CubeSmart

Good day and welcome to the Keep Smart second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-turned phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. Now I'd like to turn the conference over to Josh Schutzer, Senior Director of Finance. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Cole. Hello, everyone, and good morning. Welcome to QSMART's second quarter 2020 earnings call. Participants on today's call include Chris Marr, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tim Martin, Chief Financial Officer. Our prepared remarks will be followed by a Q&A session. In addition to our earnings release, which was issued yesterday evening, Supplemental operating and financial data is available under the investor relations section of the company's website at www.cubesmart.com. The company's remarks will include certain forward-looking statements regarding earnings and strategy that involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. The risks and factors that can cause our actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements are provided in documents the company furnishes to or files with the Security and Exchange Commission specifically the Form 8K we filed this morning, together with our earnings release filed Form 8K, and the risk factor section of the company's annual report on Form 10K. In addition, the company's remarks include reference to non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in the second quarter financial supplement posted on the company's website at www.keepsmart.com. I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks, Josh. Good morning, everyone. I will begin by recognizing our 3,100 teammates across the country. We've had to change the way we do, but along the way, our mission has been our guide, and together we've been simplifying challenges, creating innovative solutions, and delivering unparalleled service. Tim will provide insight into the second quarter results. From a high-level perspective, rentals hit the bottom in April, rates in May, and both began to recover in June. Given July was our first month of what we would consider more normal pre-COVID operations, I will focus my comments on trends we observed post the end of the second quarter. Positive year-over-year demand trends, which began in June, continued to show strength in July, with same-store move-ins up 3.8% over July of 2019. We resumed our normal lean process in June, and made significant progress in addressing our past due customers in July. We expect to conclude the process substantially at the end of August, certainly by the end of the third quarter, at which point we anticipate our receivables returning to more normal pre-COVID levels. Our July same-store vacates were down 7.7% year-over-year, partially reflective of the status of our auction process, but also reflective of continued increases in length of stay. Our same-story year-over-year net effective rents for new customers shifted into positive territory in July, up 2.5% on average for the month compared to July of 2019, and ended the month up approximately 7% compared to the last day of July 2019. As we noted in our press release, we resumed more traditional pre-COVID operations processes by the end of June. During the month of July, and into early August, rate increase letters were sent to all of our customers, including those remaining in our portfolio for whom we had paused the process in mid-March. We anticipate that the rent roll will be fully caught up with rate increases by the end of the quarter. We continue to innovate at a rapid pace, reaping the benefits of investments we have made in our technology stack, revenue management, and marketing automations. Smart Rental, our online contact-free experience, accounted for approximately 25% of our rental volume during the quarter. We remain cautiously optimistic. Our industry has been and remains very resilient. We are keeping a watchful eye on customer behavior in light of continuing uncertainty around government stimulus, the opening and closing of schools and segments of our economy, and the varying impact the pandemic is having in each region of our country. We believe that the breadth of our need-based customer, the quality of our portfolio, the strength of our balance sheet, and the investment we have made in our people and our systems will continue to create value for all of our stakeholders. Thank you, and with that, I'll turn the call over to Ken.