VICI Properties Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Vici Properties' fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please note that this conference call is being recorded today, February 19, 2020. I will now turn the call over to Samantha Gallagher, General Counsel for Vici Properties. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Everyone should have access to the company's fourth quarter 2020 earnings release and supplemental information. The release and supplemental information can be found in the investor section of the Vici Properties website at www.viciproperties.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, guidance, intends, 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 a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact future operating results and financial conditions. During the call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. These measures should not be considered an 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 fourth quarter 2020 earnings release and our supplemental information available on the VT Properties website. Hosting the call today, we have Ed Petoniak, Chief Executive Officer, John Payne, President and Chief Operating Officer, David Kieske, Chief Financial Officer, Gabe 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 thanks for joining us. If for any reason you hang up or the line goes dead in the next 30 seconds, here's the one message I want you to take away from this call. In 2020, According to FactSet consensus, two-thirds or 14 of 21 U.S. triple net REITs are projected to post year-over-year declines in ASFO for share. In 2020, as David Kieske will elaborate on in a moment, Vichy's AFFO per share grew 10.8% for the year as a whole and grew 24.3% in the fourth quarter. In a year, 2020, when again two out of three peers are likely to see declines in AFFO, We think VT's growth is worth remarking on, but it's been interesting to see commentary so far, which can be pretty much reduced to VT achieves consensus ASFO for share. Did VT achieve consensus is, of course, a key question. We think it's also worth asking, did consensus call for ASFO for share growing, staying steady, or declining? If it called for growth, was it a lot of growth or a little of growth? Once all American triple net rates report their 2020 results, we'll know with finality where VG's ASFO per share growth stands on a relative basis. We already know where it stands on an absolute basis, and it is growth we're very proud of, especially coming out of a year so tough and so thoroughly dominated by the COVID-19 crisis. As I said in our Q3 2020 earnings call, what the COVID-19 crisis has taught us across the U.S. REIT management spectrum is that the strength of a REIT's business model is the aggregated strength of a REIT's tenant's business model. And for gaming REITs generally, and BG specifically, the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated that our gaming tenants have built business models of great strength and durability, and the strength and durability of their business models is derived from the strength and durability of their relationship with their customers, the end users of our real estate. This strength of the gaming operator-gaming customer relationship is a key lesson I take from 2020. This strength of relationship and the mission criticality of our real estate to that relationship is the key reason we, VG, collected 100% of our rent in 2020 on time and 100% in cash. It's a key reason we were able to announce what we believe is one of the larger 2020 dividend increases among large-cap American REITs. It's a reason we were able to go back on offense as early as June with our Caesars Forum financing, and later in the summer, our first non-gaming financing with Chelsea Pierce. Finally, it's the driving force behind our ASFO growth in 2020 and our ASFO growth trajectory coming into 2021. But there's a second lesson I take from 2020, and it's a lesson the clarity and power of which truly burst through in the second half of 2020, and that is the emerging power of sports betting within the American gaming ecosystem. As gaming real estate owners, we aren't as focused on the TAM of sports betting revenue, so of course we hope our tenants realize as much revenue and profit as they can from this new channel of business, whether online or in property. As real estate owners of assets that we will own and our tenants will occupy for decades to come, we believe sports betting will have the greatest long-term impact and create the greatest long-term value by greatly expanding the audience for American gaming. American gaming is an American consumer discretionary sector. every American consumer discretionary sector competes for the attention, time, and spending of the American consumer. If a given sector can achieve competitive advantage in gaining and sustaining the attention of a potential new customer or consumer, that sector will likely generate outsized growth and value in the years to come. For American gaming, As an American consumer discretionary sector, we strongly believe sports betting represents a new competitive advantage. What we believe sports betting does most powerfully is insert American gaming more broadly and deeply into the American conversation. Think about it. What are the two great mainstays of getting an American conversation going? Number one, weather. Number two, sports. We'll see if the day ever comes when casinos offer betting on weather. But the day is now here when sports betting is getting powerfully woven into the all-consuming American conversation about sports. Just to cite two examples involving two of our tenants, every time the Caesar Sportsbook gets cited exclusively on ESPN, and every time Penn is able to deliver a sports betting message through its partner, Barstool, each of these great American gaming companies is reaching an audience of potential new customers, especially potential new and younger customers. For American gaming, sports betting represents a new and technology-enabled paradigm for reaching, engaging, and activating a new, bigger, and younger audience. This technology-enabled paradigm is a new tailwind behind American gaming, and if you look at REIT asset class performance over the last few years, the winning asset classes, in terms of superior total return, have tended to be asset classes with technology-enabled tailwinds. Cell towers, data centers, and e-commerce logistics are just three such examples. Conversely, the asset classes that have struggled tend to be those suffering from technology-related headwinds. We believe with high conviction that the gaming real estate asset class should, in the next few years, benefit from the technology-enabled tailwinds. So all in all, 2020 was a year in which American gaming and American gaming real estate proved its defensive strength by enduring through one of the great crises of our lifetimes. And 2020 also showed, thanks to the growing strength of sports betting, that American gaming arguably represents one of the most compelling offensive opportunities in the consumer discretionary sector in the coming years. The next sound you hear will be the sound of the American consumer roaring back. And as many of you have been writing about, after many months of consuming mainly things, American consumers will return to what has been their growing preference for the last two decades, the preference for consuming experiences over things. As some of you may have heard on the Sunstone Hotel investors earnings call last week, our good friend and Sunstone CEO, John Arabia, cited transient bookings for the second half of the year at their Maui property that are currently double-digit, 13%, above 2019 levels, and the outlook continues to improve on a weekly basis. We believe this is one of the many anecdotes around pent-up leisure demand that will benefit the consumer discretionary sector at large as the economy continues to reopen. I'll now turn the call over to our president and COO, John Payne, who will talk about what we have done and moreover what we are doing to capitalize on the roaring comeback of the American consumer. John?