

• The cash balance will likely be higher than $185MM, we should assume some additional cash build from the beginning of the year until the deal closes (although maybe not due to rebuilding efforts after the hurricanes).  Plus as part of the Tax Matters Agreement, CPLG will receive any excess between the actual tax due and the $240MM amount Wyndham agreed to escrow as part of the management company deal.  I can't quite figure out what the cost basis is for LQ itself (I saw an analyst note that pegged it at $1.7B but can't source it for myself) so if you know what the amount is, please let me know.  Let's say that $1.7B is correct and my EV on the first day is correct at $2.5B, the Tax Matters Agreement assumes the tax rate at 24.65%, which would be about ~$200MM of the gain, meaning $40MM could come back to CPLG and potentially more if really trades down day 1 (most likely as I doubt it'll trade at 12x EBITDA to start).
• This will also be taxable for shareholders, your taxable gain will be $8.40 + CPLG's first day price over your own tax basis, so all current LQ shareholders (including 30% owner Blackstone) should be cheering for the shares to get dumped the first day and then hopefully recover once the proforma numbers are clearer.
• The spinoff is maybe ~2 months out and we don't have a CorePoint specific shareholder presentation, I haven't seen a lender presentation (which makes sense since they went the CMBS route) or heard about a road show, maybe there has been one but its certainly under the radar, it seems pretty clear to me that management isn't going to try and pump the stock up ahead of time.
• This is quite the interesting dynamic where the lower the price, the better for everyone involved, management appears to know this and hasn't put out any forward guidance for the spinoff leaving the market to anchor to 2017's numbers.  2017's numbers could be deceptively low for three reasons: 
1. The 2017 hurricanes significantly impacted La Quinta's owned hotels in Florida and Texas, in Florida more than 3000 rooms were out of service for the last four months of the year, and as of 2/28, 5% of CPLG's rooms remain out of service as they undergo repairs.  They disclosed a $36.7MM revenue impact due to Hurricane Irma closures in 2017, and on the Q4 call translated this into an annualized estimated EBITDA loss of $28-35MM (to be recouped through insurance proceeds which should add to the cash balance as well).  This could be a short term risk to the stock price depending on how quickly their Florida hotels get back online, but eventually the insurance proceeds will come in and the hotels will reopen.
2. LQ initiated a big capex program in late 2016, they identified 50 hotels to renovate with the hope to move them from midscale to upper-midscale and capture greater room rates.  With this renovation project, many hotel rooms were out service and are just now re-opening, the renovation project cost $180MM and is expected to be largely complete by the time of the spinoff, what return will that investment make going forward?  On the Q4 conference call, managemend stated that remodeled hotels had on average a 13% increase in RevPAR upon reopening.
3. La Quinta has always been a standalone brand without a larger rewards group.  La Quinta Rewards has 15 million members, by joining Wyndham Rewards and their 55 million members, WYN will funnel more travelers to CorePoint's properties.  They'll also potentially see some margin benefits from shifting a few percentage points away from OTA's to their direct reservation sites being part of Wyndham.  Additionally, there could be some opportunity to rebrand some of CorePoint's La Quinta hotels that are upscale or on the high end of the upper mid-scale segment to one of Wyndham's upscale brands.
• Let's pretend forward EBITDA is closer to $235MM for 2019 (hurricane recovery, renovated hotels coming back online at higher rates and WYN synergies) CorePoint could be worth over $16 per share, or over 50% upside from today's implied price.

Other Thoughts:

• I've received some pushback on this idea due to the "one brand" risk, however with a hotel REIT, I think some of that risk is overblown.  CPLG as a hotel REIT is not taking the credit risk of LQ/WYN unlike some of the triple-net lease REITs that were spun off with one master lease tenant.  Hotels change the logo on the outside of the building not infrequently; brand diversification makes for a nice investor relations slide but how important is it really?  Quick service restaurant franchisees usually specialize in one brand, although Papa Johns franchisees maybe wished they also own Dominos stores, I think of the hotel REIT business similarly, more about locations, markets and value/price over single brand risk.
• CorePoint will have geographic market concentration risk, 23% of their hotel rooms are in Texas which caused the stock to drop significantly during the oil downturn in 2014-2015, and more recently their concentration in Florida resulted in significant disruption after Hurricane Irma.  Mr. Brightside, both markets are recovering and should provide a tailwind to CorePoint's results post spinoff.
• There will be a 1 for 2 reverse split ahead of the transaction, keep that in mind when it actually starts trading, my $14 estimate becomes $28.  In the Form 10, a purging dividend is mentioned but its expected to be minimal.
• CorePoint mentions they intend to be an acquirer, initially that seemed strange, but given the potential cash position at the spinoff, it might make sense to play consolidator for a minute in the fragmented midscale segment (another source of growth).  Either way, with the spinoff being taxable and the presence of a 30% private equity owner, I'd expect CorePoint to be acquired in relatively short order (6-24 months) after the spinoff.

It might be better to wait for the spinoff to occur and get some more color around the Florida hotel recovery speed before diving in but I have a position now and expect to add to CPLG when it begins trading.

Disclosure: I own shares of LQ and WYN (plus WYN calls)

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts: Form 10 Notes

Once again, apologies for being somewhat repetitive, but the Wyndham Hotels & Resorts Form 10-12 came out today and I wanted to update my numbers for a few changes and add some additional thoughts around the spinoff.  The biggest change from my post last week is it appears Wyndham Worldwide (WYN) already incorporates the timeshare-to-hotel group royalty fee in their segment results, which mutes some of the multiple arbitrage upside of creating an expense from the lower valuation company into a revenue of the higher valuation company.

Removing the double counting of Hotel EBITDA brings down the overall valuation a few dollars.

*Edited from original, proforma net debt was incorrect

It was also disclosed in the Form 10 that Wyndham Hotels & Resorts will have $1.888B in net debt at the time of the spinoff, essentially all the purchase price of La Quinta's management and franchise business will be placed on the spinoff which makes sense.  By incorporating the net debt number, we can infer what the target price of each side will be after the spinoff (using my multiples above) which might be useful as there's often significant volatility around the when issued and spinoff dates.

*Edited from original, proforma net debt was incorrect

Other thoughts/notes from the Form 10:

• After the closing of La Quinta's management business, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts will have over 9300 hotels in their system, making them the largest franchiser in the world by the number of hotels and #3 in hotel rooms (economy hotels tend to be smaller in size).
• The typical franchisee is a first time hotelier and single property owner, Wyndham has 5700 franchisees for their 9300 hotels, this is a small business in a box type service.  This is likely good and bad, good in that they're not exposed to any one large franchisee and bad in that the net worth of their franchisees is likely minimal outside of their hotel, leaving them more susceptible to distress.  Their value proposition is the single property owner can work with Wyndham and receive the marketing, reservation and technology system of an upscale hotel but for the economy and midscale segments.
• Royalty fees are typically 4-5%, plus marketing fees of 2% and another 2% of gross revenues for rooms book through their reservation system.  Here's a good place to point out that the economy segment is less pressured by the Online Travel Agencies (OTA's) as the upscale and luxury segments, many of Wyndham's guests are drive-up, meaning they book their room the night of based on which hotels in a particular destination have vacancies.
• Their two main strategic priorities going forward will be to grow in the midscale segment (to a lesser extent the upscale segment as well) and grow internationally.  Growing outside the economy segment helps strengthen Wyndham Rewards, their loyalty program, by keeping more people within the system, they don't want loyal guests being forced out of the Wyndham system because they don't have a mid or upscale hotel in a desired location.  International growth is an obvious given, about 70% of U.S. hotels are branded, while only 46% internationally, creating a growth runway for the entire industry.  Wyndham could also receive a tailwind from the growing middle class in developing markets, the middle class leisure traveler is the primary target demographic of economy chains.  Their recent purchase of La Quinta's management and franchise business hits both the moving upscale and international boxes.
• This is the dream asset-lite "compounder" type business model.  Capital allocation will be split between a dividend, share buybacks (starting out of the gate with a repurchase plan in place) and M&A.  They've been an active acquirer over the past few decades:
  
• Completing a spinoff isn't cheap, one-time costs add up to $330MM here with $280MM on the parent and $50MM on the spinoff.

Disclosure: I own shares and calls on WYN

Wyndham Worldwide: Hotel Spin from Timeshare Business

This idea is another addition to my unintentional ongoing series circling around the timeshare and hotel management industries.  Wyndham Worldwide (WYN) is the largest of the U.S. based timeshare companies and they will be spinning off their hotel franchise management division in the second quarter of 2018.  Timeshare multiples have run up significantly in the past several years, while this situation might not be as juicy as the past timeshare spinoffs, the pre-spin Wyndham trades at a discount to the parent's closest peer after the spinoff in ILG, while hotel management companies all trade significantly higher.  One also could argue that as the timeshare companies begin to generate increasingly more of their revenue from sticky resort management contracts, their multiples should continue to converge with the hotel management companies.

Wyndham is currently divided into three business lines:

1. Wyndham Hotel Group:  Almost entirely a low capital requirement franchise business, Wyndham has over 8400 hotels in its stable which primarily skew to economy and midscale brands.  Their brands include the namesake Wyndham, along with brands well known to those that travel US interstates like Super 8, Days Inn, Ramada, Howard Johnson, Baymont and Travelodge.  Franchise fees are usually structured with an initial on-boarding fee, plus a percentage of revenues royalty irrespective of the underlying profitability of the hotel making the business less cyclical than the hotel operator REITs.  The essential components of the hotel management business are the number of rooms in your system and the revenue per available room (RevPar), both of which have been growing for Wyndham's hotel group.  To illustrate where Wyndham's brands are on the hotel segment landscape, the RevPAR for the entire in U.S. lodging industry was $83.57 in 2017, Wyndham's RevPAR was $37.63 for the same period.  Management guidance has this segment projected to do $445-$455MM of EBITDA in 2018.
2. Wyndham Destination Network:  Wyndham operates the largest timeshare exchange network, RCI, which allows members (for an annual fee plus transaction fees) to trade their weeks or points in their own timeshare for another.  This is another low capital requirements business, but faces headwinds as consolidation across the timeshare industry has lessened the need for exchange networks.  Smaller or one off timeshare developers would typically give away an RCI membership in order to entice a sale, sell that the owner on having the option to be apart of a greater exchange network.  As larger brands entered the space, they've created their own exchange network ecosystems putting pricing pressure on RCI and their main competitor, Interval Internation (ILG's exchange network).  Management guidance has this segment projected to do $265-$275MM of EBITDA in 2018.
3. Wyndham Vacation Ownership:  Wyndham is the largest timeshare business globally, they have 221 resorts under management representing 25,000 units and 878,000 owners.  Their model is almost entirely points based giving timeshare owners flexibility in how they book their vacation, plus more importantly to Wyndham it makes it easier for a current timeshare owner to upgrade/buy additional points than it would be to sell the same owner additional weeks under the old model.  Like everyone else in the industry, Wyndham has moved to a less capital intensive model where 80% of the units sold in 2017 were not developed by the company, instead buy a developer or via a just-in-time purchase of inventory.  Additionally, Wyndham provides financing to timeshare owners and then securitizes these loans in the ABS market.  Management guidance has this segement projected to do $735-$750MM of EBITDA in 2018.

Wyndham Hotel Group is going to be the spinoff, leaving the Destination Network and Vacation Ownership segments behind to become a purer play timeshare business.  In recent months, Wyndham has announced two large M&A transactions: (1) they sold their European vacation rentals business that was within their Destination Network segment for $1.3B in cash and (2) purchased La Quinta's hotel management business for $1.95B in cash ahead of its own spinoff.  Additionally, as part of these hotel/timeshare spinoffs, there has typically been a royalty fee going from the timeshare business to the hotel management company.  In all of the other timeshare spinoffs, the hotel management company has been the larger/parent in the transaction, where the opposite is true with Wyndham.  Even so, I'm going to assume management is smart and will put in place a 5% of VOI sales royalty agreement in place going from the timeshare parent to the hotel spin.

In order to come up with the post-spin picture, I took management's guidance and added the impacts of the European vacation rental business being sold (but it's already excluded from EBITDA guidance), the purchase of LQ's management business (and varying synergies levels), a potential 5% timeshare royalty to the spinoff, and then added some additional overhead to account for running two separate public companies.

Taking a look at peers of each, the parent will look most similarly to ILG with a combination of a large VOI sales business and an exchange.  ILG has had a epic run since the RMT with Starwood's Visitana (I sold unfortunately in the low-to-mid $20) and trades for a forward EBITDA multiple of just under 13x.  The hotel group spinoff will most resemble Choice Hotels (CHH), both compete primarily in the economy to midscale segments with brands like Comfort Inn, Quality and Econo Lodge.  The hotel management group all has significant growth baked into some of these EBITDA projections, the backwards numbers are several turns higher, but Choice Hotels trades for a 16x multiple on analyst 2018 estimates.

If we assume the timeshare business parent trades for 11.5x and the hotel group spinoff trades for 15x EBITDA, I come up with the below SOTP based on my mid-point forecasts:

The primary risks here is valuation, we're presumably late in the cycle, hospitality companies are historically very cyclical (timeshare and hotel operators more than hotel management) and we could be looking at both peak revenue/earnings and peak multiples.  This spinoff transaction would have looked a lot more attractive one or two years back, but I think it still will work and I've established a position with the hopes that there's something more to do after the spinoff if one or the other trade well outside my valuation targets.

If you're interested in WYN and in the Chicago area, we're covering WYN on 3/19 at the CFA Chicago meeting I co-host every month, details here: https://specialsituationsresearchforum.wordpress.com/meeting-registration/

Disclosure: I own shares of WYN

La Quinta Holdings: WYN Buying OpCo, PropCo Undervalued

In a recent post I mentioned there are some interesting spins on the horizon, one of those is La Quinta Holdings (LQ) doing an OpCo/PropCo split sometime in Q2 2018.  Their plans changed a little last week with the announcement that Wyndham Worldwide (WYN) - also doing an interesting spin - is buying La Quinta's asset-lite management company business for $1.71B in cash (after backing out $240MM Wyndham is reserving for potential taxes La Quinta will owe in the spinoff) or roughly 15.1x EBITDA.

Since Wyndham is paying cash, it's fairly easy to back into what value the market is assigning to La Quinta's PropCo spinoff, to be named CorePoint Lodging (CPLG).  Today, La Quinta's enterprise value is roughly $3.83B and combined company has an estimated $331MM in EBITDA for 2017.  Wyndham is paying $1.71B for the management company that will do $113MM in EBITDA, leaving an EV of $2.12B and $218MM in EBITDA behind in the REIT spinoff, for a 9.7x EBITDA multiple.

CorePoint is a hotel REIT, I've discussed the disadvantages of those in previous posts, but in summary they're more an operating company/franchisees than true REIT models, they're taking the majority of the business risk rather than acting as a landlord charging rent.  La Quinta's model is a mid-market select service hotel, historically they've been concentrated in the south (particularly Texas) but have expanded and diversified in recent years after being hit hard in the oil downturn.  Their hotels typically tend to be situated in suburban, airport and interstate locations that might be less susceptible to AirBnB but more at risk for overbuilding/supply risk.

There are a lot of hotel REITs, here's a small sample of internally managed ones I pulled, they might not all be perfect comparable companies but as you can see, none of them trade below 10x EBITDA:

If CorePoint is worth 12x EBITDA, my math gets me to about a $14/share price for the spinoff (might move around a little depending on the eventual net debt on the spin) + $8.40/share from Wyndham for the management business for a total of $22.40 versus a $19.60 stock price today, or about 14% upside.  No one is going to get rich on this idea, if you could isolate the spinoff directly it'd be a better deal, but I like the risk/reward.  Two other points to consider: 1) the $240MM WYN is reserving for taxes approximates a $2.85B EV valuation or 13x EBITDA for CorePoint (21% on the difference between the first day of trading and the book value of the assets); 2) since CorePoint is a taxable spinoff (REIT spins are no longer allowed to be tax free) it will be immediately be available to get acquired, and I expect it won't be a standalone company for very long.

Disclosure: I own shares of LQ