CubeSmart

Good day, and welcome to the CubeSmart first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the store key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press store, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press store, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Josh Schutzer, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ian. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to QSMART's first quarter 2021 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.qsmart.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 could cause our actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements are provided in the documents the company furnishes to or files with the Security and Exchange Commission, specifically the Form 8-K we filed this morning, together with our earnings release filed with the Form 8-K, and the risk factor section of the company's annual report on Form 10-K. 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 first quarter financial supplement posted on the company's website at www.keepsmart.com. I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks, Josh, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. I'm pleased to report that Fundamental Trends, in the self-storage industry continue the positive momentum that began in the second half of last year. Going back to the mid-second quarter of 2020 and continuing through today, our strategy here at Cube was and continues to be a fairly aggressive approach to effective rates for new customers. Continuing that rate strategy in 2021 reflects our belief that the strong demand and net rental trends will continue through the traditional spring and early summer busy season. To place that in perspective, during the first quarter, our average offered net effective rates for new customers in the same store pool were up over the first quarter of last year in the high 20% range and ended the quarter up over 40% compared to the end of the first quarter of last year. Given the disruption and uncertainty we have all experienced over the last four quarters, our 6.7% first quarter same store revenue growth and our above sector average same store revenue growth over the last four quarters, we believe is a reflection of our high quality systems and dedicated marketing, business intelligence and operation teams. Our external growth teams are also extremely busy and focus on executing on our strategy of disciplined growth in high-quality assets. Our third-party management team onboarded 31 new stores to our platform during the quarter, split roughly 70-30 between newly developed and existing open and operating stores. The pipeline of future opportunities continues to remain very robust. Our expectation is that in 2021, supply deliveries continue to decline from their 2019 peak in our core markets. Interestingly, when looking at our population of third-party management opportunities for proposed new developments, we are continuing to see a gradual shift away from the top 25 MSAs and towards MSAs 26 through 100. We remain disciplined in our underwriting on acquisitions. After an extremely busy fourth quarter for on-balance sheet acquisitions, Our activity during the first quarter occurred with our longstanding partner through both an existing and a newly formed joint venture. We anticipate continuing to utilize our joint ventures primarily to acquire self-storage facilities that are more recently developed and that have not yet reached economic stabilization. We are very positive about our first quarter performance and strong April trends, and we believe we are well-positioned heading into the busy rental season. Thanks for listening, and I will now turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Tim Martin.