Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust

Hello everyone and welcome to Canadian Department of Properties REIT's first quarter 2025 results conference call. My name is Lydia and I'll be your operator today. After the prepared remarks will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you'd like to participate in the Q&A, you can do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I'll now hand you over to Nicole Dolan, Investor Relations to begin. Please go ahead.

Thank you operator and good morning everyone. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that during our conference call this morning, we may include forward-looking statements about expected future events and the financial and operating results of CAPRE, which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. We direct your attention to slide two and our other regulatory filings for important information about these statements. I will now turn the call over to Mark Kenney, President and CEO.

Thanks, Nicole. Good morning, everyone. Joining me this morning is Stephen Coe, our Chief Financial Officer, and Julian Schoenfeld, our Chief Investment Officer. Let's start on slide four, where we summarize some of the key performance highlights here today. You will see that we've completed $265 million in non-core Canadian dispositions, and we closed on an additional $135 million of property sales in Europe so far in 2025. at prices that are at or above previously reported IFRS fair values at the time of negotiation. We've reinvested $137 million of net sale proceeds into the acquisition of recently constructed mid-market rental properties at prices that are meaningfully below replacement costs. We've also spent a further $88 million on our value-enhancing NCIB program to buy back CAPREIT's trust units at a weighted average purchase price of approximately $42 per unit. This represents an average 25% discount to our NAV of $56 per diluted unit as of March 31st, 2025, which we've continued to prove by selling our off-strategy properties at premium pricing. This is all just to underscore the ongoing strength in Stanima in the execution of our capital allocation strategy, which Julian will expand on shortly. Operationally, our Canadian same property residential occupancy improved since year end, increasing to 97.9% as of March 31st, 2025. While our occupied AMR grew by 5.7%, since March 31st, 2024, reflecting the sizable mark-to-market built into our long-standing diversified portfolio. On the expense side, property operating costs were up due to elevated R&M and utilities, with higher weather-related expenses owing to a colder winter in certain regions. We also had an increased bad debt and advertising costs associated with changes in the rental marketplace, which we've been proactively addressing. The net impact was a decrease in our same property NOI margin to 62.3% for the three months ended March 31st, 2025. And I'll let Stephen elaborate more on that soon. One of our key priorities has been the reinforcement of our financial position. And today, we're proud to have one of the strongest balance sheets in our peer universe. We've been delivering by paying down Canadian credit facility debt. And we have significantly lowered our total debt to gross value ratio to 37.7% as of current period end. This low leverage means that we have significant room to lever up should additional funding be needed. And at the same time, we strategically retain cash on hand, which we were able to opportunistically deploy into our share buyback program. With that overview of the first quarter, I'll now turn the call over to Julian to further expand on our capital allocation program.