SITE Centers Corp.

Good day and welcome to the Site Center's Reports Fourth Quarter 2021 Operating Results Conference Call. 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 on your telephone keypad. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Monica Kukreja. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning and welcome to SightCenter's fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Chief Executive Officer David Lukes and Chief Financial Officer Connor Fennerty. In addition to the press release distributed this morning, we have posted our quarterly financial supplement and slide presentation on 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 securities laws. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially 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 Luke.

Thank you, Monica. Good morning, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter earnings call. Quarterly results and investment activity capped what turned out to be a fantastic year for site centers. OSFO was ahead of plan, really, on all line items, and new leasing volume was the highest in four years. We utilized a portion of the $190 million distribution from RBI to acquire $143 million of real estate, beginning the transformation from RBI fees to property cash flow, and we repaid mortgage debt ahead of maturity. Our balance sheet remains in great shape with debt to EBITDA in the low fives at year end. Thank you to the entire site center's team for working so hard to get so much done in one quarter to position the company for growth in 2022 and onward. I'll start this morning discussing fourth quarter results, talk briefly about leasing and tenant demand, and then discuss our investments in capital allocation as we look to grow our portfolio of assets in wealthy suburban communities. As I mentioned, fourth quarter OFFO was ahead of our budget on better operations, which Connor will provide more details on later. We collected 99% of our billed rent for the fourth quarter and for the full year 2021 and are effectively back to pre-pandemic collection levels. Our tenant assistance program is essentially complete as well, which speaks to our credit quality and is a reflection of the fact that almost 90% of our base rent is from national tenants. Moving to leasing, tenants are paying more to get into properties in the last mile of wealthy suburban zip codes and renewing leases at a higher rate than pre-pandemic levels. We had our highest level of new leasing in four years despite having a considerably more focused portfolio and signed more shop square footage in the quarter than as far back as the company has been tracking retailers as they expand their store fleets. Over the course of the year, we signed 900,000 square feet of new leases increasing our leased rate by 110 basis points. More importantly, we signed deals with well-capitalized national credit tenants, with 85% of our anchors signed with publicly traded companies and 22% of the square footage signed from new concepts that were launched in the last 18 months and are sponsored by investment-grade parent companies. Almost 10% of the new leasing activity by base rent was with grocers, and another 23% was with first-to-portfolio tenants. Looking forward, we have a half million square feet at share in lease negotiations, which we expect to be completed in the next six months, with similar characteristics to the deals we've signed in 2021. We expect the leases recently signed, along with the current activity, to be a material driver of our growth over the next several years. Shifting to investments, we had a very active fourth quarter, buying out partner interests in joint ventures in Arizona and Florida, acquiring peripheral land in Charlotte and Princeton, and adding another convenience property in Charlottesville. I'll start with our Florida portfolio acquisition. We acquired five public-anchored properties from our partner in key markets for us like Tampa and Miami. The grocers generate on average almost $800 per square foot in sales, and the properties at year-end were 87% leased, offering a mix of leasing and tactical redevelopment upside, with a five-year underwritten NOI CAGR north of 5%. We have activity on every one of the vacant anchors in this portfolio and are seeing strong momentum on the shops as well. Proforma, for this acquisition, Florida is now our largest state by base rent, with just under 20% of the company's ABR and growing. In Phoenix, we bought out another partner in a property with average household incomes above $130,000, yet with occupancy rate of just 56%. We have activity on the vast majority of the vacant square footage with an exciting mix of new retailers and expect to double the property's NOI over the next five years. For the year, we invested $223 million in assets, including four convenience properties, with an underwritten five-year NOI CAGR over 5% and a blended cap rate of just under 6%. Each of these properties, all located in key markets for the company, including Delray Beach, Scottsdale, Atlanta, and Princeton, will be drivers of the company's future growth. Shifting to investments, I'd expect us to be active in both anchored and unanchored assets that fit our growth and our sub-market criteria. We remain encouraged by our initial investments in convenience properties that do not have a traditional large format tenant, especially given the advancements in geolocation data. As a result, this compelling subsector in open-air shopping centers remains a key area of focus for the company. The subsector stands to benefit from the pandemic-induced societal shifts like work-from-home and urban-to-suburban. Our property data aggregated over the past few years is showing a distinct rise in customer traffic, especially in wealthier suburbs where retail GLA per capita is low and driving outsized rent growth in those same markets as evident in our own results. We are hyper-focused on acquiring properties that fit these characteristics within our top markets since our portfolio has a weighted average population growth rate that's double the national average. All of us at site centers are incredibly proud of the work that generated our 2021 results, and we're even more excited about our growth prospects in 2022 and beyond. And with that, I'll turn it over to Connor. Thanks, David.