Jeffrey H. Fisher
Thank you very much, and I certainly appreciate everyone joining us here for our call today. Before talking about the fourth quarter specifically and our outlook for this year, I would like to spend just a few minutes highlighting some noteworthy as we look back at the last year. Operationally, it was a really good year for us to despite the extreme volatility that adversely impacted the industry and our top line. On the top line, for the fourth consecutive year, though, our RevPAR performance beat the industry, and we continued pushing our other operating profits, other department operating profits higher as well. Despite essentially flat RevPAR, and for this, we were really we were able to limit our GOP margin decline to only 20 basis points by staying laser focused on our staffing levels and improving productivity. Our labor and benefits costs actually declined slightly in 2026, offsetting wage increases of almost 4% in the year. And most importantly, for the first time since the pandemic, we generated the highest operating margins in the industry, reclaiming our top spot among the rankings that we held for an entire decade from 2010 to 2019. Looking ahead to this year, our hotel wages are reassessed in July each year and our wage increase for the 2025 is up only 2% versus the first half of the year, which means wage pressures are moderating throughout 2026. Strategically, we sold four of our older lower RevPAR hotels proceeds to reduce debt at an approximate cap rate of 6% and used those and to acquire shares under the repurchase plan we initiated in 2025. Since announcing the plan, we have repurchased approximately 1,800,000 shares, or approximately 4% of our outstanding shares, at an average price of $6.87 per share, for a total repurchase of almost $13,000,000, or just over half of our $25,000,000 plan. At our average acquisition price, those shares were acquired at an approximate 9.5% cap rate based on our 2026 corporate NOI guidance. And might be the only lodging REIT with an average repurchase price below current trading levels since peers initiated their repurchase plans. Using average multiples for the last 25 years, these repurchases certainly are going to be accretive. On the corporate side, we added 10 rooms to our portfolio by converting excess meeting space and other available spaces, which will deliver the best returns for those spaces in the hotels. We continue to participate in the GRESB Sustainability Benchmark and ranked 29th out of 95 listed companies. We completed the largest and most attractive financing in Chatham Lodging Trust’s history, with total capacity of $5,000,000,000 while reducing our overall borrowing costs, and we used proceeds from the sale of assets and free cash flow to reduce our net debt by $70,000,000 and further reduce our leverage ratio to a mere 20%. By the way, that leverage compares to almost 35% in 2019. All of these accomplishments allowed us to increase returns to our shareholders, and we were able to increase our common dividend by 28% in 2025. Including our repurchase plan and both common and preferred dividends, we returned approximately $35,000,000 to our shareholders. It was truly a great job by our teams at Island Hospitality and Chatham Lodging Trust staying in constant communication and on the same page delivering solid results throughout a very volatile year. As we move forward, we are confident in the industry long term. The supply-demand equation should benefit existing owners as construction costs remain quite high, and development is only justified in certain markets, GDP growth is healthy and should accelerate if even a portion of the trillions of dollars of announced investments in technology and reshoring of manufacturing come to fruition in the United States. Existing hotel owners should benefit via stronger RevPAR growth in the years ahead. We obviously need to be able to push those incremental revenue dollars down to GOP, and really, for the first time in almost a decade, wage pressures are mitigating to the lower single-digit range, which is vital given that labor costs are our largest expense. As we sit here today, we are in a great position to deliver earnings growth and shareholder returns in multiple ways. First, we will continue to repurchase shares and intend to utilize most, if not all, of our $25,000,000 plan this year. Second, operationally, we are positioned to outperform the industry on both top and bottom line. There was a lot of noise in 2025 that impacted RevPAR in some of our key markets, so, hopefully, things calm down this year. And if they do, our operating model is best at driving profits higher as we have demonstrated over and over again. Third, we will continue to opportunistically sell older non assets with the goal of reinvesting those proceeds into share repurchases or hotel investments. And on that front, we were disappointed not to make any external acquisitions in 2025, but sometimes the best deals are the ones that you do not do, and we never had enough conviction on any deals and chose to remain patient. With significant financial flexibility, we are confident that we can make some acquisitions in 2026 as financing costs have lessened and seller pricing expectations have adjusted somewhat from where we were a year ago. The markets, of course, will have to make sense for us. And we are looking for some continued diversification both in markets and demand generators. And of course, yields have to approximate the implied yield on buying our own stock. We want to invest in markets that are going to benefit from increased business investments which is generally the Central and Southeastern US. Lastly, we do expect to commence our Portland, Maine hotel development in the coming months with opening before the 2028 summer. As I stated earlier in my comments, hotel development really only makes sense in certain markets. And Downtown Portland happens to be one of them, especially considering we have no cost basis in the land. Our focus is on increasing shareholder returns and, in addition to the share repurchase program, we believe our initiatives should enable us to return even more money to our shareholders via further increased dividends this year. Before Dennis gets into the fourth quarter details, I do want to spend a few minutes talking about our largest market, Silicon Valley, its performance in 2025, and our outlook beyond. Silicon Valley is our largest market, and RevPAR grew only 1% in 2026. But it was a tale of two halves, as RevPAR was up 5% in the first half of the year and then we were off 4% in the third quarter and less than 1% in the fourth. Our Mountain View Residence Inn was under renovation for the last two months of 2025 and will remain under renovation through March. Also, if you recall from our third quarter call, we lost some business related to pricing strategies around a single corporate client at our two Sunnyvale hotels. Third quarter RevPAR was down 9% in the third quarter, and we did a great job replacing that business, or some of it, in the fourth, with RevPAR only down 1%. We will continue to feel some impacts in the first quarter of this year as to that account. But as the year progresses, our comps will get better, and we will benefit from World Cup schedule, and that sets up very well for our two Sunnyvale hotels. And of course, we remain very constructive on the Valley, and Mountain View, particularly, of course, is anchored by Google, Waymo, LinkedIn, Intuit, and several other firms that certainly provide a good steady source of demand for that hotel. Sunnyvale is quickly rebounding from the post-pandemic slumber. Sunnyvale's office market is rebounding faster than any other Silicon Valley market, and had 1,400,000 square feet of positive absorption last year. In 2025, Apple increased its square footage by over a million feet, and LinkedIn added to its campuses, and Applied Intuition, which is a $15,000,000,000 software company for self-driving cars, moved into Sunnyvale. And, of course, our largest client, Applied Materials, is building a $4,000,000,000 chip facility that is only a block or two away from our two Sunnyvale hotels. So we certainly look forward to continued better times over the next few years in the Valley. With that, I would like to turn it over to Dennis.