CubeSmart

Good morning. Thank you for attending today's CubeSmart first quarter 2022 earnings call. My name is Nate and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on the telephone keypad. I would like to now pass the conference over to our host, Josh Schutzer, VP of Finance with CubeSmart. Josh, please go ahead.

Thank you, Nate. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to CubeSmart's first quarter 2022 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 risk 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 documents the company furnishes to or files with the Securities 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 factors 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.cubesmart.com. I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you, Josh. Thank you all for participating as we launch the earning season for the self-storage sector. We consider the first quarter to have been a very solid one, as evidenced by our 23.4% growth in quarterly FFO per share and 21.4% same-store net operating income growth. as we continue to execute on our business plan. Our consumer demand trends remain very healthy. We experience positive rental trends across all of our markets. Those positive demand trends have continued into April, and we are optimistic for a successful, busy spring and summer rental season. Tim will provide detail and color on our financial results and our improved outlook for the balance of the year. Looking beyond quarterly results, we believe the self-storage industry and Cube specifically are uniquely and perhaps best positioned to benefit from the current uncertain economic climate. An inflationary cost environment combined with a rapid escalation in real interest rates should create a bit of a headwind that will limit future new self-storage developments to only those markets and locations that developers believe can grow rental rates sufficient to generate attractive pro forma returns. What we are seeing and hearing from folks currently in market bidding out new construction projects is that hard costs have escalated above inflationary levels and continue to escalate, and rates on construction financing are now in the 5 percent range and rising. This hypothesis, if proven correct, should create a smooth path for owners of existing self-storage assets to continue to enjoy solid performance over the next several years. In the event the aggressive Fed actions push the economy into a recession, we believe our Q portfolio, given our focus on high-quality assets and primary markets with lower volatility, should outperform those portfolios that have benefited from the exposure to lower-quality markets during the recent cycle. Pandemic-induced consumer trends have created an environment in which we in the self-storage sector and Qube specifically have outperformed other real estate classes We believe that the current macroeconomic environment, when combined with our sophisticated operating platform, has the potential to lead to continued outperformance relative to other sectors. With that, let me turn it over to Tim for some color on our results.