Essential Properties Realty Trust, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Essential Properties Realty Trust's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. This conference call is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available three hours after the completion of the call for the next two weeks. The dial-in details for the replay can be found in yesterday'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. On the call this morning are Pete Mavoides, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mark Patton, Chief Financial Officer, Max Jenkins, Chief Operating Officer, A.J. Peel, Chief Investment Officer, and Rob Salisbury, Head of Corporate Finance and Strategy. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Rob Salisbury.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Essential Properties' first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. During this conference call, we'll make certain statements that may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities law. The company's actual future results may differ significantly from the matters discussed in these forward-looking statements, and we may not release revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect changes after the statements were made. Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations are disclosed from time to time in greater detail in the company's filings with the SEC and in yesterday's earnings press release. With that, I'll turn the call over to Pete.

Thank you, Rob. and thank you to everyone for joining us today for your interest in essential properties. In the first quarter, despite a choppy capital markets backdrop, the operating environment has remained favorable for our business as our team continues to source attractive investment opportunities, focusing on middle market saley specs with growing operators within our targeted industries. During the quarter, we invested $308 million as we continued to support our existing relationships, which contributed 86% of our investments, underscoring the value of recurring business within our tenant base. Our portfolio also continued to perform well, with tenant credit trends and same-store rent performance healthy and in line or slightly ahead of our expectations. We further solidified our capital position during the quarter, issuing over $300 million of equity and upsizing our credit facility, leaving us with pro forma leverage of 3.4 times and liquidity of $1.5 billion, which positions us well to continue to grow our portfolio and continue to generate sustainable earnings growth for our shareholders. The continued healthy portfolio trends and the attractive investment environment remain supportive of our 2025 business plan. As a result, we have reaffirmed our 2025 AFFO per share guidance range of $1.85 to $1.89. On our fourth quarter earnings call, we discussed our expectation that competition could build as capital markets normalized, resulting in modest cap rate compression. We continue to expect our investment cap rates in 2025 to be slightly lower than 2024. However, the recent heightened volatility in the capital markets has resulted in less competition than we had anticipated at the beginning of the year. Overall, our investment pipeline is supportive of the upper half of our articulated investment guidance of $900 million to $1.1 billion. Importantly, we do not need to raise any incremental capital to achieve our guidance range this year. Turning to the portfolio, we ended the quarter. with investments in 2,138 properties that were leased to 423 tenants operating in 16 industries. Our weighted average lease term stood at 14 years at quarter end, in line with a year ago, with just 5.4% of annual base rent expiring over the next five years. From a tenant health perspective, our weighted average unit level coverage ratio was 3.5 times this quarter. indicative of the profitability and cash flow generation by our tenants at the unit level. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Max Jenkins, our Chief Operating Officer, who will provide an update on our investment activities and the current market dynamics.