Samir Khanal: That’s it for me. Thanks, Chris.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Todd Thomas from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Todd Thomas: Hi. Thanks. Good morning. Chris, I just wanted to follow-up first on move-in rents. I appreciate the detail early on here in the call that you provided. I think you mentioned that the move-out to move-in spread narrowed through April. Can you just quantify that where that is today, what the change looks like sort of throughout the quarter and into April and where that stands today?
Christopher Marr: Yes, Todd, just to be clear, what I had talked about was just the new customer rate. So that new customer move-in on a quarter-over-quarter basis was down about 14% in Q4 and then 13% in Q1, 11% in April. In terms of just that delta between the customer moving out and the customer moving in, that continues to be around 33%, 34%, and that has not really moved all that much since what we reported last quarter. As we get into the more seasonal time frame here where obviously our rates to new customers are moving up, and we do expect that gap to narrow as we move through the busy season.
Todd Thomas: Okay. Got it. And then the occupancy build during the period, it appears as though it was a little bit below average when compared to prior years, just moving from the quarter average to the quarter end. Can you speak to where occupancy is today? And also vacate activity was a little bit higher year-over-year. Are you seeing any change at all in, in terms of move-outs? And can you talk about vacate activity, how that trended throughout the quarter and thus far into April?
Christopher Marr: Yes. As we’ve moved through April, we’ve seen, as I mentioned, both the year-over-year gap in occupancy, and we just talked about the year-over-year gap in rate contracting, same thing on the occupancy side. So today, we sit at 90.8%, up 40 bps from the end of March, and that gap to last year has contracted back to about 120 basis points. Month-to-day rentals in April are flat to last year. And then when we see on the move-out side, move-outs continue to – well, they obviously bounce around by market, but are fairly in line with what we saw last year. The period of time certainly coming out of COVID, where we saw increasingly longer lengths of stay, that’s really started to trend closer back to stabilization. And in some cohorts, we’re seeing that start to contract a little bit.
Todd Thomas: Okay. Does the normalization there in terms of length of stay or maybe a little bit of an uptick in vacate activity. Does that give you pause at all in terms of the company’s ECRI strategy or have you rethink at all the pricing for existing customers around the sensitivity there, the rate increases?
Christopher Marr: So obviously, something that we continue to pay very, very close attention to. But the overall length of stay, while they’re down a bit from all-time highs, they remain well ahead of historical levels. Customers in our portfolio for over a year, 62%, two years, just over 44%. So down a little bit seasonally, but still 300 basis points to 500 basis points above historical averages. So the customer behavior that we’re witnessing does not, at the moment, give us any cause to alter our sort of recent strategy as it relates to increases for that existing customer cohort.
Todd Thomas: Okay. Thank you.
Christopher Marr: Thanks, Todd.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Spector from Bank of America. Go ahead please.
Jeff Spector: Great. Thank you. Chris, my first question, just given your length of experience as I think about the conversations so far and the start of this peak leasing season, it still feels like there’s a lot of uncertainty. If you go back to pre-COVID, is this in line with historically what you would normally see entering spring leasing? Or would you say it is fair based on your comments on the week-to-week changes in the economic data that still the 2024 spring leasing season, uncertainty is still high.
Christopher Marr: Yes, Jeff, I think it’s fair to say that the uncertainty is quite high. I chunk a little bit because I’m trying to think about what’s normal, right? We would have sat here in 2018, 2019 and while the demand was normal, we had such elevated supply that the concern was, are you going to have enough demand to be able to fill up all the development that had come online. And obviously, we had the beginning of COVID, which was quite dysfunctional and then the surge in demand that we saw in late 2020 and all through 2021 to the early parts of 2022. The fact that interest rates remained elevated, the fact that we have the housing market that we’ve spoken about ad nauseam. Certainly, that’s one segment of everyday life events that is challenged at the moment in terms of mobility.
So if I had to sit and look back at a normal trend over my 30 years in doing this, I would say we’re obviously missing or not quite yet seeing that one segment. So it does feel a little bit more muted across the country than what we would have seen in whatever we would define as a more normal environment. But that uncertainty is – so again, that’s kind of where we are here in the next couple of months are going to be, as I said, very informative.
Jeff Spector: Thank you. That’s helpful. And then I just want to clarify again, I have that the higher end of the guidance reflects a stronger spring leasing season and improving price sensitivity. Is that correct? Is that still the case that the higher end reflects that?
Christopher Marr: It is, Jeff, that your recollection is correct.
Jeff Spector: Okay. Thanks. And then third, if I could just ask, I’m curious on Florida, in particular, for the markets that benefited from the pandemic and movement. Just given there’s still such strong. There is still healthy population growth in these markets. It’s definitely slowed, but still population growth. I guess, can you provide some insights on what you think is happening in some of these markets that they’re more challenged because you didn’t cite that necessarily at supply, but you – Chris, you specifically said these are markets that saw the big boom during the pandemic.
Christopher Marr: Right. Yes. I think what you’re seeing is a combination of things in Florida, you obviously have reduced inbound movement from what we saw in the COVID a couple of years. You had supply on the West Coast of Florida, pretty significant, Miami, that was introduced in 2019, 2021, that had benefited from all of that inbound COVID customers, but it’s still there. And is still weighing a bit on those markets, you had natural disasters in terms of like the Cape Coral area, huge benefit from the hurricane and now you’re on the other side of that. You have pricing in Florida from some of our larger competitors, that has not been super constructive over the last couple of quarters. So I think there’s just a variety of factors that are impacting Florida as it starts to come down off of what was just tremendous performance for two years.
