Sumit Roy
Analyst · Bank of America
Thank you, Alex, and welcome, everyone. We entered 2026 with strong momentum, and our first quarter results demonstrate progress across the priorities that matter most for Realty Income. Disciplined capital deployment, durable portfolio performance and continued expansion of our private capital platform. In the first quarter, we delivered AFFO per share of $1.13, up 6.6% year-over-year and invested approximately $2.8 billion or $2.6 billion on a pro rata basis at a 7.1% initial weighted average cash yield. Our investment activity remained balanced between North America and Europe, and we also deployed approximately $1 billion into credit and structured investments. That strong start to 2026 supports our decision to raise the midpoint of full year AFFO per share guidance by $0.025, or approximately 60 basis points at the midpoint. Jonathan will walk through the quarter and our updated guidance in more detail. Looking ahead, our 2026 outlook reflects an anticipated acceleration from 2025 as we leverage our scale, data-driven and robust platform to strive towards consistent double-digit total operational returns for our shareholders. I'd like to briefly step back and place our recent announcements into the broader strategic context for Realty Income. Over the past several months, we've been deliberate in building a private capital ecosystem to diversify our sources of permanent equity, expand our investment opportunity set and support long-term value creation, all while remaining anchored in the same underwriting discipline, credit standards and focus on durable growing cash flow that have defined Realty Income since our inception. This is demonstrated through 3 critical achievements. First, we completed our $1.7 billion cornerstone capital raise for our Perpetual Life U.S. Core+ fund. Second, we formed a strategic partnership with GIC focused primarily on construction financing and takeout commitments for build-to-suit industrial in the U.S. and Mexico. Lastly, we raised $1 billion in equity from Apollo as part of a programmatic venture that strives to ultimately deliver Realty Income's dependable income to the massive insurance and annuity market. Taken together, these initiatives represent what we view as a meaningful evolution of the Realty Income platform, rooted in years of intentional planning to strengthen how we fund growth and deploy capital across cycles. Several years ago, we identified a potential concentration risk in relying primarily on public equity markets, where pricing, at times, can become disconnected from underlying operating performance and this discrepancy persists for prolonged periods. That realization led us to a fundamental question: how do we diversify capital sources to better leverage a platform designed to deploy billions of dollars annually while seeking to create long-term value for public shareholders. These partnerships represent the early stages of our private capital journey, and we expect to continue adding accretive sources of permanent capital over time. Today, we view private capital not as a single strategy, but as an ecosystem of distinct non-overlapping verticals tailored to different geographies, property types and investment mandates. This approach has expanded our investor base, strengthened our return profile through asset-light fee income and meaningfully broadened our investable universe. Importantly, it allows us to deploy capital across property types and across the real estate capital structure while preserving the core DNA of Realty Income. Each vehicle is designed to be complementary to our public REIT model and accretive to long-term per share value. Alongside that backdrop, our global platform evolution drove transaction activity during the third quarter. With approximately $2.8 billion of investment volume, we delivered one of our higher levels of quarterly deployment in recent years, supported by consistent execution across geographies, property types and investment structures. We sourced approximately $31 billion of investment opportunities during the first quarter, reflecting the depth of our global relationships and the scale of our platform. That sourcing allowed us to remain highly selective, closing on roughly 9% of what we reviewed while maintaining discipline on yield structure and credit. Approximately 94% of opportunities were relationship-driven, reinforcing the durability of our origination engine. Our European platform continues to be a key competitive advantage. Markets remain more fragmented and less crowded than in the U.S., allowing us to source portfolio-oriented tailored transactions with attractive duration and credit and to flex capital toward highly compelling opportunities. In the U.S., transaction markets remain active and competitive, particularly for small one-off assets. We continue to see meaningful value creation in larger and more structured investments where our relationships scale and underwriting capabilities provide a competitive advantage. We deployed $1 billion into credit investments globally, including 2 mezzanine transactions. The first was a $375 million loan alongside a sovereign capital investment firm backed by a portfolio of high-quality logistics assets leased to a strong investment-grade e-commerce client with a right of first offer on the underlying real estate. The second was a $190 million loan supporting the development of a data center campus in Virginia, pre-leased to an investment-grade hyperscale tenant. Our ability to invest across owned real estate, loans, preferred equity and structured investments gives us flexibility to remain disciplined and selective, particularly in periods of macro volatility. Our global platform, long-duration leases and conservative balance sheet position us to stay active while maintaining underwriting rigor. Our platform advantage continued to deliver strong operating results, and we ended the quarter with robust occupancy and reported recapture. Through proactive asset and property management, our teams remained focused on driving AFFO per share growth from the core portfolio. We combined deep familiarity with our assets and clients, proprietary predictive analytics and disciplined credit underwriting to maximize risk-adjusted economics on re-leasing and renewal outcomes. That approach generated outsized lease termination income of $40.2 million during the first quarter. And based on current visibility, we've increased our full year termination income outlook range to $45 million to $50 million. Overall, we believe Realty Income today is more differentiated and better positioned for long-term growth than at any point in our history. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jonathan.