Let me start off with the usual disclaimer. We'll be making certain statements during this call that may be forward-looking statements. Although Sun believes that such statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, actual results may differ materially. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates, and opinions of Sun's management on the date the statements are made. Sun undertakes no obligation, one, to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates, or opinions or other factors change. We'll also be presenting some non-GAAP financial information. For the full disclaimer related to future-oriented information and non-GAAP information, please refer to our regulatory filings on our website and on SEDAR. We continue to have a 51% interest in the Evergreen at Southwood in Tallahassee, Florida. The building has performed very, very well. Occupancy is currently 89% and rising. Revenue for the property is up 10% from last year. Unitholders' equity has been increasing steadily as we've retained income in the Trust. Our property has increased in value as well over the last 2 years. Our unitholders' equity has increased by $2.3 million on December 31, 2022, compared to a year earlier. All of the numbers I present will be US dollars unless stated otherwise. Unitholders' equity per unit or NAV per unit at December 31, 2022, was $0.107 or a bit over CAD 0.14 at current rates. If you use the year-end exchange rate, it was actually CAD 0.145. This means that we're trading at more than a 50% discount from our NAV. As you know, at the end of 2022, we announced a quarterly dividend of CAD 0.095 per unit or CAD 0.38 per annum. I find these fractions of a penny a bit confusing. The way to think of it is we're paying out a little under a tenth of a cent every quarter and a little bit under four-tenths of a cent every year at the current rate. That's the best way to think about it and not lose track of the zeros. The current yield is 5.8% on the current last trading price of six and a half cents. If you acquired the units at the last public offering price of eleven and a half cents, you're still earning 3.3% on your cost. Our intention is to distribute about 90% of our expected AFFO, adjusted free funds from operations, every quarter. For this year, we expect to distribute therefore about CAD 0.0038. As I mentioned, that's 5.8% yield on current price. The distribution is payable to unitholders of record March 10th, and it will be paid on March 31st. That's a bit different from other REITs. Most REITs pay distributions in arrears, so it's to unitholders of record at the end of the quarter or the month, and it's paid then two weeks later. In our case, it's unitholders of record on March 10th, we'll pay it on March 31st. If you hold them in a brokerage account, you'll be credited on that date. At December 30, 2022, Sun had total assets of $75.5 million and cash and cash equivalents of $4.7 million. Cash comes to about CAD 0.03 per unit or a substantial fraction of the current unit price. Our financial position in the aggregate is very strong. Total working capital is about $4.6 million. Top line revenue has been stable and growing over time. The revenue of $5.5 million for the year ended December 30, 2022, was 10% higher than the previous year. Revenue during the fourth quarter was 8.9% higher than the same quarter a year earlier. Net rental income increased 5% from the previous year. For Q4, it was roughly flat compared to the same quarter a year earlier. The reason Q4 was flat is under IFRS, all realty taxes are booked in Q4. It doesn't make sense. Those are the IFRS rules. Realty taxes increased 10% this year compared to last year. The loading in the fourth quarter this year was quite a bit higher. That's why fourth quarter GAAP earnings are flat year-to-year. Although for the year, as I mentioned, they're higher. GAAP income and AFFO were strong but reduced from the prior year for 2 reasons. First, we had an appraisal increase in our property last year and this year. The appraisal increase last year was higher. We had an unusually high level of CapEx. CapEx comes off AFFO, adjusted funds from operations. It's the way we get from funds from operations to adjusted funds from operations. CapEx this past year was $480,000, which is more than double the ongoing rate. We expect CapEx to be around $200,000 a year going forward. The additional CapEx was simply normal adjustments that we get in running a new property, things like painting and landscaping and that sort of thing. In summary, our property has performed very well since it was acquired over two years ago. We're in a holding pattern, as you know, as we're waiting to access the capital markets. Meanwhile, the property's increased in value 8.6% just in the past year. Despite challenging markets overall, we continue to be profitable and cash flow positive, and now we can also support a regular distribution to the unitholders. Okay. Gordon? Thanks, Jeffrey. I think that gives you pretty much a summary of our press release and our MD&A and how it's affecting existing unitholders. We are still seeing, even though last year was a phenomenal year in the Sun Belt and particularly Florida and in our sub-market, we are outperforming the sub-market, and our property is in a position to continue that. We're seeing, you know, a little headwind on lease activity, but still projecting and expecting to do a significant increase in Net Operating Income in 2023. It's consequently gave us the comfort to get a distribution out to the unitholders, even though we're a small public company that has to absorb all the costs of running a public company with our filing fees, our audits, our reports, et cetera, against a very small base property, we're still running lean and mean and able to do that dividend, and expect it to continue as Jeffrey stated. The other thing is the capital markets themselves have in the real estate area, public markets have increased better than the Toronto Stock Exchange averages in the last year and even in the last quarter, which has seen, of course, a bit of a pickup in the market. We're seeing that trend to bring us closer to a point where capital can be accessed, and we can do our game plan of buying larger portfolios and using tax-advantaged structures to get other major portfolios into our group. Everything is going on a plan of that and, like I say, it's slow but steady getting better. I mean, these interest rate increases don't help, but it hasn't affected the latest rise in the capital markets. We have a very balanced and experienced Trustee team and, you know, acquisition team with the Trustees and the executive staff. Gord Vollmer, previously Asset Manager and Head of Acquisitions for North America for many of the Morguard Industries, he's on the call now, and he's constantly on the phone with various properties. He did bring us the actual Evergreen property that we joint ventured with Westdale. Westdale has done a phenomenal job of keeping track of this property. Jeffrey did mention about the CapEx. Well, they did paint three of the four buildings. Doing a fourth building. Sorry, two buildings last year. Two. We have, sorry, half of our buildings last year, another two or three this year. That's where a lot of our CapEx went, but it's going to be stabilized down, as Jeffrey said, to half that level in coming years or less. We have a property that's pristine in nature. If you're ever there, I'm there, been there a number of times, and it shows extremely well. Having said all that, I don't have any further information that isn't already public, and I can't, of course, state that there's anything else but what we've disclosed so far. I think, from what I've heard from various investors, they're, it's good to see that this project, even small as it is, can distribute a dividend or a distribution and also have the horsepower within its own acquisition team, CEO, CFOs, and our team to produce a quality, layout. Gord Vollmer, do you have anything else to say on the markets? What I've seen, and I'll just state one thing for the markets. The last quarter, 2022, across the real estate sector, was down 60% in global transactions from the previous quarter, last quarter of 2021. Even with that, they expect the first quarter of 2022 to start seeing transaction pickup and be at close to pre-pandemic levels. Even though things are gone very slow, and that's why there's no capital transactions in terms of equity raises to buy a lot of this property, but we're seeing a slowdown in transactions. Our property, of course, had an appraisal increase for this year, once again, and even though we've used a slightly higher cap rate than our previous year in doing our, our evaluations, and this is done by independent evaluators. because our net operating is so strong, it still required us to increase the value of the property, which Jeffrey said is over CAD 0.14 net asset value, which is significantly higher than our last offering of CAD 0.115. Gord, do you wanna comment a bit on what you're still seeing in the market out there? I can. Not really too much more to add. I think that, from what I've seen and, the contacts and connections that I will continue to talk to and people I've talked to, as Gord said, the market is still there. It has definitely slowed down. Cap rates have risen, primarily because of the capital markets, because of higher interest rates coming in the past, say two, three quarters now, whatever. There's still interest, there's still demand. If anything, what's happened is that there's been more, like a stringent, underwriting is underway. People are being a little more careful. There's a little more just being more careful in what they're buying and when they're buying and, the timing of the deals. There were a number of deals that did fall apart. People started buying and looking at things, and then as markets fell, they were dropping out of deals. It's almost the same thing as housing market here in that sense. I mean, things were hot and heavy, and then all of a sudden things just dropped, stopped and slowed down, but there's still activity in certain markets, and things are still going on. You still live in hear where there have been price increase in certain markets in Ontario as well. It sort of mirrors everything. It's sort of a. It isn't just exclusive to us or to that market, but there still is a strong interest in the Sun Belt. You'll read about that. There's still been deals being done. There's still portfolio deals being done. We know of portfolios that are available, but until capital markets open for us, there's very little we can do at this time. We're still I guess, active in the market in the sense of monitoring and making it known that we will be there if and when the markets are open. We're, I guess, optimistic that that will occur sooner than later. Again, there's nothing we can really promise or say at this point. Thanks, Gordon. Based on that, unless Jeffrey has something to add, we open the floor to questions. We have a number of participants here, so we're here to answer anything further to what we stated and can state as a public company. Um- Go ahead, Keith. Go ahead. No, it's just I wanted to thank you. You'd anticipated the one question I have, which was the nature of the CapEx, but you've already explained that. Thanks very much. I knew that was coming. Yeah. Anything else, gentlemen, ladies? Yeah, I have a question. First of all, congratulations on being able to start paying some distributions. That's nice. I wonder if you could provide a bit more information on what you mean when you're waiting to access the capital markets. Gordon, you finish off there saying that you're waiting for the capital markets to open. Like, what do you mean by that? What is it you're looking for that's gonna indicate to you that you can access the capital markets? Well, if you're asking me, and Gordon Vollmer also said it, but the fact is, right now, all the major REITs that compete with us and basically 90% of them, except for perhaps industrial, because it's a hot commodity, with the growth there, all of them are trading. Their unit price is trading on the stock exchanges at less than their net asset value. If we wanna do a raise, we don't wanna do a raise at significantly or less than our net asset value of around not the trading value, because we've got that valuation increase, but we don't wanna go out there and go at $0.09 or $0.085 to go out and raise capital to compete with the same discounts on net asset value that other publicly traded REITs are doing. That's why I mentioned, Lyle, that we have seen an increase in the unit prices as a percentage of net asset value of about I'd say 15%-20% in that range in the last quarter and a half and three, two quarters, even with the headwinds of these interest rate increases. Once the competitors of ours start trading at asset value or greater, then the major brokerage houses like CIBC, RBC, the independents like Desjardins, I call them independents, but they're really just not in the same tier as those, they can start going and raising capital for us at accessing both the institutional buyers in a serious way and also their, of course, their own wealth management teams as well. I think that hopefully answers your question. As long as that net asset value is higher than the trading price of the major competitors, the REITs are saying, "Okay, well." The major capital underwriters are saying, "We can't raise you money when the companies that are bigger and more attuned to you are trading below net asset value." That's the realities. Once it does open, it opens up fairly wide. Gordon Vollmer's been with Morguard, I've been with various public companies, and Jeffrey has too. Once it opens up, you know, it's, we have the pipelines to get the product and get moving on it. We're just basically waiting for that to happen. These all things, these cycles all have a period where they adjust. Could I ask a quick- I'd say we're in the first or second inning of it. I'm not quite sure because the interest rates went up, but we are certainly starting to move down the baseball diamond. We're not in the first inning anymore. All right. Well, thanks. That's a good explanation. Appreciate that. I'm just mirroring what everybody else says, but it's true. Absolutely true. We meet with bankers all the time, investment bankers like RBC, CIBC. We're well-positioned, as you may know, that our last equity raise, we've got Dynamic Funds in for 20% or 19.9%. That's the maximum they can take. As long as we continue to have other people come in for those offerings when they can occur, as I said, Lyle, then we know we've already got about 20%-30% of it covered with our own shareholder pool. It, it, it- Well, I hope we can keep the faith with our dividend, with the fact that there is at least some return to you, besides the fact that it's hard to trade a stock that barely trades because of the lack of liquidity. That's one of the reasons for saying we figured a way to do a dividend or a distribution so that we all get rewarded because we have had significant growth in cash in our company since we started. I just want to add, it isn't a function of how we're structured or what we can find or the deals we can see. It's not necessarily our fault. It's just, it's the market that's there. That's why it's close to us. It's close to others as well. It isn't just us, and it isn't just a function of who we are, what we are, what we're doing, or our own abilities. That's not the issue. That's not the problem. It's a larger issue outside of us. It's not allowing us to move forward and grow. We'd all love to be able to do something as we've said, you know, I think if we can identify the portfolios, we could move forward if we could get access to that capital in the right way and the right price and the right time, we'd be able to do something. All right, thank you. Thank you. I have three questions, if I could. Sure. First is, if the capital markets open as you anticipate or hope they will, where do you go from here? Do you increase the holdings and properties? What's the strategy for growth? Our strategy for growth is because of the institutional backing we already have with Dynamic Funds and/or 1832 Management for 20% of an offering. It's not to say they're gonna come in every time, but they have been part of our startup story, and they're with us, and we talk to them every month. We also have Dan Argiros, who is our chairman, who has Arch investments in for 9%. If you know Dan, he did some of the big, he owns through other entities over, you know, billions of dollars of capitalized private equity apartment blocks throughout Canada. We have seasoned... To answer your question, we don't want to do one-off deals of the nature that we did to start. We did the one-off deal because first of all, it was a great partner in Westdale who can provide us access to portfolios themselves. But we, they are sort of part of our strategy in the sense that if we can raise about $100 million-$200 million of equity through the various source I just mentioned, plus the major players of the underwriting teams, then we know we have the backing of the groups to go ahead and get those bigger portfolios which I mean, by bigger, I mean hundreds of millions of dollars at one swoop. Okay. My second question to the extent that you can, I'm thrilled with the distribution. It's nice to see a return. Do you anticipate that continuing? Yes. maybe Jeffrey did mention it's a function of AFFO, our AFFO. We have seen such a strong continuous growth of the AFFO even with the latest headwinds, that we've already got our budget laid out for next year is what it should do with Westdale as our managers. There's room, I would say, Jeffrey, in terms of there's margin for error with our AFFO numbers. Yeah. We can't predict what the board will decide. Each dividend will be declared in its time. The intention is to maintain the current rate for the current year. Okay. Very good. Thank you. Just so you know, all the Trustees, people in this room have significant shareholders on their personal basis in the company as well. You have some companies you'll see, don't have a lot of what they call skin in the game around the management table and the directors table and Trustees table, but we do. Everybody is looking at different ways to enhance value at the operational level and also how to get more money and value into the hands of our unit holders because we are significant in that way too. You know. let me ask you one more thing. Yeah. It's almost like, it's almost like the markets, the economies in the last couple of years have faced a, like a perfect storm of, you know, downward pressure on the markets due to Lord knows what. Every bad thing that could have happened to us in the last couple of years has with a global pandemic and supply chain issues and interest rate increases and all those kinds of things. Where do you think you would have been today had the conditions been more favorable? Go ahead, Gord. Well, I worked long and hard with the teams getting that first transaction done with Westdale. Westdale also, as noted in our disclosures, has another 1,000 units that, you know, we could try and buy from them in different forms and functions if we had the capital. We would like to continue that if it's not with them. There was other players that we were in serious discussion with before the bad March. We literally closed in February. Next thing you know, March, we had the pandemic, Chris. It was unbelievable, and nobody knew where it was gonna go. I would have thought we would be at, quite frankly, at about well over $600 million-$700 million in assets within 2 years, even more. Yeah. I think that if I didn't. Just late bloomers. ... if I did, if I had the market conditions before we hit the pandemic where the, you know, trading was above asset value, I'd be disappointed if we didn't do better than that, to tell you the truth. Hmm. Interesting. Okay. We're made for volume. I mean, the multi-res REIT world is made for big players at the end of the day. Right now, we're really running like a private equity company with, you know, one holding, and that's not the game plan. You don't go through all this to become a public company without the benefit of the, what they call the piggy bank of the public markets. Thank you. That's how we were set up with the legal structure, the tax structure, everything's done to be a little bit bigger than we are right now. That's for sure. I mean, it just, as you said, it was a perfect storm that occurred and nobody could have projected that in January or I guess February, March of 2020 that would've happened, did happen, and then a war, then interest rates, then inflation, then whatever else. I mean, I don't know what else we could do other than some insects. Something else, who knows what. Well, we had, you know, a couple of things that haven't happened in multi decades ever, and I agree with you. It's just that it's hard to fathom, but at the same time, I can honestly say when the pandemic first struck, we didn't know where rental rates would go or where occupancies would go. The good news is I haven't had to go to these meetings, you know, belying the fact that our product is not worth more than you bought it for. Yeah. Yeah. That's for sure. I've got other investments I'm involved with like this that don't have that same tune. Yeah. I mean, needless to say, that in retrospect, after a couple of years, this was not what I had intended, a very small startup entity with no income being generated. It's good to see that the income is coming, and hopefully market conditions will be more favorable going forward. Thank you. Good luck. Yeah. Gord- Yeah. Gord mentioned earlier that insiders have a substantial ownership. Trustees and officers own 14.9%. The insiders are certainly incented as well to move as soon as we can. Are there any other questions? Well, I just have one question? Sure. Can you hear me? Yep. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. I was looking at the property operating expenses, and I noticed the management fee was up 10%, and that's with Westdale, Evergreen, Southwood, that you engage for the, do the property management. Mm-hmm. Is the contract with them, the deal with them that they can do an annual 10% increase on their fee? No, they get a percentage of rent collected. Okay. Obviously with the growth in rent, they get a bigger fee. Their fee is at market. We shop the market when we engage with them. Obviously, we had that co-ownership agreement with them, and we have no interest in Westdale ourselves. I can tell you honestly, the methodologies and the sophistication of their rental understanding of the area, like they. It's almost like an on-time market where they check each individual competing building and what they're doing, and they will see if they have to match it that week or whether they can go live. It's real time. Yeah. It's real time. It's on real time. It's quite phenomenal. Wow. Compared to, you know, the Canadian metrics type, stuff. It's even our, even Dan Argiros, who runs a huge portfolio in Canada for various major pension players and himself said he learned stuff he'd never seen before Canada. Of course, you know, there is a lot more turnover of tenants in the U.S. portfolios than there is in Canada on average. Mm-hmm. I hope that answers your question, but that's. Yeah. Yep, that's good. ... they do. I'm glad, I'm happy working with them. They get great reports. They're super timely, and they spend the time explaining the stuff to us whenever we need to and go out there. Have you been keeping an eye on property insurance there? It's up again, this year. Yes. With all the... You know, in Canada here, whenever there's like when we get the major flooding and rains, everyone's, you know, property insurance jumps up for strata units, the strata buildings and, you know, with all the disasters- Disasters going on down in the States there, is property insurance getting to be a concern there? Not really. Again, because Westdale has in huge bulk buying ability. Mm-hmm on the property insurance side, because they do manage 40,000 units, they get great pricing and the same could be held for true. That's not, I mean, it, the property insurance has gone across the board. I have similar portfolios in res, retail and it's the same. You use your buying power, and it hasn't been that ridiculous in terms of increase. Even on the supply side, during the heat of the pandemic, they were able to get everything at a price level that was quite, you know, not at all inflationary as you would suggest it could have been. Mm-hmm. Because we have a major player that buys at huge discounts because of volume, and they were also got us our mortgage doesn't come due to 2029. It's in, it's interest only, and it's 3.52%. And if you had to go to the market today, you'd probably be paying 25%-40% more than that. Would you say, Gord Vollmer? I'd say definitely you're in there. I think the same. I think it's just a matter of their buying power. They're not just in Sunbelt, it's just in Florida. They're across the U.S., primarily Midwest and in the South, but still, so they, by them being able to buy insurance for 48,000 units, they have a better pricing than if you go in there with, "Here, I've got 288 units. What can you give me?" It's a whole different factor. Same, we did the same thing with, you know, previous company I worked for, same thing. I had properties that I was managing on behalf of European investors, and I just joined in their policy because it would just. The policy dropped basically 15%-20%. The premiums would go down because just that, the greater buying power. It's definitely an advantage to be working with a larger national group. All right. Thanks. Well, I'm glad you were here, and I think we'll have, I hopefully the market, I can say next time we meet that we're in the sixth inning of the market recovery or the eighth inning. Me too. Don't write that down. Yeah. I'm just saying hoping. Yeah, hopefully. No, we all hope, that's for sure. It's been, you know, Chris, I mean, the same things. We're thinking the same thing. We never thought we'd be where we are right now. We definitely thought we would be further along in our growth cycle, let's call it. We're committed to it. As everyone knows, we haven't made any changes. The directors that were Trustees were there at the beginning are still there today. We still have the desire and the, I guess the will to make it work. Given the backing we have, and we do have the institutional funding, it's not a normal startup in that sense. We have some good, a good foundation here, and this is one good property. Luckily... Not luckily, we bought it. We knew what we were getting. We knew it was a good brand-new property, and we bought it for that reason, that it was a stable and a good Class A property that fit into the portfolio and something we wanna just be able to be. We just wanna be able to build on that at this point. Thanks, Gord. Well, thanks to the executive team and to Gord Vollmer, Trustee, to help give us insights. like, you can always call us or email us on individual questions as well. I hope to see you next time in the next quarter or the AGM. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Have a good day. Bye-bye.
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