American Assets Trust, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q2 2020 American Asset Trust, Inc. 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 during the session, you need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star B0. I would now like to do Thursday's conference call. Mr. Atterwell, you may begin, sir.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to American Asset Trust, Inc.' 's second quarter 2020 earnings call. Yesterday afternoon, our earnings release and supplemental information were furnished to the SEC on Form 8K. Both are now available on the Investors section of our website, AmericanAssetsTrust.com. A telephonic replay and on-demand webcast will also be available for this call over the next week. During this call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to our GAAP financial results and our earnings release and supplemental information. We will also be making forward-looking statements based on our current expectations. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties discussed in our SEC filings. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Actual events could cause our results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, which we undertake no duty to update. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Ernest Rady, our Chairman and CEO, to begin the discussion of our second quarter 2020 results. Ernest? Thank you, Adam. That was well done, as always.

These have been unprecedented times. that I've never seen before in my lifetime. When COVID-19 began, I honestly didn't know how bad it would be. We expected to be catastrophic, but we just didn't know how bad it would be. Now that the second quarter's behind us, I can tell you that it's not as catastrophic as our worst-case projections. It still has been no fun. Office has performed extremely well, has been the shining light in our portfolio with high credit tenants in strong markets and that we would like to continue to grow. Multifamily has also performed well, better than we expected. Occupancy has been slightly lower, but collections have been strong in the mid-90s, and we expect a meaningful uptick in occupancy in August 1st. as a local private university takes possession of approximately 130 units in our San Diego multifamily portfolio at good risk by a master lease that has recently been executed. Retail, as expected, has been very tough. Every deal feels like a street fight in retail. We try to balance what is best for the company and its shareholders, with how to maintain the long-term viability of these retail tenants that are so important to our shopping centers. We know that some are not going to make it. Of course, we're hopeful that most will make it. In fact, we're hopeful that all will make it. We have a committee comprised of myself, Chris Sullivan, and Adam Weil that review every tenant request. If a tenant asks for a deferral, we ask for something from the tenant in return as well. Each one is a negotiation, and we try to make sure that we're getting something fair in return for anything less than 100% on-time collection of our contractual rents. I truly believe that our management team is second to none and has done an excellent job strategically navigating through this pandemic. The American Trust is reflective of the quality people that we have working together as appreciative of the quality people that we have working in our company that are focused on creating value for our shareholder each and every day. Lastly, I want to mention that our board of directors has improved increasing the quarterly dividend 25% over the second quarter 2020 dividend of $0.20 to $0.25 for the third quarter based on higher rent collections in the second quarter than we had expected. combined with the significant embedded growth that we continue to expect in our office portfolio and the recent master lease sign in our multifamily portfolio. A year from now, once there is a vaccine, we expect to look back and we hope that this is nothing more than a bad memory. I believe that when we come out of this, we will be as good a company or even better when all this started. I'm now going to turn the call back over to Adam Weil, our EVP and Chief Operating Officer, who will give us a quick update on our operations during this pandemic, followed by Paul Barton, our EVP and Chief Financial Officer, and we will end with a quick update on the leasing success that Steve Senter, our Vice President of Office Properties, is seeing.