Invitation Homes Inc. (NYSE:INVH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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We think that’s more of a transitory item and work itself out as we get later into 2023 and maybe a little bit of hangover in 2024 because of Southern California. The other item, though, is those residents I just alluded to, they’ve typically been in our houses longer. Often, they don’t allow us to come in to do repair and maintenance work. They don’t call in service requests as often as our residents, who are keeping current in their rent. And so when we go in to do the turns on those homes, those turns are materially more expensive than a regular way turn, sometimes as much as 40% to 50% more on average than our regular turn. So as we’re dealing with those residents, Tyler, that are — have been treating the houses the way they have and have not been paying the rents, we again think that it’s more of a 2023 event.

It goes away in 2024 in terms of our cost per turn, having a much more higher growth rate than we’ve seen in the past. So we don’t think that’s an issue with — if you think about the long-term thoughts about what expense growth is going to be. So summarizing real-quickly, we think that’s more of a specific €˜23 issue. We think property taxes will revert back to more normalized growth rates as we get into €˜24 and going forward. We think turnover will certainly go up over the next period of time. We get to a more normalized rate for us going forward. And then the cost return, which I just alluded to, should actually see some deflationary pressures over time because of the type of turns that we’re going to be doing. And that should all put us back on a path that you saw from us for a very long time, where we had expense growth that was within inflation or a little bit less than inflation.

Operator: Thank you. We now have John Pawlowski of Green Street.

John Pawlowski: Thanks. Maybe just continuing that line of thought. It just feels like you’re baking in a lot of inflation on the expense line items and not a lot of inflation on rents, because some of these costs are going to push up the cost of ownership. So Charles, what markets on the ground are you seeing as potential canary in the coal mine for new lease growth going to, whatever, 3%, which seems to be implied in the guidance? Where are you seeing cracks in demand?

Charles Young: Yes. As we talked about earlier, occupancy is real-strong. Historically, looking at last year, Florida has been really strong for us, where we started to see when the seasonality came back was a bit of a slowdown in our traditional colder markets like the Denvers, the Chicagos. But in — Minnesotas. But again, they’re not material to us. And generally, we’re still seeing good demand. And to Ernie’s point, there’s an opportunity or upside here on the new lease side, given kind of the structure of the portfolio today. Our occupancy is running really high for January historically, and we like the acceleration that we’re seeing. So I don’t see any markets that have concern. I see markets that have been really performing well.

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