Good day and welcome to the LHO First Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Max Leinweber, Vice President of Finance and Asset Management. Please go ahead sir.

Thank you Leanne. Good morning everyone and welcome to the first quarter 2018 earnings call and webcast for LaSalle Hotel Properties. I'm here today with Mike Barnello, our President and CEO; and Ken Fuller, our CFO. Mike will begin by providing a summary of the quarter and our results. He will then dive into a brief overview of the industry and macro landscape, discuss our first quarter results and activities and then provide an update on our 2018 full-year and Q2 outlook.

Ken will then provide details on our portfolio performance and then update on our balance sheet for the first quarter. Then we will open the call for Q&A. Before we start, please take note of the following. Any statements that we make today about future results and performance or plans and objectives are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ as a result of factors, risks and uncertainties over which the company may have no control. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially are discussed in the company's 10-K, quarterly reports and it's other reports filed with the SEC.

The company disclaims any obligation or undertaking to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Our SEC reports as well as our press releases are available on our website lasallehotels.com. Our most recent 8-K and today's press release include reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to most comparable GAAP measures.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike Barnello. Mike?

Thanks Max and good morning everyone. We're pleased with our results this quarter which meaningfully exceeded on our expectations. As we detailed for you in February, the combination of renovations and integrations contributed to some noise in the quarter. When you strip out the noise and look at the performance, we're very encouraged by the results which appear to be continuing into the second quarter.

These developments are significantly more positive than we expected just two months ago, especially the corporate international segments of our business. There are number of promising market and performance drivers positively impacting our business.

With the bulk of our renovation noise behind us and a rebound in the market sooner than we expected, we're happy with what we're seeing for the remainder of the year. Our positivity is bolstered by the best quarter New York market has had in five years, the start of the ramp-up in demand in San Francisco, and the strong overall performance in our urban markets in March and April. As a result, we've raised our first year outlook -- full year outlook.

Importantly, we achieved financial results above our expectations, including flat RevPAR year-over-year, excluding affected and under-renovation properties. In terms of the macro economy, for the S&P 500, first quarter profits are estimated to grow 24%, one of the highest growth rates