Creative Media

Hello and welcome to the Creative Media and Community Trust Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Steve Alto Brando. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. My name is Steve Altibrando, the portfolio oversight for CMCT. Also on the call today is David Thompson, our chief executive officer, Shaul Kuba, CIM co-founder and CMCT board member, and Barry Berlin, our chief financial officer. This call is being webcast and will be temporarily archived on the investor relations section of our website, where you can also find our earnings release and latest investor presentation. Earnings release also includes reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures discussed during today's call. During the course of this call, we will make forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs of, assumptions made by, and information currently available to us. Our actual results will be affected by known and unknown risks, trends, uncertainties, and factors that are beyond our control or ability to predict. Although we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, they are not guarantees of future performance, and some will prove to be incorrect. Therefore, our actual future results can't be expected to differ from our expectations, and those differences may be material. For a more detailed description of potential risks, please refer to our SEC filings, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to David Thompson.

Thanks, Steve, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. Yesterday, we announced our third quarter 2022 earnings. Some highlights from the quarter. First, we had continued strong leasing activity, which is positioning us well for next year. Second, we made significant progress on our value-add and development pipeline. Third, we took steps to improve our liquidity and balance sheet. This is extremely important in the current rising interest rate environment where we expect future acquisition opportunities. And fourth, we accretively deployed capital through both common and preferred share repurchases. Our core FFO per share was negative 7 cents in the third quarter. While we completed a significant amount of new leases this year and have a strong lease pipeline, we will not see the full benefit until next year. Most notably, this includes our lease signed in August with the Rolls-Royce dealership at our Beverly Hills property, which will start generating revenue in 2023. Trends at our one hotel continue to improve on a year-over-year basis, and the outlook for 2023 looks strong based on a pickup in group bookings. The third quarter is typically a seasonally slower quarter for the hotel. And in our lending business, we had a slowdown in originations in the quarter due to, among other things, the reduced volume of commercial real estate transactions market-wide. We also had some one-time costs in our JV property in Echo Park, in addition to some non-recurring items in our G&A. Finally, the amount of our preferred dividend payment is increasing as a result of the significant amount of preferred stock we raised in the third quarter. Our third quarter FFO picks up dividends we declared in the fourth quarter, even though we did not have the benefit of the capital for the full quarter, and Barry will provide some more detail on these items. As we've discussed on previous calls, we were committed to balancing our portfolio between both creative office and multifamily assets. Right now, we are focused on growing the multifamily side of our portfolio in order to achieve that balance. We have a significant pipeline of multifamily development opportunities on land that we already own. As we have previously mentioned, for value-add and development assets, we'll look to co-invest to increase our diversification and supplement returns by generating fee income where advantageous. We have a lot of work to do in front of us, but we believe we have an opportunity to create significant value for our shareholders by using our resources and access to capital. I would now like to turn the call over to Shaul Kuba.