Equity Residential

Good day and welcome to the Equity Residential first quarter 2025 earnings conference call and webcast. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Marty McKenna. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thanks for joining us to discuss Equity Residential's first quarter 2025 results. Our featured speakers today are Mark Perel, our president and CEO, and Michael Manelis, our chief operating officer. Both Bob Garachana, our CFO, and Alec Brackenridge, our chief investment officer, are here with us as well for the Q&A. One of our peers will be hosting their call in an hour or so, so we plan to finish in time for that call to begin on time. To be respectful of time for today's Q&A, we are going to ask that you limit yourselves to one question and one follow-up, and we greatly appreciate your cooperation. Our earnings release is posted in the investor section of equityapartments.com. Please be advised that certain matters discussed during this conference call may constitute forward-looking statements in the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain economic risks and uncertainties. The company assumes no obligation to update or supplement these statements that become untrue because of subsequent events. Now, I will turn the call over to Mark Perel.

Thank you, Marty. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today to discuss our first quarter 2025 results. I will start us off, then Michael Manelis, our Chief Operating Officer, will speak to our first quarter operating performance, and then we'll go ahead and take your questions. Our first quarter results exceeded our expectations, and we are well positioned for the primary leasing season. Our operating dashboards continue to show good to excellent demand across all of our markets, with levels of supply the main differentiator in the strength of each market's performance. As is our usual practice in the first quarter, We have not made any changes to our guidance. Like most market participants, we see a higher than usual level of uncertainty in the forward path of the economy, given various recent governmental actions relating to tariffs and other matters. The impact of these actions on the larger economy and on our business are hard to estimate currently and will take some time to unfold. That said, Equity Residential will continue to benefit from powerful supply and demand tailwinds that favor the rental housing sector, including the long-term undersupply of rental housing in our markets, the high cost and low inventory of single-family owned housing, and demographic and social factors that are driving increased rental housing demand, especially for our higher quality communities located in our country's most desirable metro areas. Also being a strong cash flow business with a material dividend and fortress balance sheet and without foreign operations, in a time of heightened uncertainty is a definitive positive and may lead to opportunity later. Turning to investment matters, we have left unchanged our guidance for $1.5 billion of acquisitions and $1 billion of dispositions in 2025. When we gave guidance, we expected to transact very little in the first quarter, and that was the case. The institutional sales market in the first quarter was reasonably busy, with volumes higher than a year ago, but still below pre-COVID deal volume levels. Asset prices so far seem unaffected by higher rates and uncertainty. There are probably several factors at play here, including some sales that closed in the first quarter that were contracted for in an earlier, more stable time, or that involved mandatory reinvestment needs like Section 1031 exchanges. However, we also continue to see a significant number of buyers interested in investing in multifamily assets at five cap rates and below, given their stable cash flow and inflation protection characteristics and secular supply and demand tailwinds. If apartments continue to evolve as a safe haven trade in real estate and in an increasingly uncertain world, we would expect over time for our company's multiple to reflect that fact and to increase accordingly. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Michael Manelis.