VICI Properties Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Vici Properties First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please note that this conference call is being recorded today, April 30th, 2026. I will now turn the call over to Samantha Gallagher, General Counsel with Vici Properties.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Everyone should have access to the company's first quarter 2026 earnings release and supplemental information. The release and supplemental information can be found in the investor section of the VG Properties website at www.vgproperties.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, outlook, 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 certain 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 on our website in our first quarter 2026 earnings release, our supplemental information, and our filings with the SEC. For additional information with respect to non-GAAP measures of certain tenants and or counterparties discussed on this call, please refer to the respective company's public filings with the SEC. Hosting the call today, we have Ed Petoniak, Chief Executive Officer, John Payne, President and Chief Operating Officer, David Kieske, Chief Financial Officer, Dave Wasserman, Managing Director of Business Development and BECS, Jeremy Waxman, Chief Accounting Officer, and William McCluskey, Senior Vice President of Capital Markets. Ed and team will provide some opening remarks, and then we'll open the call to questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ed.

Thanks, Samantha, and good morning, everyone. This morning, you'll hear from John Payne on our recent investment and growth activities, and you'll hear from David Kieske on our financial results and updated 2026 earnings guidance. To start, I'd like to thank the members of the VG team for their continued hard work. Their contributions to the business, including their efforts around the deal activity we announced this quarter, are essential to our success and ability to deliver value to our owners. Today I'd like to share with you, in abbreviated form, the thoughts I shared in my recent annual report letter. I'll begin with this. The leaders of any business should always have a clear and cogent answer to the question, what business are you in? At VG, the high-level answer to that question is, we are in the business of sourcing, allocating, and stewarding capital invested accretively in experiential real estate of enduring value. That could be the answer offered by any REIT or real estate investment management firm in America, save for one word, experiential. The 28 other REITs currently in the S&P 500 all have their own distinct adjectives in front of real estate, whether those modifiers be logistics, data center, office, residential, lodging, retail, self-storage, et cetera. Our property types may differ, but we all wrestle with the key real estate investment attribute of relevance and on the opposite end of the investment spectrum, obsolescence. The more relevant the real estate is to its intended end users, the greater the likelihood that the income and value of that real estate will be sustained and potentially grow. The relevance of a property is ultimately determined by the people who use the real estate for its intended purpose. And for that reason, I believe the real estate investment insights are ultimately cultural insights. To evaluate the current and moreover future relevance and value of real estate requires the development of insights and forecasts into how people will live, work, play, heal, gather, create, and otherwise manifest the experience of living their lives now and over the lifespan of the investment. As I noted a moment ago, at BG, we are strategically and organizationally committed to investing in experiential real estate, and that commitment is anchored in the insights and forecasts we've developed around the experience economy during our first eight years as a company. Spending trends support our thesis. According to MasterCard, during the period of 2019 to 2023, when the COVID pandemic led to a spike in goods purchases, Global spending on experiences nonetheless rose 65%, while spending on things only increased 12% over the same period, a more than 5 to 1 growth ratio favoring experiences. This momentum has persisted after the post-COVID boom. TD Cowan's January 2026 report on the experience economy showed that experience-related services like gaming, accommodations, sports, air travel, and other leisure-related spend have seen an average annual growth rate of 5.2% from 2023 to 2025 compared to average annual total personal consumption expenditure or PCE growth of 2.9% during the same period. The durability and persistence of this trend across multiple economic cycles, demographic shifts, and technological innovations supports the thesis The preference for experiences is not transient and instead signifies a deeper and enduring secular change. At Vichy, we balance our secular focus with sharp attention to what's going on here and now. At any given time, we at Vichy believe we are responsible for managing our relationship and exposure to three key dimensions of impact. Secular trend impact, cyclical trend impact, idiosyncratic impact unique to Vici. Let me take each one of these dimensions of impact in reverse order. By idiosyncratic impact, I mean developments unique to Vici rising out of our specific business conditions. These can be issues or situations that generally don't have secular or cyclical causes beyond our management control. These are issues that we can and must address through our own management actions. By cyclical trend impact, I mean cyclical developments and trends in our economy and our society. These are fluctuations that are likely beyond our or any management team's control, but Avicii's business model, our revenue income streams as a net lease rate are generally not highly subject to material cyclical fluctuation. We also strive to invest in businesses and sectors that have lower than average cyclicality to mitigate cyclical risk. By secular trend impact, as I noted above, I mean material and impactful changes in the ways in which people are living, working, playing, healing, gathering, creating, and otherwise manifesting the experience of living their lives. As with cyclical trends, our management, well, sorry, let me just start that one over again. As with cyclical trends, secular change is beyond our management control. But what is within our control is identifying, understanding and preparing for those changes and consequently developing and executing responses that enable us to capitalize on positive developments and manage our risk exposure to potential negative developments in and around the experiential economy. As investors in large-scale, long-duration real estate, we work hard to be right about the secular. If you get secular trends wrong as a real estate investor, it's hard to overcome the value eroding impact of negative secular impact. If you get secular trends right, you have more management capacity to seize opportunity and manage cyclical and idiosyncratic developments. The BG executive team was in Las Vegas two weeks ago, and around every corner, we witnessed the secular power of experiences. Secular is long-term. Getting secular right represents long-term competitive advantage. And with that, I'll turn it over to John.