Public Storage

Greetings and welcome to Public Storage First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. To access the queue at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star 0 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Ryan Burke, Vice President of Investor Relations and Strategic Partnerships. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Rob. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm here with Joe Russell and Tom Boyle. Before we begin, we want to remind you that certain matters discussed during this call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain economic risks, and uncertainties. All forward-looking statements speak only as of today, May 1st, 2024, and we assume no obligation to update, revise, or supplement statements that become untrue because of subsequent events. A reconciliation to GAAP of the non-GAAP financial matters we provide on this call is included in our earnings release. You can find our press release, supplement report, SEC reports, and an audio replay of this conference call on our website at publicstorage.com. We do ask that you initially limit yourself to two questions. Of course, if you have additional questions after those two, feel free to jump back in queue. With that, I'll turn it over to Joe.

Thank you, Ryan, and thank you all for joining us today. Tom and I will walk you through our recent performance and updated industry views. Then we'll open it up for Q&A. Our first quarter performance was in line with our expectations. As we anticipated, the new move in customer environment remains challenging. However, we are encouraged by positive trends across our business, which include industry-wide customer demand improves sequentially through the quarter, the ability to raise our move-in rates as we enter the peak leasing season, strong in-place customer behavior, including longer than normal lengths of stay and lower delinquency rates, moderating move-out volume, improving occupancy, and waning development of new competitive supply, a trend we expect will continue. As mentioned on last quarter's call, we were encouraged by month-over-month revenue growth re-acceleration in certain markets, including Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Seattle. That momentum has continued, and additionally, we see accelerating trends in markets including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Minneapolis. We anticipate more markets will be added to this list across our portfolio over the next few quarters. These bottoming to improving trends are particularly important for two reasons. First, they are in stark contrast to 2023 when all markets were decelerating as we normalized from record performance in 2021 and 2022. And second, they put us on track for improving company-wide financial performance in the back half of this year, as embedded in our guidance. Additionally, our high-growth, non-same-store pool of assets comprises 538 properties and 22 percent of our overall portfolio square footage. With NOI growth approaching nearly 50 percent during the first quarter, these properties remain a strong engine of growth. Overall, we are encouraged by what we are seeing on the ground. The team is very focused on capturing new customer activity as we approach the busy season, which will help drive our performance for the remainder of 2024 and into 2025. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom to provide additional detail.