CubeSmart

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jordan, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the CubeSmart fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call over to Josh Schutzman, Senior Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jordan. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to QSMART's fourth quarter 2025 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 8K we filed this morning, together with our earnings release filed with the Form 8K, and the risk factors 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 fourth quarter financial supplement posted on the company's website at www.qsmart.com. I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. We are encouraged heading into 2026 that fundamentals have stabilized and we are positioned to return to growth. Operating metrics have seen improvement over the last couple of quarters. and now that's beginning to flow through to financial metrics. Our more stable urban markets in the Northeast and Midwest continue to outperform, while our more transient supply impacted markets across the Sun Belt and the West Coast are beginning to see green shoots in the form of second derivative improvement. Across all our markets, Our existing customer metrics remain strong, with no change to attrition rates or credit. 2025 was a year of stabilization for demand trends. Overall demand patterns were more consistent throughout the year, and the environment has been more constructive, leading to move-in rates in the back half of the year moving positive year over year. The trend in move-in rates has been very encouraging, with year-over-year quarterly growth improving from minus 10% in the fourth quarter of 2020, improving to minus 8.3% in the first quarter of 2025, improving again to minus 4% in the second quarter of last year. continuing to improve and turning positive at plus 2.5% in the third quarter of 2025 and increasing that positive momentum at plus 2.8% in the fourth quarter of 2025. In the early part of 2026, we have seen similar trends with the occupancy gap continuing to narrow with positive move-in rates. Specifically, The occupancy gap at the end of January of this year improved from year end when it was down 70 basis points to end January at 88.7%, 40 basis points below January of 2025, with rental and vacate trends consistent with our experience during 25. With a few days left here in February, overall trends continue to be encouraging, with the occupancy gap continuing to narrow. and the quarter-to-date move-in rate trend continuing to be positive with year-over-year move-in rates growing generally in line with what we reported with fourth quarter results. Improvement in operating fundamentals is beginning to show up in the financial results. It will be steady, gradual improvement as we typically turn over approximately 5% of our cubes in any given month. We started to see that momentum play through in the fourth quarter, and would expect that gradual improvement to continue through 2026. Demand does vary across markets and submarkets, with continued outperformance from core urban markets in the Northeast and Midwest, and more supply impacted through the Sun Belt and Southwest. However, we saw improvements in fundamentals across many markets, with over 75% of our top 25 markets seeing revenue growth accelerate from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2025. As trends in our markets have been quite positive over the last four or five months, I am optimistic that we are inflecting and see a path to return to more historical levels of revenue and not net operating income growth. In 2026, only 19% of our same stores are projected to face an impact of new supply. the lowest percentage since we began articulating this metric back in 2017. The magnitude of the impact of this competitive supply continues to lessen as more of the deliveries in that three-year rolling impact are from two or three years ago and those stores are beginning to reach their first level of occupancy stabilization. Our highest quality portfolio and best-in-class operating platform along with a seasoned management team with senior leadership having multiple decades of experience across cycles against the backdrop of declining impact of new supply and more constructive operating fundamentals has us well positioned to take on any challenges and maximize all opportunities through 2026. Now I'd like to turn it over to Tim Martin for insight on our thoughts on capital allocation and guidance for 2026.