Welltower Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Welltower third quarter 2026 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt McQueen, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel. You may begin.

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 Wells Tower 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 business trends and our capital allocation priorities and the team will follow the usual cadence. Our business continued to fire on all cylinders during the third quarter as the all weather compounding engine we have built continues to deliver exceptional results for our existing investors. The strong in-market demand for our luxury senior living product, coupled with attractive capital deployment opportunities, drove revenue growth of 38% and adjusted EBITDA growth of 35%. Most notably, we delivered nearly 25% FFO per share growth while maintaining extremely low leverage balance sheet and doubling down on our investments in operations and technology. These results, coupled with momentum that we are carrying onto the fourth quarter, enabled us to raise the midpoint of our full-year FFO outlook by $0.10 per share to $6.50, which, if achieved, would represent a 23% year-over-year growth. What matters to us, however, is not simply the magnitude of the growth in a given quarter or year, but the duration of that growth. We believe that favorable demand-supply backdrop When combined, more importantly, with an affluent customer base and the digital transformation of our portfolio through Wealth Tower business system gives us a long runway to compound partial earnings and cash flow growth for existing investors. To be clear, our recent results and outlook are not simply a byproduct of demographic trends or the expansion of our footprint. Instead, They are a function of our long-held view that enduring businesses simply cannot respond to change. They must continue to reinvent themselves ahead of it. In that vein, we have retooled nearly every aspect of a company over the past decade, from capital allocation to improving the resident and employee experience, in addition to meaningfully deleveraging our balance sheet. These actions have positioned us not to simply withstand an increasingly uncertain economic landscape, but to remain on offense and continue to deliver outsized growth, almost irrespective of micro conditions. Turning back to the quarter, our total portfolio same store net operating income increased nearly 16%, second highest level of growth achieved in our recorded history. This is largely a functional makeshift of our portfolio, which we have discussed previously, as our seniors housing portfolio, operating portfolio, or SHOP, now represents 70% of total same-store NOI. And our SHOP performance remains strong, delivering 9.1% organic revenue growth, driven by another period of both healthy occupancy gains and robust pricing power. Against a backdrop of growing macroeconomic uncertainty, the demand for luxury senior living remained resilient during the summer months, with 120 basis points of average occupancy increase from second quarter. This gain exceeded the sequential occupancy increase recorded during the same period last year, reflecting the uncorrelated demand for a product offering. and while it is still early, we're encouraged by the trends we're seeing to the start of the fourth quarter. Unless the strong sequential tailwind we experienced in Q2 and Q3 subside, we should be in a position to deliver another year of favorable occupancy growth next year. However, as communities are filling up, the deliberate and methodical handover from occupancy to pricing as the driver of revenue growth is taking place under the surface. Our all-in measure of pricing or report or unit revenue increased by 5.3% during the period, highlighting the strong pricing power maintained by our operators. If we zoom into the U.S. where occupancy crossed 90%, the portfolio achieved report growth of 5.5%. If you further zoom into a traditional senior living business, the same number was 5.8%. Though quarterly numbers are irrelevant as we are focused on long-term, the underlying trend perhaps provides a peek into the future, which is inherently uncertain. Taking a first principle approach, it makes fundamental sense that rates should continue to move higher as capacity in the system grows increasingly scarce. but more importantly, our operators pricing power reflects a luxury product in premium locations coupled with strong value proposition of the service that our operating partners provide to residents and their families. On the expense side, cost growth across our senior housing portfolio remain well contained even amongst the broader inflationary pressure. Expenses in shop grew 4.3% or below 1% on an export basis The favorable spread between report and export growth persisted during the third quarter, driving another period of outsized margin expansion of 300 basis points. Going forward, we continue to see sustained opportunity for margin expansion as this delta is expected to remain wide while WBS initiatives continue to bear fruit. As John will describe momentarily, the flow-through margin of our shop business reached a record high of high 66%, resulting in more cash flow dropping to the bottom line for each incremental revenue. When assessing the future earnings part of this platform, this relationship is important to consider along with the pricing versus occupancy dynamic mentioned above. From a capital allocation standpoint, there was no let up in activity across US, UK and Canada. After a record setting year of capital deployment in 2025, we have completed or announced over $21 billion of investment activity here today. Similar to last year, we got lucky again with unprecedented interest rate and macro volatility this year, which drove this significant opportunity set. It didn't hurt that we are prepared with both an underlevered balance sheet and the most pristine reputation in this business as an entrepreneurial shop which operates at lightning speed and the highest level of transaction integrity. $21 billion could very well be the size of a large-cap REIT, but the total acquisition volume is the least relevant measure of what we have accomplished. Instead of large-scale M&A, which we shun like the plague, we completed 196 granular transactions with a median size of $35.5 million in 204 business days. More importantly, please see page 9 of our business update for the number of transactions we rejected, owning to issues concerning price, location, product market fit, management contract, or other issues. Nonetheless, as Nikhil will describe shortly, our pipeline of opportunities remain robust, visible, and actionable across our regions. As we have discussed previously, the vast majority of our acquisitions are granular, off-market opportunities with a clear path of driving meaningfully higher cash flow post-closing. said differently, we're not spread investing shadow banks that are fixed rated on cap rate, relative size, and near-term earnings accretion. Those metrics take on outsized importance when there is little ability to drive excess operational cashflow from underlying portfolio. We're playing a different game, buying an attractive basis and compounding cashflow over time through simple and yet extraordinarily difficult post-closing execution. This advantageous divergence is only widening and it is critical how we think about creating long-term value for existing investors. At the same time, I would be remiss not to mention that we continuously seek opportunities to refine the portfolio through selective dispositions. With $6 billion of dispositions this year, we're clearly willing to accept some near-term dilution to extend and amplify the duration of our par share earnings and cash flow growth. Lastly, given the current macro backdrop, it's worth highlighting that our balance sheet remains in excellent shape. Tim will provide the details, but we maintain exceptionally low leverage with a meaningfully ramping free cash flow expected in the coming years. Our financial flexibility will be enhanced even farther. With that, I will turn it over to John. Thank you and good morning, everyone.