Sky Harbour at Noble Conference: Strategic Growth in Aviation Infrastructure

On Wednesday, 08 October 2025, Sky Harbour Group Corp (NYSE:SKYH) presented at the Noble Capital Markets Emerging Growth Virtual Investor Conference. The company outlined its strategy to become a leading provider of private aviation hangar space, emphasizing both growth potential and financial challenges. CEO Tal Keinan highlighted the demand for private hangar facilities, while CFO Francisco Gonzalez discussed the company’s financial strategies, including debt financing and future equity needs.

Key Takeaways

• Sky Harbour aims for significant growth by securing land at 50 airports, with 18 already announced.
• The company targets operating cash flow break-even by December, driven by new and existing campuses.
• Recent financial moves include a $200 million facility through J.P. Morgan and plans for further equity raises.
• Vertical integration and in-house general contracting are expected to reduce costs and improve project timelines.
• Management remains optimistic about capitalizing on the increasing demand for private aviation infrastructure.

Financial Results

• Raised $250 million in equity and $166 million in long-term, tax-exempt debt.
• Established a $200 million warehouse facility with J.P. Morgan, expandable to $300 million.
• Aims for cash flow break-even by December, leveraging revenues from Denver, Phoenix, and Dallas campuses.
• Plans to open Miami Phase 2 in March/April, expecting increased profitability.
• Future equity needs anticipated, with options like PIPE transactions and long-term leases under consideration.

Operational Updates

• Secured land at 18 airports, with 9 operational and 9 in development; 5 more expected by year-end.
• Vertical integration includes manufacturing steel components in Texas, contributing to cost efficiency.
• General contracting brought in-house to enhance development speed and cost control.
• Pre-leasing underway for future campuses, maintaining a focus on yield on cost between 13% and 15%.

Future Outlook

• Aims to expand to 50 airports, with potential for further growth.
• Plans to accelerate groundbreaking on new projects, such as Bradley and Addison 2.
• Exploring various equity-raising options to support expansion.
• Seeks investment-grade bond ratings by increasing cash flows and securing GMP contracts.

Q&A Highlights

• Lease-up activities at Addison and Centennial are on track, with updates expected in November.
• Reaffirmed guidance for EBITDA break-even by December.
• Dual-tracking financing options, including PABS long-term bonds and bank facilities.
• Emphasized the strategic importance of securing land as a critical business element.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Noble Capital Markets Emerging Growth Virtual Investor Conference:

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Global Capital Markets, and today I’m pleased to be joined by Sky Harbour. Before we get started, let me just remind everyone that you can ask questions for the Q&A period at the end of the discussion. Feel free to enter those in at the bottom of your screen. With that, I will hand the floor over to Francisco Gonzalez, who’s the CFO of Sky Harbour.

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Thank you, Pat, and welcome, everybody. It’s great to be again at a Global Capital Markets virtual equity conference. We actually also like to attend the ones in person, which I think is coming up at some point later this year. With us is Tal Keinan and Andreas Frank. Tal, he’s our CEO. Andreas is our Financial Associate. Tal is going to review quickly here the story for Sky Harbour for some of you who are new to the name, and then we’ll leave time for Q&A in the second half of this short period that we have. Without further ado, Tal, please kick us in.

Tal Keinan, CEO, Sky Harbour: Thanks, Francisco. Everyone, I’m going to keep this very high level, so we can leave as much time as we can for questions. Introductions, I think you guys can see here. Let’s skip to the first slide. Thank you. Yeah, before you go to the next one, just go back one. I just want to highlight to everybody what you’re seeing. The images, all the images that you’re seeing here from the various Sky Harbour campuses around the country will give you a sense of what the physical offering actually is. Next slide. Our business is conceptually very simple. We secure land at airports around the country, develop these campuses of private hangars like you see in the pictures, lease them out long term and manage them. That’s the business. We’re looking to achieve yield on cost, which is our primary unit economics target metric in the mid-teens.

That’s pre-leverage, which translates after leverage. Francisco will discuss exactly how we use debt at Sky Harbour, which is an important part of the story, but translates into returns on equity deep in the thirties. We’re looking to get to 50 airports. Right now we have 18 announced airports, guidance for another five by the end of this year. Nine of those 18 are already operating and cash flowing. The other nine are in development. The objective is to get to 50. The market is a lot bigger than 50, though. If we get there, there’s no reason for us to stop at 50. Lastly, we aim to remain the leading player in this space. For the time being, we’re the only player in this space, but we don’t think that that’ll last forever.

There are significant first mover advantages that we can get into during Q&A if people are interested. Next slide. The fundamental macro tailwind for this business is what you see in the chart. I don’t know that anyone else measures this, but this is the number of aircraft in the U.S. Business Aviation Fleet times their length times their wingspan. That is the total square footage of the U.S. Business Aviation Fleet. I don’t know that anyone else follows that because no one else really cares about what the demand is for real estate. We’re the only real estate player in business aviation. For us, this is the proxy for demand. What you can see is over the 10 years leading up to COVID-19, you can see about a 3 million square foot a year increase net. That’s new entrants to the fleet minus retirements from the fleet.

So the square footage of the fleet is growing at a faster rate than the number of aircraft in the fleet, right? Aircraft are getting bigger every year. That’s what you see in the gray bars. What you see in the red bars at the bottom is, you know, kind of the heart of the envelope for Sky Harbour’s market, and that is aircraft that have a tail height of higher than 24 feet. The reason we measure that is that much of the install base of business aviation hangars in the country has a door threshold height of 24 feet because that accommodated the tallest business jets when those hangars were built 30 or 40 years ago.

Today, as you can see, the majority of the new entrants to the fleet have a tail height that’s higher than 24 feet, and that is the area where the supply-demand mismatch is the most acute. That’s on demand. On supply, next slide, please. You know, difficult to measure exactly how much hangar capacity there is in the United States. What I think anybody in the industry, which is primarily FBOs, would agree on is that it’s lagging demand growth by literally an order of magnitude. I don’t know that that’s such an important metric anyway, because a square foot of hangar space in, you know, in rural Kansas is not necessarily relevant to the New York City market, let’s say. What we can say, though, you know, again, I think it’s a fair generalization, is you, there is no such thing as a new airport.

You cannot have new airports. Where there’s land for an airport, there’s no need, and where there’s need for an airport, there’s no land. We are pretty much stuck with the inventory of airports that we have in the United States right now, and the amount of remaining available land on those airports is dwindling quickly, which is part of the reason our company is looking to grow and expand so quickly, because this is a scarce resource. It’s, you know, take your pick. I’ll, you know, island of Manhattan or beachfront property or whatever it is, you cannot create more airport space in the country. This is kind of the key, the key piece here. Supply is by definition constrained. Next slide. Okay, so the company itself, you know, we think of our activities in four verticals: site acquisition, development, leasing, and operations.

They’re very fused in practice, but I think it’s a good framework for thinking about it. Site acquisition is probably the most special thing that we do, the most proprietary in that there’s really nobody out there who’s going across the country, on a serial basis, initiating negotiations with airport owners or sponsors to lease land at airports and develop campuses. That’s not how the FBO companies grow. They grow through M&A. There is no rocket science here, but there is a deep and deepening bag of tricks that we’ve developed and continue to develop, and a team that has very proprietary knowledge on exactly how to grow in airport land. There is a lot of information on this slide. I’m going to leave it at that, but we’re happy to circle back. It’s important to know that we consider this the key to the business. Everything else is important.

You want to get better at it, but this is your binary entry ticket. Without the land, there really is no business. At the extreme, you could outsource the rest of the business, right? Kind of Marriott model. Get the land, pay somebody else to develop it instead of developing it ourselves, pay somebody else to lease it, pay somebody else to operate it. We think you’re leaving a lot of money on the table if you do it that way. We’re integrated, but that’s the approach. I’m going to have one final slide where I just talk about how I would value this company on the basis of that thesis that it’s primarily about site acquisition. Next slide. I won’t get into this, but if there are questions on it later, we can take those. Next slide.

Before I stop talking, because I’m going to hand it to Francisco for this one, Andreas, can we run to the revenue capture? Thank you. One thing I’ll leave everybody with, which is the way we see value in the company, is look at the available revenue that we have from land that is already under lease. I’ll explain exactly how we get to that, and then discount for whatever risks you see. There’s a development risk, there’s a lease-up risk, there are operational risks, and then discount for time. How long does it take us to actually get these sites cash flowing? You’ll have, I think, the appropriate starting point for valuing the entire business. What you see in this chart is the land that we have under lease at each airport. Each airport has a site plan.

When we sign the ground lease, there’s already an associated site plan with, so we know exactly what the rentable square footage is on each of these. It’s the total rentable square footage that we have under ground lease times what’s called the Sky Harbour equivalent rent or share, which is what people are paying today at those airports. We think that’s conservative because our actual rents exceed our Sky Harbour equivalent rents by a very, very significant factor, in certain airports, 100%. We think it’s conservative to use Sky Harbour equivalent rent as the proxy in this model. This is the revenue that’s available from land that is currently under ground lease. I think it’s an important place to start if you’re trying to value this company. With that, let me hand it to Francisco.

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Thank you, Tal. We could go, Andreas, back to some of the, yeah, no, actually the next, the next slide. No, the next slide. The one with the, yeah, that one. It’s important to note that our, you know, we’re an early-stage company. We are a company that is entering a higher growth stage than we’ve been so far. Our revenues go up, step function as we open new campuses. We have given prior guidance to the street that, by the end of this year, meaning a couple of months in December, on a run rate basis, on the back of the revenues coming out of, and cash flows coming out of, Denver, Phoenix, and Dallas that opened up recently, plus our legacy, well, our prior campus that are operational for longer than six months, we will be cash flow break-even on an operating basis this December.

When we open up in a second phase of Miami in March, April of next year, that will take us deeper in the black. These companies are about the future, not just looking at the rear view mirror of our recent results. We go up to three columns, Andreas. Thank you. This just gives a sense of capital formation going forward. We have raised so far about $250 million of equity in the form of the, you know, the dispatch, the investment for various of our key investors and the two pipes that we did in 2023 and 2024. We have raised $166 million of long-term, tax-exempt debt. We recently announced the $200 million warehouse facility through J.P. Morgan.

If we go to that, before we go to that, you can see here that we still need growth equity into the future to continue growing at the SLR pace that we’re looking to grow here. Obviously, the economics as we grow continue to sustain themselves, given the strong yield, you know, teens, yield, NOI yield on cost. When you put that with the leverage, the tax-exempt leverage that continues to result in unit economics in the thirties. If we go to the warehouse facility slide, just to give a sense to people of how we’re going to be funding ourselves next year and the following two years, we are going to contribute Camarillo, which we bought in early December of last year in an all-equity transaction at $32 million, $33 million.

We’re going to contribute that as the first equity contribution to this portfolio that will include Bradley International in Hartford, Salt Lake City, O’Keeffe in New York, Trenton in New Jersey, and Dulles International in Virginia. We’re going to be able to borrow from the warehouse facility. We’re going to contribute additional equity next year, which obviously we have at the holding company of Sky Harbour. By the fall of next year, we will be looking to access markets or do another prior placement to raise additional equity for growth. Our goal is obviously to do that earlier than we need it. We are going to be deliberate about when to do that at the appropriate time. In the meantime, we retain significant liquidity, and now especially with the warehouse facility, to continue to pursue our growth. Let me just also note that this J.P. Morgan facility is tax-exempt.

The current floating rate is about 5.40%. We’re looking to swap it into fixed rate in the coming days. If we were to swap it right now, we’d be looking at a fixed rate of around 4.75% to 4.80% in the current market for the next five years. Again, 4.75% to 4.80% if we were to swap it into fixed for the next five years and make this a fixed rate facility rather than floating. With that, I think, Andreas, I think we’re done and we should open up a path to questions from the audience.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Great, thank you. The first question has to do with the lease-up at Addison and Centennial. Could you give an update on how the lease-up activity is going there? Is it tracking all along the lines of your expectations?

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Yes, thanks for the question. Yes, this year, as you all know, or may know, we opened Phoenix first a few months ago, and then Dallas, and now, more recently, Denver. Leasing is going at a good pace. Obviously, Austin Finance wished that was even faster, but there’s a balance that has to happen within the speed of leasing and the rents that we want to secure for that initial rent. I will characterize it as on pace. We’re going to do a more detailed update with the Q. We usually update leasing at the time of our growth results. We do that in early November when we do our Q3 announcements.

We rate our guidance that on the back of those additional cash flows coming up, at this quarter, in Q4, we’re tracking to have the EBITDA break even or operating cash flow break even, in December on a run rate basis that we mentioned at the beginning of the year. One more thing to note is that we are also starting to do pre-leasing of campuses like the Opa-locka 2, a phase 2 that is opening up in April of next year. Also, even Bradley and Dulles that have not yet started even construction, they’re about to break ground in terms of construction. Those two already have pre-leased and signed hard leases in one hangar in each or one tenant in each so far. It’s important, you know, as we do more pre-leasing, which is something that we’re now doing at Sky Harbour.

I think as we grow our portfolio, more people know about us. They can go and visit the product in the operating campuses. People more and more, when they hear that we’re about to start construction, have approached us too, and we have been open to signing at the right rent and leases even two years in advance of opening.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Thank you. I wanted to touch on the in-house construction efforts, with the in-house general contracting now part of your model. How do you expect this to impact the construction costs, the project timelines, and ultimately what would be the impact on margins?

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Pat, great question. You know, one thing that Tal mentioned in his remarks is that a real critical thing for our business is to get the ground leases at the airports. Everything else in theory could be subcontracted. We have seen in the past years that first manufacturing our own Lego systems, I call them, all this steel that you see in this photograph on the walls, in a hangar, you only, you don’t have anything to hold the roofs. Everything has to be, we basically vertically integrated about a year ago into a manufacturing facility of our steel products out of Texas, and we ship those via truck. The steel components are about $45 of our total construction cost estimates of $300. Anything that we can get there in terms of cost compression or cost maintenance obviously is very helpful to the overall cost figure.

What we’ve done recently in the past few months is also bring in-house the general contracting, not of all, but some of our future projects. We basically onboarded one of the principals of our general contractor who did our original first campus on time and on budget in Texas, in Houston, and also who did our campus recently finished in Denver. His name is Phil Amos, and with his team, we look to GC ourselves. We’re still going to subcontract in the various markets. This will allow us, back to your question, Pat, to speed our developments, to maintain them at that target of $300 total project cost per square foot, and also to maintain quality as well. We’re very much looking forward to maintaining that 13% to 15% yield on cost, which, the numerator is driven by rents.

The denominator is driven by construction costs, and that’s where we’re trying to focus our attention while at the same time not losing sight of the most important thing in our business, which is landing the ground leases at the airports we care about.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Excellent. Could you touch again on the strategy with the drawdown facility and how that helps you to minimize interest rate expense during the construction phase, and just kind of how you balance the drawdown facility use with a new upfront private activity bond issuance?

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Pat, excellent question. We have been, and everybody, I think we made it very open and to the public that for six, nine months, we have been, we had been dual tracking, doing another PABS long-term bond financing or pursuing a bank facility. We’ve got proposals from six banks, on both bank facility and bonds. We reached the conclusion that at this moment in time, pursuing this J.P. Morgan facility was the right thing for the company. A couple of things I will add to that. First of all, in an ideal world, we’d rather come and do the long-term bonding when we have reached investment grade on our bonds. We feel that we’re not too far away. We’re not there yet, but we’re not too far away.

I think on the back of Denver, Phoenix, and Dallas cash flowing in the coming quarters, we will put us in a strong position to pursue that investment grade rating. The interesting thing is that the market is different than four years ago. Four years ago, when we did the bond deal, we were able to reinvest our cash in ways that allow us to actually cover and even surpass our cost of our debt. Right now, if we were to do a bond deal, given the construction schedule, we’d be losing about 200, 250 basis points of a negative arbitrage during the construction period. By having a drawdown facility, we only pay interest once we start drawing. Yes, we have an undrawn commitment fee of 55 basis points, but that is dwarfed compared to the negative arbitrage of having raised the money right now.

The second critical thing is that we think what will support investment grade ratings will be to have as many GMP contracts in place. If you try to ask to put GMPs in subcontractors and so on too far in advance of a project breaking ground, you’re going to have our cost go up because of that. That involves risk transfer, too much risk transfer to our construction vendors and so on. One of the benefits of the drawn facility is that we can wait to the right moment, opportune moment to lock in those subcontractors and that cost of construction right before we’re going to break ground. Only then, when we have that, can we then draw on the facility. Again, we see significant, in the millions of dollars, of savings of doing that, which is only available if you do a drawdown facility.

I think lastly, there’s no prepayment penalty when we go and do the bonds. We have a lot of optionality here in terms of the coming couple of years. Once we see that the opportunity that we get investment grade ratings, that the long-term interest rates are at an attractive level, that we have constructed some of these campuses so we can do a bond deal where a lot of the construction risk has already been absorbed and behind us, that will be the opportune time to lock in. You know, when we go long, we go, when we do bonds, we do 30 years. We want to lock in at the most attractive moment for the company.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Excellent. We do have a few more questions from the audience. We got pretty strong engagement here. Let me try to rapid fire go through a few more questions while we have time. Our first question is that you mentioned that new airports are not opening. Did you mention this to say that there’s a limit on growth or what should we take from this?

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: I’m new, so.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: There aren’t new airports opening. Should that be a concern? What’s the key takeaway from that?

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: I think, so if Denver, Phoenix, and Dallas did open, and now we’re in the leasing stage and so on, they’re operational, and the tenants are moving in, and then we’re going to be, we’re in permitting and construction on the other nine campuses, as I mentioned here, Bradley, Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Teterboro, New Jersey, and Dulles. That obviously is going to have to follow their schedule and so on. We keep at a fast pace and we’re looking to accelerate that pace in all our areas in continuing to secure new ground leases at airports we care about. Stay tuned for some announcements coming in the next few weeks. We continue to accelerate the groundbreaking. We’re going to groundbreak in Bradley very soon. Actually, we already moved a lot of dirt over there.

Addison 2 also is going to be, in Dallas, in motion very quickly here and so on and so forth. Things are, if anything, accelerating at Sky Harbour, not otherwise.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Okay. Do you expect the equity issuance in the fall to be relatively small, as well as with the significant equity capital to be injected due to the warrants being exercised in January 2027? How does that impact your equity issuance plans as well?

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Yes, no, good, good questions. As I mentioned earlier, we will have equity needs a year from now. We’re going to be deliberate about when’s the right time to either, you know, raise additional equity through a PIPE, raise through our ATM program, although we don’t see that necessarily as a way to raise, you know, in size or have some type of other product, and so on. We also have the, you know, we mentioned in our Q2 conference call that we have been in discussions with certain tenants that actually are interested in entering into long-term leases with upfront payments. If we were to do one of those sales, that will probably address our equity needs that we show in this chart. We’re going to be deliberate. There’s nothing yet coming up, but we’re going to be, you know, looking and being opportunistic on when to do that.

In terms of the warrants, you’re right, their term comes due in January of 2027, so a good 15 months away. You know, a half, actually, no, about two-thirds of the warrants have or have to be cash settled, cash exercised, which means that will be around, I think the number is $90 some million of cash equity issuance through the warrants. Obviously, we have that kind of like as something that may be happening, which obviously will be very helpful in terms of capital formation in 2028, 2029 projects and 2027 projects, as you see in this chart. By the way, the J.P. Morgan warehouse facility could get expanded to $300 million. If we do that, indeed, the cash that will come from the warrant exercise could be used in 2027 as the equity component to match the J.P. Morgan facility.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Excellent. Another one has to do with the financials you disclose. Would you ever consider disclosing campus-level financials for the more mature airfields, for example, OPF?

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Yes. We actually disclose for the obligation, so the disclosures you see at the SEC are for the entire company. We do disclosures of the obligated group number one, you mean the first five, six campuses, in our disclosures that we do through EMA, through MSRB, through our bondholders. We do provide some information, and we break it down, actually here in our Q2, you may have seen that we provide rents and so on, on a campus level. We try to avoid profitability per campus because that’s, that’s, you know, becomes something that is maybe too granular, we believe, but we are profitable, very profitable in our campuses, and obviously some more than others. You can basically track that in looking at rents per campus, which we do provide.

That will give you a sense of profitability because everything else is really OpEx in terms of ground leases, which we also provide publicly, and operating expenses, which are relatively minor in every campus. You can get a sense based on rents of how different campuses are tracking.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: One final question, because we are running short on time. This looks like a devil’s advocate question. Is the cost of storage a large percentage of the annual expense to own a private aircraft? If there was ever a severe economic downturn, could owners or operators find alternative storage options?

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Yes, very good question. As it turns out, the cost of storage, even at Sky Harbour, which we know we’re the premium, storage in business aviation in the U.S. these days, even our cost, which is a premium, as Tal mentioned, to what FBOs charge and others charge, it ends up being still a significantly low % of the cost of running a flight department for a major aircraft owner and so on. Remember, these planes cost $70 million, $80 million. You do not want to store them outside or in a community hangar where they could be, you know, entering into some type of rash accident or so on. Overall, we see the cost of storage as being relatively minor compared to the flight department, the pilot, the fuel, the financing of having one of these planes.

That is what makes our tenant base very inelastic because once you’re in business aviation, I think in a downturn, a lot of these very wealthy, ultra-wealthy individuals, billionaires, some places trillionaires, and corporate fleets, the last thing to go will be the plane, and so on. It’s difficult to go back to commercial aviation once you have your own flight department.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Excellent. Francisco, really appreciate the time and the presentation. Thanks to you and Tal, and thanks everyone for joining us today.

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Thank you, Pat, and thank you, everybody. I look forward to in-person meetings. I think it’s in Florida, correct, Pat?

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Correct, yep, or early December.

Francisco Gonzalez, CFO, Sky Harbour: Early December. Thank you.

Pat, Global Capital Markets: Yep, thank you. Bye.

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