Invitation Homes Inc.

Greetings and welcome to Invitation Home Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode at this time. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Greg Van Winkle, Vice President of Corporate Strategy strategy, capital markets, and investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. On today's call from Invitation Homes are Dallas Tanner, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ernie Friedman, Chief Financial Officer, and Charles Young, Chief Operating Officer. I'd like to point everyone to our fourth quarter 2020 earnings press release and supplemental information, which we may reference on today's call. This document can be found on the investor relations section of our website at www.invh.com. I'd also like to inform you that certain statements made during this call may include forward-looking statements relating to the future performance of our business, financial results, liquidity and capital resources, and other non-historical statements. which are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes or results to differ materially from those indicated in any such statements. We describe some of these risks and uncertainties in our 2019 Annual Report on Form 10-K, our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended September 30, 2020, and other filings we make with the SEC from time to time. Invitation Homes does not update forward-looking statements and expressly disclaims any obligation to do so. During this call, we may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. You can find additional information regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measures, and our earnings release and supplemental information, which are available on the investor relations section of our website. I'll now turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Dallas Tanner.

Thank you, Greg. I'd like to thank you for joining us this morning. I hope you're all doing well and staying safe. It's an exciting time at Invitation Homes as we enter 2021 with positive momentum, accelerating fundamentals, and the opportunity to grow our best in class platform. We feel well positioned for another year of strong organic growth. At the same time, We're entering the new year more active in the acquisition market than we have been in years. We also see exciting opportunities in front of us to further elevate our resident experience. Before discussing the path ahead, though, I want to take a moment to reflect on the unique year we just completed. 2020 was a year in which the durability of our business was tested and validated, and in which the value of our differentiated product, service, and people resonated with residents and communities more than ever. I'd like to highlight a few of these accomplishments. We achieved record high same store occupancy that increased every month in 2020 and ended the year at 98.3%. We executed well to capture market rent growth, which accelerated to a high of 5% on a blended basis in the month of December. We maintained rent collections around 97% of our historical rate throughout the pandemic. As a result, we met the midpoint of our initial 2020 guidance, growing AFFO 4.6% despite the disruption in the world that was around us. We also raised nearly $700 million of equity and formed a joint venture with a world-class partner to support external growth. With these tools, we ramped up acquisitions to our fastest pace since 2014, buying over $350 million of homes in the fourth quarter alone. At the same time, we decreased net debt to EBITDA in 2020 by almost a full turn. Finally, of all of our 2020 accomplishments, I'm most proud of the positive impact we made in our communities. We served as a port in the storm for residents, delivering comfortable homes and genuine care when it mattered the most. We worked to create solutions for residents experiencing hardship. We kept our residents and associates safe by reacting quickly to enhanced safety protocols and leveraging the advantage of our virtual leasing and self-show technology. And in doing this, we were able to achieve all-time high resident satisfaction scores. As proud as I am of our team for what we have accomplished together in 2020, I'm even more excited as I look ahead. Industry fundamentals are in our favor, with more and more of the millennial generation coming our way. COVID appears to have been beneficial for demand, but we believe its impact has simply been to accelerate a shift from dense urban housing to single-family housing that was already poised to take place over the next many years. As such, we believe it is quite possible that single-family will hold on to the share gains it picked up in 2020. Our home's compatibility with a work-from-home lifestyle and the relative affordability of our square footage when compared to other residential alternatives give us even greater conviction that we are favorably positioned for a world ahead in which people rethink the ways they use space to work and to play. Put simply, We see ourselves as a solution to changing preferences, demographics, and housing supply demand imbalances for years to come. In addition, we believe our differentiated locations, scale, and local expertise give us an advantage in turning these favorable industry fundamentals into even better results for our residents and for our shareholders. One of the ways we'll do that is by continuing to focus on the resident experience. In 2020, we rolled out new ancillary services for residents, including smart home enhancements and a convenient HVAC filter delivery service. In 2021, we'll continue down the path toward expanding additional ancillary options. We're also working to enhance the technology experience through which our associates deliver those services and through which our residents actually interact with Invitation Homes, with a particular emphasis on web and mobile capability. on top of creating a better experience for residents we're growing our portfolio to serve more residents and widen the scale advantages that allow us to serve residents this efficiently in the fourth quarter of 2020 we purchased approximately 1200 homes which is more homes than we have acquired in any quarter since the second quarter of 2014. i want to stress that we have elevated our acquisition pace while maintaining our underwriting discipline we estimate a mid five stabilized cap rate on homes acquired in the fourth quarter consistent with our track record over the last several years we believe it continues to be a great time to grow the portfolio through our proprietary acquisition iq technology local relationships and experience across multiple acquisition channels and see the opportunity to acquire at least one billion dollars of homes this year between our joint venture and the wholly owned portfolio in closing I'm excited and optimistic about the future as we carry the strong momentum we generated in 2020 into the new year. With record high occupancy, strong organic growth fundamentals, external growth in a high gear, and initiatives in progress to enhance our resident experience, I'm thrilled with how we are positioned entering 2021. I want to say thank you to our exceptional associates for helping put us in this position. Their commitment to genuine care throughout the pandemic has been inspiring, and it makes me feel even more confident about the heights we can reach together in our future. With that, I'll turn it over to Charles Young, our Chief Operating Officer.