Equity Residential (NYSE:EQR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Michael Manelis: Yes. Hi Chandni, this is Michael. So, I think in both of those areas, clearly, you saw more of the concession use in the fourth quarter concentrated into those urban cores of those markets. The demand is there across urban, suburban across all of the submarkets. It just got a little bit more price sensitivity to it. And clearly, I think the urban still has more pronounced price sensitivity than the suburban areas. And we haven’t really seen any change. Like in the demand profile coming in, we haven’t seen any shifts like going urban or suburban in those markets, the profile seems very similar to what we are typically used to kind of seeing in the market. And right now, I guess I would tell you, when we look at these January stats and we think about the sequential improvement that we’re seeing over kind of the December numbers, those urban markets are actually kind of growing at a pace a little bit faster than the suburban and probably because we’re pulling back on the concession, right?

So, when we think about that, you can see you pull back a couple of weeks on a concession, that’s like a 4% change in pricing right off the bat. So, no real signals yet to any significant change other than what we have felt, which is the urban cores, which by the way, do feel better from a quality of life. You could see the efforts that are being placed in both of these cities right now on it. You can feel the improvement there. But you still just have more pronounced price sensitivity in those urban areas.

Chandni Luthra: That’s very helpful. Thank you. And this one for my follow-up, I’m not sure if you guys look at it that way. I know you guys do a lot of bottom-up stuff. But as you think about different markets, what’s your overall job growth assumption? And then, what’s your sort of top market versus bottom market as you think about job growth forecast in there, how much delta are we looking at? Are you still in positive territory on the West Coast? Any color there would be appreciated. And I completely understand if that is not something that you guys look at that level of detail.

Mark Parrell: Yes. Hey Chandni, it’s Mark. We don’t look at job forecast — national job forecast, especially as particularly relevant to our numbers. We do focus a little more on the bottom up. We do spend time and we’ve done the regression analysis and a lot of the work to try and understand how different variables, job growth, like foremost and household income among them, impact our numbers in the near term. And so we do kind of gut check what comes out of the bottom-up process with our perspective from the top down, both in terms of numbers that your firm and others put out there as potential forecast. But we don’t have a model that we would rely on that would spit out numbers. I think there’s just too many variables. We back tested lots of those models.

And I’ll tell you, we don’t have confidence than that system being a better one than looking at it from the bottom up, feeling your market, understanding local drivers of employment, local supply and sort of thinking about your business that way, has proven to us to be much more reliable. So, we feel really good, though, about job growth in our markets generally. I mean, the employment report last week was terrific. Our residents, as I said in my remarks, they found work when they’ve lost their positions. And it’s been a very small number of people, literally handfuls that have handed us their keys. So, this is — if this is a recession, it’s the best one we’ve ever been to. And it’s going pretty well for us so far. So, I don’t have anything to share with you in terms of top-down job forecast inputs.

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