Christine C. Mastandrea
Good morning, everyone. On the leasing front, we had a strong quarter, and we're accelerating as we close in on year-end. We signed $29.1 million in total lease value with spreads on new leases at 22.5% and renewals at 18.6% for a combined 19.3% on a straight-line leasing spreads. Same-store NOI growth was 4.8% for the quarter, allowing us to raise the lower end of the same-store NOI growth target by 50 basis points. Foot traffic across the portfolio was up 4% versus the third quarter of 2024. That's a good indicator we've got in terms of the health of the consumer specific to our footprint and our locations. What we're seeing in terms of successful tenants right now are those that are successfully expanding on their offerings. For restaurants, delivery services have gone from a nice add to a critical component of the business. In addition, we continue to see an expansion of beauty, health, wellness, fitness and see the spend on overall health and mental wellness continues to increase. Understanding these avenues for the tenant success is critical for Whitestone to stand top as we curate our centers to the neighborhood needs. On the redevelopment front, we've completed the facade renovation at La Mirada, which puts us on track to finish this by year-end. And at Lion Square, the transformation of striking is about 75% complete. With the redevelopment at Lion Square, the grocery we brought in last year at Sun Wing will expand, creating value by making this grocery-anchored center the heart of Houston's Asia town. Now we're kicking off the facade work at Terravita, which we talked about on the second earnings call, bringing in the Pickler and ACE hardware. This will further accelerate the transformation of the center, which is experiencing dynamic growth as a result of TSMC's nearby semiconductor fabrication facility. We also generally move a couple of pads into action each year. This year, we created a pad at Lakeside in Dallas and brought in Central National Bank on that pad. We also signed a tenant for a pad at Scottsdale Commons. As a reminder, we purchased Scottsdale Commons in 2024, so the creation of the new pad represents a significant value creation pretty rapidly post acquisition. We anticipate bringing a couple of pads -- additional pads online in 2026 as well. We continue to see pickleball succeed as the demand with the younger demographic accelerates. We're looking at bringing pickleball on the roof of Boulevard, which is adding value to where we had no income stream for that square footage previously and welcome this as an opportunity to add value also for the office community in the area. On the last several calls, we've talked about the intentional design of our business model to benefit from change, both in terms of change allowing us to enhance our growth trajectory and change enabling us to ensure more durable cash flows, a key component of what we do proactively tracking and understanding consumer behavior and capitalizing on that knowledge, we will see change as the result of 3 primary forces. First, change is a result of generational shifts as the younger generations step up into new roles, both as consumers and business owners. Two, migratory change as consumers move to more business-friendly areas and take advantage of opportunities there, such as our markets and what we've seen over the last number of years. And number three, technological change as both consumers and businesses become more sophisticated in utilizing technology and as spending patterns shift accordingly. Both generational change and migratory change show up in the Esri data, heavily used by our acquisitions team and our leasing team. Migratory change is a bit slower moving, but also critically component for acquisition team to get it right. The Houston metro area has added nearly 2 million people over the last 15 years, while the Phoenix Metro area has added 1 million residents during that time as well. Ensuring we benefit from that phenomenal growth is very important in terms of Whitestone's success. All 3 types of change also impact the consumer data that we -- and traffic data that we follow and Pacer AI. This is critical for leasing, but is key in our underwriting process. Our assessment of the business' ability to meet the future consumer demands weighs heavily into our decisions to move forward on any lease we sign. For all of our leasing agents, our weekly leasing meetings provide an opportunity to discuss what changes we're seeing as they interact with their neighborhoods and the tools they're using to evaluate those changes around our centers. The biggest takeaway for investors here is that our ability to translate change into a higher same-store NOI growth starts with our assets and our business model, but also relies heavily on technology, but ultimately needs to be embedded in our culture and our processes to which Whitestone delivers our results. We delivered strong finishes in both 2023 and 2024, and the team here is pushing hard to take advantage of the year-end dynamics and close leases. And with that, I turn it over to Scott to cover the financials.