Thank you. Welcome to STAG Industrial's conference call covering the first quarter 2026 results.

In addition to the press release distributed yesterday, we have posted an unaudited quarterly supplemental information presentation on the company's website at www.stagindustrial.com under the Investor Relations sections. On today's call, the company's prepared remarks and answers to your questions will contain forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those discussed today. Examples of forward-looking statements include forecasts of Core FFO, same-store NOI, G&A, acquisition and disposition volumes, retention rates and other guidance, leasing prospects, rent collections, industry and economic trends, and other matters.

We encourage all listeners to review the more detailed discussion related to these forward-looking statements contained in the company's filings with the SEC and the definitions and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures contained in the supplemental information package available on the company's website. As a reminder, forward-looking statements represent management's estimates as of today.

STAG Industrial assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. On today's call, you will hear from Bill Crooker, our Chief Executive Officer, and Matts Pinard, our Chief Financial Officer.

Also here with us today are Mike Chase, our Chief Investment Officer, and Steve Kimball, our Chief Operating Officer, who are available to answer questions specific to their areas of focus. I'll now turn the call over to Bill.

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the first quarter earnings call for STAG Industrial.

We are pleased to have you join us and look forward to discussing the first quarter 2026 results. Q1 industrial leasing velocity and volume were healthy both market-wide and within STAG's portfolio.

Year-over-year absorption continues to improve. Notably, the multiyear weakness in demand for big-box product has reversed, with vacancy in larger spaces decreasing in many markets.

This has not been limited to larger spaces, however, with strong activity in the 150 to 250,000 square foot segment of the sector where STAG's portfolio predominantly sits. The market is benefiting from a more recent demand driver tied to the rapid acceleration of data center construction.

3PLs supporting these data center developments have resulted in a new segment of leasing demand for traditional warehouse facilities. Since the beginning of 2025, we have signed eight leases totaling 1.6 million square feet to data center-related tenants.

New supply also remains subdued, with approximately 40% of new supply constructed for build-to-suit projects, above historical averages. We continue to expect national vacancy rates to peak in the coming months, with an inflection point in the back half of 2026.

Capital markets have remained stable to start the year, and industrial product remains one of the most liquid asset classes. We see momentum in the transaction market, with the pipeline growing and transaction volume increasing.

Our internal pipeline has increased to $3.9 billion. In February, we acquired a 750,000 square foot building located in Platte City, Missouri for $80.7 million at a reported cap rate of 6.1%.

The newly constructed Class A building features 36-foot clear height, ESFR, ample trailer parking, and heavy power. Strategically located within a northwest submarket of Kansas City, the building benefits from close access to highways and the Kansas City International Airport.

The building is 100% leased for 12 years with 3.2% annual rental escalators. In terms of our development platform, we have seven buildings for 1.8 million square feet of development activity that is not in service as of the end of Q1.

These buildings are in various stages of development and have an expected stabilized yield of 7.1%. Subsequent to quarter end, we have signed two new development leases.

We agreed to a 73,000 square foot lease at our Casual Drive development in Greenville. That building is now 100% leased.

We also executed a lease totaling 45,000 square feet in one of our Charlotte development projects. That building is now 90% leased.

With that, I will turn it over to Matts, who will cover our remaining results and guidance for 2026.

Thank you, Bill, and good morning, everyone. Core FFO per share was 65 cents for the quarter, an increase of 6.6% as compared to last year.

Leverage remains low, with net debt to annualized run rate adjusted EBITDA equal to 5.0 times. Liquidity stood at $806 million at quarter end.

During the quarter, we commenced 37 leases across 6 million square feet, generating cash and straight-line leasing spreads of 20.9% and 39.6%, respectively. This is a quarterly record in terms of total operating portfolio square feet leased.

Tenant demand is strong and spanned many industries, including air freight and logistics, retail, and containers and packaging. Retention for the quarter was 69.5%.

We are maintaining our retention guidance of 70 to 80% for the year. As of today, 79% of our forecasted leasing for 2026 has been addressed at levels consistent with our initial guidance and at levels equal to our previous years at this point.

We still expect cash leasing spreads of 18 to 20% this year. Same-store cash NOI grew 4.1% for the quarter.

Credit loss was minimal for the first quarter as well. At this point, we are maintaining all guidance for the year.

2026 guidance can be found on page 21 of our supplemental package, which is available within the Investor Relations section of the website. I'll now turn it back over to Bill.

Thank you, Matts. I want to thank our team for the great start to 2026.

STAG has set the foundation of sustainable growth in 2026 and will continue to benefit from a strong balance sheet, ample liquidity, and broad market diversification. We will now turn it back to the operator for questions.

Hey, good morning, guys. Bill, you noted, similar to peers, that the leasing market is healthier here today.

I'm just kind of curious, you guys did maintain retention guidance and all your guidance, actually. I know you guys have an elevated expiration schedule this year, are you seeing quicker backfills on spaces that have come back to you or anything encouraging on that front?

Because I know you guys are a little bit worried about that as a source of occupancy downside.

Thanks, Craig. It's certainly a higher lease expiration year, and that's driving our occupancy guidance for the year.

With respect to what we're budgeting, it's still 9 to 12 months of lease-up time for assets when they go vacant. I will say we had good activity in Q4, that has continued in Q1.

We had a large amount of square footage leased in Q1, it was 6 million square feet. The activity is really strong.

We're seeing it from multiple industries. We're getting a lot of RFPs.

It feels really good. With all that being said, we have not changed our lease-up assumptions at this time.

The momentum from Q4 has continued into Q1 and into Q2.

Yeah. Then just follow-up here, you mentioned, I think, eight leases, 1.6 million square feet to data center supply tenants.

What markets are you seeing that in predominantly, and do you think that this is concentrated in your portfolio or grows a little bit as just the proliferation of data centers takes hold?

It certainly feels like it's going to continue to grow. South Carolina, we're seeing a lot of it.

We had three leases in South Carolina, two in the Greenville-Spartanburg market. Nashville, the lease we signed in Nashville was a data center-related tenant.

Then we saw some in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, one lease there. We had a lease we signed in Ohio and also in Charlotte.

It's really that Southeast, Midwest markets is where we're primarily seeing that demand, and that's where a lot of our portfolio is concentrated, we anticipate further demand from data center-related tenants.

Not to ask a third one, but what type of tenants are they? Are they 3PLs, or are they equipment manufacturers, or servicers?

Who are you leasing to?

One was a 3PL to one of the largest 3PLs in the world serving a Meta data center contract. We have some tenants that are distributing generators to data centers.

We have some light assembly of racking of power conversion systems in one of them. One's manufacturing battery components.

It's a variety of things supporting data center developments and just the operations. These are long-term leases.

The weighted average lease term is a little over eight years, and the leasing spreads we achieved on that 1.6 million square feet was about 35%. Good economics, long-term leases, strong credits backing these leases as well.

Great. Thank you.

Thanks, Craig.

Great, thank you. I appreciate the commentary on the leasing front.

It seems like it's been a good start to the year. I realize you've maintained your guide across the board, but maybe, Bill, if you can give us a sense of any updated thoughts on market rent growth expectations.

I think at the beginning of the year it seemed like you were flat to up 2%. Does it feel like we're above the midpoint on that?

I realize things can fluctuate around, but any commentary there would be helpful.

I think this is a part of the theme of Q1 calls, especially with us, where we just put out our annual guidance a couple months ago. We had pretty good insight into where things were trending to start the year.

Activity is probably a little bit stronger than what we initially thought, but with all that being said, we maintained our guidance really across all components of that. With respect to market rent growth, our guide was 0 to 2%.

We're going to maintain that guidance as well at this time. That will likely trend higher on a quarterly basis as we move through the year, as we see that market vacancy rate peak in the coming months.

Everything is panning out as we thought a couple months ago, maybe a little bit more optimism in the portfolio just given the activity we're seeing and the leases we're signing and discussions we're having with tenants. It's still early in the year, right?

We're two months past our original guidance we put out.

Great, that's helpful. Then maybe for my follow-up, you're at about 80% of your 2026 leasing goal, seems pretty good so far.

I don't want to put the cart before the horse, obviously, but as you look to maybe 2027, are you starting to have those conversations? Does it feel like, as you look even at the year ahead, you're running maybe ahead of where you were relative to expectations, or anything you can glean on maybe those '27 conversations would be helpful.

It's obviously a little early for '27, but we do, especially for renewals, we start those conversations typically 12 months in advance, when you look at our '27 leasing plan, we're about 25% through that at this point, and that's pretty comparable to the last few years.

Great, thanks so much.

Thank you.

Hey, good morning, guys. Maybe wanted to touch a little bit on what you're seeing on the acquisition front.

Is there any sort of change in the pool of assets you're looking at? With the increased demand environment, are you willing to take a little bit more value-add, or I guess bucket the development, value-add versus core acquisitions, and what you're underwriting today and how that's sort of trended over the last 90 days or so?

I'll let Mike jump in in terms of kind of what we're seeing broad-based, but with respect to identifying a certain profile of asset and focusing on that, we're fortunate enough that we've got the people, the processes in place, and the systems in place to underwrite a large number of transactions. We'll look at everything and, depending on what meets our criteria and if we can meet the price, then we'll buy it.

It's not like we're going to shift materially into value-add or materially into long-term stabilized leases. We'll acquire what meets our investment criteria at that time, but we'll look at everything.

Just one thing on the sourcing side, and then I'll pass over to Mike for more the broader view, is we did yesterday just acquire a piece of land adjacent to one of our buildings in Dallas, Texas. It's about a 300 the land is large enough to fit about a 340,000 square foot facility.

We're going to start development of that facility shortly. It's good to put that land under contract.

It's shovel-ready. That transaction is going to be about $38 million at a 7.4% yield on cost.

Excited to get that going, and that's just an example when we're looking at a number of development opportunities, we're looking at a number of value-add opportunities, stabilized opportunities, some small portfolios. It really depends on what meets that investment criteria.

If I didn't mention that piece of land is in Dallas, Texas, with that, I'll pass over to Mike to share any more commentary on that.

Sure, and I think another thing just to mention on that piece of land is that that's a committed build-to-suit where we already have a tenant committed for that building on the land that we just bought yesterday. Just looking nationally, it was a strong end to '25, Q4 came in from an investment sales perspective pretty strong.

That's carried over into Q1 of '26. That stability and momentum in the capital markets has resulted in an increase in confidence from both side buyers and sellers in the market, so that's also resulted in an uptick of deal flow, more buyers coming off the sidelines and into the market.

There's been good deal flow that we've seen in Q1, and that's continuing into Q2.

You see that in our pipeline, too. Our pipeline is $3.9 billion.

About 70% of that is the single transactions, 30% portfolios. Just on the seller side and buyer side, bid-ask spreads are pretty tight now.

We expect just the overall industrial transaction market to pick up here as we move through Q2.

That's helpful. Then, Bill, I know you've mentioned with some of these partnerships you've had with regional developers and sounds like Dallas might be an opportunity that you just locked in here as well.

I guess longer term, are you thinking about getting a little bit more concentrated now that you're building these relationships with these developers and I guess are you guys being a little bit more submarket focused and looking for a little bit more growth in markets and underwriting that? I guess more commentary there would be helpful, because that's something that we've talked about in the past,

but Just backing up on the piece of land we bought, that was sourced by us. We had a tenant in our portfolio that's on an adjacent site that wanted to do a build-to-suit, we were able to source the land and go through all the approval process.

That was done on balance sheet, that's not being partnered with anybody. With all of our developments, we look at the submarkets and make sure that those buildings fit the submarkets.

These buildings that we're putting up meet the teeth of demand in these markets, so that's first and foremost. We appreciate the partnerships we have with our development partners.

We want to grow those, we're trying to grow those, and in some respects we are growing those, and there's also some opportunities to expand partnerships with new partners. All that's on the table.

If you were to ask what's our best use of capital today, it's probably on the development side. Just this one in Dallas, it's a 7.4 yield.

That's our best use of capital. It's harder to acquire that land and takes longer to develop it, but we like the opportunity and we'll do it either on balance sheet or with existing partners or with new partners.

Appreciate the commentary. That's it for me.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks.

Hi. Good morning.

I guess first, Q1 same-store was pretty solid at 4.1%, though the guidance was unchanged at 3, suggesting somewhat of a possible slow down. Just can you talk about how you expect that to take shape, or how we should be thinking about the cadence of that metric for the rest of the year?

Absolutely. Good morning, Jason.

Cash same-store 4.1% in the first quarter is very healthy, but really what we need to do is talk about the economic impact of occupancy decline. In the first quarter, occupancy decline was only partially reflected in the same-store number, meaning a good portion of the non-renewals occurred near the end of the quarter.

Basically the second quarter is going to reflect the full impact of that vacancy. Put a different way, the 4.1% includes impact of the 60 basis points of average occupancy loss, not the 120 basis points of actual occupancy loss of period end.

All that's related to the first quarter. The 4.1% does not account for the fact that this space is vacant for an entire quarter.

First quarter cash same-store was fully anticipated, it was included in our guidance. As you said, we continue to expect cash same-store growth of 3% at the midpoint, no change to the guidance.

This was expected. It really comes down to the impact of occupancy over a full period.

Great, thank you. Then, secondly, could you just give us an update on where your embedded rent increases are trending for newly signed leases and also remind us what the average escalator is across the portfolio is at this point?

Absolutely. The weighted average escalator across the portfolio is 2.9%, almost 3%, and that's going to increase every quarter because every lease that we're kind of coming across our desk starts with a three.

Anywhere in the 3 to 3.5 range, call it 3 and 1/4 on average of leases that we are signing. Again, just mathematically, that 2.9% will continue to increase.

Great. Thanks again, guys.

Hey, good morning. Thanks, guys.

Matts, you just touched on this a little bit about the same-store, but just on the occupancy front, you started off the year with positive leasing, but had a few known move-outs in the back end of the quarter. How should we be thinking about the quarterly occupancy cadence just for the balance of '26, and as we look to the rest of the year, should we expect any additional known move-outs?

Exactly. With the known move-outs, we didn't change our guidance.

We're at 75% at the midpoint retention, which is basically spot-on what we've averaged as a public company, what you can see from many other institutional quality industrial portfolio. Look, the same-store experienced 60 basis points of average occupancy loss and 120 basis points of period end occupancy loss.

That resulted in 96.6% occupancy in the same store, and I just want to pause here, that's a very healthy level. As Bill mentioned, our budget assumed 9 to 12 months of lease-up, space that rolls vacant in our budget to lease up next year, not this year.

If we think about the cadence, we expect the trough occupancy to occur in the second quarter, with occupancy increasing during the second half of the year, and that basically squares with our view that at the end of this year, we're going to start to see equilibrium and market rent growth acceleration. Again, the change in occupancy is fully anticipated, we had messaged it, it's included in our initial guidance.

We continue to expect average occupancy in the same-store pool to be 96.5% with no change to our guidance.

Great. Thank you.

Then just going back to the increasing data center demand, how are you guys thinking about underwriting that tenant base in terms of power availability, building specs, CapEx needs, and credit duration, just versus traditional warehouse tenant?

One of the themes we're seeing across a lot of tenants is they want more power, right? Whether that's today or in five years in their lease term, maybe because they plan to automate their facility or whatnot, but power is certainly something tenants are looking for.

With respect to the spaces that we leased to the data center tenants, some of them had access power and some did not, it's your traditional warehouse that is just being used for a different use. It's same example we've had warehouses that were regional distribution centers, that second tenant was a light assembly tenant, and then the third tenant was warehousing, right?

These are functional buildings that can be used for multiple uses. We're just seeing an incremental demand driver from data center tenants.

Appreciate the time. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning. Just following up on the data center piece.

For the construction tenants that signed the longer-term leases, do you know if they're serving multiple data centers in the area, and if not, do you know if they'll be servicing the data centers' operations after the construction completes? I'm just curious about the kind of the sustainability of this new tailwind here.

Yeah. Some of them are servicing the data centers that are already complete, and it's just servicing their ongoing operations.

Some are servicing the development of it. Some are servicing multiple data centers, and some are servicing just one data center.

Where these warehouses are located, there's multiple demand drivers within those markets. We have at least two of these data center leases in the Greenville-Spartanburg market, and we've spoken about that market many times.

It's one of our top markets, and there's consumption in that market for warehousing and local distribution. There's regional distribution related to the inland port.

There's now data center demand there. There's the BMW plant that creates a lot of demand there.

These are functional buildings that can meet many of the demand drivers. There's just this incremental demand driver of data centers.

Great, thank you for the color. Then additionally, I was wondering if you could just kind of walk through your other markets and kind of highlight the ones with relative strengths and weaknesses right now.

Yeah. If you look at kind of markets that are a little weaker, we have one asset in San Diego that's proving to be a little challenging now.

Memphis is a little slower, Pittsburgh a little slower. I'd say our markets that have probably been improving the most: Greenville-Spartanburg and Charlotte.

Then, if you want to move a little further to our best markets, Houston's been a great market, Nashville, and the Midwest big-box distribution markets have really started to perform extremely well. That's a trend we're also seeing is big-box leasing has been strong, and a lot of these markets have very low vacancy rates for big-box distribution.

That's your Columbus, your Louisvilles, your Indys.

Great, super helpful color. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning. Just wondering about where you're seeing underlying private market valuation trends in your specific markets and if you're seeing them being impacted by really what's going on macroeconomically or geopolitically at the moment.

I assume you're talking cap rates, is just to clarify the question?

Yeah.

Yeah. Individual transactions, we just bought a one transaction in Q1, we're close to putting a couple others under LOI.

Those are transacting at around where we're buying assets, right? Sometimes, 25 basis points or 50 basis points inside of that, and that's why we don't win the deal, right?

They're trading at cap rates a little bit lower than what we're willing to pay. Then portfolios, because there's a lot of capital still chasing this asset class, we're still seeing a slight premium for portfolios.

Anywhere from a 25 to 50 basis point portfolio premium on private transactions.

Wonderful. That's good color.

That's all I had on that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody, for participating in the call. We appreciate the questions and look forward to seeing you all soon.

Thank you.