Equity Residential

Stand by. Good day and welcome to the Equity Residential 1Q2026 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Marty McKenna. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thanks for joining us to discuss Equity Residential's first quarter 2026 results. Our featured speakers today are Mark Perel, our President and CEO, and Michael Manelis, our Chief Operating Officer. Brett McLeod, our TFO, and Bob Garachana, our Chief Investment Officer, are here with us as well for the Q&A. 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 within 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 2026 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 operating results met our expectations with strength in San Francisco and New York. driving our same store revenue performance. These two markets share common elements of strong demand from our target higher earning renter demographic for our well-located apartment homes and low levels of new supply. So let me spend a few minutes now talking about why we are excited for the setup for our business in the back half of 2026 and into 2027. As I said on our last call, we expect deliveries in our markets to be down 35% in 2026 versus 2025. And the forecast for expected future deliveries continues to show substantial declines over the next few years, creating a very positive trend line for our business. Also, our higher earning customer demographic continues to demonstrate solid financial health with rising incomes, and we also see lower delinquency across our portfolio. Then there is a single family for sale market that continues to be a challenge in terms of both cost and inventory, translating into customers renting for longer and leading to our record low turnover levels and strong renewal rates. With all those positives, the one missing ingredient is an accelerating job market and current signals there remain mixed. That said, we do see some green shoots in the form of postings on the Indeed job site, for tech roles and other similar high-earning jobs rising substantially across many of our markets since November of 2025. That provides us cautious optimism, even in the face of recent job cut announcements at big tech firms. But with a portfolio that is more than 96% occupied with much lower levels of new apartment supply for the foreseeable future and limited owned housing choices, It will not take a lot of new jobs to drive more widespread, strong operating performance in the future. On the transactions front, we did not acquire or sell any assets in the first quarter. We did update our transaction guidance for the rest of the year to reflect the likely sale of a couple of properties. This is a continuation of our process of improving the portfolio by selling older capital-intensive assets or assets in places where we have heavy concentrations. As we previously disclosed, we repurchased $220 million of our common shares during the first quarter, bringing total repurchase activity to $500 million since August of 2025. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Michael Manelis.