Greetings. Welcome to National Retail Properties 37th Annual Meeting of Stockholders. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If you would like to ask a question during the Q&A portion of the presentation, please click on the Ask Question box on the left side of your screen, type in your question, and hit Submit. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Chris Barry, Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, Kristen. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. This presentation contains certain statements that are the company's and management's hopes, intentions, beliefs, expectations, or projections of the future and might be considered to be forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. Prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties. The company's actual future results may differ significantly from the matters discussed in these forward-looking statements, and we may not release revisions of these forward-looking statements to reflect changes after we've made the statement. Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations are disclosed from time to time in greater detail in the company's filings with the SEC, including, but not limited to, the company's report on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, as well as company press release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chairman of the Board, Steve Cosler. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am Steve Cosler, Chairman of the Board of Directors of National Retail Properties. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and to introduce Jay Whitehurst, Chief Executive Officer, President, and a member of the Board of Directors of the company, who will lead the remainder of our meeting. Thank you, Steve. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As Steve mentioned, I'm Jay Whitehurst, Chief Executive Officer, President, and a Member of the Board of National Retail Properties, Inc. The time is now 8:32 A.M., and the 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders is called to order. Welcome to the company's 37th Annual Meeting of Stockholders. After our formal meeting, I'll give a brief presentation about the company's strategy and execution. In attendance today is Chris Barry, Secretary of the company, whose office will prepare the minutes of this meeting, and Louis Larson, the Inspector of Election. On or about April 2nd, 2021, a notice of this annual meeting, a proxy statement relating to the matters to be considered at this meeting, and a proxy ballot were sent to each stockholder of record, determined as of the close of business on March 15th, 2021, our record date. According to the records of the company and a certified proxy register, a total of 175,579,683 common shares of the company stock were issued, of which 174,987,931 were entitled to vote at this annual meeting as of the close of business on March 15th, 2021. Of these, 163,353,193, or 93.03% of the outstanding shares, are represented in person or by proxy at this meeting. On the basis of this report, a quorum is present, and this annual meeting is now officially called to order. The polls for the election are open. It's noted that the time is now 8:34 A.M. There are three matters to come before this meeting for your consideration and approval. The first matter to come before the meeting is to elect eight directors of the company to hold office until the 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders or until their respective successors are duly elected and qualified. The directors for election are Pamela K. M. Beall, Steven D. Cosler, Don DeFosset, David M. Fick, Edward J. Fritsch, Kevin B. Habicht, Betsy D. Holden, and myself, Julian E. Whitehurst. The second matter is for an advisory vote on executive compensation. The third matter is to ratify the selection of our independent registered public accounting firm, Ernst & Young LLP, for 2021. I now declare the polls closed. The preliminary results of the voting show shareholder approval of the election of all eight directors under proposal one and the approval of the selection of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent public accounting firm under proposal three. There's no other business to be conducted at this meeting. Therefore, the 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders is adjourned at 8:35 A.M. This concludes the formal portion of the meeting. Now that the formal portion is over, I'd like to take a few minutes and review our strategy and results with you, and then take some questions. As the operator mentioned, there should be a box on your webcast screen for you to type in your questions any time during this presentation, and we'll address the questions at the end. Moving down here, this first slide is the cover page of our annual report, the theme of the annual report this year is about the enduring value of consistent results and long-term perspective. It's a true hallmark of National Retail Properties is our consistent focus on long-term operations and multi-year shareholder value creation. The value of this consistent long-term approach was never more evident than during the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In this presentation, I'll talk about some of the drivers of our long-term success. First, let me just discuss briefly the impact of COVID-19 on our tenants and our business. Throughout the pandemic, the first priority for us was the safety of our associates and their health. We kept the office open all of last year, but we allowed working from home transition to working remotely for any of the associates that felt like that was the right choice for them. Our investment in technology allowed us to continue to smoothly operate our business. We managed through the pandemic very well. Many of our associates are listening to this webcast today. To those folks, I just want to once again say thank you for your hard work and your perseverance and your collegiality, your flexibility and professionalism and dedication in 2020. You're an inspiring group of people to work with. This slide here highlights some notable facts and conclusions that we've drawn from our approach to the pandemic in 2020. Personally and professionally, I'm very proud of our customer-focused approach to the modest short-term rent deferrals that we granted to those tenants whose businesses were disrupted during 2020. We strengthened our tenant relationships with those deferrals, and we're on track to collect the deferred rent that is scheduled to be repaid in 2021. This ability to meaningfully provide customer service to our tenants via these rent deferrals was a product of our long-term focus and business model. That the long-term approach to all these aspects of our business positioned us to weather the pandemic and continue our track record of uninterrupted dividend increases. Really an important driver of long-term value creation by National Properties is this history of raising the dividend every year for the past 31 years. This impressive feat's only been accomplished by two other REITs and by less than 90 public companies across the United States. In 2020, our board increased the dividend to its current annualized rate of $2.08 per share. Even after the effects of the pandemic, our dividend remains safely covered by Funds from Operations. Now this record of dividend increases is really a valuable intangible asset of National Retail Properties, and it's a powerful indicator of the value of our long-term focus and business model. We currently sit in a strong liquidity position, and our board will continue to evaluate the dividend policy with this long-term perspective in mind. In times of economic turmoil, a strong balance sheet and ample liquidity are crucial, and this is not news to us, not new news to us at all. It's been the longstanding philosophy of National Retail Properties to operate with low leverage and maintain access to all sources of capital, which has resulted in the fortress-like balance sheet that we have today. We're investment-grade rated at BBB+ and Baa1. At the end of the first quarter, we're in a very strong liquidity position with $311 million of cash in the bank and zero balance drawn on our $900 million line of credit. In addition to this strong liquidity position, our debt maturities are well-laddered with no material debt coming due until 2024 and a weighted average debt duration of over 13 years, which we believe might be the best in all of REIT world. At our core, we're a real estate company focused exclusively on single-tenant retail properties. National Retail Properties, we own over 3,100 individual single-tenant retail properties leased to large national and regional retail businesses across the U.S. Our properties tend to have strong retail real estate characteristics. They're generally located along high-traffic roads with good visibility and access and signage. Our average property cost is only $3 million. Our portfolio is generally just lots of well-located small box retail properties. We're broadly diversified across geography, industry, and tenant mix. We have over 375 different tenants, over 30 different lines of trade, and in 48 states. The primary lines of trade in our portfolio focus on customer services and e-commerce resistant consumer necessities. Some of the top sectors, such as convenience stores and fast food restaurants and car washes and auto services facilities, fared very well during the pandemic. The line of trade that struggled the most in 2020 was our theater properties, where our tenants were hit by the double whammy of pandemic shutdowns and the lack of movies from production companies. Even in that environment, our primary theater tenants, AMC and Cinemark, were able to raise capital and pay rent in accordance with their deferral agreements that we negotiated with them. If you drill a little deeper into the list of our top tenants, you'll see that our portfolio consists primarily of large, well-capitalized tenants. Our top 25 tenants operate over 1,000 units each on average, and they're typically leaders in their respective lines of trade. These are large regional and national companies that are generally better positioned than smaller operators to withstand a major disruption such as occurred in 2020. An important driver in our success is our consistently high occupancy and steady cash flow. Our long-term occupancy rate is 98%, ±1%, which is, as you can see, amongst some of the best in commercial real estate. This long-term high level of occupancy creates a stable cash flow stream that's highly preferable to the more variable revenue streams you see in other commercial property types. Our occupancy rate at the end of 2020 was 98.5%, which continues to highlight the strength of our portfolio, even during the pandemic. Another long-term attribute of this portfolio is that retailers do not like to relocate their stores. Location is more strategically important for retail operators than for tenants in many other property types. Over the last decade, when a retailer's lease is expiring, about 80% of the time the retailers renewed the lease in the same location at its then current rent, all without the landlord putting in more lease incentive or tenant dollars. This impressive statistic was repeated in 2020, which to me, again, highlights the strength of our retail locations and the desire by our tenants to stay in business in those locations. This next slide really highlights a moat around our business, which is sourcing acquisitions directly from relationship retailers. The primary focus of our acquisition strategy is to acquire properties directly from retailers and then lease those properties back on long-term triple net leases. One of the benefits of this direct relationship is that the tenant self-selects the properties to be included in the long-term sale-leaseback, which means we get the tenants better performing properties. Another benefit is that our investment is typically at the tenant's cost without any developer markup. Lower cost per property means lower rent per property, which means a greater margin of safety and a higher probability of the tenant's ability to pay rent if its business is disrupted. Historically, about two-thirds of our acquisition volume has come from doing these off-market business with our relationship tenants. During 2020, our relationship tenants took a pause in their new store growth, we took a pause in our acquisitions with them while they figured out the best way to operate their businesses during the pandemic. As our tenants returns to growth mode, we began to ramp up our acquisition engine again. Looking ahead to 2021, you should expect us to remain cautious in our underwriting. It's an unsettled post-pandemic environment where cap rates remain at all-time lows, meaning prices remain at all-time highs for our types of properties. We're going to continue to be very thoughtful in our underwriting and pursue sale-leaseback transactions with strong operators at reasonable prices and reasonable rents. That philosophy has stood us very well through the years. The last driver behind our strategy are the great people we have here in our supportive culture. As I said, it's over 3,100 properties, almost 400 tenants, roughly $675 million of annual rent, and it's all handled by just 70 associates here in this office at National Retail Properties. In the last decade, we've roughly tripled our number of properties while keeping headcount nearly flat. We've done this by empowering and training and retaining the high-performing associates and investing in technology and professional development to help each of our associates learn and grow. One other main point I want to make on this slide is just the long tenure of our entire team. Over two-thirds of our team has been with the company for more than five years, and almost half have been here for at least 10 years. This is really a stark contrast with many other companies, and it's a competitive advantage when it comes to institutional knowledge and consistency of culture, which is especially important in a time when folks are working remotely and have less day-to-day personal interaction. Lastly, as I mentioned in the shareholder letter, National Retail Properties has been walking the talk of corporate responsibility, and ESG, long before it was fashionable. In addition to being proud of the long tenure of our diverse workforce, I am particularly proud that National Retail Properties was named to the Bloomberg 2021 Gender-Equality Index. This is a meaningful recognition of our company's commitment to diversity and equity, and we'll continue to focus on all our stakeholders, internal and external, in our strategic planning and business operations. This last slide highlights our activities and results for 2020. I've covered most of these items in my comments up to this point. I think I'll stop now and take any questions. Chris, do we have any questions? Not so far, no. Okay. We're here in the office, and we do have one shareholder with us, and he has a question. With 3,100 properties and that many people, I'm wondering how often you get a chance to visit each property, and how was that impacted last year? That's a great question. It's because we are so focused on the real estate that we're acquiring, we have historically visited every property that we've ever acquired at least once. Steve Horn's here in the room with us, and he's our Chief Operating Officer, and has run acquisitions for a number of years. Steve's acquisition officers would visit a property as they're making the deal to acquire it. We have a separate underwriting department here, made up of three highly trained, highly qualified underwriters, and they would separately go visit these properties. We have people out traveling all the time, right up through the beginning of the pandemic. Last year, our acquisitions were much lower, so we didn't have the need to visit as many properties. We did not travel. That group didn't travel very much at all last year. They are getting back to traveling now. Because we've been out on the road all through the years, looking at different corners that are for sale, it was really something. Last week, we looked at acquiring a property, and folks had noted that they'd been to visit that intersection four or five different times through the years. That because they're out and about looking at one property, they look around at everything else. We're still getting a good feel for what are the right locations for us. Now that the team here has largely been vaccinated, and it's feeling safer to travel, we will get back on the road and continue to visit the properties at least once before we buy them. To us, that's a really important discipline in good underwriting. Jay, we have a question from Joel Skipper in South Carolina. It's actually two parts. First, how does NNN feel about the threat of rising inflation in the economy? Would NNN ever consider moving to a monthly dividend payout? Joel, it's good to hear from you. Thanks for the question. We've operated in environments of higher interest rates before. I talked about the strength of our balance sheet in my prepared comments there. We have nothing but fixed-rate debt and no maturities coming due until 2024. We don't carry any variable rate debt at all on the books at this time, and have always maintained very little or no variable rate debt. We feel like we've done a good job of protecting ourselves in that environment against rising rates. What happens in that environment too is that ultimately cap rates catch up with rates to the extent they move up and stay up. There may be a short period where there's a bit of a compression between rising rates and where cap rates move to, but what we've found over time is that that catches up, and net spread returns, and so we're able to continue to make accretive acquisitions even as rates go higher. All of that said, the world is awash in cash, and so it's something that we think about all the time, the effect of rising rates. I think there's some evidence out there that rates may not move up materially or stay up materially in the current environment. The second question was about monthly dividend. I may call on Kevin from the audience here. We look at it all the time, or look at it occasionally, I guess I would say, but haven't found that that was We think would make a meaningful change in the stock price or creating shareholder value. Kevin, is that fair? Yeah, no, I think that's right. A lot of our shareholders are institutional, and so they have less interest in that. I know some retail shareholders like that. So far, we haven't seen the kind of the cost outweigh the benefits, in our minds anyway, to go down that avenue. Joel, thank you for that question. It's good to hear from you. That's the only question so far. Well, with no other questions, we will end this presentation. Thank you for your support and throughout the years. We very much appreciate it, and we're available anytime. Call with questions. Thanks very much. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect at this time. Thank you for your participation.