Mid-America Apartment Communities, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the MAA Third Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listenable mode. Afterwards, the companies will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, October 29, 2020. I will now turn the conference over to Tim Argo, Senior Vice President, Finance for MAA.

Thank you, Ashley, 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 Del Priore, our General Counsel, Tom Grimes, our COO, and Brad Hill, Executive Vice President 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 statements 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.maac.com. I will now turn the call over to Eric.

Thanks, Tim, and appreciate everyone joining us this morning. Results for the third quarter were ahead of our expectations. Cash collections on rents billed in the third quarter were strong, and October trends are the same. While we still have a long way to go in capturing full economic recovery, we are encouraged by the early signs of improvement evident in our third quarter results. Leasing traffic was well ahead of prior year. On a lease over lease basis, new move-in rent pricing meaningfully improved as compared to the second quarter. Overall, net effective rents were 1.8% higher than Q3 of last year, and average daily occupancy remained strong at 95.6%. As a result, we captured positive sequential revenue growth in each of our markets as compared to the second quarter. Demand is strong across our footprint and growing. While we expect new supply levels to remain elevated for the next few quarters, Forecasts for new deliveries and the trends for permits for new construction suggest moderation in deliveries beginning in the back half of next year and significantly declining into 2022. We continue to make progress on our new development pipeline with construction and scheduled deliveries on track to our performance. Where we are underway with initial leasing, both our leasing trajectory and rents are in line with our expectations. We are in active pre-development work on several other new development projects that we hope to start next year. We believe MAA's strategy, with a focus on the Sunbelt region, uniquely diversified across both large and mid-tier markets and serving a broad segment of the rental market, has the company well positioned to continue to work through the challenges presented by the current economic slowdown. As the economy begins to recover post-COVID, we believe our markets will continue to outperform, capturing employment trends and a demand for housing that will be well above national averages. MAA is well positioned for a coming recovery cycle. To our team of MAA associates, thank you for your tremendous work and commitment to our mission over the busy summer leasing season. You have, again, exceeded expectations and, as a result, have as well positioned as we head into next year. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.