Matthew Furbish - Vice President, Investor Relations Scott Bowman - President and CEO Nick Radesca - CFO, Treasurer and Secretary.

David Corak - FBR Capital Markets.

Good morning and welcome to the Global Net Lease Fourth Quarter 2016 Earnings Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will an opportunity to ask questions. Please note that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr.

Matthew Furbish, GNL’s Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead..

Thank you, Andrea. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to review Global Net Lease's earnings for the fourth quarter and full year 2016. With me today is Scott Bowman, GNL's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Nick Radesca, GNL's Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer and Secretary.

This morning's call is being webcast on our website at globalnetlease.com in the Investor Relations section.

Before I turn the call over to Scott, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements and assumptions in this earnings call which are not historical facts will be forward-looking and are being made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These forward-looking statements are subject to certain assumptions and risk factors, which could cause GNL's actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. The risk factors that could cause these differences are more fully discussed in our filings with the SEC.

In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this conference call are only made as of the date of this call. And as stated in our SEC reports, GNL disclaims any intent or obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements except as expressly required by law. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to GNL's CEO, Scott Bowman.

Scott?.

$150 million to $200 million in acquisitions which will primarily be focused on the U.S. market in the near term and we will continue to refine our portfolio with $50 million to $75 million in dispositions.

Again we remain excited about the growth opportunities ahead for the company and continue position ourselves to take full advantage of this market. We certainly look forward to updating you as the year continues and now let me turn it over to Nick for more detail on our results..

to lessen trading volatility in our common shares, essentially a tick up or down in stock price would represent less of a percentage move in a stock with a higher price. This has been done across a number of other publicly traded stocks, including our peers, and we believe it makes our stock friendlier for institutional investors.

The reverse split doesn't affect our business in any way and clearly the math makes sense and it was an easy housekeeping measure for us. Now let me give you an update on our comprehensive hedging program.

We continue to utilize a three part comprehensive hedging program designed to mitigate risk to our cash flows, risks to the value of our assets and fluctuations in our interest rates. This program has historically been highly effective for us.

Over the quarter we added to our tool chest the use of FX options to hedge currency risk on our net cash flows. These FX options protect against a drop in the value of the British pound sterling or the euro while giving GNL the opportunity to participate in the upside of currency movements.

Given the current volatility in the pound sterling and Euro, FX options married with our continued use of FX forwards and FX swaps are highly effective in creating consistency in our lease income.

We also continue to utilize interest rate swaps to effectively fix a large portion of our mortgage debt and maintain our use of asset liability matching to hedge the value of our European assets. Now let me turn the call back to Scott for some closing remarks..

Thank you Nick. Our strategy is stay consistent, focused on building a best-in-class portfolio of high quality, mission critical assets of long term leases to largely investment grade tenants, to effectively manage our balance sheet and best position the company for long term success.

We are optimistic about what we see as a very attractive real estate landscape and we have ample dry powder to execute on a number of initiatives that position the company for sustainable growth.

Looking forward, a top priority as Nick mentioned, is restructuring our debt over the next twelve months and preparing the company for discussions with rating agencies. In addition, we will continue to selectively fine tune our property portfolio while being opportunistic in our asset purchases and driving portfolio growth.

Finally before we open it up for questions, I'd like to step back and look at the unique opportunity we have in this market and our strategic advantages versus our peer group. GNL is a pure play real estate company focused exclusively on equity investments in properties. Our investment strategy affords us the flexibility to invest in the U.S.

and in Western Europe. Our portfolio is built on long duration leases to predominantly investment grade and implied investment grade tenants. We have the ability to access capital markets in both the U.S. and Europe. Our strong management teams are resident on both sides of the Atlantic.

That concludes our prepared remarks, so let's go ahead and open up the call for questions.

Andrea?.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from David Corak of FBR Capital Markets..

Good morning guys. Just looking at your kind of acquisition appetite and the guidance you gave, obviously your appetite has gone up a little bit here with that guidance.

But how do you think about utilizing the ATM and what’s your funding look like for that? And then is that ATM decision purely based on where you trade versus NAV or is there more math to that if you could just give some color around, that’d be great?.

Sure. Thanks, David. I'll start out and then I'll turn it over to Nick. We feel very good about the market now. We've been active in the market for some time and see some really terrific opportunities for us to accretively grow the GNL portfolio. With regard to the ATM, yes we have not yet sold shares across the ATM.

We do think at some point it is important for us not only to be able to provide capital for growth and other strategic purposes for GNL but also just to demonstrate access to the capital markets. It's a tool for us, we have not yet made a final decision on timing, we’d continue to monitor it.

But it is an opportunity for us at the appropriate time to drive growth for GNL. And I will see if Nick has any other thoughts to add..

Sure. Thanks for the question David. I don't know that it's a pure mathematical equation.

Obviously at the higher stock level, it makes a lot of sense to be able to tap the equity markets but for the reason Scott outlined, I think a temperate approach to start to raise capital through equity, even if it’s slightly accretive makes a lot of sense for us..

Okay, so opportunistic in the usage there.

So can you just talk about kind of progress on the milestones associated with reaching investment grade status and then kind of on that note, any change in your thoughts on potential financing activities, not necessarily equity but on the debt stack given the move-in rates and so forth?.

Nick, do you want to go ahead and take that?.

Sure. We expect in the near term to begin discussions with the credit facility providers. We’d like to extend maturity of our credit facility as well as seek out probably initially from the bank community some term debt as well. I don't think any recent rates will keep us away from that strategy.

And we believe that getting a facility in place that has a longer term than our current facility and having some term debt in place as well as possibly accessing the equity markets through the ATM really get us in position to have serious discussions with the rating agencies to prepare us for investment grade rating.

At the same time keeping our debt metrics in line is a balancing act to continue to drive earnings on a per share basis, yet rein in some of the use of debt so that the ratios are more favorable, is our goal and what we're modeling out for the next twelve months..

And then I would assume pricing on that kind of term out debt would be slightly more attractive than kind of unsecured private placement paper but a little bit above the current line of credit..

That's what we're hearing but the proof is in the pudding, right. We'll be back to you on that as it starts to transpire..

Sorry, David, just to add to that.

The expectation is the term and the facility would be fully unsecured and then in addition to that to help to manage costs we're looking at some of our older GNL debt, that came on line early in the process of building this portfolio in Europe where we've seen substantial reduction in cost of debt and believe that we can use some refinancing of that debt not only to extend term but also to arbitrage the overall cost of debt as we execute the plan that Nick was talking about..

Right, okay. That makes sense.

And while we're on Europe, can you just talk a little bit, Scott, about the cap rate environment over there in your markets and some of the new markets that you've got, specifically any movement I guess since the last time we were all together?.

Sure, thanks David. So we see the markets that we're in, in Europe remaining strong. As part of our asset recycling program we sold one of our European assets and by the way just for everybody, when we release 10-K that will show and I believe it is footnote four by asset details of the asset recycling program.

But we had a very good result on the asset that we sold in the Netherlands. We've had numerous in-bound inquiries on assets within our portfolio that we have chosen to hold in our portfolio at substantially higher rate.

So I think the best way to answer your question, not only is, with real data points but also to say we're fortunate that we don't own any financial services assets in London or any assets at all in London and in the markets that we're in, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, we see very strong and stable markets and we continue to be interested by the consistency of the markets and our ability to continue to accretively investigate the market even though for right now we see it as a good time to invest in the U.S.

and we have been underwriting a number of assets in the U.S. and we'll probably talk more about that in the coming months..

I mean just on that, can you give any color about kind of industries or property types that you would be -- that you're looking at in the U.S., just generally high level speaking?.

Yeah, I think right now, David, we have been very comfortable in the 50% office because it's long duration leases to high quality tenants .With the acquisition of Global II, some of the strongest assets in Global II, like ING’s corporate IT headquarters in Amsterdam pushed that percentage up a little bit.

So we're looking across our metrics but we're looking very heavily at some distribution assets in the U.S. that seem like they would be great additions to our portfolio. But again we'll have more to specifics for you at a future date. End of Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] This concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Scott Bowman for any closing remarks..

Thank you, Andrea. And I want to, again, take this opportunity to thank everyone for joining us today. We look forward to continuing to update you throughout the year. I hope you'll have a great day. And now let me turn it over to Matt..

Thanks Scott and Nick, and Andrea, and thank you everyone for joining us today. As always, our management team is available to speak with you should you have any follow-up questions. If so, please don't hesitate to contact me directly at 917-475-2153. Have a great day..

Thank you, Mr. Furbish. As a reminder, this conference call will be available for replay beginning approximately one hour after this call. Dial-in for replay is 1-877-344-7529 with the confirmation code of 10101329. Again the dial-in for replay is 1-877-344-7529 with the confirmation code of 10101329. The conference has now concluded.

Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines..