CareTrust REIT, Inc.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Care Trust first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the Conference over to Lauren Beale, Care Trust's Chief Accounting Officer. Lauren, please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome to Care Trust REIT's first quarter 2026 earnings call. We will make forward looking statements today based on management's current expectations, including statements regarding future financial performance, dividends, acquisitions, investments, financing plans, business strategies, and growth prospects. These forward looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to materially differ from our expectations. These risks are discussed in Care Trust REIT's most recent Form 10-Q filing with the SEC. We do not undertake a duty to update or revise these statements except as required by law. During the call, the company will reference non-GAAP metrics such as EBITDA, FFO, and FAD. A reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures is available in our earnings press release and Q1 2026 financial supplement that are available on the investor relations section of CareTrust website at www.caretrustreit.com. A replay of this call will also be available on the website for a limited period. On the call this morning are Dave Sedgwick, President and Chief Executive Officer, James Collister, Chief Investment Officer, and Derek Bunker, Chief Financial Officer. I'll now turn the call over to Dave.

Thank you, Lauren, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us. The first quarter was a strong start to the year and a continuation of the momentum we've been generating over the past several years. We closed approximately $245 million of investments in the first quarter, and the pace only accelerated from there. Since the start of April, we have closed a dozen separate transactions for approximately $865 million. Just last Friday on May 1st, we closed three of those 12 deals that we have not yet had a chance to announce, including our second shop investment. James will provide color on some of the deals we've closed year to date and on the reloaded pipeline of $360 million. Our investments team continues to perform at a phenomenal level. What else can you say? I'll just reinforce that shop is an important part of our growth story, and you should expect to see us continue to build that part of the portfolio with the same discipline and operator-centered approach we're known for. DealFlow continues to be active and interesting across shop, skilled nursing, and UK care homes. A quick acknowledgement to some of our unsung heroes here. Our accounting team proves every day to be the best pound for pound accounting team around. They have shouldered an enormous load onboarding a massive number of new properties and operators across the US and UK while continuing to support the next wave of growth. Our asset management group continues to do great work curating a strong portfolio and de-risking it as we go. And every other function across the company, legal, tax, finance, operations, data analytics, shows up in a way that allows us to keep executing at a very high level and transforms a growing portfolio into a compounding portfolio. The results of the hard work and sacrifice of an extraordinary team produced year-over-year FFO per share growth of 14%, a 16.4% increase to the dividend, an upgrade to investment grade by Moody's, and a raise to our FFO per share guidance for the year that at the midpoint would be 14.8% higher than 2025. I think you can tell how I feel about my team. Let me talk for a second about our operators. Many of you know I'm a recovery nursing home administrator. Several of us here have many years of experience inside the buildings. We have always hoped that our operating history and DNA would differentiate us in how, where, and with whom we build this portfolio. Our tenants continue to deliver for their employees, residents, patients, and communities. We've recently begun a meaningful study of publicly reported CMS outcomes in our skilled nursing portfolio compared to the rest of the sector. The preliminary findings show that skilled nursing operators who lease from Care Trust deliver care that is measurably better than the sector averages. With respect to the care trust facilities included in our analysis, we limited it to those facilities that have been under leased for at least four years to give adequate time for star ratings to adjust to the new licensed operators. We are specifically pleased to observe in our initial findings that compared to all for-profit operators, our tenants achieve higher overall CMS star ratings and higher health inspection star ratings. And compared to all operators, for-profit and nonprofit, our tenants achieve higher quality measure star ratings, lower rehospitalization rates, and higher successful discharge rates. Now, let's take a look at how that commitment to quality care translates to the financial health of our operators. Our overall EBITDAR rent coverage in our stabilized triple net portfolio remains very strong at 2.25 times and EBITDARM coverage at 2.79 times with broad-based improvements throughout the portfolio. We collected 100% of contractual rent and interest in the first quarter, which speaks to the caliber of our tenants and borrowers. Putting it all together, We are in another extraordinary and busy period full of external growth and internal development as we continue to refine our processes that enable a bigger and better CareTrust portfolio. As we continue to position ourselves with urgency to keep the flywheel going, we see steady deal flow across our three growth engines and the team is firing on all cylinders. We could not be more excited about where we sit today or about what is still in front of us. With that, I'll hand it off to James for a report on investment activity and the acquisition landscape. James?