Welltower Inc. (WELL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

February 16, 2023 9:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning. My name is Audra, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Welltower Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Matt McQueen, General Counsel. Please go ahead.

Matt McQueen - General Counsel

Thank you, and good morning. As a reminder, certain statements made during this call may be deemed forward-looking statements in the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Although Welltower believes any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, the Company can give no assurances that its projected results will be attained. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statement are detailed in the Company's filings with the SEC.

And with that, I'll hand the call over to Shankh.

Shankh Mitra - CEO

Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone.

I will review fourth quarter and the year and describe high-level business trends and our capital allocation priorities. John will provide an update on operational performance of our SHO and MOB portfolios. And Tim will walk you through our triple-net business, balance sheet highlights and 2023 full year guidance. Nikhil, our newly appointed CIO, is also on the call to answer questions.

While we are happy to bring back full year guidance after three years, I'll point out that many macro and business uncertainties remain. I would recommend investors and analysts to focus on 2023 exit run rate to understand the earnings power of this platform and not overly emphasize the calendar year guidance.

I have mixed emotions as I reflect back on 2022. As I've described to you in my prior calls, our results frankly underwound our expectation during the first half of the year. While we don't like to fix that on short-term stock performance as we believe, an appropriate window to gauge our performance is at least three to five years, you should so to measure that [ph] for generating an unsatisfactory return -- total return in 2022. But remember, a stock is a fractional ownership of a business and not a ticker.

We view our fellow investors as partners for the long haul and continuously strive to improve the prospects for long-term compounding of this business. In spite of some of the headwinds that we experienced in 2022, my team and I are pleased with the underlying improvements we have seen in this platform and our talent base, resulting in a strong rebound of performance in fourth quarter and farther improving momentum being carried into 2023.