Scott Stubbs : Hi, Eric. So the main driver of that is not the 165 stores. I mean, the — those stores actually increased our performance in the quarter. I think they added about 40 bps to our revenue growth in the quarter. Our revenue growth throughout the summer is impacted somewhat by our performance last year, obviously, where you’re coming off higher numbers. Comps do get easier as you move throughout the year. But we are not seeing — our current expectation similar to what we said at the — when we gave our annual guidance is we’re not expecting a major recovery from the housing market today. We’re expecting things to kind of perform as they are today and not seeing a major rebound. And I think that may be one difference from what some other people have projected or thought.
Eric Wolfe: That’s helpful. And then I guess conversely on your LSI guidance, you’re expecting looks like around 3.25% same-store revenue growth for the rest of the year. Can you just talk about the timing of that acceleration from your 1Q numbers? Obviously your occupancy did increase I think 200 bps at quarter end so that should drive over 200 bps same-store revenue growth but just curious what gets you the rest of the way there to that 3.25%? I mean, when would you expect to see that?
Scott Stubbs: Yeah. So obviously it’s a range that we provided. So it’ll depend a little bit on where you are in that range. But the way we’re viewing this is as occupancy moves up to parity with the Extra Space stores, those rates will move up. So today, our live storage stores have rates that are 5% to 10% below our Extra Space stores as they are growing faster. We saw very good rentals in the first quarter. We’ve continued to close that occupancy gap. We would expect that occupancy gap to be closed at some point during this rental season and then see the growth in the back half of the year.
Eric Wolfe: All right. Thank you. Thanks for the detail.
Scott Stubbs: Thanks, Eric.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Nick Yulico with Scotiabank. Your line is open.
Nick Yulico: Thanks. Hi. First question is just, can you give us a feel for how, you know, ECRI is trending, year-to-date versus, let’s say, the back half of last year on percentage basis?
Joe Margolis: So, I would say very similarly. I mean, we’re constantly testing and trying new things but overall the program is very similar to the back half of the last year customers are accepting ECRI at the same rates and it’s a effective tool for us to maximize revenue.
Nick Yulico: Okay. And then in terms of — maybe could you just elaborate a little bit further on — on that pricing strategy right now where it feels like it’s been, a discounted, heavily discounted, promotional move in web rate in some cases. And then you’re trying to get that customer back up to a more normalized rate in a pretty quick timeframe. What, are you getting pushback from, customers? I mean, what’s sort of the feeling for that? And I guess I’m wondering, at some point, do you — do you need to — do you move away from that strategy as you get more comfortable with occupancy? And then that’ll help show improvement in moving rates. How should we think about that?
Joe Margolis: So, I mean, the strategy, you described it pretty well, right? On the web, for the web customer, they get a discounted rate but no promotion, right, which is different than our peers who offer many times promotions on the web. So a discounted rate, we do that because the data tells us these are the longer-term and better customers, and that is the pricing package they react best to. We use ECRI to get them to street rate within a reasonable period of time. We have a different structure for the customer who walks in the store and our data tells us and our testing tells us this is a very effective strategy and when the data tells us and the testing tells us we should evolve it to something else, then we will. It’s not in place for a fixed period of time or until we see something.
We’re constantly — one of the advantages of our scale is we can constantly have a few hundred stores here and there or running different tests. And when we see something that tells us we need to evolve our strategy, we will.
Nick Yulico: Okay. Thanks, Joe.
Joe Margolis: Sure.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Juan Sanabria with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Juan Sanabria: Good morning. Just hoping you could talk a little bit about the transaction market. You guys have done some deals in the first quarter and then expected to close over the balance of the year. So maybe you could give us a little flavor for what’s going in and stabilized yields that you’re underwriting to?
Joseph Margolis: Sure. So the transaction market is pretty muted. There’s still a significant bid-ask spread. There’s not a lot of distress in storage, so sellers don’t need to sell in general. We see a lot of transactions get put on the market and get pulled particularly larger transactions. It seems there’s less capital for big portfolios than there are for one-offs. So the transaction market is pretty quiet. We did close seven deals in the first quarter, but one of those was a joint venture development and one was a CO deal. So those were agreed to some time ago. We only approved, I think the better sense of the market is what’s approved in a quarter because the ones that closed might have been baked many, many, many months before.
And we only approved three transactions in the first quarter. One was a remotely managed store and the cap rate was in — initial cap was in the mid-6s. And then two developments where the development yield at a property level was in the high 8s and about 100 basis points higher to us, because of the joint venture structure. So mean good deals will do good deals like that when we see them but there’s not a lot of them in the market right now.
Juan Sanabria: Great. And then just a bigger picture question. Maybe a little bit to Jeff’s question earlier that you guys sound pearly optimistic but the guidance doesn’t necessarily call for any necessary reacceleration in the second half. But I guess, are you seeing signs at the different markets that individual markets are starting to reaccelerate at all?
