Primaris Real Estate Investment Trust

Good morning and welcome to Primaris REIT's second quarter 2022 results conference call. At this time, all lines have been placed on meet. After the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I would now like to hand the call over to our host, Alex Avery, to begin.

Alex, over to you.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss Primaris REIT's second quarter 2022 results. Joining me on the call today are Patrick Sullivan, President and Chief Operating Officer, Rags DeVleur, Chief Financial Officer, and Leslie Boost, Senior Vice President, Finance. Reflecting on our first six months as a public company, we are all thrilled with how the business is performing and the excellent financial and operating results. Pat and Rags will provide further details on our recent performance and our prospects over the remainder of 2022 in a moment, but I'll share a few thoughts before they get into it. Almost a year ago, as our plans for the spinoff were coming together, we began the process of building the 2022 budget. At the time, the Delta variant of COVID-19 was threatening to set the economy back yet again. Many of our retailer tenants were still experiencing depressed sales volumes despite foot traffic having surged last summer. Primaris had many short-term modifications to leases in place and the early signs of inflation were arriving. We were also about to grow our portfolio by a third. We were understandably cautious given the experience of the previous years. 2020 and 2021 were the two hardest years in the history of malls. and the next five hardest years were the five leading up to 2020. It's safe to say we are coming off of a low bottom in our business. Today, we can say that our business has produced exceptional results year to date. There is clear positive momentum in our business at the property level, with rental rates growing and continued strong leasing activity. This momentum is driving our results, and we see a long runway for continued growth. Our tenants have seen rapid recoveries in sales in recent months, with many of our malls reaching all-time high sales productivity levels. We knew there was a lot of potential, but we have been able to capture some of that opportunity faster than we had anticipated. With six months of strong financial and operating results delivered, among internal priorities, the team continues to focus on building out our finance and reporting group and expanding and refining our disclosure package. Demonstrating disciplined capital allocation is a cornerstone of our strategy and how we make decisions. Our measurement of success is growth in value per unit and cash flow per unit, while maintaining the defensive integrity of our balance sheet. Externally, we've begun to explore capital recycling opportunities, including both acquisitions and dispositions. While the direct property markets for other property types may have become less liquid in recent months, the mall market has been thin for a number of years and there are signs that some participants may be ready to transact. While we anticipate opportunities to recycle capital over the next year, today our greatest opportunity, bar none, is buying back our own units. We have bought back units every day since March 9th when we received TSX approval for our NCIB reflecting the extraordinary value we see in our units. Because we fund this buyback activity from retained free cash flow, we can continue this buyback activity indefinitely on a leverage neutral basis. That is pretty remarkable. To date, our buyback activity has increased our FFO run rate by an annualized two cents per unit, while our debt to EBITDA has actually fallen slightly. and the buyback has increased our NAV by 31 cents per unit. We are compounding capital at a rapid pace. We continue to see significant internal growth potential, bringing our occupancy back to a more stabilized level in the low to mid 90s percentage range over the next few years and capturing higher rents. This is consistent with the 2.8% increase to our 2022 NOI guidance we raised this quarter. Now I'll turn the call over to Pat to discuss our operating and leasing results, followed by Rags, who will discuss our financing, financial results, and provide you with an update on our disclosure package.