Safehold Inc

Good afternoon, and welcome to Safehold's first quarter 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 Pierce Hoffman, Senior Vice President of Capital Markets and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Safehold's earnings call. On the call, we have Jay Sugarman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Trachtenberg, President, Brett Asness, Chief Financial Officer, and Steve Wilder, Executive Vice President, Head of Investments. This afternoon, we plan to walk through a presentation that details our first quarter 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 8pm Eastern time today. The dial in for the replay is 877-481-4010 with a confirmation code of 53936. In order to accommodate all those who want to ask questions, we ask the 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 Pierce and appreciate everyone joining us today. We're three years into building a standalone safehold and nine years into building the new modern ground lease business. In ground lease timeframes, we're still in the early innings. We continue to learn and refine the business model to gain scale and unlock the full value of the business. Multifamily and its variations have proven to be the core of the business. And we are leaning hard into meeting our customer's needs with new products and increased outreach. We like the long-term dynamics in the sector and we'll continue to innovate to penetrate a larger slice of this market. One of our key goals in our multifamily push is to expand our success in the affordable multifamily sector beyond the California market. And we've begun to see some progress on that front with our first non-California deal closing this quarter and others in the pipeline. We also have a developing situation at our 50th Street asset. As many of you know, new property tax incentives in New York City have made older office buildings candidates for conversion to multifamily. Our tenant approached us seeking permission for a potential conversion, as required by our lease, with pro formas indicating multifamily conversion could generate significantly higher ground rent coverage versus office. We provided a framework for preliminary approval subject to certain conditions, including the tenant complying with their obligations under our lease. While to date fixed ground rent has been paid, the tenant has repeatedly failed to pay property taxes as required under the ground lease. If we're unable to reach a resolution, which starts with the tenant unconditionally paying the required taxes, we will be forced to exercise our rights under the lease. We'll share more details depending on the tenant's course of action, but feel comfortable with our position and recent valuation work from our third party valuation consultants. The new 467M tax incentive program has the potential to add important value to the conversion, but the value of these incentives is negatively impacted the longer it takes to get the conversion underway, so time is of the essence. Lastly, another key goal for this year is to address the value gap we see in our share price. With Michael and Steve finding good risk-reward on the new deal front and UCA values starting to move up again, we began a buyback program at the tail end of last quarter to take advantage of the underpricing in our stock. We look forward to highlighting the value in our portfolio and to demonstrating why new groundless originations at today's levels can add significant value to shareholders' long-term returns. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Michael and Brett to recap the quarter and take you through the details.