Mid-America Apartment Communities, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the MAA first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, the companies will conduct a question and answer session. Reminder, this conference is being recorded today, May 7, 2020. I'll now turn the conference over to Tim Argo, Senior Vice President, Finance for MAA. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Keith, and good morning, everyone. This is Tim Argo, Senior Vice President of Finance for MAA. With me are Eric Bolton, our CEO, Al Campbell, our CFO, Rob DelPriori, our General Counsel, Tom Grimes, our COO, and Brad Hill, EVP and Head of Transactions. Before we begin with our prepared comments this morning, I want to point out that as part of the discussion, company management will be making forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from our projections. we encourage you to refer to the forward-looking statement section in yesterday's earnings release and our 34-act filings with the SEC, which describe risk factors that may impact future results. These reports, along with a copy of today's prepared comments and an audio copy of this morning's call, will be available on our website. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, a presentation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures as well as reconciliations of the differences between non-GAAP and comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release and supplemental financial data, which are available on the For Investors page of our website at www.mac.com. I'll now turn the call over to Eric.

Thanks, Tim, and thanks to all of you on the call this morning for joining us. I know it's a busy day of earnings reports, so we'll keep our comments brief and get to your questions. I'd like to start by offering my appreciation and thanks to the hardworking associates at MAA. I especially want to thank our associates serving at our properties and working directly with our residents. Your dedication and commitment to supporting and serving our residents has been on full display over the past few weeks and has never been more important than it is today. I'm proud of the work you're doing and the service that you're providing. As noted in our earnings release, first quarter results were better than expected with solid rent growth and strong same-store performance. Our comments this morning, however, will focus on April performance and early May trends. We're encouraged by the solid performance in rent collections for April as well as the early trends in May. We've taken a proactive approach to directly assist and support those residents who are financially impacted by the shutdown of the economy. while also working to ensure that all other residents in various aspects of our operations are performing and functioning as expected. Given the severe pullback in the economy and the associated job losses, leasing conditions deteriorated beginning in late March. This is particularly evident in our leasing trends as it applies to new move-in residents. On the other hand, We're seeing positive trends associated with our existing residents electing to stay put, and resident turnover continues to decline. Overall, we would expect these leasing conditions to persist over the next two to three months. As you know, the reopening of local economies and businesses across our Sunbelt markets is now underway. Given the range of protocols being used by various states and cities to reopen their economies, it will be a choppy process. However, with unemployment claims across the majority of our states currently running below national averages, coupled with the active efforts now underway to reopen across the Sun Belt, we're hopeful that leasing conditions will start to improve later this year. As efforts to reopen Sun Belt economies are just now getting underway, it's difficult at the moment to gauge the pace at which employment conditions will improve. We hope to gain better visibility on the important underlying economic and employment market conditions during the second quarter and be in a more informed position as to the outlook for the remainder of the year when we report second quarter results. In the meantime, we're confident that our strategy focused on the appealing Sunbelt markets supported by our strong operating platform and our strong balance sheet executed by a cycle-tested and proven team of associates will enable MAA to continue to successfully navigate this down cycle. That's all I have in the way of prepared comments, and I'll turn the call over to Tom.