Welltower Inc.

Thank you and good morning. As a reminder, certain statements made during this call may be deemed forward-looking statements in the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Although Welltower believes any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, the company can give no assurances that its projected results will be attained. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are detailed in the company's filings with the SEC. And with that, I'll hand the call over to Sean for his remarks.

Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone. I will review our fourth quarter and full year 2023 results and describe high-level business trends and our capital allocation priorities. John will provide an update on the operational performance of our senior housing and outpatient medical portfolios and progress on our operating platform build-out. Nikhil will give you an update on the investment landscape. And Tim will walk you through our triple net businesses, balance sheet highlights, and 2024 full year guidance. First, as I reflect back on 23, it was a year of solid execution across the board with significant progress achieved in all aspects of the business. Operating performance far surpassed our initial expectations. We had a great year, a record-setting year in terms of capital deployment, and we meaningfully strengthened our balance sheet and liquidity profile. Just as importantly, perhaps, is the groundwork we laid to sustain this level of performance and continue to deliver outsized growth, not only in 2024, but also well into the future. This includes the considerable progress John and his team have made on the build-out of our operating platform, which we continue to believe will transform the industry. On top of that, as we have discussed in recent quarters, we have executed a number of operator transitions across all our geographies as well as converted a handful of properties from triple net to RIDEA, all should bear fruit later this year and in 2025. We finished the year strong with significant momentum to set us up for another year of solid performance in 2024. In terms of our senior housing operating portfolio, I was particularly encouraged by the occupancy growth in fourth quarter, which is seasonally not the strongest period. the portfolio saw 110 basis points of sequential occupancy gains, which translate into 330 basis points year-over-year occupancy growth. And the 330 basis points year-over-year occupancy growth is by far the highest level we have ever achieved in the fourth quarter of any year in our recorded history. Just as compelling is that looking at the intra-quarter trends, Year-over-year occupancy growth strengthened each month, which is unusual given the aforementioned seasonality of the business. We're also pleased with the rate growth achieved by our managers. During our last call, I described to you that one of our largest operators, Sunrise, pulled forward Jan 1, 2023 rate increases into 4Q 2022. This year, they have returned to their historical cadence of Jan 1 rate increases. While this distorts our show portfolio's reported Q4 2023 report, or the unit revenue, the rest of the portfolio delivered report growth of 6.8%, reflecting the underlying fundamental strength of the business. While our 2024 guidance assumes some diminution of report growth from full year of 2023 levels of 6.6%, we still expect another year of near double digit top line growth as occupancy continues to build at a solid pace. 4Q2023 same store export or expense per occupied room grew 1.7% year over year, the lowest level of growth in World House recorded history driven by 4Q2023 same store compensation for occupied room growth, which grew 1.9% year over year also the lowest growth in WorldTax recorded history. While the normalization of agency labor usage is helping to dampen compor growth, we are also seeing some good trends in the salary and the wages line. All of these trends are resulting in a favorable spread between report growth and export growth. The powerful combination of this revenue backdrop with continued margin expansion that should be expected due to the high operating leverage inherent in the business, leaves us feeling very strongly about our 2024 NOI growth setup. Tim will give you our detailed buildup of our NOI guidance based on our current assumptions, but please understand that we have no false pretense about perfectly knowing what the business will look like as we move through the year, particularly the all-important summer months. But we are optimistic given the demand supply backdrop, which improves by the day, and the rising system-wide occupancy, as well as the early success we have seen in John's operating platform build-out. While 24.4% NY growth last year for our shop portfolio alone was very encouraging, I'm extremely pleased with our capital allocation activities as well. In 2023 was the most active year in our history in terms of raising and deploying capital. We completed almost $6 billion of investments in the year, nearly half of which closed in Q4 alone. While I won't get into the specific transactions, I will mention that they share some common characteristics. First, we generally grew with our existing operating partners in their respective markets. Second, we acquired assets at a significant discounted replacement cost from core funds, PE funds, pension funds, and financial institutions who are seeking liquidity. We also added a couple of new operating partners along the way who I envision us growing with in the near term. More to come on this topic as we progress through the year. The torrid pace of investment activity in Q4 has continued with 2024 starting off with a bang. In fact, I do not recall having ever been this busy in first quarter on the deal front. While we have pre-negotiated documents and structure to leverage, it is great trust that we have built with our 2023 counterparties that will make follow-on transaction easier to execute. These counterparties also experienced what our promise always is, that we honor our handshake, irrespective of circumstances, as evidenced by our continued execution through this historic capital market volatility in the fall and winter of 2023. They know that we remain the clean shirt in an industry where retrading counterparties is the norm. It is interesting and perhaps coincidental that we're experiencing another bout of market volatility after a few weeks have come. Over the past few weeks, Another regional banking crisis driven by USCRE debt appears to be rearing its ugly head from New York to Tokyo to Germany. We are currently staring at approximately $16 billion of senior housing loans maturing in the next 24 months in the U.S., which dwarfs roughly about a couple of billion dollars of agency financing completed in 2023. This should generate significant equity as well as private credit opportunity for us. Suffice to say, our near-term capital deployment pipeline remains robust, highly visible, and actionable, and squarely within our circle of competence where we can bet with house odds rather than gambler's odds. Along with what we have already done in 2023, these acquisitions that carry an attractive basis operational upside and significant value-add from WellTower's operating platform, we will have a meaningful impact on what remains a true North Star, long-term compounding of partial value of our existing shareholders. With that, I will hand the call over to John. John? Thank you, Shouk.

Although most of my time at WellTower has spent doing the WellTower hustle, Getting up every day, identifying and aggressively pursuing the opportunities that exist focused on improving the customer and employee experience. I want to take a moment and reflect on how proud I am of the Welltower team for its success in doing just that, improving the customer and employee experience, which in part is reflected by our performance. Focusing on senior housing for a moment, the Welltower team consists of our top operators and all of their employees. our key vendors, as well as the Welltower employees. We have all worked together to improve the customer and employee experience, which has resulted in fantastic results. On top of the industry-leading senior housing same-store NOI growth for the full year of 2022 of 20.1%, our full year 2023 senior housing NOI growth was 24.4%. Often on earnings calls, you hear the words, tough comps. That's certainly true here. Yet our guidance for 2024 same-store senior housing NOI growth at the midpoint is 18%. Therefore, based on our two full years that are completed and in the record books, 2022 and 2023, and our guidance of 18% in 2024, That indicates that the three-year compounded growth of our same-store senior housing NOI in 2024 will be over 75%. That's something to reflect upon. Thank you, Welltower team. Now back to our business. Our portfolio generated 12.5% same-store NOI growth over the prior year's quarter led by the senior housing operating portfolio with 23.7% year-over-year growth. The outpatient medical portfolio produced same-store portfolio growth of 2.8% for the fourth quarter of 2023. This was driven by favorable operating expense management, increasing the operating margin by 220 basis points year-over-year to 71.4%. Notably, our proactive appeal process achieved favorable real estate tax reductions. The 23.7% fourth quarter year-over-year NOI increase in our same store housing operating portfolio was a function of 9.7% revenue growth driven by the combination of 5.5% rev4 growth and 330 basis points of average occupancy gain and moderating expense growth. Expenses remain in control, coming in at 5.7% for the quarter over the prior year's quarter. The strong revenue growth and expense control led to continued margin expansion of 290 basis points. Again, our export growth for the quarter set a record for the lowest growth in our recorded history at 1.7%. All three regions continue to show strong same-store revenue growth, starting with the U.S. at 9.4%, Canada and the U.K. growing at 9.7% and 14.1% respectively. The strong revenue growth in each region combined with the expense controls have led to fantastic NOI growth in the US, Canada, and the UK of 21.8, 21.7, and 75.5% respectively. We're flying along with our integrated platform initiative, which will start to go live at our first operator in the first half of this year. I will not go into all the details, but I will say that our focus on improving the customer and employee experience is coming together very well. The integrations of the various modules will simplify the customer experience and reduce the labor around basic tasks, enabling our site teams to focus on what they love, our customers. More to come in 2024. I will now turn the call over to Tim.