But more often we simply received the benefit of having our real estate back the opportunity to commence a lease with a resident who abides by the rental contract and lower bad debt from having a new resident who actually pays. The accelerated move out to delinquent residents did put pressure on our physical occupancy, so we made a pricing strategy shift during the quarter, reducing rental rate to communities less than 95% occupied in order to maximize pricing power as we entered our peak leasing season. As a result of this shift, we experienced higher occupancy during the quarter, but that was entirely offset by lower rental rates. Our outperformance for the first quarter was also driven by $0.015 and lower operating expenses resulting from lower core insurance claims and lower property taxes.
Although we are pleased with our first quarter revenue outperformance, at this point we are maintaining the midpoint of our full year guidance at 1.5%. However, we are changing some of the underlying assumptions. Our original guidance assumed 1.2% of rent growth, comprised of our 50 basis point earning at the end of 2023, effectively flat loss to lease and approximately 70 basis points in market rental rate growth recognized over the course of the year. We also assumed flat occupancy versus 2023 and a 30 basis point contribution from lower bad debt, bringing us to our 1.5% total budget revenue growth at the midpoint of our original guidance range. Our current revenue guidance reflects the same assumptions of a 50 basis point earning and flat loss to lease, but now with 25 basis points of market rental rate growth and 10 basis points of occupancy gains as a result of our first quarter marketing initiative.
In addition, our revised estimates for bad debt will add 65 basis points of revenue growth, bringing us back to the 1.5% midpoint for our current revenue guidance. Last night, we lowered our full year expense guidance from 4.5% to 3.25%, entirely driven by the assumption of lower than anticipated insurance and property taxes. Insurance represents 7.5% of our expenses and was originally anticipated to increase 18%. In addition to lower insurance claims in the first quarter, we just completed a very successful insurance renewal and we are now anticipating insurance will be flat year-over-year. Property taxes, which represent approximately 36% of our total operating expenses were originally projected to increase 3% in 2024. We have since received very favorable tax valuations, particularly in Houston, and we are now assuming a 1.5% year-over-year property tax increase.
These positive expense variances are partially offset by increases in salaries in part associated with increased performance incentives and higher marketing costs associated with higher search engine optimization expenses. After taking into effect the decrease in expenses, we have increased the midpoint of our 2024 same-store NOI guidance from flat to positive 50 basis points. We are maintaining the midpoint of our full year core FFO at $6.74 as the accretion associated with lower same-store operating expenses is entirely offset by higher-than-budgeted floating rate interest expense, primarily as a result of fewer than anticipated Fed rate cuts. At the midpoint of our guidance range, we are still assuming $250 million to the acquisitions, offset by an additional $250 million of dispositions with no net accretion or dilution from these matching transactions, and up to $300 million of development starts in the second half of the year with approximately $175 million of total 2024 development spend.
We also provided earnings guidance for the second quarter of 2024. We expect core FFO per share for the second quarter to be within the range of $1.65 to $1.69, representing a $0.03 per share sequential decline at the midpoint, primarily resulting from an approximate $0.01 decrease in interest income due to lower cash balances, a $0.01 increase in overhead costs due to the timing of various public company fees, and a $0.01 sequential decrease in same-store NOI as higher expected revenues during our peak leasing periods are offset by the seasonality of certain repair and maintenance expenses and the timing of our annual merit increases. At this time, we will open the call up to questions.
Keith Oden: I think the fact that we can pivot with technology the way we have through adapting to the sort of bad guys who come in and use identity theft to lease apartments and then go through the process. So the fact that we are trying to — that we are able to pivot with new technology to find — be able to find out, meet those people out before they get into our properties is a big part of the equation. And it’s sort of like anything else when you have — when the bad guys figure out that they can’t get in the front door, they go to somebody else. And so I think we are — I’m really excited about being able to deploy technology as quickly as we did and adapt to that situation.
Operator: The next question comes from Haendel St. Juste with Mizuho. Please go ahead.
Haendel St. Juste: Hey, there. Good morning. Ric or maybe Keith, can you talk a bit about what the operating strategy here for the portfolio going into peak leasing. You talked about pulling back a bit on rate to get occupancy to 95%. It seems like you’ve maintained that in April. So I’m curious, is the plan to continue to push rate here? Are you willing to trade some occupancy, and maybe which markets do you expect to be able to push rent a bit more near-term beyond [indiscernible]? Thanks.
Keith Oden: Sure. Haendel the …
Ric Campo: Go ahead, Keith. Go ahead.
Keith Oden: Yes, Haendel, we are back basically where we want to be from an occupancy standpoint. We were 95.2 at the end of the quarter, and we’ve actually trended up a little bit since then in the month of April, where we got to 95.4% occupied. And again, we are not looking for making the decisions on pricing. We are not looking at necessarily what in place occupancy is. We are looking at 6 weeks, 8 weeks out on projections. And as we look at what we see right now, we’ve got — regained the occupancy in real time that we wanted to. And the next step is you push rents. So I think our — the opportunity that we are going to continue to have in the better markets they are the less supply impacted. We’ll be able to push rents and should be able to hit our revenue targets for the year.
I’m certainly pleased to see the kind of relative pricing power that we’ve in our D.C. Metro and in Houston. Those two markets are really important for us. They’re 25% of our same-store pool and those are both performing really quite well. And I think that there’s a good chance that, that will continue.
