Essential Properties Realty Trust, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Essential Property Realty Trust's second quarter 2021 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. This conference is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available two hours after the completion of the call for the next two weeks. The dial-in details for the replay can be found in today's press release. Additionally, there will be an audio webcast available on Essential Properties' website at www.essentialproperties.com, an archive of which will be available for 90 days. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Dan Donlan, Senior Vice President and Head of Capital Markets at Essential Properties. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for Central Properties' second quarter 2021 conference call. Here with me today to discuss our operating results for people who voted as our president, CEO, Greg Seibert, our COO, and Mark Patton, our CFO. During this conference call, we will make certain statements that may be considered forward-looking statements on our federal securities law. The company's actual future results may differ significantly from the matters discussed in these forward-looking statements, and we will not release revisions to those forward-looking statements to reflect changes after the statements were made. Factors and risks that could cause actual results for different material from our expectations were disclosed from time to time in greater detail in the company's funds with the FCC and in yesterday's earnings release. With that, Pete, please go ahead.

Thank you, Dan. And thank you to everyone who is joining us today for your interest in essential properties. The second quarter was another strong quarter for us on all fronts, starting with the portfolio. With collections of 99% in the second quarter, and July collections at 100%, our portfolio has returned to pre-pandemic levels. While we continue to monitor how COVID could potentially impact our portfolio, our tenants have largely adapted to the current realities of the pandemic and emerged as stronger operators. With just two vacant properties at quarter end and one vacant property as of today, We have effectively repositioned all properties previously leased to tenants that did not survive the pandemic. With that in mind, over the trailing 12 months and into June 30th, we experienced recoveries of 87% on all re-leasing activity, which is a strong indicator of not only the quality of our real estate, but our disciplined focus on owning fungible single-tenant properties at an appropriate basis. In terms of investments, our industry relationships, which we worked to cultivate and strengthen during the pandemic, drove the bulk of our growth this quarter, as 98% of our investments being relationship business. And we continue to deploy capital at high levels relative to our historical pace. During the quarter, We invested $223 million into 94 properties at a weighted average cash cap rate of 7.1%, with 88% of investments being originated through direct sale leasebacks and 83% containing master lease provisions. On the capital markets, With the second quarter marking the third anniversary of our IPO, we achieved several milestones, including the receipt of two investment-grade issue ratings from S&P and Moody's, the completion of our $400 million inaugural 10-year unsecured public bond offering, and our asset base becoming 100% unencumbered with the full payoff and retirement of our ABS notes. As a net leasery that intends to build and maintain a portfolio of long-dated leases, we are thrilled to have access to the public unsecured bond market, as we can now better match fund our debt obligations with our lease maturity schedule. Additionally, we remained active on the equity issuance front with a $193 million follow-on offering in April and $15 million of gross ATM issuance. With quarter-end net debt to annualized adjusted EBITDA RE of 4.6 times, we have ample capacity to continue to capitalize on our robust investment pipeline. Turning to the portfolio more specifically, we ended the quarter with investments in 1,325 properties that were 99.8% leased to 281 tenants operating in 17 industries. Our weighted average lease term stood at 14 years, with 4.1% of our ABR expiring over the next five years. Our weighted average unit level coverage ratio was 3.2 times, which improved versus last quarter's coverage of 3.0 times. As we have previously mentioned, our traditional credit statistics which focus on implied credit ratings and unit level coverage remain negatively skewed by the pandemic related shutdowns that occurred last year. However, with most of our tenants reporting trailing 12 months financials to us with a one quarter lag, we expect these statistics to experience solid improvement next quarter when the depths of the pandemic, the second quarter of 2020, are no longer in the reporting period. Looking out to the balance of the year, we anticipate our portfolio to remain highly occupied and our focused and growing pipeline to generate accretive and attractive investment opportunities. When coupling this positive outlook for the back half of 2021 with our strong second quarter performance and our current capital position, we are raising our 2021 guidance range for AFFO per share to $1.30 to $1.32. This compares to $1.24 to $1.28 previous. We continue to believe our strong AFFO growth combined with our well-covered dividend of 3.4% and our commitment to prudently manage our balance sheet and portfolio risk offers investors a compelling total return opportunity. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Greg Seibert, our COO, who will take you through the portfolio and investment activity in greater detail. Greg?