Kennedy-Wilson Holdings Inc.

Good day, and welcome to the Kennedy-Wilson fourth quarter and 2024 earnings conference call and webcast. 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 touch-tone phone. And to withdraw your question, please press star and then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Devin Bovsar, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you and good morning. Thank you for joining us today. Today's call will be webcast live and will be archived for replay. The replay will be available by phone for one week and by webcast for three months. Please see the Investor Relations website for more information. With me today are Bill McMorrow, CEO, Matt Windisch, President, Justin Embody, CFO, and Mike Pegler, President of Europe. On this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income. You can find a description of these items along with the reconciliation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure and our fourth quarter 2024 earnings release, which is posted on the investor relations section of our website. Statements made during this call may include forward-looking statements. Actual results may materially differ from forward-looking information discussed on this call due to the number of risks and certainties and other factors indicated in reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I would now like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Bill McMorrow.

Thank you, Devin, and thank you, everybody, for joining the call today. Yesterday, we reported our results for the fourth quarter, which represented a strong ending to a solid year of executing on our strategic initiatives, including increasing our baseline EBITDA growing our investment management business, disposing of non-core assets, reducing unsecured debt, and finding meaningful ways to deploy new capital with our many institutional partners. We saw great momentum in our earnings this quarter with improvements across all key components of adjusted EBITDA, which nearly tripled from $190 million in 2023 to $540 million in 2024. On today's call, I'll start by reviewing the progress made on our key initiatives in 2024, followed by a discussion of our priorities for 2025, before turning it over to Justin Enbody to discuss our financial results. The overall market environment is showing steady improvement. Debt markets are strengthening with lower base rates and tighter spreads, while transaction volume is clearly rebounding. Against this backdrop, our investment activity accelerated in 2024 with over $4 billion of capital deployed, including $3.5 billion in our debt originations and $800 million in rental housing and industrial acquisitions, an increase of over 50% from 2023 levels. Strengthening liquidity and improving market sentiment supports the continued expansion of our investment management business. Investment management fees grew by 60% year-over-year to approximately 100 million in 2024, reaching a major milestone for the company. Fees have grown from 25 million in 2019 to the previously mentioned 100 million in 2024. A significant driver of this growth has been our credit platform, which has seen huge momentum in the last year. We completed a record $1.4 billion of new loan originations in Q4 and $3.5 billion for the year, all focused on construction of high-quality, market-rate multifamily and student housing. This momentum has carried over into 2025, $1.5 billion in new originations in closing or already completed year-to-date. Additionally, we have seen meaningful growth in the interest to deploy capital into real estate equity from our institutional partners. A prime example of this is the launch of the new UK single-family rental strategy with the Canadian Pension Plan, CPP, one of the world's largest global investors with approximately $500 billion in assets under management. We are off to a strong start in this new platform with total committed capital of $361 million or approximately 30% of the strategy's current target of $1.3 billion. Further highlighting our growth in investment management, we successfully closed fundraising on our seventh discretionary commingled fund securing $400 million in discretionary capital for U.S. investments. We remain focused on attracting capital from leading institutional investors across North America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, who we expect to be increasingly active in the equity markets. In total, we believe we continue to grow our investment management fees by approximately 20 to 25 percent per annum. A second important initiative has been recycling capital through our non-core asset sales. In Q4, we generated $122 million in cash proceeds from non-core sales, bringing our 2024 total to $475 million of cash and $200 million of gains generated from asset sales. With our Q4 activity, we have successfully achieved our $550 million asset sale target set last year. Looking ahead, capital recycling remains a core focus with an expected generation of over $400 million of cash in 2025 through asset sales, recapitalizations, or using assets we currently own to seed new investment platforms. We intend to deploy this capital into higher return opportunities, particularly within our investment management platforms, while we continue to reduce the company's unsecured debt, which is our third key initiative for the year. In December, we repaid $185 million of our KWE bonds leaving $310 million maturing in November, the only remaining unsecured maturity until 2028. We also made significant progress on our revolving credit facility, repaying $78 million in Q4. Turning to our portfolio, our real estate equity and credit investments total $28 billion in assets under management, producing an estimated annual NOI of $467 million for the company. Our fee-bearing capital stands at a record $8.8 billion. Over the last several years, we have meaningfully repositioned our portfolio with approximately two-thirds of our stabilized assets now concentrated in rental housing, comprising the 60,000 units we either own or are currently financing. The outlook for our apartment portfolio, which ended the quarter with 95 percent occupancy, continues to improve. Same property NOI grew by a solid 5.6 percent in Q4. Supply headwinds in most of our markets are easing, which will allow us to continue to grow our NOIs. This dynamic should provide a very favorable backdrop for rental housing fundamentals going forward. As market conditions continue to recover, we remain well positioned to capitalize on new opportunities with a continued focus on rental housing and industrial assets. With over three decades of experience navigating various interest rate environments, We have the flexibility now to deploy capital across the entire real estate capital structure. We anticipate a very active year and remain committed to execute it on our previously mentioned key initiatives in 2025, while continuing to strengthen our balance sheet and growing our recurring cash flow. I'd now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Justin Hanbody. Thanks, Bill.