National Health Investors, Inc.

and welcome to the National Health Investors Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Webcast and Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Dana Hamley. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you and welcome to the National Health Investors Conference Call to review the results for the second quarter of 2024. On the call today are Eric Mendelson, President and CEO, Kevin Pascoe, Chief Investment Officer, John Spade, Chief Financial Officer, and David Travis, Chief Accounting Officer. The results as well as notice of the accessibility of this conference call were released after the market closed yesterday and a press release has been covered by the financial media. Any statements in this conference call which are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. NHI cautions investors that any forward-looking statements may involve risks or uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance. All forward-looking statements represent NHI's judgment as of the date of this conference call. Investors are urged to carefully review various disclosures made by NHI and its periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the risk factors and other information disclosed in NHI's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2024. Copies of these filings are available on the SEC's website at sec.gov or on NHI's website at nhiread.com. In addition, certain terms used in this call are non-GAAP financial measures, reconciliations of which are provided in NHI's earnings release and related tables and schedules which have been furnished on Form 8-K to the SEC. Listeners are encouraged to review those reconciliations provided in the earnings release together with all other information provided in that release. I'll now turn the call over to our CEO, Eric Mendelson.

Thank you, Dana. Hello, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. The second quarter exceeded our forecast and represents the fourth straight quarter of outperformance relative to our expectations. The drivers of the strong performance have been consistent as we once again had stable cash collections, steady deferral repayments, improving operator fundamentals, shop occupancy and revenue growth, and no unexpected rent concessions. While the recent outperformance has been driven primarily by organic measures, we're very excited about the recent investment activity and our growing pipeline. Year-to-date, we've closed on $56.6 million of investments at an average initial yield of approximately 8.4%. In addition, we have sourced investment opportunities totaling more than $1.8 billion. Of this amount, we have board-approved signed LOI investment opportunities of $155.4 million that we expect to close this year. We're also evaluating a pipeline of approximately 270 million. These investments target senior housing assets and fee simple real estate and loans with purchase options. We're also pursuing several large portfolio deals, including RIDEA deals, which are not included in our pipeline. We've patiently spent multiple years positioning our company to return to the level of acquisition growth we experienced prior to the pandemic. With ample dry powder and improved cost of capital and more realistic seller expectations, we expect that external investment activity will be a significant driver of cash flow growth in the foreseeable future. Regarding our quarterly results, Compared to the second quarter of 2023, normalized FFO per share and total dollar FAD increased 11.4% and 16.1% respectively. We received a $2.5 million deferral repayment in the quarter, which is a testament to our strategy allowing us to recapture NOI that would have been otherwise lost. The April 1st Bickford rent step-up also contributed nicely to our growth, as did their revenue-based $1.3 million deferral repayment. Including Bickford, we have $19.6 million in net deferral balances tied to senior housing operating revenue goals. The Senior Housing Operating Portfolio, or SHOP, NOI increased by 39.9% year-over-year to approximately 3 million. While the NOI result was slightly below our internal expectation, we're encouraged that occupancy continues to move higher, and we remain confident in our guidance growth rate for the year and the longer-term upside potential of this portfolio. Given the strong quarterly results and good visibility into the second half of the year, we're once again raising our 2024 guidance. Our updated guidance represents midpoint normalized FFO per share growth of 4.8% and a midpoint FAD growth of 7% when compared to 2023. The increased guidance continues to be broad-based with several factors contributing to the improved outlook compared to our original February guidance. Our growth profile is multifaceted, both internally and externally, and is supported by an increasingly bullish demographic environment characterized by favorable supply-demand dynamic. We believe that we position the company to succeed through all stages of the business cycle and are therefore generally agnostic to the short-term ripples in the economy. While we have a long history as a public company, we're excited about the future as we have ever been, and we are convinced that we're in the early days of exceptional growth for several years to come. I'll now turn the call to Kevin to provide more details on our operations. Kevin.