Investing In Summit Hotel Properties, Inc. (NYSE:INN): What You Need To Know
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Summit Hotel Properties, Inc. is a US$1.2b small-cap, real estate investment trust (REIT) based in Austin, United States. REITs own and operate income-generating property and adhere to a different set of regulations. This impacts how INN’s business operates and also how we should analyse its stock. In this commentary, I’ll take you through some of the things I look at when assessing INN.
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REIT investors should be familiar with the term Fund from Operations (FFO) – a REIT’s main source of cash flow from its day-to-day business activities. FFO is a higher quality measure of earnings because it takes out the impact of non-recurring sales and non-cash items such as depreciation. These items can distort the bottom line and not necessarily reflective of INN’s daily operations. For INN, its FFO of US$147m makes up 78% of its gross profit, which means the majority of its earnings are high-quality and recurring.
INN’s financial stability can be gauged by seeing how much its FFO generated each year can cover its total amount of debt. The higher the coverage, the less risky INN is, broadly speaking, to have debt on its books. The metric I’ll be using, FFO-to-debt, also estimates the time it will take for the company to repay its debt with its FFO. With a ratio of 17%, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor would consider this as significantly high risk. This would take INN 5.91 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.
I also look at INN’s interest coverage ratio, which demonstrates how many times its earnings can cover its yearly interest expense. This is similar to the concept above, but looks at the upcoming obligations. The ratio is typically calculated using EBIT, but for a REIT stock, it’s better to use FFO divided by net interest. With an interest coverage ratio of 4.95x, it’s safe to say INN is generating an appropriate amount of cash from its borrowings.
In terms of valuing INN, FFO can also be used as a form of relative valuation. Instead of the P/E ratio, P/FFO is used instead, which is very common for REIT stocks. In INN’s case its P/FFO is 8.13x, compared to the long-term industry average of 16.5x, meaning that it is undervalued.
Next Steps:
In this article, I’ve taken a look at Funds from Operations using various metrics, but it is certainly not sufficient to derive an investment decision based on this value alone. Summit Hotel Properties can bring about diversification for your portfolio, but before you decide to invest, take a look at the other aspects you must consider before investing:
Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for INN’s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for INN’s outlook.
Valuation: What is INN 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 INN 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.
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If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. On rare occasion, data errors may occur. Thank you for reading.
