Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Alexandria Real Estate Equity first quarter 2023 conference call. All participants will be in a 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 a touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paula Schwartz with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. This conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. The company's actual results might differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the company's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Joel Marcus, Executive Chairman and Founder. Please go ahead, Joel.

Thank you, Paula, and welcome everybody to Alexandria's first quarter 23 earnings call. With me today are Peter, Dean, Hallie, and Dan. And first of all, I want to send a big thank you to our entire ARE family team. for an operationally and financially strong first quarter in a tough, continuing tough macro environment. As you know, Alexandria is truly a one-of-a-kind S&P 500 company, and we're very pleased that we just received one of Newsweek's most trusted company awards. We have no peers. We're kind of a peer play company. In our field, we first identified and pioneered the lab space niche back in 1994, and then through our disciplined execution of our original vision using the strategic architecture of our cluster model, which we customized to the life science industry, we have brought the mission-critical real estate infrastructure of the life science industry and integrated it with an unparalleled and world-class 24-7 operational excellence service component to protect the hundreds of billions of dollars of leading-edge science, which is conducted 24-7 within our asset base. And we have brought this to a highly respected and recognized real estate product type today. Alexandria is definitely not a healthcare service facilities company, nor a generic office company. Our discipline core focus is our patented and trademark lab space. It's a premium price non-commodity product, generally characterized by high barrier to entry markets, where we have a dominant franchise and where we exercise pricing power, especially in our highly sought after Alexandria branded mega campuses. And those markets exhibit deep science base, deep life science talent base, a rich abundance of risk capital, and also are ones that are generally safe, and have excellent transportation access. And what we saw in 1994 in the embryonic days of the life science industry is multiplied geometrically today 30 years later. As Steve Jobs said, the 21st century will be the century of the intersection of biology and technology innovation. We have 10,000 known diseases wreaking havoc on human beings each and every day. and the personal and economic cost of sickness, illness, and today, the mental health crisis is continuing to skyrocket. Continued innovation in medicine is an absolute national priority, and the transformative work of our tenants in the industry is critical to addressing the massive unmet medical need. Literally every day, we hear of great progress, and today, for example, one of our greater Boston tenants, Morphic Therapeutic, which has an oral drug addressing moderate to severe ulcerative colitis, and if you've ever had it, it is a tough condition, a major GI indication, announced that it hit its phase 2A clinical trial endpoint, and their stock has been up 75% this year. The 10 most prevalent diseases in the US, heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, obesity, Alzheimer's, diabetes, substance abuse, infectious disease, chronic kidney disease and mental illness are not being solved to date. We have a large mountain to climb, and the industry is really in its formative days. Weathering a tough macro environment, ARE posted a very solid first quarter. Our funds FFO per share is up 7%, as you see, and top line revenues up almost 14%. and Dean will go into the metrics, but almost 100% collections, which bodes well for our continued strength and stability of the company. We've maintained strong guidance while lowering uses and sources of capital. We've had very solid leasing with the highest ever rental rate increase, and we've had continuing strong operating and EBITDA margins. All stakeholders should recognize and appreciate This management team took a highly disciplined approach over a multi-year period to create a fortress balance sheet to successfully weather what now is the current self-inflicted economic storm by the various policies that we implemented over the last many years. We have taken judicious measure to cut our capex while at the same time making strong progress on our funding plan for 2023, and you'll hear more about that from Peter. So without any further hesitation, let me turn it over to Hallie, who's gonna give you some bird's eye view of our view on the life science industry. So, Hallie.