National Health Investors, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the National Health Investors Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Webcast and Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode and 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. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Dana Hambly, Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you and welcome to the National Health Investors Conference Call to review results of the third 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 in a press release that's 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 September 30, 2024. Copies of these filings are available on the SEC's website at sec.gov or on NHI's website at nhireet.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 8K 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 Mendelsohn.

Thank you, Dana. Hello, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. The third quarter results largely reflected continued strong fundamentals through much of the portfolio with occupancy and EBITDARM coverage improving sequentially from the second quarter across all our major asset classes. Our shop occupancy continues to show strong growth and at 88.6% for the quarter is approaching levels at which we believe we can start to drive more rate growth with significant margin upside. likely to follow. As Kevin will discuss in more detail, Senior Living Management, one of our cash basis tenants, notified us late in September of their inability to pay their lease and interest obligations. I'm proud of our team's quick response in securing new management for each of the leased properties and transitioning within days to ensure no adverse impacts to the residents. On a more positive note, we're very excited about recent investment activity in our growing pipeline. Year to date, we've closed on investments totaling over $205 million at an average initial yield of approximately 8.4%. This includes $121 million acquisition of the Spring Arbor portfolio of 10 senior living communities in North Carolina, our largest acquisition since 2020. We have sourced opportunities of more than $1.9 billion. Of this amount, we have board-approved signed LOI investment opportunities of $59.8 million that we expect to close this year and or early next year. In addition, we're evaluating an incremental pipeline of approximately $350 million. We are also pursuing several large portfolios, including shop and skilled nursing deals, which are not included in our pipeline numbers. Frankly, I've not seen this level of actionable investment opportunities in my entire career. And while nobody can ever be certain how long this window stays open, I see several factors supporting years of exceptional growth. Just a few of these factors include, one, our cost of capital has improved significantly over the last 12 months as industry fundamentals improved and the noise from the multi-year portfolio optimization has been reduced. As evidenced, we completed the successful offering of 2.76 million shares on a forward basis in a deal that was significantly oversubscribed and allowed us to upsize the offering by 20%. Two, traditional capital providers to the senior housing sector include banks and private equity have either scaled back their exposure or have exited the industry completely. While we expect that they'll be back at some point or replaced by other participants, we still believe well-capitalized REITs such as ourselves are best positioned given the cost of capital advantage and ready access to debt and equity. And three, the industry has tremendous tailwinds as inventory growth at approximately 1% is at historic lows and new starts are at the lowest level since 2010. and of course, the major demographic tailwind currently underway. We're as excited about the future as we've ever been. Our growth profile is multifaceted, both internally and externally, and is supported by a strong financial position. We believe that we have positioned the company to succeed through all stages of the business cycle and have added depth and preparation for expanding the shop platform. I said this last quarter and it remains the case that we are convinced that we are in the early days of exceptional growth for many years to come. Before turning the call over, I have a couple of items to address. First, I want to acknowledge all of the operators and their employees that were impacted by the recent hurricanes. Your efforts to keep residents and patients safe have been nothing short of heroic and we deeply thank you. Second, as many of you have seen, we recently filed an 8K announcing that our chairman, Andy Adams, will be retiring from his role effective December 31st. Andy has been with us from the beginning, serving as the founding chairman and CEO of NHI from its inception in 1991. He is a visionary pioneer in the industry, and we are incredibly grateful for his leadership and mentorship. He will be missed, but we look forward to staying in touch and wish him the very best in a long and productive retirement. I'll now turn the call over to Kevin to provide more details on our operations. Kevin.