Hospitality Properties Trust at Deutsche Bank Securities Hospitality & Gaming Conference - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

CHRIS WORONKA, ANALYST, DEUTSCHE BANK: Okay, last but certainly not least, and I certainly do appreciate everyone sticking around. Hospitality Properties Trust, locally based here just outside of Boston, so we're very happy that they could join us today.

Again, a little bit of a different story -- I know all the REITs are a little bit different in one form or another. HPT is probably significantly different than many of the companies you've been hearing from this afternoon. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to President and Chief Operating Officer, John Murray.

JOHN MURRAY, PRESIDENT AND COO, HOSPITALITY PROPERTIES TRUST: Thanks, Chris. Thank you for being here today. HPT is one of the largest REITs in the United States today. We're in the top 30 of all REITs; probably the second-largest lodging REIT; our total market cap one of these recent days, about $6.3 billion, including about $3.4 billion of common equity. Today we own 292 hotels with over 43,000 rooms and 185 travel centers located in 44 states, Puerto Rico, and Toronto, Canada.

Our properties are all operated under 12 portfolio agreements. So one of the things that distinguishes us from our competitors is that we only do portfolio transactions. All of our properties are managed by the brand owners. We set minimum returns under management contracts or minimum rents that cover our cost of capital. We're not dependent on percentage rents or percentage returns or additional returns to pay our debt service costs or our dividends.

We believe that our agreement structure, our leases and our management contracts provide stable cash flow throughout the business cycle because of the way we've structured them, which I'll get into more detail in a minute. We also have various security features like security deposits all-or-none renewal options, guarantees that we think also help ensure that our managers are committed to doing a good job at our hotels and travel centers.

We believe we own very high quality properties, well located, operated, again, as I mentioned, by large brand owners under nationally recognized brands. We have a very conservative financial profile. We are the only investment-grade rated lodging REIT. We've had investment grade credit rating for a number of years. One of the reasons for that is we have essentially no secured debt, no derivatives, no joint ventures, or other off balance sheet items.

We have a history of attractive returns to our shareholders. Since our IPO in 1995, we've raised our dividend 18 times. We are one of the only lodging REITs that has never cut its dividend, never amended our credit facilities or anything like that. Our current dividend rate is $3.08 annually, which is almost a 9% yield at our share price.

During 2007 we completed a number of transactions that both …