Plymouth Industrial REIT, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Plymouth Industrial REIT third quarter 2021 earnings 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 your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Trip Sullivan of SCR Partners. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the Plymouth Industrial Reef conference call to review the company's results for the third quarter of 2021. On the call today will be Jeff Witherall, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ben White, President and Chief Investment Officer, Dan Wright, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Jim Connolly, Executive Vice President of Asset Management, and Ann Hayward, General Counsel. Our results were released this morning in our earnings press release, which can be found on the investor relations section of our website, along with our Form 10-Q and supplemental filed with the SEC. A replay of this call will be available shortly after the conclusion of the call through November 12, 2021. The numbers to access the replay are provided in the earnings press release. For those who listened to the replay of this call, we remind you that the remarks made herein are as of today, November 5th, 2021, and will not be updated subsequent to this call. During this call, certain comments and statements we make may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning prescribed by the securities law, including statements related to the future performance of our portfolio, our pipeline of potential acquisitions and other investments, future dividends, and financing activities. All forward-looking statements represent Plymouth's judgment as of the date of this conference call and are subject to risk and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Investors are urged to carefully review various disclosures made by the company, including the risk and other information disclosed in the company's filings with the SEC. We also will discuss certain non-GAAP measures, including but not limited to core FFO, AFFO, and adjusted EBITDA. Definitions of these non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in our filings with the SEC. I'll now turn the call over to Jeff Witherell. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Tripp. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our team continues to set a strong pace for the year with leasing, acquisitions, and capital markets leading the way. This is a collective effort, and I'd like to thank our entire team here in Boston and in our regional offices for their commitment and diligence, as well as a relentless focus on operations. The improving industrial fundamentals provide support for what we want to accomplish, but it requires a strategy and teamwork to build scale in the way we have within our markets. I want to spend some time this morning on some updates around our progress. Our key operating stats for the quarter continue to demonstrate the strength of our portfolio. Occupancy was 96.3%. Cash releasing spreads were 10.8%, bringing us up 9.7% through the first nine months of the year. Same-store NOI on a cash basis was up 6.2%, and rent collections at 99% plus. Core FFO per share was in line with our forecast, while AFFO reflected the impact of solid real estate decisions to sign several longer-term leases. We have had a record amount of acquisition activity so far in 2021, and we have a few more transactions baked into our guidance for year-end. We've also made great strides on the balance sheet with the addition of our expanded unsecured credit facility and successful deployment of our ATM program to match fund these acquisitions. I would like to provide an update on our development program. We currently have 11 projects in various stages of planning and development in four different markets, with three of them currently under construction or active development. The balance are forecasted to start in 2022. All told, we believe these projects will total about 1.3 million square feet and represent a total investment of approximately $82 million with a targeted range in the high single digits. In Cincinnati, at our Fisher Industrial Park, we have two exciting projects we are working on. In early July, we started to reclaim over 150,000 square feet to put into our leasing inventory. This project involves capping the existing press pits within the existing 1.25 million square foot building. We are on track for a completion of this redevelopment by year end, and as of today, have signed 60,000 square feet and have proposals out on another 60,000 square feet. The second project is the additional acreage at this site, which provides us an opportunity to consider three separate new buildings totaling almost 500,000 square feet. We are in the planning phase now with these three buildings and anticipate one of them will break ground in early 2022. In Portland, Maine, we are on track with completing shell construction next month at our $7.3 million, 70,000 square foot ground up development. Discussions with potential tenants have picked up now that the shell construction is close to being finished. In October, we broke ground on a new $13 million, 237,000 square foot industrial building in Atlanta. On the same site, we are in the planning stages for adding another building of approximately 180,000 square feet. These buildings are adjacent to our existing building that is 100% leased and within a market that has solid absorption rates and rent growth. In Jacksonville, Florida, we have four buildings in design phase right now, and we are waiting on final permitting. These are all located within two of our existing business parks and will total approximately 175,000 square feet. We don't have a definitive start date for construction, but with the infrastructure already in place, we believe it is feasible to have all of these online in late 2022. We were able to pursue this additional value creation through development because of the market cluster strategy we pursued to gain scale in our markets, but also because we have the liquidity to fund this growth. As disciplined as we are on acquisitions and new developments, we are even more diligent on the balance sheet. Our top priorities with the balance sheet are to ensure that our dividend is well covered, our leverage profile continues to improve, and that we have access to multiple sources of capital. I believe we have done a great job of balancing these priorities while still maintaining a growth posture. We have one of the lowest payout ratios in our industry. We are still on track to stay within our leverage targets, and we have demonstrated we can fund a record amount of acquisition in development activities. This continues to be the time to own industrial buildings from the first mile to the last mile, and we have the right people, strategy, and liquidity to achieve our top priorities, namely find the right opportunities that can provide the most embedded growth and extend a platform that is difficult to replicate in our markets. Penn, why don't you walk us through our acquisition activities?