I'm pleased to welcome Braemar Hotels & Resorts. And presenting from the company, we have President and CEO Rich Stockton. Before I hand it over, a quick reminder that the Q&A tab is located at the bottom of your screen there. Feel free to type in any questions throughout the presentation, and we can save time for Q&A at the end. But with that said, Rich, take it away. Thanks a lot, Brandon. So welcome, everybody. Great to see you all, or at least you can see me. Love to tell you about Braemar Hotels & Resorts today. I'll spend about 20 minutes or so, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. So please, as Brandon said, send any questions you have across the chat, and we'll get those addressed. For those of you who don't know Braemar, Braemar Hotels & Resorts is a lodging REIT listed on the New York Stock Exchange. I've been CEO of the company since 2016, so this is my ninth year. When I came into the company, I reviewed and put in place the current strategy, which is to focus on luxury hotels. So we have the highest quality portfolio amongst the publicly listed lodging REITs, and that's an objective statement as measured by RevPAR. RevPAR is Revenue Per Available Room and is directly correlated with the quality of the hotel, including both the physical product, but also the service levels, and so we like being in the luxury space because the luxury hotel chain scale segment has had the greatest growth of any of the hotel property types over the last 30 years, and that has averaged average rate growth of 4% annually versus 3% through all other chain scale segments, so if you want to be in hotels, this is the place to be. Luxury hotels have very high barriers to entry because there's only finite locations that can support the rates necessary to deliver the quality and service of a luxury property, so that's kind of a very quick overview. Let me kind of dive into some more specifics about the company. You can see a little bit about me here on the page. This is a picture without glasses. I've been in the hospitality business for nearly 30 years. This is going on my ninth year with the company. I spent the majority of my career with Morgan Stanley in real estate investment banking, but also real estate investing, having previously gone to the Cornell Hotel School. So hotels are definitely in my blood. We're a small cap company, $228 million equity market cap, as I said, listed on New York Stock Exchange BHR, $1.8 billion of enterprise value. Since we spun off from another REIT, which was in 2013, we've increased assets considerably to over $2 billion, almost $2.2 billion in assets across 15 hotels, with nearly $700 million in revenue, top line revenue. Even for the trailing 12 months as of the third quarter is $180 million. We've just passed the fourth quarter. It's a little bit of a tricky time to have a presentation because we haven't yet released our fourth quarter results, which is why I'm only really permitted to talk about our third quarter results at the moment. Our top five properties by revenue, you can see, are dominated by Ritz-Carlton. We have three of our four Ritz-Carltons listed here, and then Four Seasons Scottsdale, and then Capital Hilton. So even though we have the 15 properties, we have some amount of diversification across those properties as well. A couple of key themes I'd just like to point out as I walk through the presentation. We have very stable industry performance right now. We definitely had some volatile years around the time of COVID. That has all subsided, and we have returns to what I would say is kind of normalized growth. And it varies a little bit whether you're looking at our urban properties or our resort properties, but certainly with supply being constrained as it is right now with a very high interest rate environment, we're seeing some decent growth in excess of inflation on the top line. We have a balanced portfolio that is balanced geographically, but also across the resort and urban segments. I'll go through my recent results here shortly. And we've also been taking advantage of lowering our interest costs. So another key theme here is we've seen spread compression, particularly in the CMBS market, that we've been able to take advantage of. So we're now refinancing at lower cost of interest because of lower spreads, but also our portfolio is financed 75% floating rate. So as interest rates are starting to come down, we stand to benefit and will be generating even more excess cash flow as a result of that. So a little bit just on the industry. These are numbers over the last five years. You can see occupancy, and this is indexed to 2019, which is the pre-COVID year, that we're up to 95% of occupancy. So almost back to where it was. I think this type of interaction over video definitely has had an impact on travel. And so that's why we're seeing a little bit lower occupancy than pre-COVID. But look what ADRs have done. So ADRs are 25% higher than they were pre-COVID, resulting in RevPAR, which is the combination of occupancy and ADR, to being 18% above pre-COVID levels. So we like to reference COVID because it was a turning point in the business, but it's also one that we're more than fully recovered from at this point. Just some other stats on taking out inflation, looking at the real numbers. And so you see real ADR is about where it was pre-COVID. So even taking out inflation, we're kind of back to where we were. Whereas occupancy, just a little bit lower, as I said before, resulting in RevPAR a little bit lower on a real basis than where it was in 2019. And that's really because the urban side of the business is still growing, still recovering, as work from home is being abolished. And Amazon is telling people they have to go to work. JPMorgan is telling people they have to go to work, go in the office. And now the federal government, as of yesterday, is telling people they have to be back in the office. Physical office occupancy is positively correlated to hotel demand and hotel room night demand. And so as we see the impact of work from home being repealed, if you will, over the course of this year, you'll see occupancy start to tick up at hotels, particularly in the urban centers. If you look at forecasted year-over-year growth, you've got RevPAR growth for 2024 shown here. A little bit muted. I'd say it's a very different picture for 2025. We'll be rolling out those numbers shortly. But as I said, we're now at a period where the future supply of hotels over the next four years is going to be less than half of what it's been historically. And that'll put a lot of upward pressure on rates and RevPAR. Our portfolio, turning to that, breaks down between resorts in the gold and urban and the purple across the U.S. and Caribbean, about 60% resort and 40% urban. You can see the large water carriers there at the top of the resort list, Four Seasons Scottsdale, Ritz-Carlton Sarasota, St. Thomas, all generating over $20 million of EBITDA for us. And on the urban side, Capital Hilton, nearly $20 million, all the way down to one property that is in repositioning right now, which is the Cameo Beverly Hills. We're investing $25 million into that property this year for renovation. And that will emerge as an LXR Cameo in 2026. And then you'll see the impact of that come back into the numbers. But that property is being repositioned right now. Just some charts that take out the effect of seasonality. So these are quarter-over-quarter comparisons, which isn't usually how you see this data, but it's more reflective of what's happening. There's a fair amount of seasonality in our portfolio, which is typical of many hotels, particularly resort hotels. But you can see resorts' ADRs have come off from their peak. They peaked on the back of excess COVID stimulus in 2021 and still 40% up from 2019 numbers. And now at a point where I think we have achieved mean regression or mean reversion. So we're back on track to where we're going to start to positively grow resort RevPAR ADRs, I'm sorry, from this point forward. And you can see occupancy for both resort and urban still a little bit below pre-pandemic for our portfolio. That's for the reasons I explained. But frankly, I think that's about to turn a corner as well this year as, again, work from home has been officially repealed. And then these are some trends for RevPAR up versus 2019 levels. If you look at the breakdown of our portfolio by brand, Ritz-Carlton is driving our results in terms of profitability by and large, with $65.6 million on a TTM basis. Luxury hotels comprises the vast majority of our EBITDA. If you look at our demand from a group versus transient perspective, we're about 23% group business. That's back to normal levels, I call them. We historically operate around 25% group business. Group business is great to have because it has what we call a longer booking window. So you've got greater visibility on how much group business you have. And then what you do is you book up that inventory at your hotel in order to create more scarcity of the remaining rooms in order to drive the highest possible transient rates. So that's kind of how we revenue optimize, we call it. And then you can see the resorts contributing about 70% of our profit versus urban at 30%. So a little bit heavily resort-oriented than the percentage is driven purely by number of hotels. Our recent results and development, if you look at our breakdown by property, you can see our overall occupancy of the portfolio is about 70%. This is, as I said, below our pre-pandemic levels, which gives us some room for growth. ADRs at $383, RevPAR at $261. This is as of the third quarter. If you look at it on a TTM basis, it's more like $330, which is significantly higher than any of our peers. For the third quarter, because many of our resorts were still normalizing, RevPAR was slightly negative. You can see the resort negative 8.4%, but the urban, the property is growing at 6%. So this is, I think, the point. This is the inflection point where now we start to see resort RevPARs growing from here. And just looking more at our operating results, anything to note here, I don't think there's much to say other than comparable RevPARs on the bottom left are a bit above last year on a TTM basis. And then you've got lower EBITDA only because we actually sold an asset last year, which is the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines. Occupancy has stabilized over the last couple of years, as have rates. And then we have some full-year highlights that show EBITDA and AFFO per share. Again, we're getting into a little bit of nitty-gritty that I think we can probably save for Q&A. One of the things I mentioned was the sale of Torrey Pines last year. This was a property that was an upper upscale asset, so non-luxury. So one that we were happy to recycle capital with. We sold for $165 million. It represented an all-in cap rate of 7.2%. This was a property that required a significant amount of capital expenditure to renovate. It's about $40 million. And so we thought it was a great time to exit in order to not only avoid that capital expenditure, but to take that capital and then recycle it into our own capital structure. With that, we retired and redeemed a number of non-traded preferred equity shares, as well as repaying the debt associated with this property. As we look forward, we are more likely to sell than to buy this year as well. We are looking at selling one or two hotels this year and doing the same thing. That would be redeeming non-traded preferred shares and possibly also buying back common shares. Last year, we got an authorization in place for a $50 million share buyback that will enable us to do that. Otherwise, in 2024, we had planned to spend between $70 and $90 million in CapEx. The final number will be out soon. We renovated a restaurant in St. Thomas. We renovated public spaces in Ritz-Carlton Lake Tahoe, including building a Topgolf Swing Suite, which has been very popular. We redid the spa in Sarasota at our Ritz-Carlton. We did all the guest rooms at Capital Hilton. That's been a very well-received renovation. And then we renovated Bardessono and also converted a fitness center into a sitting room that can be attached to one of the suites. And then we started the renovation of the Cameo Beverly Hills, which, as I mentioned, was ongoing this year. Also, recently, we added a new director. For those of you who invest in the publicly traded lodging REIT space, you may know Jay Shah. Jay was Chairman and CEO of Hersha Hospitality Trust. Hersha was taken private by KSL last year. And in doing so, that freed up some of Jay's time. And so we know him and have asked him to join the board of Braemar. We think he brings great experience, particularly in major transactions and potential restructurings. And this sort of work is in addition to just knowing the lodging business very well, having worked in it for so many years. So he'll be a great addition to our board. You can see our other board members listed there. So we did have some changes at the end of last year in our most recent proxy. And then we've also added, so we've had two of these board members, Ken Fearn and Abtin Vaziri, retire from the board, but then we've also added back another board member named Rebecca Meisel, who is a certified internal auditor. So a very varied skill set among our board members. In terms of just balance sheet management, I mentioned that one of the themes for last year was to reduce interest costs through refinancing. We refinanced three of our loans into a CMBS deal to also not only reduce interest costs, extend maturities, but also generate excess proceeds of $25 million. So we do have a fair amount of cash. As we look forward to 2025, we have another CMBS deal that we're going to refinance, and that is underway. I don't expect any issues with that, certainly. We'll be able to refinance again at an attractive cost from a spread perspective, and we'll extend maturities. And then you'll see we have relatively few maturities to worry about in 2026 and 2027 relative to the size of our overall debt. All right. So that really summarizes the presentation. The industry is in a very interesting inflection point with low supply coming in the next few years. And people returning to work, driving urban room night demand. We've got a balanced portfolio to take advantage of all that, having almost half our portfolio in urban hotels, but then also balanced across markets throughout the U.S. I think our results for the third quarter, not too inspiring, frankly, but I think that's where the opportunity lies given where our share price is and what we see on the horizon. So with that, Brandon, I think we can open up to questions. Sounds great. Thanks for the overview, Rich. We can open the floor for Q&A here. Looks like our first question is around that revenue optimization process that you touched on. Can you discuss the mix in bookings between that group business and some of the more leisure side of the business? And I guess talk about how that impacts the business. Yeah, sure. Sure. As I showed just for the third quarter, but this is typical of many quarters. We were running at a little under 25% group business. And that's as much as you really want, frankly. I think maybe as much as 30%. Just because when we take on group business, we offer negotiated discount rates in order to have the certainty of the business, in order to take that inventory off the books and create more scarcity for the transient business. And that enables us to achieve transient rates that are typically 20% or 30% higher than the group rates. Now, the other benefit of group is you typically have the banquets business that comes with it. So there tends to be more of an F&B spend on a per-head basis with group business than there does on your transient business. But as I had mentioned at the end of our third quarter on our earnings call, we were looking at our group pace for the first quarter of 2025 being up over 30%. And a lot of that is just because every year since 2020, conventions have gotten bigger. There have been more meetings, and they've gotten bigger, and that trend is still coming. Citywides are still coming back onto the calendar that had been postponed associated with the disastrous 2020 meeting calendar. And so that's driving group business, and that's why it's an important part of our results going forward. Got it. And looking at the two sides of the business, the resort side and the urban side, what if you could touch on the margin profiles of each of those businesses, which is more attractive? Yeah. Yeah. Overall, our margins at an EBITDA level are about 30%. If you look kind of year in and year out, it's difficult to parse out how much of that is leisure and how much is corporate because we have some properties that have both types of business. But that said, if you look at our resorts versus urban properties generally, we have independent resorts that have been known to generate extraordinarily high EBITDA margins that can be 40% or more. Those are the Bardessono and Hotel Yountville, the Pier House in Key West in particular. If you have a very well-located independent hotel that has a little bit of a name for itself and you don't require the distribution agreements with a major brand, that all flows through to margin. And so those can be the highest-performing hotels, the highest-margin hotels in the portfolio. On the urban side, margins have been lower typically because you also tend to see more unionization and higher labor costs in the urban properties. And so if you want to generalize, I would say urban properties would have lower margins, resort properties would have higher margins, and independent resort properties would have the highest margin. That makes sense. That's interesting. And then looking at the balance sheet here, just to kind of get an idea of growth going forward, as far as capital allocation priorities go, what can we kind of think about going forward? I know you mentioned the plan is to monetize a handful of assets in the coming year or so. Where's that capital going to flow to? Yeah. There's really three potential uses for it, and it's very difficult for me to predict exactly what we're going to do. It's a little bit based on markets, and it's a little bit based on opportunity. One of the things that, for those who have followed our story through various filings, will know that the board is considering restructuring the business through an internalization that will disconnect Braemar from one of its major service providers, which is called Ashford Inc. And in doing that, pay a termination fee, but then achieve an internally managed business with all of the employees being part of Braemar. That could be a use of capital from the sale of these assets. That could have a very significant impact on the share price due to the cost savings associated with that. That's one thing. Otherwise, I do think we'll continue to buy in non-traded preferred equity and redeem that just because, given where our equity market cap is, for me, it feels like there's a little bit too much non-traded preferred equity in the capital stack, and so I'd like to see that lower and increase the equity base more, and then finally, share buyback up to $50 million is authorized. That's also an opportunity for the excess cash from those hotel sales, so you maybe see one or all three of those happen over the course of this year. That makes sense. That's very helpful, and I think maybe further down the line, in 24 months or so, what kind of growth drivers can we look at at that point? And looking at the transaction market, what are you seeing in terms of volume and pricing there? And how do you expect that to change? Well, I do. I think it's just going to get better. There's no doubt interest rates need to come down to a neutral rate. So I think we've got another 100 to 150 basis points of cuts coming. That will make the, well, first of all, for us, it'll generate more excess cash flow for us just because of our floating rate debt. And then that will bring us back into the acquisitions market. And we will be looking at acquisitions with a lower cost of financing. We typically will finance an acquisition of kind of 40%. Our overall leverage is about 40% net debt to gross assets right now. So we use 40%-50% on an acquisition. So I think there will be great opportunities because, again, the supply pipeline, I'll just kind of reiterate this, is less than half of what it's been historically. And that's expected for the next four years. I don't see, even in a slightly lower interest rate environment, I don't see banks opening up credit for hotel construction lending nearly in the way that they had in the past. And therefore, the alternatives are the much more expensive debt funds, which means there's just going to be a lot less projects built. And that's going to put upward pressure on rates. So I would say over the next two years, three years, maybe four years, you're going to have to pay more for your hotel room. And the way to hedge that is to buy a lodging rate because you'll make more money on that side to kind of pay for your vacations. But rates are going up. Got it. Absolutely. We'll take one more question here for the attendees. Can you talk about an FFO run rate and maybe a dividend payment rate, I guess, targets there if you disclose those metrics? Yeah. Sure. Sure. On the FFO side, it's been volatile, right? It's been volatile based on the fact that we have been primarily floating rate borrowers. And so went into this interest rate cycle with 90% floating rate. We're down to 75% now. And so you've seen erosion in our FFO per share that you'll see reverse dollar for dollar as interest rates come down. And so that's kind of the upside on FFO. You'll find, as you look through our numbers, FFO per share also varies by quarter due to seasonality. Think of it this way. If we had 100 basis points of rate cuts on $1 billion in debt, roughly, that's $10 million a year that would get added to FFO or AFFO per share. We have 70 million shares outstanding, so pretty significant contribution to AFFO per share. What was the second part of the question? Say? Talk about the dividend payment structure. Oh, yeah. Then on the dividend. Rather than fix our dividend to a percentage of CAD or AFFO per share, we fix it to the rate that makes sense vis-à-vis where our shares are trading and the dividend yield that the rest of the sector is paying. And so we had fixed it a few years back at $0.20 a share, which is $0.05 a quarter. At the time, that was generating a yield that was in the kind of 3%-4% range. That's a yield of 7.7% now. The reality is that's only $15 million a year for us. And for a company with $2.2 billion in assets, that's just not a lot of liquidity to worry about playing with, frankly. So we don't necessarily, there's not necessarily any risk in us going lower with that. The opportunity would be to go higher if our share price moves up considerably and we felt that our dividend yield was too low, we'll move it up. But if our share price goes down, there's very little chance that we would cut that dividend just because we think it sends a disproportionate bad signal to the market relative to the amount of cash it costs us every year, which is frankly not very much. Great. That's very helpful insight. Well, Rich, we'll conclude there. We really appreciate the overview today. Yeah. Thanks, Brandon. And thanks, everybody, for listening. Yep. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Have a great day. Bye.