Life Storage, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Life Storage First Quarter Earnings Release. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, David Dodman, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Strategic Planning. Sir, the floor is yours.

Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2021 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 with any follow-up questions thereafter. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Joe.

Good morning, and thank you for joining this morning's call. I am very pleased to report another solid quarter and a great start to this year. With record occupancy of 94% at quarter end, we have managed to grow occupancy by 460 basis points year over year, an incredible accomplishment, and I'm very proud of the entire Life Storage team. With this level of occupancy, we have been aggressively pushing asking rates while also decreasing free rent, resulting in higher net effective rates, which were up roughly 20% for the quarter. Further, we have been very active on the acquisition front with 33 stores acquired or under contract since the beginning of the year. These stores are a blend of lease up and stabilized and as a group will be immediately accretive and growing thereafter. We also continue to see strong growth in our third party platform with 18 new additions during the quarter and a very robust pipeline as more and more owners consider Life Storage as a leading candidate to manage their stores. And we continue to see further traction in Warehouse Anywhere with a significant contract for our enterprise product. This product is unmatched in the self-storage industry, and we continue to drive more corporate business to our unique solution. These enterprise customers would unlikely be using self-storage for their inventory needs if it were not for what Warehouse Anywhere brings to the table. Our newer Lightspeed product also continues to expand with now three fully operational micro-fulfillment centers and three more in the works to open over the coming months. Revenue for this business will continue to grow as we add more and more clients to our last mile fulfillment solution. This solution is also unmatched in the self-storage industry. With all of this success and growth, we exceeded our expectations for the quarter and as such are increasing our guidance for the remainder of the year. We are raising the midpoint of our estimated adjusted funds from operations per share by more than 3% to $4.37 this year, which would be 10.1% growth over 2020. And with that, I will hand it over to Andy to provide further details on the quarter and revisions to our guidance.