Essex Property Trust, Inc. (NYSE:ESS) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call October 30, 2024 1:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Angela Kleiman - President, CEO
Barb Pak - EVP, CFO
Rylan Burns - EVP, Chief Investment Officer
Conference Call Participants
Daniel Tricarico - Scotiabank
Nick Joseph - Citi
Haendel St. Juste - Mizuho Securities
Steve Sakwa - Evercore ISI
Alexander Goldfarb - Piper Sandler
Adam Kramer - Morgan Stanley
Jamie Feldman - Wells Fargo
Josh Dennerlein - Bank of America
John Kim - BMO Capital Markets
Linda Tsai - Jefferies
John Pawlowski - Green Street
Julien Blouin - Goldman Sachs
Alex Kim - Zelman & Associates
Conor Peaks - Deutsche Bank
Angela Kleiman
Good morning. Thank you for joining Essex third quarter earnings call. Barb Pak will follow with prepared remarks and Rylan Burns is here for Q&A. We are pleased to report our third guidance raise this year as a result of another healthy quarter with core FFO per share exceeding the midpoint of our guidance range. Today, my comments will focus on our performance year-to-date, preliminary considerations for 2025 and an update on the investment market. Starting with highlights to-date, notable milestones this year include record low turnover, excellent progress resolving delinquency and positive inflection points in several key demand drivers. These factors combined with muted level of new housing supply have enabled Essex to deliver results exceeding the high end of our original 2024 expectations. Year-to-date, we've achieved solid results with market rents generally trending consistent with historical patterns as shown in the chart on Page S-13.2. In the third quarter, rents peaked in July and remained resilient through August before moderating in September. As we expected, the blended rate growth of 2.5% for the quarter was tempered by the combination of seasonal moderation in rents, which started in September and difficult year-over-year comparison. Especially since last year, our rents did not moderate until late October. As we enter the fourth quarter, our market remain stable. We shifted our operating strategy to focus on occupancy as we've done in prior years in anticipation of slower demand characteristic of normal seasonality.
Moving to regional highlights. Seattle has been our top performer this year, delivering a strong 3.8% blended rate growth in the third quarter. The East side, where we have approximately 70% of our portfolio, was our strongest markets with 4.7% blended growth. For the rest of the year, we anticipate a heavier supply delivery and thus more concessions usage in this region. Northern California has performed well, achieving 2.3% blended rate growth in the third quarter, led by Santa Clara County with 3.6%. The overall supply for this region remains very low but we anticipate most of the deliveries for San Jose this year to occur in the fourth quarter. Therefore, we plan for higher concessions to address this short term impact. On to Southern California, which achieved 2.1% blended lease rate growth in the third quarter. Lease rates in this region were tempered by headwinds related to delinquency recovery in Los Angeles. Excluding LA, this region produced 3.5% blended rate growth for the third quarter. While the exact timing is difficult to pinpoint, we are cautiously optimistic that new lease rates will begin to recover next year in LA as volume of delinquent units continue to subside. Heading into year end, we are well positioned at 96.1% financial occupancy for October with year-over-year comps easing in November and December.