Chartwell Retirement Residences

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Chartwell Retirement Residences Q1 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to the CEO, Vlad Volodarsky. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Maude. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. There is a slide presentation to accompany this conference call available on our website at chartwell.com under the Investor Relations tab. Joining me are Karen Sullivan, President and Chief Operating Officer, Jeffrey Brown, Chief Financial Officer, and Jonathan Bulakia, Chief Investment Officer and Chief Legal Officer. Before we begin, I direct you to the cautionary statements on slide two, because during this call, we will make statements containing forward-looking information and non-GAAP and other financial measures. RMDNA and other securities filings contain information about the risks, assumptions, and uncertainties inherent in such forward-looking statements and details of such non-GAAP and other financial measures. More specifically, I direct you to the disclosures in our Q1 2025 MD&A under the heading Risks and Uncertainties and Forward-looking Information for discussion of such risks and uncertainties. These documents can be found on our website or on the CDERplus website. Turning to slide three. The streak of solid operating and financial results continued in Q1 2025, and I cannot be more proud and grateful to our teams for their outstanding work. Their consistent focus on creating exceptional resident experiences, combined with innovative sales and marketing strategies, generated strong increases in occupancy, driving a 400 basis points operating margin expansion and 21.3% same property net operating income growth. Our continuing investments in our management platform, portfolio optimization, and most importantly, the strength and dedication of our people have positioned us to capitalize on unprecedented market dynamics in seniors housing, where demand is accelerating and new supply remains limited. We will work hard to maintain this momentum of occupancy and cash flow growth for the remainder of 2025 and beyond. My partners will provide you with more color on various aspects of our business. Karen will do an operating update. Jeff will dive deeper into our Q1 financial results. And Jonathan will discuss our portfolio optimization and growth activities. We'll start with Karen. Karen, over to you.

Thanks. Thanks, Vlad. We achieved a strong 110 basis points sequential quarter occupancy gain in our same property portfolio with Q1 2025 occupancy reaching 91.5%. We reversed historical seasonal trends of occupancy declines in the winter months. Importantly, with strong leasing activity and somewhat lower than historical notices, we are now forecasting to reach 92.2% occupancy in June 2025. We held a two-day open house event in January, which brought in over 900 initial contacts. This is a 6% increase in initial context compared to January 2024 open house. We held another successful open house in April, and our teams are busy nurturing these prospects by bringing them back for follow-up tours and events at our homes. We recently introduced a new automated post-tour survey to gather valuable feedback from our prospects about their experience and to continue to uncover conversion potential. As part of our enhanced approach to business development, we have launched a professionals webinar series. Over the course of the year, we will deliver six recorded webinars tailored to real estate agents, healthcare professionals, and finance professionals. In the first quarter, this allowed us to connect with over 1,000 professionals. To further leverage resident referrals as an initial contact generator, we launched a housewarming party initiative, encouraging new residents to invite friends and family to visit them in their new home. This initiative fosters a welcoming atmosphere while organically introducing potential new prospects to our communities. Turning to slide five, we reduced our staffing agency costs by 50% in Q1 2025 compared to Q1 2024 through our continued focus on recruitment and retention activities. The agency usage across our portfolio is now well below pre-pandemic levels. The final step of our operational reorganization was completed in March with our Quebec team moving to the new structure designed to enhance agility and responsiveness and empower and support our general managers and management teams to drive results. The Quebec team also focused on integrating our newest acquisition Chartwell-Rosemont 632 suite complex on the island in Montreal. We completed the repositioning of the underperforming Duke of Devonshire residents in the oversupplied Ottawa market by entering into a long-term lease with the Ottawa Hospital. The building will be used by the hospital for transitional care, adding much needed capacity to the region's healthcare system. We've been working with our residents and their families to find alternative accommodations, with over half of them choosing to move to other Chartwell homes in the Ottawa area. Finally, I wanted to share another example of our ongoing efforts to develop individual property-specific strategies to better meet the needs of our local communities. Chartwell Lansing is an older home in Toronto with smaller studio suites. We combined some of these into one-bedroom units, reducing the overall unit count from 100 to 90, while introducing changes to our operating model to reduce management costs. We are also investing capital in common area upgrades at this home. In April of 2024, the occupancy at Lansing was 64%. Today, it is 89% and is on track to surpass 90% in Q2. I will now turn it over to Jeff to take you through our financial results.