Safehold Inc

Good morning and welcome to Safehold's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. If you need assistance during today's call, please press star zero. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one. That's star one to ask a question. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the conference over to Piers Hoffman, Senior Vice President of Capital Markets and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Safehold's earnings call. On the call, we have Jay Sugarman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Brett Asness, Chief Financial Officer, and Tim Dougherty, Chief Investments Officer. This morning, we plan to walk through a presentation that details our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 results. The presentation can be found on our website at safeholdinc.com by clicking on the investors link. There will be a replay of this conference call beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern time today. The dial-in for the replay is 877-481-4010 with a confirmation code of 51963. In order to accommodate all those who want to ask questions, we ask that participants limit themselves to two questions during Q&A. If you'd like to ask additional questions, you may re-enter the queue. Before I turn the call over to Jay, I'd like to remind everyone that statements in this earnings call which are not historical facts may be forward-looking. Our actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements, and the risk factors that could cause these differences are detailed in our SEC reports. Safehold disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as expressly required by law. Now with that, I'd like to turn it over to Chairman and CEO, Jay Sugarman. Jay?

Thanks, Fierce, and good morning to everyone joining us today. The fourth quarter was in many ways a continuation of themes we have seen over the past 12 months. The prospect of lower rates early in the quarter helping to activate business, and higher rates as the quarter went on reversing the equation. A relatively sharp increase in rates ended up posing headwinds for customers, upended many deals, and put upward pressure on discount rates and cap rates used for valuing our existing portfolio. While we can't control interest rates, we still believe that there are reasons to expect rates will come down over time and that the current headwinds we're facing will become strong tailwinds with more deals, higher values for our cash flows, and higher estimates of UCA. In the meantime, will work to counteract the impact of higher rates with two specific initiatives in 2025 to demonstrate value in the portfolio and build on the successes of 2024. The first initiative is continuing our momentum and penetration in the multifamily market, particularly the affordable sector. We like this market for its stable cash flows, high occupancy rates, compelling supply-demand dynamics, and the clear societal benefits that our ground lease provides. In 2025, we plan to double down on our efforts with the goal of doubling last year's affordable volume and expanding to at least two new states. Deal sizes are still on the smaller side, so expanding our footprint and customer relationships will be important to increasing volume. Second, we'll look to take advantage of what we view as significant undervaluation of our shares. To this end, our board has approved a new share buyback authorization up to $50 million. Any repurchases will be subject to market conditions and other factors that we deem appropriate. And our goal for this program is to be leverage neutral. We'll be looking for opportunities to recycle capital from the existing portfolio through asset sales or JVs where advantageous. We'll also focus on bridging the gap with Carrot, as we believe it is a significant source of long-term value for shareholders not currently recognized in the share price. As part of those efforts, our goal is to have Carrot become more accessible to third-party investors. In sum, 2025 will be about building on areas of progress from 2024 and continuing to look for ways to highlight the significant value of the portfolio and platform. All right, let me turn it over to Brett to review the quarter and the full year in more detail. Brett?