Essex Property Trust, Inc. (ESS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon. This meeting will please come to order. Welcome to the 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Essex Property Trust, Inc. Due to the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and to support the health and wellbeing of our stockholders and employees and their families, we are hosting this meeting in a virtual-only format with our stockholders participating via the web portal. I am George Marcus, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company, and I will act as Chairman of this meeting. I would like to introduce the other directors of the company who are present on the webcast. The following directors are joining us today virtually during the meeting: Keith Guericke, Maria Hawthorne, Amal Johnson, Mary Kasaris, Irving Lyons, Thomas Robinson, Michael Schall and Byron Scordelis. Also present for today's meeting will be the General Counsel of the firm, Anne Morrison, who will act as the secretary of the meeting; and Brandon Wilcox, partner of the accounting firm, KPMG, independent registered public accountants to the company. Each of you has received a copy of the notice of the annual meeting and the availability of proxy materials for this meeting, which were mailed on or about March 26, '21. There are present at this meeting, attending virtually or by proxy, stockholders representing at least 45 million shares of common stock of this company out of a total of approximately 65 million shares of common stock outstanding and entitled to vote at this meeting. Therefore, a quorum is present. At this time, I appoint [ Chris Melko ], a representative of Broadridge, to act as inspector of elections. First order of business is to describe the proposals properly before the meeting, followed by voting on these proposals. All of the proposals and the votes required for each proposal have been described in detail in the proxy statement. As explained in our proxy statement, our bylaws have advanced notice provisions for proposals intended to be made by the stockholders. There are no stockholder proposals, and therefore, the proposals that I will discuss are the only business properly brought before this meeting. Our Board of Directors unanimously approved and recommends the adoption of the following proposals, which hereby I present -- excuse me, hereby presented for a vote at this meeting. First is the election of 9 directors of the company, as described in our proxy statement. Second is the ratification of appointment of KPMG public accountants as the independent registered public accountant firm for the company for the year ending December 31, 2021. Advisory vote on the company's named executive officers' compensation. If there are any questions concerning any of these proposals, please submit your questions through the web portal. The time for submitting questions is now closed. We will now move on to the voting. If there is anyone who has not submitted a proxy or wishes to change his or her vote at any -- on any proposals, you may do so now by clicking the voting button on the web portal and following the instructions there. We will pause to permit anyone who desires to vote to do so on this web portal. [Voting]

The polls are now closed. The secretary of the meeting will now report on the results of the voting.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As secretary of the meeting and based on information given to me by the inspector of elections, I report that each of the nominees for election to the Board of Directors, the ratification of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm and the advisory vote on the company's named executive officer compensation received sufficient for votes to be approved.

Thank you. I now declare that the 2021 Annual Meeting of Essex Property Trust is hereby formally adjourned. I will now turn the remainder of this meeting over to our CEO of Essex Property Trust, Michael Schall, who will give a brief presentation. Michael?

Thank you, George. As we customarily does, we have a brief presentation to share with you. And maybe just a quick introduction. I want to note that 2021 is Essex's 27th year as a public company, and it is also the 50th year since George Marcus founded the company in 1971. George's vision early on...

I'm not that old.

George's vision early on was to identify competitive advantage by using housing supply demand research, which is a discipline that we follow and actually is at the core of our strategy many years later today. So that has worked out very well, I think, for everyone involved. As a reminder, I want to note that we will be making some forward-looking statements today, which involve risk and uncertainty, and we direct you to our recent SEC filings, including a report on 10-K and is updated by other recent filings, which are available from the SEC website. So turning to 2020, I would say that 2020 was a year that was unlike any other in my 35 years here at Essex. We had a very strong first quarter, and then the world very abruptly changed as a result of the pandemic. Throughout the West Coast, there were shelter-in-place orders that were made -- put in effect, and that effectively shut down many of the cities and led to extraordinary job losses throughout the West Coast and the nation. And that these job losses especially affected certain industries, certainly travel and entertainment, on hospitality, motion picture industry in Los Angeles and, as a result of those components, had an especially difficult impact on the city centers and -- while the suburban areas in our portfolio performed much better. As a result, we had much higher delinquencies than we've ever had in our many years as a public company before that, which are attributable to the eviction prohibition laws. And these forces led to core FFO declining 4.2% in 2020. And the chart in the middle of the slide goes through the revenues by major geography. In essence, that was based on a 3.9% decline in same-store revenue. Virtually, all of that decline was attributable to higher delinquency and higher concessions on the same-store pool. When the pandemic hit, we responded very quickly, and our priorities changed as a company to focus on the safety of employees and residents; different operating metrics, i.e., maintaining high occupancy and try to maintain as high a coupon rents as we could; and then focused on the balance sheet, liquidity and cash flow from that point on. And so next page. Accomplishments, overall, I think we came through the pandemic very well positioned for the recovery. And again, we were successful in maintaining high occupancy, which was 96% for the year. The balance sheet was as strong as it has ever been and remain stronger actually after the pandemic. We refinanced a number of our bond -- outstanding bond issuances, and we extended our maturities. We've included a 30-year bond that was priced at 2.7 -- 2.67%. We lowered our average interest rate to 3.2% for all of our debt, and we have very little variable rate debt. And so our floating rate exposure is very limited. And we also had a number of accomplishments on the investment front, including the sale of 4 properties in 2020 for $343 million, essentially to match fund all of our investment needs for the year and to finish out our development pipeline, funding our development pipeline, increased amount of structured finance investments, both preferred equity and mezzanine debt. And in addition to that, we repurchased about $269 million of common stock at $2.25 a share. So we thought we used the proceeds of the sales in a very productive manner during the year. We also focus much more time these days on corporate social responsibility, and so I wanted to outline a couple of those accomplishments. A year ago, we published our second annual CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility report. And last week, we published our third report, which -- both of which are available on our website. The results were recognized in -- the results that we have in CSR were recognized in a variety of awards, including NAREIT's Bronze Award for Diversity and Inclusion. We're proud of the progress that we made in a number of categories. Certainly, within the social area, for example, we formed a Women at Essex affinity group. We achieved a 0% pay gap for men and women at Essex, and we adopted a $15 minimum wage for all of our workers. So we had good progress given the dramatic challenges posed by COVID-19 throughout the year. Looking forward to 2021. Operationally, we hit the bottom -- what we believe is the bottom in Q4 2020 and in the first quarter of 2021, and rents are starting to grow once more. And so we're looking forward to a full recovery of the company beginning in 2021 and over the next several years, definitely helped by vaccine rollouts and cities reopening. As there -- and central part of the recovery, we need to recover the jobs that were lost, extraordinary number of jobs that were lost during the pandemic, and we think we're on track to do so. Our guidance for 2021, again, reflects this. The first half of the year will be -- we will have a negative rent growth. And then the second half of the year, we'll turn positive is our expectation. And overall, we expect to hit gross revenues averaging about minus 2.5%. And again, our results should improve every quarter from this point forward. And then finally, under the other key assumptions, we are also beginning to see more apartment transactions in the market. And so we think that, that will lead to a resumption of external growth of the company. And so we have acquisition and disposition goals of $300 million to $500 million in 2021, and we expect to continue to fund our remaining development pipeline, which require about $60 million. Again, overall, the balance sheet is in great shape. And by the end of the year, we expect to be very much back in the deal-making moves going forward. The success of the business model and the team ultimately goes down to our results. And I wanted to share with you 3 key metrics used by our Board of Directors and our leadership to gauge our performance. And so in each of these 3 key categories, we outperformed the peer group fairly handily. So one is the 10-year compounded annual growth rate of same-store NOI, which is 5.3% for Essex; and the CAGR of core FFO growth, which is 9.8% for Essex; and the CAGR of dividend growth, which is 7.8% for the company. So in each of these cases, we handily beat the peer group. And which leads to our final page of the presentation, which is the overall shareholder returns since the IPO back in 1994. So the shareholder returns is a compounded annual growth rate of 15.7% over 27 years as a public company. We've grown our dividend each year. And currently, our dividend is about 4x the dividend that we had at the IPO. And the consistency and the performance of dividends of the company has made us an S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrat. Shareholders that bought the company at the IPO now receive a dividend about 42% annual return on the $19.50 IPO price. And so all of that has been pretty outstanding, and we're very excited about these results, obviously. So that concludes our presentation. We want to thank our shareholders for joining us, and have a good day.

Goodbye.