Invitation Homes Inc.

Good morning or good afternoon all, and welcome to today's call, the Invitation Homes Fourth Quarter 2021 Results Call. My name is Azim and I'll be your operator today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A portion of today's call, you may do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to Scott McLaughlin to begin. So Scott, please go ahead when you're ready.

Good morning and welcome. I'm here today from Invitation Homes with Dallas Tanner, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Charles Young, Chief Operating Officer, and Ernie Friedman, our Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we may reference our fourth quarter 2021 earnings release and supplemental information. This document was issued yesterday after the market closed and is available on the investor relations section of our website at www.invh.com. Certain statements we make 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 described some of these risks and uncertainties in our 2020 Annual Report on Form 10-K 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. We may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures during the call. You can find additional information regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures in yesterday's earnings release.

With that, let me turn the call over to Dallas. Thanks, Scott, and good morning to all of you joining us today. In my remarks this morning, I'd like to share several thoughts and highlights from this past year and also take a look at the year ahead. To start, we continue to be impressed with the level of demand we are seeing for high quality housing that focuses on functional living with the flexibility of a leasing lifestyle. It's this strong demand that's helped us maintain our same store occupancy above 98% for the entire year in 2021 and also taken our average market rents to over $2,000 a month this past quarter. As a result, our core FFO per share increased 16% from the prior year. And thanks to the execution of our teams, we were able to deliver full year 2021 same store revenue and NOI growth at the high end of our expectations. During 2021, we acquired 4,800 homes, which was roughly double our original guidance at the beginning of the year. With an average cost basis of over $400,000 and an acquisition cap rate of over 5%, We believe our home buys were among the highest quality of those bought by our industry peer group and accretive to both earnings and NAV. I'd like to mention a few additional highlights from this past year. We achieved three investment grade ratings. We made significant investments in technology, including the introduction of our new mobile maintenance app, and we continue to work on adding amenities and services that improve our residents' experience, such as offering great pricing on pest control and other services by using the value of our size and our scale. We also made great strides with regards to ESG, where we improved our disclosures and scoring and launched two big initiatives. First, our Step Up, Stand Out program in partnership with SkillsUSA, which encourages and supports careers in the skilled trades. And second, our Green Spaces program, which is dedicated to the development and improvement of outdoor community spaces within our markets. So while our teams did an outstanding job in 2021, it's time to look ahead. Demographics remain solidly in our favor. The leading edge of the millennial generation is now starting to reach our average resident age of 39 years old. In addition, migration trends continue to result in significant household and job shifts to the southeast, southwest, and sunbelt. At the same time, many Americans are showing a preference to lease their home so they can have more space and live in great neighborhoods with improved access to better schools, jobs, and transportation. By contrast, housing supply in the US continues to be a challenge for a variety of reasons, and those challenges are even more pronounced within our markets. We believe it's imperative that we play a more significant role in bringing new housing supply to the market, along with helping to provide additional housing solutions around flexibility and choice. Let me offer two examples. The first is our commitment to invest in new housing supply. As you know, we've chosen to focus on being the best owner and operator of single family for lease housing. So when it comes to building new product, we believe it's better to partner with the best home builders rather than competing with them directly in the home building space. Last year, we announced our strategic relationship with Pulte Homes, which amplified our new home acquisition pipeline and gave us additional strategic opportunities for future growth. In addition to that important relationship, we're also working with other home builders across the country to help them break ground on new communities where they are strongly needed. At the end of last year, we were under contract on over 1,700 of these new build homes in eight of our existing markets, while staying true to our criteria for location and risk adjusted return. We expect to see delivery of these new homes beginning in 2022 and accelerating in future years. The second example involves our commitment to expanding opportunities for choice. Earlier this month, we announced that we're the lead investor in Pathway Homes. Pathway's mission is to make homeownership more attainable for more families. They do this by working directly with aspiring homeowners to identify and purchase a home, offering them the opportunity to first lease that home with the opportunity to buy it at a future date if they choose. The new venture with Pathway creates additional options for choice. In addition to being the lead investor in Pathway, our partnership offers us the opportunity to broaden our third party property management expertise. Outside of Pathway, another way that we've helped families achieve their housing goals is through our Resident First Look program. For homes that we've identified for sale, for strategic reasons, this program offers residents residing in those homes a first opportunity to purchase. Since we started the program in 2016, we've sold nearly 250 of these homes to our residents, representing over $60 million in sales, further living out our mission of together with you, we make a house a home. That mission marks a big milestone in 2022. On April 11th, we'll celebrate 10 years of providing high quality housing to people choosing to lease a single family home. When we launched this business, a professional home leasing company with coast to coast 24 hour customer service seven days a week did not exist. Invitation Homes was at the forefront of creating a new model and changing the narrative by offering an innovative concept built on customer demand and favorable demographics. During this past decade, we're pleased that an important part of that narrative has been our meaningful impact in the communities in which we serve. We've invested nearly $2.5 billion in home renovations within our communities. While last year alone, our associates also volunteered more than 13,000 hours of company-paid volunteer time to help local organizations they care about within their communities, a practice we strongly encourage. In conclusion, today in the U.S. there are over 125 million households with 90 million single family homes, of which about 17 million are single family rentals. I'm extremely proud of the 80,000 of those within our portfolio where we believe the highest standard of quality location and genuine care for our residents is both expected and delivered. I'd like to close by saying thank you to our teams, for 10 years of curating a unique leasing lifestyle, providing a level of service that gives our residents peace of mind, and creating strong communities where our residents and our associates can thrive together. With that, I'll pass it on to Charles, our Chief Operating Officer.