SITE Centers Corp.

Good day and welcome to the Site Center second quarter 2021 operating results. All participants will be in a 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. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brandon Day of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning and welcome to SightCenter's second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Chief Executive Officer David Lukes and Chief Financial Officer Connor Finnerty. In addition to the press release distributed this morning, we have posted our quarterly financial supplement and slide presentation onto our website at www.sightcenters.com, which is intended to support our prepared remarks during today's call. Please be aware that certain of our statements today may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal security law. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ maturely from our forward-looking statements. Additional information may be found in our earnings press release and in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. In addition, we will be discussing non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. including FFO, operating FFO, and same-store net operating income. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in today's quarterly financial supplement. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce our Chief Executive Officer, David Lukes.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. We had another very strong quarter, with results well ahead of our expectations and the deployment of nearly $50 million of external investments. Leasing activity remains robust, and we're seeing the early signs of that velocity in our lease rate, which will flow through in future periods. I'll start this morning with a summary of our second quarter events, talk briefly about operations, and then discuss our investments and our capital as we look to grow our portfolio of assets in wealthy suburban communities. Our properties remain 100 percent open, and customer traffic continues to grow. Collections and deferral repayments also continue to trend higher, and as of the 21st, we've collected 98% of second quarter rents. We've also collected nearly 100% of the deferral payments due to date, which, when applied to last year's rent, means that we've now collected 95% of contract rent for the calendar year 2020. The durability of our portfolio cash flow and the elevated level of demand for space at our assets speaks to the quality of our team and our real estate. Included in the 95% of 2020 base rent collected to date are $5.4 million of deferral payments from cash basis tenants. This is a positive one-time benefit to us, including $3 million in the second quarter, and speaks to two things. First, the success of our methodical tenant-by-tenant approach to resolving unpaid rent, and second, the strength of the credit profile of our national tenants, which make up 90% of our base rent. Moving to leasing, we had another quarter of elevated activity with 873,000 square feet of total volume and 167,000 square feet of new leases, including five anchors. We have 15 more anchors in lease negotiations, which we expect to be completed by year end. To put all of this activity in context, we've signed more deals in the first six months of this year, as we did for almost all of last year. And the first half deal count is up over 30% from 2018 and from 2019. Needless to say, I'm really excited about the level and the quality of activity and our pipeline continues to grow. Connor will give some details on this leasing pipeline relative to the size of our company, but as I mentioned last quarter, our optimism on the operational side is giving us greater clarity on where we see opportunities to deploy capital. We closed on two new acquisitions in the second quarter, totaling just under $50 million, which is good progress toward our capital allocation goal this year of $75 million of external investments. Both properties are benefiting from what we believe is the beginning of a multi-year trend. More money in wealthy suburbs with more frequent customer visits due to a flexible work from home culture and an increasing value and convenience both from tenants and from customers alike. In the case of our recent acquisitions, convenience is the anchor as neither has a traditional large format tenant on the site. We know the scale and the depth of the trade area as mobile phone data tells us that these locations are dominant and well-located, and the rising rents are proof that the tenants agree and are performing well. Our investment thesis for these properties is that a simply designed row of shop tenants with the ubiquitous size and depth that fits many retail concepts located along a high-traffic corridor will result in rising rents and low CapEx, and therefore match or exceed the durability and the growth of our core portfolio today. We are seeing rent growth in many of our submarkets, and we're continuing to target investments in those properties that have a heavy convenience element and are set to benefit from these tailwinds. The foundation of our acquisition program is our access to growth capital. As many of you know, Site Centers has a $190 million preferred investment with no coupon in our spinoff company, RBI. The Board of Directors at RBI will need to decide when to repay this preferred investment, as it has no defined maturity. However, the preferred must be repaid to site centers before RBI can make special dividend payments to its common shareholders, which is why I wanted to briefly mention the RBI-AK filed on July 15th. RBI has entered into an agreement to sell its remaining Puerto Rico assets for $550 million, with an expected closing in the third quarter, subject to various closing conditions. The sale proceeds would be sufficient to fully repay RVI's mortgage loan, which had an outstanding balance of $215 million as of June 30th, 2021. This transaction would also leave RVI with just eight of the original 50 spinoff properties, all of which are located in the continental United States. Site Centers is in a fantastic position to recoup its preferred investment in RBI because of the work of our entire team. So a sincere thank you to all of my colleagues across the company for their creativity and their contributions. And with that, I'll turn it over to Connor.