All right, shutting the doors, so I'm gonna take that as my cue that we're good to go. We don't have the green light, but I'll take it anyway. For those of you who haven't met me, my name is Buck Horne. I'm the Raymond James analyst for residential REITs and home building, and I'm thrilled to be able to introduce to you the team from Invitation Homes. To my left, Charles Young, Dallas Tanner, Scott Eisen, and Jonathan Olsen. The entire dream team is here to give you the update on all things single-family rental. We'll do a few minutes of overview with Dallas, a quick update, and then we'll dive into some questions. So with that, Dallas?
Great. Thank you, Buck. Good morning, everyone. It's nice to be with everybody here at the Hilton in Midtown once again. We're grateful for the opportunity to give an update on the business, the industry, trends, things we're seeing with our company. There's sort of been three kind of major themes as we've talked with investors over the last little bit around our business. First has been and foremost is just a reminder on the outstanding fundamentals that surround single-family rental. There's an absolute lack of housing supply in the marketplace today, and we have a customer that continues to get more and more qualified, stays with us longer and longer, and continues to adopt ancillary services as part of their lease structure with us.
Average customer staying now over three years, over four years in parts of California and our western markets, where we rolled out the business initially. And we find that this propensity to renew and to adopt these services continue to be a value additive choice to our customer. Today, 97.5% full from an occupancy perspective. Our blended rate in May was, I think, 5.3%. We've seen that continue to accelerate through what is our peak leasing cycle, which is typically between, say, March and August. Business feels great from that regard. That's point one. Point two has been we've leaned in, and we've talked about this now for the last year, year and a half, on trying to build much more new supply, newer housing construct, for the single-family for-rent customer.
And we've been very active in that space with a number of both public, private, and regional builder partners. We will continue to use our balance sheet to lean in to create additional new housing stock and supply, because the customer continues to tell us that through both our surveys, when we're in and out of homes, on our renewals, and as we pilot new services, the new community aspect is something that many of our customers are craving. Third, we've been very active and quite vocal in our ability to adopt a third-party management approach for professional capital in the space that's looking for an Invitation Homes standard operating model.
We've announced and mostly onboarded 20,000 units in the last six months, which have taken our, call it current home count, close to 110,000 homes on our portfolio. So the business itself today will continue to lean in on both third-party growth, looking for customers in that business that are particularly professional capital with scale that want to leverage the Invitation Homes operating playbook. We are hyper-focused on finding portfolios that look and feel and are synonymous with the current real estate offerings that we have in our book, and we're gonna continue to try to find ways to use our third-party business to also enhance the returns on our wholly owned portfolio on the balance sheet. Those are sort of the three themes. We're excited to be here today.
We're grateful to Buck to be willing to host us, and we're happy, Buck, to jump into- and maybe I should just introduce.
Yeah.
You give brief introductions, but to my right is Charles Young, our President and Chief Operating Officer. To my left is Scott Eisen, who's been with us almost a year in our Chief Investment Officer role, and to the left of him is Jonathan Olsen, our Chief Financial Officer. Buck?
All right. With that, this one may be for Charles to start off with, because I kind of wanted to dive into the May operating update, and just kind of the stats you guys provided around that. I guess, first of all, you know, congrats on the really strong results, clearly demonstrating there's lots of strength of demand for the SFR space. I guess, maybe a higher level question, how are you handling the revenue optimization process right now? Like, what tools are you using? What data points are you looking at for how far you can push pricing, and I guess, you know, bigger picture question is, do you think you're still leaving some money on the table in terms of what you can ultimately raise rents to?
First of all, thank you, and appreciate the question. Look, results are as expected, yet strong. We set the portfolio up coming out of last year to get to a position, as Dallas said, where we're full, and we knew that peak season on new lease is coming, so we're accelerating into that, and we're able to take advantage of it while we're holding renewals. Your optimization question is something that we've always focused on, and it's really a balance between occupancy, and what's driving that is low turnover and days to re-resident, how quickly we are turning from economic occupancy to economic occupancy.
I would argue that we're one of the best at being able to do that, and if you stay in that kind of full position of power, you can capture the rents that are out there. But that's the reality. We're really only able to capture what is the loss to lease that's in our portfolio, and if you go back and look at our portfolio over the last five years, we have constantly been trying to optimize and grab as much of the rents that are out there. We've always been one to push on the renewals and try to capture it.
That's two-thirds of our business, and so when you look at our blend today in May at 5.3, or for the quarter at 5.3, the majority of that is driven by, almost 6% on the renewal side. That really is the push here, and you balance that with, our occupancy, that's the power of this platform. And you gotta remember in single family, when you're turning over, it costs a bit more to turn a home. So we wanna find that balance between all of those scenarios, while capturing as much of the loss to lease that's out there. The loss to lease in the portfolio is still healthy, but it's not as high as it was during COVID, where the numbers were just elevating, escalating.
What we're seeing right now is, if you go back to any period other than kind of COVID period, we still have a healthy growth at these numbers at 95.3% and mid-97% occupancy. So we really like where we are, and it's a constant balance, and it kind of ebbs and flows. One of the things to pay attention to is we are back into more of a seasonal period.
Mm-hmm.
where you're gonna get a, you know, acceleration of new lease in the summer, and then the slowdown in the shoulder quarters.
Yeah. And, and I guess kind of more broadly speaking, when you look at the cost of homeownership right now, I think, you know, either you have your loss to lease statistics, and that's kind of what's in the market today. But against the cost of ownership in your markets, I mean, our stats say the gap is as wide as $1,000 a month in many cases, at current mortgage rates and current home prices. What's, I mean, how do you think about that in the context of, you know, where kind of current loss to lease is, and, and what's the longer-term runway for.
You know, do you think there's that kind of gap where, like, we could see a protracted run to fully raise rents $1,000 a month to close that gap, or is that, how does that work?
I can start, and if Dallas wants to add anything, he can. Look, I think that's what's showing up in the long-term fundamentals. It's still a seasonal business.
Yeah.
But ultimately, when you look back at the 12 years that we've been in business, this is some of the better fundamentals that we've seen, and it's showing up where we've had periods of, you know, longer, higher lease spreads, but not with this occupancy, not with this level of days to re-rent resident and low turnover. So when you take that bigger picture, it really is a healthy fundamental to drive kind of NOI for the long term. And you're gonna get some seasonal periods up and down, but the answer to your question, as I see it, is we are going to have a long runway here. Even if rates come up a little bit, there's still high demand. We're undersupplied in housing.
We have many of the folks that are coming to us because they want the option to rent. They want to stay in a single-family home. They want to be in a good school district, in communities that are safe. This is where they want to raise their family. And to your point, they can do it more affordably and use that money for other things, whatever that may be.
Yeah. And you know, just going diving is kind of a hybrid question. Going into your thoughts around adding more new supply, obviously, you guys are leaning into that strategy with the build for rent. Other builders have been working on adding their own supply, you know, building it on spec in many cases. Are you seeing any effect of the ramping of that new build-for-rent supply dampening rent growth? Or how does that affect your pricing strategy in the near term?
No, I think if anything, we're seeing that customer profile wants more of that new product. I think, you know, BTR is like cast a broad net around what BTR is. And you certainly have single-family detached homes between 1,500 and 2,500 sq ft built in a variety of locations, and then that goes to the age-old principle of location matters. So if you've built that product an hour outside of town, you may be fighting for rent a little bit harder. If you've built that product thirty minutes inside of town, you've got much more inherent natural demand. The same can be said about some of the smaller product that's been built between 800 and 1,200 sq ft that also gets kind of cast underneath the BTR net. It's just not all like for like.
So just like anything in real estate, it goes back to product, location, and customer fit. And I think what we're finding, Buck, is that massive sort of dearth of la- or I'd say, lack of supply, that's in a lot of the markets that we operate in will continue to keep demand elevated. So I don't see that changing. I 100% agree with Charles. And then I think what we believed 10 years ago as the business was starting to form, was that families who either wanted to be down payment light or needed to be down payment light, still desired these same neighborhoods, is now being validated by studies like the University of North Carolina put out last week, that are showing that academic standards are lifting among some of these families that are renting.
And so I think as that narrative gets heard more broadly, you're gonna actually have increased demand for people that want access to better schools, transportation corridors, job centers, but maybe do not have the ability to have a huge down payment to own. And so finding that blend is always gonna be the right balance.
Yeah. No, I think it's really interesting. Just as I was on the road recently with PulteGroup, one of your key partners on the build-for-rent strategy, and interesting comment they made was that in communities where they're building houses and they've kind of carved out a section for that you guys will do some rental product with, and maybe they've got some entry-level customers on the other side, that they're you know, finding that the customers that are leasing homes from you guys, in many cases, are, for better or worse, they've got stronger incomes and higher credit scores, and maybe not the down payment that is needed, but than what they're getting in terms of their entry-level customer qualification.
So it just speaks to, I think, the quality of the tenants that you're attracting from a lifestyle perspective. What's your reaction to, to something like that, that you're attracting that kind of tenant quality?
I'm gonna go, and then I'm gonna ask Scott to give some of his perspective, 'cause he's on the ground looking at these communities day in and day out. Look, we started positive credit reporting with our customers last year. We have 190,000 people signed up for positive credit reporting. We've seen average credit scores in the last year go up 30 points. We've seen 6% of our portfolio go from subprime credit to prime. Those are really kind of measurable impact as you think about being down payment light, increasing your quality of living, 'cause you're in a newer community or a great neighborhood with access to better schools, and oh, by the way, also enhancing your credit profile for future opportunities, whether that's to own, to lease, to buy a car, to lease a car, you name it. Really doesn't matter.
So what I think is starting to resonate, and is also starting to be substantiated by facts, are that a leasing lifestyle can lend itself to a lot of the similar, upside opportunities as owning a home, except that you have greater flexibility. And I think as you look at our core demographic, that customer that's 38, 39 years old, combined household income of $140,000, has a rent-to-income ratio, I think today, of 5.6 times, Scott, it's a pretty powerful story. And I think as we continue to tailor our product or our partnerships with builders that build this product in a way that will draw more of those customers in, this is going to be a very accretive story over time and distance. Scott, what would you add in terms of-
We're actually excited to hear Pulte say things like that. When we look at a new community acquisition, right? 'Cause, you know, the people throw around this expression, BTR. And so for us, what that means is, is that we will work with either a national production builder or a regional builder, and we will agree to forward purchases from them, to buy homes from them in a community. Sometimes they might be building a 400-home community, and we're buying a third of that community, and we're buying 10 homes a month as they develop that community over time. Sometimes we may be buying, you know, 200 homes in a fully contained community with its own amenities, and so it can be a little bit of both.
But when we evaluate a new acquisition, and when we evaluate a new, you know, location with a home builder, we have our own internal scorecards that we look at. We look at census data in a 3-, 5-, and 10-mile radius, and then we also look at our own internal Invitation Homes data within a 3-, 5-, and 10-mile radius. And this is really where the power of the platform comes in, where, you know, when I first joined last year, we had 86,000-87,000 homes in the system. Now, with our third-party management business, we're approaching 110,000. We are leveraging that data on our internal portfolio, and so a lot of times when we look at a community, I might be looking at a deal in Charlotte, I've got information on.
You know, we might have 100 Invitation Homes in a 3-mile radius, 300 homes in a 5-mile radius, and 600 homes in a 10-mile radius, and we are analyzing that data. It's quite often that when we look at that information, you know, we may see census tract data that says that in that 3-mile radius, the average income is $93,000, but our resident, 'cause we have that data, says it's $125,000 in that 3-mile radius. So that's why it doesn't surprise me, and I'm excited to see Pulte saying things like that, 'cause it is consistent. Obviously, if we see a situation where, you know, the census data is different than ours, then we have to take that into account and analyze it as part of our acquisition process.
But this is how we look at acquisitions, and we're excited to see Pulte say things like that.
Good. Appreciate that, that color. I'm gonna dive into the third-party management strategy and the growth of the platform and kind of where this is. You know, how has your evolution or your thought process around third-party management kind of evolved over the past year or so, now that you're starting to attract some partners that are really adding some significant scale, and now you're seeing. I think Lennar is now doing a kind of a joint venture, where they're putting some their own equity in the game with some of those homes. So how do you see the structure of those types of partnerships evolving, and what's the kind of the longer term runway for that opportunity?
You want to jump in? Feel free to add. I think the market's evolving. Just like any good market, it gets smarter. Gets a little bit more efficient over time, capital gets more intelligent. I think what we saw as the industry started to professionalize, and I think it's an important reminder, you know, if you look at the 16 or 17 million units that are out there that are single-family homes, detached, for lease in the U.S. today, professional capital may be involved in about 3% of it. So 97% of our marketplace is still very much a mom-and-pop industry. But what you're starting to see in the evolution of how professional capital, professional management thinks about this, are structures that could vary in kind of wide ranges. You know, we have structures.
If you look at the three third-party announcements we've made this year on those 20,000 units, they're all three very different structures. One is a professional capital partner who is looking for professional-grade management, and we have the ability to buy some of those assets over time. The second is, we went in and actually physically bought the management contracts with our own balance sheet capital and are looking to negotiate ways to do more business with that potential partner. And then the third, as you referenced, Buck, is a JV of consortium between a professional home builder, professional capital, and now a professional operator, and we are very excited about where those types of structures can go. So I think what's the beauty for Invitation Homes is, based on where our cost to capital is in the cycle, we can be nimble.
We can do things on balance sheet, which, for the record, we'd prefer to do as much as possible, when our cost to capital lines up the right way. We can do things in part in JV with other professional capital stacks that are out there that would like SFR exposure with a professional operator, and/or we can operate our way into being a potential partner or a value-add partner into existing portfolios. And so I think the type of capital will, just like in the multifamily space, evolve over time. It will go from balance sheet risk capital to more maybe lower threshold and return capital that you see more synonymous with the insurance industry. I think the financings that are available to the space will only get better over time.
If you look at how the GSEs have financed multifamily and manufactured housing, I would expect that over time and distance, they will get more active in the SFR space, specifically as you see communities get more established and developed. We will, by the end of this year, have somewhere close to 70 full communities on our platform that we're managing. That is a very different business than a scattered site business that was in the first 10 years. It looks and feels much more like multifamily. I would expect that our processes, our value-add offerings, the ancillary services that we drive, will adjust and change, and that will in kind lend itself to all different sorts of types of capital, and also third-party companies that will support the, that type of a living experience.
So I think, Buck, it's early days, and we know kind of who the capital is. It's been in SFR, in professional SFR, the first 10 years. I would expect it to continue to mature and to get much more sophisticated and intelligent and simple over time.
What I would just add is when you think about the third-party business for us, it's really five advantages for us, right? First is, it's a capital-light way to grow the fee stream and earnings of the company. Second is, by taking on these third-party agreements, it also gives us the ability to potentially scale in new markets more quickly. So, for example, Nashville was a market we had exited. Between these three agreements, we now have 700-800 homes in Nashville, and so it's now giving us an opportunity to leg back into Nashville on a much more efficient basis than it would've been to buy homes one at a time. Third is, we either have a ROFO or at least an effective first look on any assets that get sold by our partners. And so they notify us when they're considering selling something.
We obviously have the information advantage and the first look on it. It gives us an opportunity to potentially buy assets and put them on the balance sheet. The fourth advantage is, these three people that we've announced this with are very well-capitalized institutions that clearly could be future capital partners for us. And then lastly, it's the information advantage, right? We now have information on 110,000 homes, and we can use that information to help manage our business, manage our acquisitions, have better information advantage when it comes time to thinking about revenue and expenses for the company. And so when you really think about this, this is a very. We call it 3PM, but Dallas and I have jokingly called it SPM, Strategic Property Management, right?
This is, this is what we think will be value add to us and help obviously grow earnings and be accretive to our shareholders.
Can we drill down a little bit on the fee structure and the margins of how these initial agreements work, and what kind of accretion you guys are anticipating? And I guess, you know, if you add, keep adding more of these agreements, does it get incrementally more profitable as you scale?
I think the short answer is, it depends, right? So the structures and the economic terms of each of these agreements vary depending on what our partners' sensitivities and goals may be. You know, we've been a little bit coy about sharing a tremendous amount of detail on the economics, in part because, you know, we're sensitive to our customers' right to confidentiality. You know, recall that we onboarded the first portfolio, I believe it was January 15th or 16th. The second portfolio was onboarded in the middle of May. So, you know, in our first quarter numbers, you saw less than a full quarter of contribution from the original Starwood portfolio. We'll have a little bit of contribution from the Nuveen portfolio that was onboarded in May. And then the last piece will come on sometime in the third quarter.
I think once we have onboarded, you know, all 20,000+ of these homes, and we're able to provide information on a slightly more anonymized basis, and candidly, had a little bit more operating and financial history we can look at, I think we'll be in a much better place to give folks a little bit of a shorthand way of thinking about the economics that is useful in terms of understanding the business and what it can do, while sort of preserving the confidentiality of our customers. What I will say is this: This is a high-margin business for us. We are not interested in commodity property management. That's not what we do.
As Scott said, this is a highly strategic line of business for us, the goal of which is to improve our wholly owned portfolio and grow our business over time and distance, in a thoughtful, capital-light way. And we're really excited about it. I think that, the paradigm of third-party management in the multifamily world does not apply here. I think, you know, some of our peers have talked about, third-party property management, as, as maybe not being what they had anticipated or hoped. I think we have entered into these agreements very much with eyes wide open, and with economic structures that are designed to both protect us and, align our incentives in terms of driving better operational and financial performance over time. So we really view it as a win-win-win.
It's a win for our customers, it's a win for us, and it's a win for our stakeholders.
What kind of operational lift does it require to onboard 20,000 houses into the portfolio? And does that stress the other regular business? Or, you know, is there an upper limit to what you guys can onboard in a year?
Yeah, as we mentioned, we've been really strategic about who we're partnering with. First of all, they're in our markets, so. And part of why they wanna partner with us is that we have that scale and density in those local markets. We have the teams on the ground. So really, it's incremental. We're just adding to the teams that are already there. We're not building anything new on that side of the business. And in many ways, we'll see how it plays out. We think it's gonna add efficiency to our base book and our ability to have more density locally, whether it comes to leasing, the repair and maintenance, the turns or rehabs.
The ability, you know, the drive time from one home to another is a big part of our efficiency, and if we have more dense with the third party, we're able to service those homes, get to them quicker, use our algorithms to route and all that stuff that really makes us as efficient and high margin that we are as a business. So we really see it as we've done this before, whether it's buying a portfolio of 3,000 homes or managing a portfolio. Now, the first one with Starwood of 14,000 homes, that was a bit of a lift.
Mm.
And there were a couple of markets like Atlanta and Phoenix, where it took a little extra lift, but we took down all 14,000 homes in terms of integrating into our portfolio in 2 days. A lot of work happened before that, but our ability to just jump, you know, have them come into the portfolio, is a testament to our teams locally and their dedication, and being able to hire and get them into our engine. And long term, it's gonna our partners are gonna be excited to be able to try to get some of the improvements and efficiencies that we can bring to their portfolio.
Awesome. And I wanna dive back into the build for rent side or the build to rent, 'cause you had this announcement, just second quarter to date, like upwards of 1,000 houses under new contract, $274 million potential total investment. Are the yields on those homes similar to what you've characterized before, you know, in terms of a roughly a 6%-ish yield? And I guess, you know, the question we get from investors a lot is, you know, "Is this 6% a real number?" Like, are we talking apples to apples versus, you know, comparable yield on cost, you know, after CapEx, fully loaded kind of thing?
Well, I think the short answer is, when we're underwriting these communities, we're underwriting on an untrended yield, and we're targeting north of a 6% return. Now, remember, this, this is new construction homes, right? So the delta between, you know, the nominal and economic cap rate is, is very little because when we first buy them, the upfront CapEx, they're brand-new homes. And so, you know, realistically, it's a 5- or 10-year cycle until the, the CapEx spend on this increases materially. But I think the short answer is, is, you know, what we just announced last night was 1,000 homes that we have under forward purchase agreements. It's spread across 4 different builders. And those are homes that, you know, get delivered any time between, you know, the next month and the next 12 months.
And so, you know, I think you should see us. You should expect to see us continue to make announcements like this. When I joined the company almost a year ago, I think we were engaged with, you know, two major home builders. Now, we're engaged with, like, six to eight. We'd like to be engaged with more. We're increasing that dialogue with both the national production builders as well as the regional builders. And we think from a risk-reward perspective, this is the right place in the spectrum for where we can play. This is also giving us forward visibility to our acquisitions pipeline.
If you think about it, while, you know, when you look at what we were doing three, four years ago in terms of the MLS acquisitions, we didn't necessarily have line of sight because we were still buying homes one at a time, but at the time, there was very substantial increased volume of home sales. Obviously, the existing home sales has declined dramatically in the last few years because of where interest rates are, but we now have forward visibility. I think we said in our first quarter earnings, we had about 1,900 homes under forward purchase. We announced another 1,000 last night, so that's 3,000 - almost 3,000 homes of forward visibility. And we expect to continue to do forward purchases with the builders and expect to still target something in and around, if not north of a 6 cap.
All right. I gotta jump in before we run out of time with an obligatory balance sheet-type question for John. You know, given these opportunities that you can grow both a 3PM platform and the build for rent as you're leaning in on that, you know, how do you think about the capital stack right now? Do you think about, you know, at some point, utilizing the ATM for additional equity issuance if there's additional growth opportunities? How do you position your cash flows going forward?
Yeah, I think the answer is all of the above, right? So as we sit, disposition proceeds have been a significant source of capital for us because it is so accretive for us to sort of prune the portfolio of underperforming assets or maybe assets in markets where we'd like to have a few fewer eggs in one basket. And we're able to sell between a 3-4 cap, put the cash on the balance sheet at, you know, 5.25, 5.35, and then redeploy it, as Scott said, north of a 6.
I think if you couple that with, you know, our access to capital, both debt and equity, you know, we certainly don't love our share price today, but would love to get to a point where we could use the ATM, including potentially the forward component of our ATM to match fund. But I think we feel very comfortable with where the balance sheet sits, with our access to capital. We have a plan to address our near-term maturities, which recall, we don't have any debt maturing prior to 2026. So I think from a capital perspective, we feel really good about, you know, our approach to the new product pipeline that doesn't require us to put a bunch of capital out the door.
It allows us to sort of maintain dry powder and sort of evaluate the full spectrum of opportunities that present themselves. And then, as we sort of move forward with, you know, takedowns, then we address the capital need accordingly. But I think, you know, our approach is designed to be attractive from a risk-adjusted return perspective and from, you know, the perspective of being capital light up until the point that we are prepared to take down a finished home that is ready for lease-up and to start generating cash flow. So I think the balance sheet's in a great spot. Obviously, you know, we were pleased to see the upgrade from Moody's recently. And so I think from a capital availability perspective and from a match funding perspective, we feel really good.
All right. With that, I think we're out of time, so let me leave it there. Thank you all for joining us and attending, and thanks for the team. Appreciate the invitation to be here.