Vornado Realty Trust

Welcome to the Vornado Realty Trust earnings and webcast for first quarter of 2022. My name is Vanessa and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. During the question and answer session, if you have a question, please press 0 then 1 on your touchtone phone. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Stephen Bornstein, Senior Vice President and Corporate Counsel. Stephen, you may begin.

Welcome to Bernardo Realty Trust's first quarter earnings call. Yesterday afternoon, we issued our first quarter earnings release and filed our quarterly report on Form 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These documents, as well as our supplemental financial information package, are available on our website, www.bno.com, under the investor relations section. In these documents and during today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release, Form 10-Q, and financial supplement. Please be aware that statements made during this call may be deemed forward-looking statements and actual results may differ materially from these statements due to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and other factors. Please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, for more information regarding these risks and uncertainties. The call may include time-sensitive information that may be accurate only as of today's date. The company does not undertake a duty to update any forward-looking statements. On the call today from management for our opening comments are Steven Roth, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Michael Franco, President and Chief Financial Officer. Our senior team is also present and available for questions. I will now turn this call over to Steven Roth.

Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Let me begin by saying I thought we had a very good quarter, with FFO up 22% from last year, reflecting the continued recovery in our business. And we continue to see many positive trends across the business. To my eye, the streets of New York are back to pre-COVID in terms of pedestrian counts and our beloved traffic congestion. Apartments are full, and by full I mean literally full with long waiting lists. Restaurants are booming, and office utilization is climbing. We are now over 46% utilization as we speak. There are a couple of things I'd like to highlight. First, we have more floating rate debt than most, and that strategy is correct nine out of every 10 years, but this is the 10th year. The economy is now in the hands of the Federal Reserve in their role as inflation fighter, and appropriately so. If past is prologue, we expect rates to climb quickly up a mountain, slow the economy and inflation, and then quickly fall down the other side. Second, for the first time this quarter, our GAAP financial statements reflect the balance sheet and income statement effect of the pending June 2023 PEN1 ground lease renewal. We have estimated 26 million as the new ground rent pending the actual arbitration proceeding. While these two numbers are substantial and will slow our growth short-term, we believe that as Farley, PEN1, and PEN2 come online, Those will be very, very substantial. Now over to Michael.