Here’s a selection of Lamar CEO Sean Reilly’s comments at this week’s Wells Fargo TMT conference, sponsored and analyzed by SignValue.
Lamar is testing an automated plaform for local ad buying
We’re actually beta testing and automated buying platform for local customers in in three markets as we speak. Now it’s not full blown programmatic like we make available to our national customers, primarily because our local customers aren’t really asking for that, but they do want a self-service platform where they can go into their office open up their computer see avails, see pricing, get some rudimentary demographic information, put together their own campaign and then hit a button. That’s what we’re experimenting with… not what i would call the full blown algorithm driven programmatic but it is impression based buying that is self service.
The future of measurement and Geopath
I think increasingly customers are gonna not necessarily look to our industry to provide all the measurement solutions. There are third party vendors that are trusted by different verticals really popping up everywhere…I think it takes a little of the pressure off of the industry to necessarily get every aspect of measurement correct because we’ve struggled with that as you know. We have an industry measurement organization called Geopath and it’s it’s been tough for Geopath to keep up in an ever changing world and so we’re working as an industry to get the baseline data corrected in Geopath and then let our customers take whatever other data they want to overlay and and use that so that’s where the industry is going and it can only be good for us.
Reilly expects to do $300 million in acquisitions in 2026
We just reconstituted our balance sheet we’ve got well over a billion dollars in dry powder…We’re open for business on the M&A front and this year $300 million dollars in asset value you know without a big one. I’m targeting the same number for next year you
On the acquisitions market
There’s maybe 5 targets…let’s call it asset value north of $500 million. None of those are rumored to be coming available anytime soon. Then if you look at asset value over…$100-150 million…there’s probably a dozen of those…I t wouldn’t surprise me if something doesn’t break loose in that order of magnitude…and then once you get…below $75 million there’s hundreds and hundreds… of the cash transactions we did this year let’s call it $175 million, the average transaction size is going to be $810,000,000…just lots of little ones.
Target leverage is 3.5 to 4 times debt to cashflow
We’ve been very consistent in saying that if you’re a publicly traded REIT you’re leverage should be in the 3 1/2 to 4X range…You get above that and you’re in not necessarily a comfortable place… we could do a transaction in the neighborhood of a billion and a half dollars and be barely at 4… so…plenty of headroom on the on the balance sheet.
If you have questions, contact one of SignValue’s experienced analysts for a free and confidential consultation at info@signvalue.com or call 480-657-8400.
To receive a free morning newsletter with each day’s Billboard insider articles email info@billboardinsider.com with the word “Subscribe” in the title.Our newsletter is free and we don’t sell our subscriber list.
Paid Advertisement
