Chicago Atlantic Real Estate Finance, Inc.

Good day and welcome to Chicago Atlantic Real Estate Financing first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in the 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 one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference to Strip Sullivan with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

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 Peter Sack, Co-Chief Executive Officer, David Kite, Chief Operating Officer, and Phil Silverman, Chief Financial Officer. Our results were released this morning in our earnings press release, which can be found on the Best 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 listened 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. 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 Peter Sack. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Tripp. Good morning, everyone. At Chicago Atlantic, we place credit and collateral first and seek to add value to our borrowers through collaboration in an evolving industry. We are a leader in cannabis lending with a team of industry experts, originators, and underwriters. From day one, we have underwritten our portfolio, assuming that the regulatory environment at the federal level does not improve. We've seen the gyrations that occur in the cannabis equity markets as optimism surrounding federal reform ebbs and flows. We seek to provide our investors downside protected returns and consistent yield, regardless of fleeting sentiment and related equity volatility. That same volatility drives other capital providers to exit or scale back their presence. Amid this industry uncertainty, we believe Chicago Atlantic is a constant that borrowers and investors can count on. We deploy capital with consumer and product focused operators in limited license jurisdictions. at low leverage profiles to support fundamentally sound growth initiatives. In some quarters, that means that originations are at a strong pace and others like Q1 are at a slower pace. Investments are driven by credit and our ability to protect principle and achieve strong risk-adjusted returns. If those opportunities aren't there for a period of time, we believe that the right decision is to be disciplined and patient. The cannabis pipeline across the Chicago Intic platform now stands at $462 million. There continue to be a number of well-run and well-capitalized operators that will need to address upcoming maturities over the next 12 months, and we believe we will earn our fair share of those opportunities. As you've heard me say before, our goal is to create a differentiated and low-levered risk-return profile that is insulated from cannabis equity volatility and outperforms our industry-agnostic mortgage-REIT peers. Updating the analysis we provided last quarter, I'm pleased to note that despite all of the volatility in the broader financial services market, we remain the number three top performing exchange listed mortgage rate. We have a slide in our supplemental that walks through this analysis. We're quite proud of this achievement and have our sights set on being number one. I'll close with this statistic. Since our inception, we've outperformed the median and average total return for all exchange-listed mortgage rates by approximately 51% and 55% respectively. David, why don't you take it from here?