Life Storage, Inc.

And welcome to the Life Storage fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. If you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dave Dodman, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategic Planning. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning and welcome to our fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Leading today's discussion will be Joe Sapphire, Chief Executive Officer of Life Storage and Andy Gregory, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, the following discussion and answers to your questions contain forward-looking statements. Our actual results may differ from those projected due to risks and uncertainties with the company's business. Additional information regarding these factors can be found in the company's SEC filings. A copy of our press release and quarterly supplement may be found on the investor relations page at lifestorage.com. As a reminder, during today's question and answer session, we ask that you please limit yourself to two questions to allow time for everyone who wishes to participate. Please re-queue and follow up with any additional questions thereafter. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Joe.

Good morning. Thank you for joining this morning's call. I'd like to open my remarks by acknowledging our co-founder and former executive chairman, Bob Attia, who sadly passed away in December from a short illness. Bob was a true visionary who guided Sovereign into self-storage back in 1985, and he will be very missed. So we are pleased to report fourth quarter and full year 2020 results that I believe Bob would be very proud of. As I think back to where we were in late March and early April last year, I cannot be more pleased with how our business has performed and how we are positioned as we begin 2021. In the early days of the pandemic, our priority was the safety and health of our roughly 2,000 teammates and more than 500,000 customers. Decisions were made with a keen eye on our core values, teamwork, respect, accountability, integrity, and innovation. and I believe that our favorable operating results reflect that. We grew adjusted funds from operations in 2020 by 5.9% despite the global pandemic. Operationally, we continue to maintain record same-store occupancy for this time of year, 92.8% as of the end of January, almost 370 basis points higher year over year. I believe customers are attracted to our online rental platform and its differentiated and innovative features such as tiered pricing. January represented the eighth straight month where roughly 30% of our movements came via our self-serve platform. I am proud that we were the technological leader and early adopter of the online self-serve channel. Though we continue to see robust demand throughout our network, a few regional highlights include our Metro New York City New England, and Boston regions, which were each up more than 500 basis points in occupancy and 900 basis points in revenue in the fourth quarter year over year. Also strong were St. Louis, Sacramento, and Tampa. As it relates to investments, we continue to be very active and acquired nine stores in the quarter for almost 115 million. Our total investment for the year was just over 530 million, with the acquisition of 40 stores, 32 of which were managed by us as part of our joint venture portfolio, and as such are in markets we know well. We grew several existing key markets by adding stores in the greater New York City area, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Tampa, Miami, Atlanta, and Dallas, among others. 2021 is off to a good start, with 13 stores closed or under contract thus far, representing a total investment of roughly $200 million. We remain focused on building our portfolio in markets with attractive demographics and rates per square foot greater than our portfolio average. Our third-party management business had one of its strongest years as more and more owners recognize our leading same-store performance and innovative technologies. On a net basis, we added 66 non-joint venture stores to our management platform representing 38% growth for the year. With regards to Warehouse Anywhere, we now have three micro-fulfillment centers in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and most recently Chicago, and are actively working with our partner Deliver on the next three to six locations. We believe our Warehouse Anywhere platform uniquely positions us to leverage our self-storage real estate assets to capitalize on the consumer shift toward e-commerce and last mile delivery. And finally, we have reinstated guidance with a slight broader range than normal, primarily due to COVID-related uncertainties as they relate to ongoing demand this year. I'll now turn it over to Andy to walk through the details of the quarter and our outlook for this year.