Stag Industrial, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to Stagg Industrial's fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Matt Spenard, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome to Stagg Industrial's conference call covering quarter 2020 results. In addition to the press release distributed yesterday, we have posted an unaudited quarterly supplemental information presentation on the company's website at staggindustrial.com under the Investor Relations section. On today's call, the company's prepared remarks and answers to your questions will contain forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risk and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those discussed today. Examples of forward-looking statements include forecasts of core FFO, gains for NLI, G&A, acquisition and disposition volumes, retention rates, and other guidance, lease and prospects, rent collections, industry and economic trends, as well as other matters. We encourage all of our listeners to review the more detailed discussions related to the forward-looking statements contained in the company's filings with the SEC and the definitions and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures contained in the supplemental informational package available on the company's website. As a reminder, forward-looking statements represent management estimates as of today. TAG Industrial assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. On today's call, you will hear from Ben Butcher, our Chief Executive Officer, and Bill Crooker, our Chief Financial Officer. Also here with us are Steve Mackey, our chief operating officer, and Dave King, our director of real estate operations. They will be available to answer questions specific to the areas of focus. I will now turn the call over to Ben.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the fourth quarter earnings call for Stagg Industrial. We are pleased to have you join us and look forward to telling you about our fourth quarter results. 2020 was a challenging year for our company, our country, and the world as a whole. Despite the ravages of a global pandemic, significant social unrest, and a contentious political climate, we're able to efficiently and successfully navigate the year. I want to thank our team for the excellent work they have done in facing up to these challenges. Through their efforts, we're able to meet our original pre-pandemic financial guidance for core FFO per share and exceed on same-store cash NOI. We also finished the year with our largest acquisition quarter in the company's history. As we begin 2021, There are reasons for optimism as we move forward towards a new normal. Highlighting this has been the development and initial distribution of multiple highly effective vaccines. Tempering that optimism has been an emergence of virus variants and mutations. These two will be overcome as we move forward to that new normal. In our corner of the world, industrial real estate, we continue to enjoy strong tenant demand and positive fundamentals. E-commerce continues to be a significant incremental demand driver, and can reasonably be expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Online shopping will continue to grow. Not surprisingly, after many years of falling vacancy, supply has finally caught up with demand for the country as a whole, albeit at heightened levels for both. As has been the case in recent years, the excess supply tends to be concentrated in larger markets and is not expected to significantly dampen prospects for rent growth. Supply demand evaluations need to be done on a market-by-market basis and updated periodically. These market-specific evaluations are an integral part of the STAG underwriting process. In March, we paused our external acquisition efforts in order to more fully understand the scope of the pandemic and its impact on both capital markets generally and the industrial real estate sector in particular. Over the next couple of months, we observed tenant and seller behavior to try and get a sense of the new market equilibrium. During this time, the team also identified and completed internal projects in data utilization and modeling that was to support our long-term acquisition efforts. Towards the latter half of the second quarter, it became clear that market conditions and industrial fundamentals were supportive of a full return to our acquisition program. The pace of acquisitions accelerated in the back half of the year as we and sellers gained confidence in pricing levels and assets returned to market. The $32 billion STAG acquired in the fourth quarter for an aggregate price of $579.9 million represent the largest quarterly acquisition volume in our history. For 2021, we see acquisition volume continuing at a strong pace with guidance of $800 million to $1.2 billion. This guidance range is supported by our current $2.1 billion acquisition pipeline that reflects the large and attractive opportunities that we see today. 2020 was also our company's largest year for dispositions, highlighted by large granular dispositions in California and New Jersey. Seven buildings were sold during the year with gross proceeds of $279.4 million. These proceeds resulted in an aggregate disposition cap rate of 5.4%. The funds from these sales were then accretively redeployed into fungible industrial assets. Our portfolio performed exceedingly well during this pandemic year. we collected 99.6% of rental billings for the year. The handful of rental deferrals we granted have concluded and the repayment is proceeding as scheduled. This demonstration of portfolio resilience was at a level at least in line with the experience of our public peers. We spent a significant amount of time over the last year discussing two large known vacates, the one million square foot building leased to Solo Cup in Hampstead, Maryland, and the million square foot building leased to GSA in Burlington, New Jersey. Both lease maturities have been successfully resolved to great outcomes. The Hampstead building was backfilled to a strong credit tenant with zero downtime occurred. The Burlington building was sold and produced outsized returns, a nominal gain of $41.5 million at a 5.4% cash cap rate. This year we returned to a more normalized lease expiration schedule with no large tenant lease maturities. The level of annual credit loss we expected to occur in 2020 was heightened by the onset of the pandemic and the associated economic downturn. As credit concerns moderated through the year, we were able to increase our cash and store guidance. We continue to benefit from the combination of widespread tenant demand and declining credit concerns across the portfolio. This is reflected in a more normal 2021 cash and store guidance range of 2% to 3%. Bill will discuss all of our 2021 guidance in detail, but the takeaway is that our business remains vibrant and our guidance reflects a return to more normal conditions. In particular, our core FFO per share guidance implies solid accretion supported by a defensive balance sheet and ample liquidity. With that, I'll turn it over to Bill, who will discuss our fourth quarter and annual operational results and our 2021 guidance.