Monty Bennett
Management
Good morning and thanks for joining us. We are excited to update you on recent progress we have made on several fronts. Yesterday we announced the appointment of our new CEO. We've recently announced some very well received corporate governance enhancements, we've added a great Independent Director in Ken Fearn to our Board and execution of our strategic initiatives has been successful. We've also had strong performance from our hotel portfolio. Our RevPAR grew 4.3% in the third quarter, which significantly outperformed both the industry and our peers. We believe this performance speaks to the quality of our portfolio and highlights our asset management team's ability to drive results at our properties. Our management team's sole focus is to maximize shareholder value and deliver superior total shareholder return for our investors. With our industry-leading insider ownership, which currently stands at 16% versus a peer average of 2%, we are highly incentivized to outperform and highly aligned with our shareholders. We also have an advisory agreement with Ashford Inc. that creates further alignment through its fee structure by incentivizing its management team to create value and outperform its peers. I believe these factors create a structure that makes us more aligned than all internally managed companies, and our outperformance is evidence of that. As announced on our last conference call, in addition to advancing our strategic initiatives, we are moving forward on several corporate governance enhancements, based upon feedback from our investors. The governance committee and Board, in consultation with outside advisors, have approved several shareholder-friendly policies. These enhancements include, one, adopting a majority voting standard for the election of directors; two, providing proxy access to shareholders; three, prohibiting share recycling in the company's stock plan; four, adopting mandatory equity award retention periods for officers and directors; five, separating the role…