Alex Gress: Steve, when you think about 2024, I want to go back and just quickly say, to put in context, we are a relatively young company with a smaller base. As we’ve talked about in our meetings, we’re very much continuing on our journey to grow and expand and we’ve shown that. Since 2019, we’ve driven same-store margins up by 630 basis points than most of our peer group. So we recognize that. We recognize we have more work ahead. I think in terms of 2024 and specificity around the weight of each factor, while we are confident in that outlook, we’re not going to give specific weightings to the individual growth drivers. But I would really go back and reiterate a couple of points that Joe made. It’s a couple of different things from different factors, the growth of our same-store pool, the strong performance of our acquisitions, $5.5 billion of wholly owned and JV over the last few years, growth of 3PM and JVs and contribution from our lease-ups.
We’ve talked about margin initiatives and improvements of at least 70 basis points in that outlook and that comes from an investment in process and technologies. So it’s continuing that journey of the 630 basis points that we’ve done to date.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And either Joe or maybe Alex, employee costs at the site have certainly been a big focus for everybody as people have tried to streamline kind of operations and improve margin. Maybe just talk about some of the things that you’ve done technologically and what else is left to be done on the on-site personnel side? And how much of that factors into the 70-basis-point margin improvement over the next 2 years?
Joseph Saffire: Steve, I’ll take that. Listen, thanks for acknowledging and talking about technology. Many may forget, we led the sector with the Rent Now program. When everyone else kind of laugh and said, we want to sell at the counter, we prove that technology can improve payroll, improve efficiency and actually improve customer service levels. So obviously, we’re still heavily invested in our Rent Now program. We have dynamic pricing. We continue to look ways to increase the utilization of that channel. It continues to go up. But we’re not just stopping with that. Obviously, there are other things that we can do to make the stores more efficient and maintain the livable wage that we provide. We invest in our people. We’re very proud of our people.
There are lot of the reasons why we are growing our 3PM business and our JV business. So we’ll continue to invest in our people. But we’re just trying to work smarter at the counter. We’re trying to reduce the hours. We’re using data. We have a ton of data that we’re just really learning how to utilize. We’ve been hiring data scientists and that data is helping us decide hours of stores, traffic which stores do we need more people? Which stores can we pull back but still keep them open? So there’s a lot involved in that. Obviously, there’s been talk of kiosks in the industry. We’re looking at kiosks, a different type of kiosk, virtual management, a live agent at a kiosk. These are the types of things we’re looking at and we’re excited about what they’re going to do for us going forward.
Operator: Your next question for today is coming from Smedes Rose at Citi.
Smedes Rose: I guess just with this year’s guidance and next year’s guidance, maybe you could just talk a little bit about what you’re seeing kind of on the wages and benefits line? What you’re thinking about for this year’s growth in ’23 and how you think that will grow in ’24?
Joseph Saffire: Smedes, I’ll let Alex talk a little bit about ’23 in the payroll that we expect. But for ’24, probably won’t get that granular but go ahead, Alex.
