VICI Properties Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Vichy Properties third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please note that this conference is being recorded today, October 29, 2020. I will now turn the call over to Samantha Gallagher, general counsel with Vichy Properties.

Thank you, operator, and good morning. Everyone should have access to the company's third quarter 2020 earnings release and supplemental information. The release and supplemental information can be found in the investor section of the VT Properties website at www.vtproperties.com. Some of our comments today will be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by the use of words such as will, believe, expect, should, intend, projects, or other similar phrases, are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Therefore, you should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on them. I refer you to the company's SEC filings for more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact future operating results and financial conditions. During the call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is available in our third quarter 2020 earnings release and our supplemental information. Hosting the call today, we have Ed Petoniak, Chief Executive Officer, John Payne, President and Chief Operating Officer, David Kieske, Chief Financial Officer, Gabriel Wasserman, Chief Accounting Officer, and Danny Beloy, Vice President of Finance. Ed and team will provide some opening remarks, and then we will open the call to questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ed.

Thanks, Samantha. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our third quarter earnings call. As we sit here today, Vici is a few weeks past her third birthday. We've done a lot of work in three years, and in quarter three of this year, our work over the past three years truly crystallized. In Q3 2020, we executed the following strategic growth and activities. We closed on the acquisition of three new properties, Harris Atlantic City, Harris New Orleans, Harris Laughlin. We accretively added incremental rent at our two Las Vegas properties, Caesars Palace and Harris Las Vegas. We provided a $400 million mortgage on the Caesars Forum Convention Center, And we made our first investment outside of gaming with our $80 million financing of Chelsea Piers in New York, of which I'll say more in a moment. These strategic accomplishments in Q3 led to the following financial accomplishments. We grew adjusted EBITDA year over year by 41.9%. We grew AFFO year over year by 38.4%. We increased our dividend by 10.9%. And not to be taken for granted, since the COVID-19 crisis began, we have collected 100% of our rent through October in cash. All told, looking forward, these VT growth activities in Q3 added annualized rent and income from loans of $288 million and a blended unlevered yield of 7.80%. Granted, all American REITs haven't reported yet, but in what we've seen so far, few other American REITs have posted these kinds of financial growth numbers in Q3 2020. And this growth of VG takes place against the COVID-19 backdrop that has significantly degraded the financial results of many American rates. And if I could just take a moment, I would note that much of the commentary we've seen so far, we've seen Vici described as having met its expected results for Q3. And on the one hand, we're glad that we were expected to grow in the way we have, but we hope it is not lost on anybody that the growth we did produce is truly remarkable. And this surge of growth consummated in the third quarter of 2020 comes in our third year of real estate investment management. Over this three-year period, on an annualized run rate basis, we have grown our rent since emergence by 100% or $633 million, while significantly lowering our leverage from 8.5 times to the low end of our targeted range of between 5.0 and 5.5 times. PG stands here today with a substantially bigger and moreover higher quality portfolio with much lower leverage and a better ladder of debt structure. And as I spoke of a moment ago, in Q3, we also made our first allocation of capital outside of gaming. Chelsea Pierce is no doubt well known to those of you who live and work in New York. For anyone who doesn't know Chelsea Piers well, this morning we uploaded to our website, www.v2properties.com, a deck that summarizes the transaction and the asset. So the most valuable elements of the deck are the protos. Only protos, not words, can begin to do justice to the magnitude and experiential diversity of this asset. But here are a few words. Chelsea Piers is a 780,000 square foot facility on the Hudson River in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. It is New York's largest and best equipped sports and recreation facility. It offers one of New York's biggest and most dramatically situated banquet locations. Finally, and very valuably in a time of unprecedented film production activity, it offers the largest film production space in Manhattan. Roland Betts Tom Bernstein and David Tewksbury founded Chelsea Piers in 1995. They remain in charge today, and through their 25 years of ownership and management, they have expertly and energetically steered Chelsea Piers through such past crises as 9-11, the Great Financial Crisis, and Hurricane Sandy. We have confidence that under their continuing leadership, Chelsea Piers will recover strongly as the COVID-19 crisis eventually subsides and as the Yorkers once again return to New York's most spacious place to play and perform. Well, we're excited about our new financing partnership with Chelsea Piers, a partnership that could become longer term in nature. We remain very glad and very proud to be principally invested in American gaming real estate, a sector that has arguably performed better than any other place-based experiential sector during this COVID-19 crisis. To tell you more about how our tenants are doing and how we remain focused on gaming growth, I'll now turn the call over to our president and chief operating officer, John Payne. John?