Welltower Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the first quarter 2019 WellTower earnings conference call. My name is Nicole, and I will be your operator today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a question and answer session towards the end of this conference. If at any time during the call you require assistance, please press star followed by zero, and an operator will be happy to assist you. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Tim Hughes, Senior Vice President of Corporate Finance. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Nicole. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us today to discuss Welltower's first quarter 2019 results. Along the safe harbor, you'll hear prepared remarks from Tom DeRosa, CEO, Sean Mitra, Chief Investment Officer, and John Goody, CFO. Before we begin, let me remind you that certain statements made during this conference call may be deemed forward-looking statements in the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although Welltower believes results projected in any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, the company can give no assurances that its projected results will be attained. Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are detailed in this morning's press release, from time to time in the company's filings with the SEC. If you did not receive a copy of the press release this morning, you may access it via the company's website at welltower.com. And with that, I will hand the call over to Tom for his remarks on the quarter.

Thanks, Tim. I'm pleased to report a strong quarter, completely in line with the expectations we laid out for you at our Investor Day last December. These results are the product of consistent growth across all of our business segments, in particular, seniors housing, where performance is being driven by an ongoing stabilization of occupancy, which Well Tower began to benefit from in 2018. We expect this to continue through the rest of the year. We also continue to benefit from excellent access to capital. which allowed us to both fund our contractual investment pipeline and position the balance sheet for opportunistic investments going forward, locking in long-term value creation for our shareholders. Our differentiated strategy and approach to capital allocation has resulted in a total of $2 billion in new investments, closed or announced, since the start of 2019, bringing accretive new investment volume to over $6 billion since early 2018. This is enabling Well Tower to deliver the earnings growth we report to you today. Simply put, we run Well Tower to deliver sustainable and reliable growth to our shareholders. Our results demonstrate that our strategy works. Shank Mitra will now give you a closer look at our operating performance in the quarter, as well as our new investment activity.