CubeSmart

Good morning. Thank you for attending today's CubeSmart fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. My name is Alicia, and I'll 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 your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Josh Scherzer, Vice President of Finance with CubeSmart. You may now proceed.

Thank you, Alicia. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to CubeSmart's fourth 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 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 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 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 fourth quarter financial supplement posted on the company's website at www.cubesmart.com. I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks, Josh. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. Our fourth quarter results capped off another excellent year of performance by our CubeSmart platform, and I thank all of our teammates, for their dedication and outstanding customer service. Same-store revenue growth for the year came in at the high end of our guidance. Our focus on operational excellence contained expense growth to an annual rate of 3%, resulting in same-store NOI growth at 16.7 for the year coming in above our guidance. As we have performed our business planning and the related financial forecasts each of these last three years, we certainly have had to do so facing significant uncertainties surrounding the impact of COVID and the resulting changing consumer behaviors. Entering 2023, while many aspects of our business such as seasonality and delinquency have returned to more typical historical patterns, we certainly are faced with domestic economic uncertainty and the potential for geopolitical shocks. We believe that our strategy of owning a high quality portfolio in the best markets, maintaining a high quality balance sheet with conservative leverage and well staggered fixed rate maturities, and the fact that we foster an innovative culture consisting of high quality people and systems will, over the long term, produce above average risk adjusted returns throughout economic cycles. My message today will therefore sound familiar to those of you who have been valued stakeholders in CUBE over these last few years of robust outperformance. We believe our high quality stores located in submarkets with sector-leading demographics, have us in an excellent position entering 2023. The New York MSA, our largest market, is beginning to positively experience the waning impact of new supply. Operational performance remains steady, and we are starting to see the green shoots from recent supply deliveries leasing up nicely, and the new delivery pipeline has almost been exhausted. Our expectation is for absolute levels of growth to remain steady, and by the back half of the year, the New York City boroughs will be performing above the portfolio average. We're one year on from the storage west transaction, and we couldn't be more pleased with the assets and the strategic fit on our platform. As expected, despite the stabilized occupancies of the assets, there was significant upside to rents on our platform. These properties saw accelerating growth through the back half of 22, and they are well positioned for continued growth into 2023 and beyond with an expectation that they will be achieving a mid fours yield by the end of the year and generating meaningful accretion, given that we were able to lock in long-term capital, exceptional low rates, including our billion dollar bond deal, which had a weighted average yield of 2.45% and an average tenure of 8.4 years. We enter 2023 with 98% of our debt being fixed rate with a weighted average maturity of just over six years and net debt to EBITDA of 4.3 times. We have and will continue to focus on being operationally excellent. We enter 2022 with a thesis that businesses that operate lean and agile will be best positioned to succeed during a period of economic uncertainty. Our sector low expense growth and margin expansion in 2022 and our outlook for 2023 are reflective of that focus on operational efficiency. Such heady times as we've experienced over the last few years can make many strategies appear clever. We are seeing the benefit of our strategy as our sector-leading portfolio demographics continue to generate stable growth. While secondary and tertiary markets may generate elevated growth in boom times, there is increased risk and volatility to those cash flows during times of uncertainty, and we believe our focus on a high-quality portfolio in top markets will generate the most attractive long-term risk-adjusted returns. There is no doubt that when viewed through a historical lens, 2021, 2022, and in my opinion, 2023, will be judged among the best years for our business. In spite of uncertainty in the world, I believe that the industry, and Cube specifically, are well positioned entering 2023 to produce operating metrics above the historical 20-year average. We think this makes us an attractive option for investors, and we appreciate our valued stakeholders' support. With that, please allow me to turn it over to Tim Martin, our Chief Financial Officer, for additional commentary. on the quarter and on the year ahead.