Yahoo Finance Is Park Hotels & Resorts Inc. (NYSE:PK) A Healthy REIT?
Park Hotels & Resorts Inc. is a US$5.8b mid-cap, real estate investment trust (REIT) based in Tysons, United States. REIT shares give you ownership of the company than owns and manages various income-producing property, whether it be commercial, industrial or residential. The structure of PK is unique and it has to adhere to different requirements compared to other non-REIT stocks. In this commentary, I’ll take you through some of the things I look at when assessing PK.
See our latest analysis for Park Hotels & Resorts
A common financial term REIT investors should know is Funds from Operations, or FFO for short, which is a REIT’s main source of income from its portfolio of property, such as rent. FFO is a cleaner and more representative figure of how much PK actually makes from its day-to-day operations, compared to net income, which can be affected by one-off activities or non-cash items such as depreciation. For PK, its FFO of US$653m makes up 72% of its gross profit, which means the majority of its earnings are high-quality and recurring.
Robust financial health can be measured using a common metric in the REIT investing world, FFO-to-debt. The calculation roughly estimates how long it will take for PK to repay debt on its balance sheet, which gives us insight into how much risk is associated with having that level of debt on its books. With a ratio of 21%, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor would consider this as aggressive risk. This would take PK 4.75 years to pay off using operating income alone. Given that long-term debt is a multi-year commitment this is not unusual, however, the longer it takes for a company to pay back debt, the higher the risk associated with that company.
Next, interest coverage ratio shows how many times PK’s earnings can cover its annual interest payments. Usually the ratio is calculated using EBIT, but for REITs, it’s better to use FFO divided by net interest. This is similar to the above concept, but looks at the nearer-term obligations. With an interest coverage ratio of 5.27x, it’s safe to say PK is generating an appropriate amount of cash from its borrowings.
I also use FFO to look at PK’s valuation relative to other REITs in United States by using the price-to-FFO metric. This is conceptually the same as the price-to-earnings (PE) ratio, but as previously mentioned, FFO is more suitable. PK’s price-to-FFO is 8.89x, compared to the long-term industry average of 16.5x, meaning that it is undervalued.
Next Steps:
As a REIT, Park Hotels & Resorts offers some unique characteristics which could help diversify your portfolio. However, before you decide on whether or not to invest in PK, I highly recommend taking a look at other aspects of the stock to consider:
Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for PK’s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for PK’s outlook.
Valuation: What is PK worth today? Is the stock undervalued, even when its growth outlook is factored into its intrinsic value? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether PK is currently mispriced by the market.
Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.
To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
