Chicago Atlantic Real Estate Finance, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Chicago Atlantic Real Estate Financing First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your questions, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. And I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Tripp Sullivan with Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the Chicago Atlantic Real Estate Finance Conference call to review the company's results. On the call today will be John Masarakis, Executive Chairman, Peter Sack, Co-Chief Executive Officer, and Phil Silverman, Chief Financial Officer. Our results were released this morning in our earnings press release, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website, along with our supplemental filed with the SEC. A live audio webcast of this call is being made available today. For those who listen to the replay of this webcast, we remind you that the remarks made herein are as of today and will not be updated subsequent to this call. During this call, certain comments and statements we make may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning prescribed by the securities laws, including statements related to the future performance of our portfolio, our pipeline of potential loans and other investments, future dividends, and financing activities. All forward-looking statements represent Chicago Atlantic's judgment as of the date of this conference call and are subject to risk and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Investors are urged to carefully review various disclosures made by the company, including the risk and other information disclosed in the company's filings with the SEC. We also will discuss certain non-GAAP measures, including but not limited to distributable earnings and adjusted distributable earnings. Definitions of these non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in our filings with the SEC. I'll now turn the call over to John Mazarrakis. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Tripp. Good morning, everyone. We started 2024 much like we ended 2023, growing the loan portfolio in a disciplined fashion, maintaining strong credit quality, and an attractive weighted average portfolio yield, and diversifying across operators and states. The biggest news on the regulatory front was, of course, last week's announcement that the DEA has pledged to reschedule cannabis. We're thrilled by this significant step in the process. Once enacted, the policy change is likely to bring significant benefits to the industry, including the elimination of 280E that we discussed last quarter, increased access to capital, and increased employment and investment. The state-level news on legalization continues to remain positive as well, with the Florida Supreme Court recently approving ballot language to have a referendum in front of voters in November and Ohio likely to have the recreational rollout soon. We're staying in front of these developments in both states as well as in PA. Our pipeline of actionable deals across the Chicago Atlantic platform currently stands at $585 million, with our focus remaining on operators in limited licensed states and those transitioning from medical to adult use. For the last two quarters, we've called out the improving sentiment in the cannabis industry. That has translated into loan demand and it has helped in accessing additional capital to deploy. Peter will touch on our expansion of the credit facility, but I'd like to highlight our use of the ATM in an accretive fashion during the quarter. We issued approximately 896,000 shares through the ATM program at a weighted average price of 1593, raising net proceeds of approximately 13.9 million. Most importantly, we sold those shares at a premium to book value. The same discipline we brought to underwriting new opportunities is the same one we've used to determine the best time and manner to access capital. Peter, why don't you take it from here?