Slate Grocery REIT

Good day. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Slate Grocery Read 4th Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. In addition, if you require any further assistance, please press star 0. Thank you. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. Braden Lyons. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Q4 2021 conference call for Slate Grocery REIT. I'm joined this morning by Blair Welch, Chief Executive Officer, Andrew Agatep, Chief Financial Officer, and John Herrick, Vice President, Asset Management. Before getting started, I would like to remind participants that our discussion today may contain forward-looking statements. And therefore, we ask you to review the disclaimers regarding forward-looking statements, as well as non-IFRS measures, both of which can be found in management's discussion and analysis. You can visit Slate Grocery REIT's website to access all of the REIT's financial disclosure, including our Q4 2021 investor update, which is available now. I will now hand over the call to Blair for opening remarks.

Thanks, Braden. Good morning, everybody. This past year has proven again that grocery-anchored real estate is extremely resilient. It is a central part of food distribution, which is required in all kinds of market conditions. And we have consistently loved this type of real estate. In 2021, it was a transformational year for Slate Grocery REIT. We achieved record growth at attractive valuations. We invested about $470 million in accretive grocery-anchored assets at compelling values. What does that mean? We grew by about 3.7 million square feet, or 40%. And we increased our exposure to leading omnichannel grocers in the U.S. in large metropolitan areas such as New York and Texas. And we further enhanced our portfolio's durability through proactive asset management. The team had a record year where we completed 375,000 square feet of new lease deals at a almost 18% weighted average rental spread. And we are now at about 94% occupied. It is our sixth consecutive quarter of occupancy growth. And when you look at that in the pandemic lockdowns, I think that's a very impressive stat that shows this real estate is in demand and people want to be in these assets. Our same property NOI was up about 3%. And I'll let Andrew later talk about our AFFO, which was about 22 cents. Heading into 2022, we feel the grocery rate is well positioned to pursue organic growth and high quality accretive acquisitions. We can do that through buying single assets as we've mostly done, but we can also be opportunistic as the market dictates or shows us opportunities. We are actively writing compelling investment opportunities always. and we've maintained a strong balance sheet through a period of growth, so we have ample liquidity and flexibility. Slate Asset Management owns and operates over 3 billion of grocery assets worldwide. Grocery REIT has over 100 assets in the US, and we own over 240 assets in Europe. And I think our expertise with these leading retailers gives us a competitive advantage to all the unit holders of Slate Grocery REIT. I will now hand it over for questions.