Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc.

And welcome to the Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc. First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in 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 touch tone 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 Brian Wolf, General Counsel. Please, go ahead.

Thank you for joining the call. Presenting today are Alan Gold, Executive Chairman, Paul Smithers, President and Chief Executive Officer, David Smith, Chief Financial Officer, Catherine Hastings, Chief Operating Officer, and Ben Regan, Chief Investment Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made during today's conference call may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. and actual results may differ materially due to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and other factors. Please refer to the documents filed by the company with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. We are not obligated to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. In addition, on today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial information, such as FFO, normalized FFO, and adjusted FFO. You can find this information together with reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure in our earnings release issued yesterday as well as in our 8K filed with the SEC. I'll now hand the call over to Alan. Alan?

Thank you, Brian, and welcome everyone. We are pleased to report another solid quarter of operations and financial results, especially in the context of ongoing challenges in the macroeconomy that we are all experiencing. We believe we have positioned ourselves well in this context with one of the strongest and most experienced teams of real estate professionals in the cannabis industry, a high quality portfolio, and arguably a conservative and flexible balance sheet. With that, I'm also pleased to introduce our newest member of the management team on this call, David Smith, who joined us in late March as our new chief financial officer. David brings a wealth of senior management experience in the real estate industry, including cannabis real estate and publicly traded REITs in particular, and we look forward to his insight and contributions to our company for many years to come. With David's appointment, we also promoted Catherine Hastings to Chief Operating Officer and Ben Regan to Chief Investment Officer, both seasoned executives that have been with us nearly from the start of the company. We are truly fortunate to have such a dedicated team and to expand our team with David's caliber of talent. To recap the quarter, we generated total revenues of $76 million in Q1, adjusted funds from operations of over $63 million, rent collection from IEIP's operating portfolio was 98% for the quarter, the financial performance combined to drive dividend returns to investors with a $7.15 of dividends declared per share in the past 12 months alone. While we have noted for the past several quarters that we expect investment activity to slow given the significant increases to funding costs that have taken place and overall macroeconomic headwinds, I wanted to highlight our transaction with our new tenant, Battle Green, during the quarter, where we acquired a 157,000 square foot industrial facility under development in Ohio and executed a long-term lease with Battle Green. Battle Green has a great leadership team in place, and we see Ohio being one of the states poised to adopt an adult use program in the near term. Including that transaction, we've committed over $90 million in additional investments year to date. Ben will provide further detail on our Battle Green transaction and other investment activities year to date. We continue to strive, as we have from the very beginning, to be as transparent and detailed as we can about our business and prospects, and hope all our shareholders feel the same. On the positive side, we are seeing green shoots in the industry, such as the reintroduction of the SAFE Banking Act, which Paul will spend more time discussing. Catherine Hastings, as I mentioned, will highlight our positive portfolio statistics, including rent collection from the first quarter and from the first two months of this quarter. I will now turn the call over to Paul to discuss licensing industry dynamics.