All right, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Invitation Homes 2025 Investor Day. I'm Scott McLaughlin, Head of Investor Relations. It's great to see many of you again, including many of our largest stockholders, along with our esteemed sell-side community. Today is about transparency, engagement, and execution, giving you a clear view of where we're headed and how we plan to get there. Before we dive into all that, let's just take a quick look at some of our required disclosures. This presentation includes forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financials. Please review the disclaimers on this page, along with the appendix at the back of our presentation for additional details. With that, let's set today in our purpose. Our purpose at Invitation Homes is simple: unlock the power of home.
We do that by delivering quality living solutions and genuine care for the family in search of better schools, or a nurse who needs a shorter commute, and the couple who wants a yard without the maintenance surprises. That's the power of home. Think of today as a guided tour through one of our homes, with each room representing a key aspect of our business. Here's a look at our agenda. Dallas will kick things off in the living room with a review of our business and strategy, followed by Tim, who will take us into the kitchen to talk about operational excellence and the resident experience. Next up, Virginia's in the den to share how we're unlocking the future of home through innovation and technology. We'll then do our first of two Q&A sessions, followed by a short break.
After that, Scott Eisen will take us into the garage to discuss external growth opportunities, and we'll then join Jon in the Home Office to walk through how we plan to unlock shareholder value. Finally, Dallas will return to meet us on the front porch to summarize our plans and send us off with some closing thoughts. We'll then hold our second Q&A session and conclude by around 4:00 P.M. Following that, we hope those of you here in the room can stay and be our guests at an open house reception immediately afterward and connect with our leadership team, who's here today throughout the room. Before we sit down with Dallas in the living room, let's start our home tour with a quick look around through the walls, up the stairs, and into the heart of what makes this home special.
I found my place. I found my place. I found my place in every day. That silver lining is always shining. I'm growing strong in the garden. Watched you strike lightning. I watched you paint the ocean blue. Now we know we're never waiting. We're gonna fly. We can't, we can't forget forever. We can't, we can't forget forever. I found my place. I found my place.
Please welcome Dallas Tanner, President and Chief Executive Officer, to the stage.
Thank you. Thank you. We really are grateful to have everyone in attendance today. Thank you for spending the day with us trying to figure out how we can unlock the power of home for our residents, our stockholders, and our associates together. Why now? We feel like we're on a path to create incredible efficiencies in our business through automation, AI, centralized processes. We feel like we're in the early innings of where the industry is going, and we're basically only a decade plus into our story. It's exciting to be with everyone today, to be able to kind of go deeper under the hood with key members of our team to really look at what we're focused on in real time that's going to lend itself to outperformance over time. We also acknowledge that the setup's a little bit interesting right now.
There's a little bit of headwinds around supply in that backdrop that people have been talking about. At our company, we have a culture of controlling the controllables. It's something we talk about all the time. It was actually kind of fun that we saw that we were able to put those on some of our patches today. Always taking accountability and trying to make sure that we can not only control the pieces and the inputs that go into our business that are within our reach, but also holding us accountable to that control and making sure that we sort of share with you guys the work we've been doing to set the mark for the next couple of years in our business. I want to set the table today really around three key concepts.
One is innovation, how we are focused on getting more efficient, some of the early wins we've seen in our business, and where the puck's going to go for us over the next couple of years. Growth, what are those different channels? We've talked about a couple of new things just within the last year around our lending program and 3:00 P.M., and what does that look like for us going forward? What the kind of avenues of possibility are going to be for our company? How are we going to continue to define the SFR space going forward? How is Invitation Homes going to continue to lead and set the bar where the Single-Family Rental living experience should be?
These three areas we fundamentally believe are going to lead to outperformance for our company that will also complement the normal growth we are going to see in our business year in and year out. First, let's talk about innovation. How are we imagining the resident experience through the use of AI, centralized services? How do we decrease our cost structure over time and maximize revenues? How do we continue to kind of lead in that category, whether it is talking about our employees who are wonderful, the tools that they have, how efficient can we get on our current headcount? There is just a number of things that we are going to talk about there. Second is growth.
The opportunities that are in front of us in our ordinary course channels, things that we see that potentially could be on the horizon, and our ability to expand because of the efficiency of our platform and deliver sustainable returns for shareholders. Third is possibility, which is sort of the fun stuff. This is where we get to dream a little bit as entrepreneurs and builders. What is the long-term vision for Invitation Homes, and what role will we continue to play in shaping that narrative? Today, we're going to explain how we expect these teams basically to deliver another $0.20 per share of AFFO over the next few years as we implement some of these processes into our company.
Before we get into that, let's take a quick look back at how we've grown, sort of set the table for our discussion, and at each phase of our foundation, the company has evolved. We started the company with a really simple concept, right? It was, how do we make flexible living and leasing efficient, friendly, and full of genuine care, which you heard Scott talk about when he kicked things off? Really, our first phase, which you guys are all familiar with, is this asset aggregation phase coming in 2012 when we started the business. We were able to assemble basically 50,000 homes one-off over a three or four-year period and then start to standardize what that business should look like. Those early days, the margins were nowhere near where they are today. We had our second consolidation, our first big consolidation opportunity.
We call it the second chapter in our story, which was our merger and integration with Starwood Waypoint. That took a bit of digestion, as you can imagine, and we, I think, have proved to the street and also to ourselves over time that those efficiency gains were there. We saw it in really unprecedented NOI growth for a period of four to five years. This third chapter, which we call opening the aperture for our company, is really where the puck is going.
We have this baseline now of 110,000 units between wholly owned and our third-party businesses that set the stage for us to invest in technologies, processes, people, efficiencies in a way that will continue to drive and lead in outperformance, both in metrics we want to hold ourselves accountable to as an organization, but I think more importantly, how the resident feels living in our home and experiencing an Invitation Homes experience. Throughout this journey, we're proud of how Invitation Homes has been a leader within the SFR sector. Over the 14 years that we've been in the business, we've consistently led the way. We talk about that internally. What standard are we going to hold ourselves to as a company and as a leadership team, and how do we measure the success of that standard?
From being one of the founding members of the NRHC to doing the first securitization in the bond market to being the first S&P 500 company invited in in the SFR category, we've been a company that's continually sort of led the way and done things in what we would call first, first of its kind. We're really just getting started. Being a leader and a leader in the space as a company is really only part of the story or part of what we really want to focus on. What matters most is how these milestones translate into real results. Let's take a little bit closer look. Since our 2017 IPO, we've basically led the residential REIT sector in NOI growth.
That story obviously came through those few chapters that we had or the first three chapters of our book or the story that we're trying to tell as a company and organization. The most important thing about the performance, it's great, and it's really set us up with the confidence that as we look ahead, we know that we can adjust our thinking based on the opportunity set which is in front of us. We've always had an ability to react and to sort of see where the puck is going and put ourselves in a position to try to capture that in a meaningful way, both for our shareholders and also for our residents. This will lay a strong foundation for us as we prepare for what's next in our journey. For us, performance always starts with location.
Just taking a step back, let's zoom in to where we operate and why we believe our markets give us a very durable edge as a company. We're long-term investors pursuing growth and risk-adjusted returns in areas of the country that we believe will lend themselves to outperformance over time. 96% of our wholly owned portfolio is in what we would call high-growth markets. Our homes are primarily located in infill neighborhoods near great jobs, good school districts. Schools are really important to our customer. They're close to job growth where companies are moving and relocating, Southern markets, et cetera. We've always had this ideology of making sure that we lean into infill locations. Why is that? We're less exposed to competition. We serve the residents in a way, in a neighborhood that they actually want to be today and over time.
That's important when we talk about retention and our ability to continue to set a bar that's pretty high for us in terms of our customers renewing with us time and time again. Our customers have proven over time that they're extremely sticky. The other piece of being infill is that you have higher gross economic rents, which also equals basically better margin expansion over time. It helps you actually against the cost structure of OpEx and CapEx. If you're lower gross economic rents as a percentage of the overall revenue, it creates a bigger dent when things don't go right. It's not just about being in the right markets. It's also about having sector-leading scale and density. On the map in front of us is Atlanta as a good example. Today, we own and operate over 18,000 homes in this market.
To optimize staffing, routing, customer service, we've organized Atlanta today, and this is adapted over time, and it's very different from where we started, into four pods. The average pod today in Atlanta manages 4,600 units. Most companies don't have 4,600 units in any market. We have four sets of those in Atlanta alone. Each pod today is now almost double what it was just a few years ago in terms of the efficiency, by and large due to technology, processes, and procedures, which we're going to get into a little bit later. This means we just haven't grown. We haven't just put more homes on a map or tried to just create scale for the sake of scale. We've tried to be very deliberate about where we've invested capital, why we've invested capital, and having the right geographic concentrations that will lend itself to outperformance.
This unmatched scale and density actually translates into real advantages, as I mentioned before, faster turns, more efficient operations on a per-head basis, better service for our customers, all which drive higher satisfaction scores, which we can hold ourselves accountable to and ultimately lead to greater retention, and ultimately better risk-adjusted returns on our capital. It also builds a moat around our business that competitors find increasingly difficult to replicate or breach. The operational excellence does not go unnoticed. We have been recognized time and time again, and we hold ourselves accountable to some of these very metrics internally as we think about the types of efficiencies in our operations that we are trying to build. The real proof of success is in this experience that we deliver for the customer.
We have the strongest renewal rates in the residential sector, best in our industry, and best from what we can tell across our SFR peers. Long duration of stay will continue to confirm our own strategies that are centered around locations and service, like key principles in how we think about the customer. Tim's going to get into this a little bit deeper and in greater detail, but once we have a customer with us, we want them to want to stay for long periods of time. You're going to see these outcomes reflected through today's story and also through some of the strategy discussion we're going to talk about together. Now, let's bring this to life. We've talked about our purpose unlocking the power of home. This short video captures what we think it means for our residents, our communities, and our key stakeholders.
Let's go ahead and just roll the video.
What is home? More than a place to hang your hat, home is a safe haven where families and friendships can grow, the canvas on which cherished memories are painted. When you truly feel at home, there's nothing quite like it, and no one understands this more than America's premier single-family home leasing and management company.
Invitation Homes has a unified purpose: to unlock the power of home. We do this in a variety of meaningful ways. We unlock the power of home for residents by providing high-quality, hassle-free living. Our families get peace of mind, flexibility, choice, and freedom.
We unlock positive community impact by maintaining the quality of our homes, which contributes to the local economy, all while promoting sustainability and community engagement.
We unlock value for our investors through a sustainable business model that consistently delivers attractive returns and long-term growth.
We unlock professional and personal growth by offering career development and meaningful work that contributes to the creation of our homes and our communities. We are a high-touch, high-tech, highly motivated professional team. All across the country, families know what they want: a spacious, updated, or newly built home that is four-legged friendly with access to good schools and jobs in a community with playgrounds, parks, and other amenities nearby. Invitation Homes delivers this lifestyle like no one else can, thanks to a company culture that is rooted in genuine care.
The key to delivering a quality resident experience out there is consistently living up to our values in here and in here. We connect the dots by being transparent, communicating clearly, and building trust. We aim true by acting with integrity, taking responsibility, and doing what's right. We raise the roof by pursuing excellence through continuous improvement and innovation. We embrace the journey by being curious and encouraging different perspectives that drive our community forward.
These values start with every associate and extend to every resident. It's simply who we are, and this is something to be proud of.
I personally believe that home is the most powerful place in the world. We should never miss an opportunity to unlock that power. Let's do it, do it.
There are four major forces that are converging to create a powerful setup for Single-Family Rental today. First, it's the structural demand. Demographics are on our side, with millennials expected to drive household formation for years to come. The second, which you can't go a day without reading about in the news anywhere, is affordability.
Leasing remains far more cost-effective than owning in any of our markets. Third, the fragmented ownership. Roughly 97% of Single-Family Rental homes today are owned and operated by mom-and-pop landlords. It's a totally different experience than leasing from Invitation Homes. Our technology and the areas that we're going to focus on and get a little deeper in today are only going to expand that lead. Virginia is going to spend some time letting you under the hood so you can see exactly what we're cooking up in some of the areas of efficiency that are going to make that resident experience that much better. Fourth, the improving supply trends. While some markets have experienced some near-term supply pressures, we've talked about this for the last few quarters, the broader picture is that there is an ongoing housing shortage.
Build-to-rent deliveries and new starts from our nation's homebuilders are expected to decline significantly over the next year. While SFR supply coming in and out on the for-sale to for-rent could be a little bit transient versus a sell decision, these metrics aren't grossly out of balance today. Let's take a closer look at what some of these demographics and these demand demographics are starting to tell us. Our average new resident was born in 1986. It's a late millennial who values space, access to great schools, and even greater access to flexibility. They're often part of a dual-income household or need some sort of approach or balance with Hybrid Work. They've got kids. They have pets. They probably have multiple cars. They want a simple yard.
They want a garage where they can store stuff and space to live in without a 30-year debt anchor or a down payment. I think for those of us who own in here can attest to the maintenance surprises of homeownership. I literally have somebody looking at a water leak in my house today. They also want value. On a cost per sq ft basis, Single-Family Rental delivers that substantially over multifamily options in similar neighborhoods, making it a clear choice for families who are seeking space at a reasonable price. Our residents also tend to stay longer, too. I talked about that earlier. They're stickier. They're remaining with us significantly longer than an average multifamily resident and a sign of stability and satisfaction in our communities with some of the metrics I shared before. The pipeline is strong.
There's roughly 13,000 people turning 35 every day, with our key millennial today being 39 in our portfolio, fueling household formation for the next decade to come. There's a steady stream of future residents, and we're excited to show them what an Invitation Homes leasing lifestyle is all about. Where are they headed? Our markets really continue to be magnets for this demand. Net migration patterns continue to support housing demand across a variety of samples and metrics. While most growth has normalized coming off extraordinary pandemic eras, most of our key markets actually remain very net positive. Even in markets where we've seen a little bit of a softening in migration, the Sunbelt remains one of the most compelling reasons for all the long-term growth metrics that you guys watch and follow as well: job growth, lifestyle appeal, warm weather.
I think beyond all of that, it's affordability. Let's talk about affordability. Leasing a home through Invitation Homes is more affordable than owning in nearly every one of our markets, which I talked about earlier. Those of you who also own a home can attest, the cost of ownership keeps getting more expensive well beyond the mortgage. We see it in homeowners insurance rates. We see them in property taxes. We see them in maintenance surcharges. That cost can be very burdensome for a young family or somebody that's truly looking for flexibility or for a period of time. According to the Burns data, which we share pretty frequently, on average in our markets, it's $900 a month cheaper to rent than it is to own. It's almost a saving of $11,000 or $12,000 a year.
Let's take a little closer look now at the housing landscape, the opportunity that sits in front of us for professionally managed rentals. According to the U.S., the data is split in a few different areas. There's roughly somewhere between 14-15 million single-family homes for rent in the U.S. As I mentioned before, the interesting metric here is 97% of these SFR homes are traditionally managed by mom-and-pops, with 77% of those being somebody that owns and operates 10 homes or less. The fragmentation is a pretty powerful setup, not only for our company, but the industry, as there is a massive need for professionalized services in this category.
As an industry, and if we're being honest, we're really proud about the progress we've made as a company over the last 14 years, but we are literally just barely scratching the surface of what a flexible leasing experience can be like. We've seen how fragmented ownership creates opportunity. We saw that in our first chapter. We've seen it in some of the consolidation that's currently going on. Another critical factor in shaping housing supply will be the opportunities to professionalize and standardize some of these services. Here the story is pretty clear. As a reminder, we're somewhere under-supplied between, let's call it, 2-4 million units, depending on which data set you gravitate towards. Permits as a percentage of households tells this story pretty well. Basically, going back to the GFC, we've sort of consistently under-supplied.
While some of the more pro-growth markets have experienced some of that near-term supply imbalance that I talked about, the broader shortage is not going to go away anytime soon. The setup is really strong in terms of the demand profile for this sort of product. Why is it so hard? None of this will surprise anyone in the room. Zoning restrictions, rent control laws, NIMBYism, layers of blue, red tape, state and local regulation have all constrained new development. It is a topic of mine in almost every housing article I read. It is just how hard. And we know, because of our development business and the stuff that we are doing with our national partners, how hard it is to get through the municipalities, new communities.
The structural imbalance will continue to underscore the enduring need for not only great located product, but well-served product that are professionally managed and reinforce some of these essential principles we were talking about today. Within SFR specifically, the newest supply stream is actually starting to roll over. I want to touch on this for a second. Build-to-rent has emerged as a distinct asset class in its own. The surge that we saw in like 2022 and 2023 is starting to clearly moderate, likely supported by cheaper cost of capital from 2019 to 2022, really put a lot of new product in the system. Quarterly starts have peaked nationwide at roughly 24,000 homes in 2023. Today, deliveries are down to about 12,000 homes per quarter.
The forward pipelines that we follow all suggest that we're going to have less than about 5,000 per quarter as projects continue to cycle through. That's an expected 73% drop from peak levels, some of those levels that we started to talk about last summer. What's driving it? Higher financing costs, tighter capital markets, rising construction expenses, some of the regulatory environment that I've talked about. Many developers are starting to hit pause as they consider new projects. For disciplined operators such as us with infill portfolio locations, this creates an extremely constructive backdrop for us, not in just the real estate that we own and the natural demand you'll have for that product, but also in the services that we can provide that can truly delineate an experience between us and a smaller operator.
This favorable trend is also true for the four markets I feel like we've been talking about on every earnings call for the last four quarters. The good news is, as these deliveries start to come in, they're projected to decline meaningfully from those prior peak levels that I talked about. Now, these markets aren't fully normalized yet. Quality and location will still sort of carry the day and continue to what matters most to us as an organization. These fundamentals will consistently drive performance over the long haul, regardless of these sort of short-term fluctuations we see from time to time. Now, I want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of why Invitation Homes has built to outperform and why now is the right time to own Invitation. First, the power of our platform.
This is where we're going to get a little deeper today. Tim is going to get really in the weeds on this topic. Our unmatched scale, density, data-driven operations, proprietary technology stack, we're proud to be continually setting the standard for what innovation in the for-lease housing space should be. Second will be the diversity of our growth channels. Scott's going to spend a ton of time talking through everything from organic rent growth to creative acquisitions, strategic partnerships, third-party management, our new lending vertical that we've stood up in the last year and what that's leading to from an opportunity set, and talk about that compounding growth. We're excited to have Scott really unearth a lot of what we're working on there. Third, our premier customer experience. We're not just providing homes. We're delivering a lifestyle.
Our commitment to resident satisfaction and value, ad offerings, and premier service will continue to open the door for new possibilities, new partnerships, new things that we can start to merchandise with our customer. We know that these adoption rates are highly sought after, and we just are barely scratching the surface of how to provide additional value. We will spend some time on that as well. If there is a bonus, it is probably the setup. The stock is really cheap right now. We believe in the value of our business so strongly that our board recently authorized a $500 million stock repurchase program. We view this tool as another tool in our toolbox that will help us demonstrate our own confidence in our long-term value and alignment with you, our stockholders. You are going to hear a lot about more of each of these today during the presentation.
In short, and I think this is simply how to sum it up and why we felt like today was meaningful, we want to show you guys how we think we can drive another $0.14-$0.20 of AFFO alongside our normal baseline growth assumption over the next several years. We're excited to show you all the different things that we're working on that are going to drive to that metric, and they're the same metrics we're going to hold ourselves accountable to internally. It takes the best team to make this all possible, as you know. The innovators, the builders, the entrepreneurs, and the people that are in the room today that we're going to hear from in much greater detail than just the setup that I've been laying out for you this afternoon. Let's start with our speakers.
First, we're going to hear from Tim Loebner, following which we're going to hear from Virginia Solomon, Scott Eisen, and then Jon Olsen. Each of these partners of mine bring decades of experience across technology, investments, and finance. We also have a deep bench here, and I hope some of you get an opportunity to meet many of them. I want to thank each of them for being here and also being available to answer questions. This team is the engine that turns strategy into execution. You will see many of them here today as we present our plans. Please, again, do not hesitate to ask any questions in the Q&A. With that, let's move from strategy to execution. Please join me in welcoming Tim Loebner to the stage to take us into his kitchen.
Thank you, Dallas. Thank you, everybody, for being here. I am Tim Loebner, and I'm the Chief Operating Officer here at Invitation Homes. I've been with the company for 13 years and in my current role for just over six months. It's hard to believe how time flies. In fact, Jon, you and I were chatting briefly, and you said, "Can you believe it's been almost a decade since our first property tour in Southern California?" The answer is, "I can't believe it's been that long." In my time at the company, I've realized that the operations department does a few things. It's fairly straightforward. The first thing we do, we maximize revenue. The second thing we do, we manage our expenses.
The third thing we do, which is as important as the first two, is elevate the experience of our customers in an effort to build longevity of tenancy, build brand loyalty, and to build trust. It is what this game is all about. It is interesting. I was speaking with Haendel earlier today when you came in, and you said, "Wait a second. Back in 2019, was not your theme ready to run?" The answer is, "Yes, it was ready to run." It is amazing over six years how the theme of running still has great applicability. I am curious, by a show of hands, I am not asking anybody to run here, but how many have run one mile before? By a show of hands. I am not going to ask you how fast you run it. Okay, so a lot of people have run one mile. It is a good reference point.
What you see up here on the right is the record-breaking times for the mile run since the inception of the mile run being recorded officially. It's interesting. I did some research prior to our presentation, and the mile was first timed in the 1850s, although it wasn't really official. The first time it was officially timed was in 1913, and the time was 4 minutes and 15 seconds. Over time, over the next, really, the next four decades, 40 years, the holy grail of running was the four-minute mile. In 1954, Roger Bannister broke that record, ran a four-minute mile, actually a sub-four-minute mile. Since then, as you can see by the curve, times keep getting faster and faster and faster. What does that have to do with us today?
I’d say that at this moment in time, our industry, and specifically Invitation Homes, we’re sitting somewhere on the left side of that chart. I don’t even think we’ve broken the equivalent of the four-minute mile yet. We’re continuing to get faster. We’re continuing to get better. That’s what I’m excited to tell you about from an operations perspective over the next 20 minutes. Over the next 20 minutes, I’m going to break my presentation into two parts. The first part is where we are today and what makes us different. The second part of the presentation is where are we going and why should you, as analysts and investors, care? To carry that running analogy forward, have you ever watched runners? You look out and you see people in a race, and you say, “Wow, that’s a fast runner.” Generally, they’ve got long legs.
They've got lean torsos. They probably have a lung capacity a lot larger than ours in this room. That's one of the things that makes them a good runner. They have these natural advantages that we can't compete with, or at least I can't compete with. Our natural advantage is our scale and density. No one can say that they have the scale and density that we have. Why is that important? As investors and analysts, I'll tell you why that's important. There's a couple of benefits that come from that. First, it enhances our revenue. There's a couple of things I'll point out. We know more about every neighborhood where we operate than anybody else. Therefore, we can price better. Pricing better means better revenue. Second, on the revenue side, we have a value-add services program that allows us to diversify our revenue streams.
When you think about programs like the internet package that we offer, internet service providers, think about Charter Spectrum, AT&T. They search us out because they see us as an opportunity for them to scale their business. We can offer that to residents and enhance our revenue profile through diversified streams. Lastly, on the enhancing of the revenue front, our density in markets allows us to get to residents faster and solve their problems faster. Speed's important in this game. Speed is service. Good service drives renewal. Good renewals drive revenue. Let me talk about lowering expenses. That same density that helps us get to residents faster also really makes our maintenance platform highly efficient. On the average day, our maintenance technicians can visit five houses and work on 9-10 service requests. Do not let that fool you. It's not at the cost of a great experience.
Our average service score is a 4.74 out of five stars. We are not cutting corners here. We are just efficient because we are leveraging our density and scale. Also, on the expense front, we buy more than just about anybody out there. When you think about HVAC systems, when you think about appliances, when you think about flooring, manufacturers reward us for what we buy. We get better point-of-sale discounts. We get better back-end rebates so that every dollar we spend goes further than others. The third point I will point out under benefits is this unlocking of technology and data opportunities. When you think about when we spend money on technology, meaning integrated workflows, new tech enablement of people's jobs, AI integration, data infrastructure, we are spending that money and spreading it across 110,000 homes. On a per-home basis, that cost is much more reasonable.
We can do things that others can't when it comes to technology. You'll hear Virginia talk about that later today. It's really important because that's the future of the business, leveraging data and technology to become better. The last thing I'll point out is that our scale and density allow us to diversify risk. I'm going to point out two things. Is there any other asset class in real estate where the loss, the entire loss of a single asset, has a de minimis impact on revenue? God forbid we have a fire in one of our houses, takes the house offline, but it has almost a negligible impact on our returns. Other asset classes cannot say that. The second point I'd make about risk diversification is how we communicate and when we communicate with insurers.
They look at our portfolio, and they see tens and tens of thousands of houses across multiple geographies exposed to a variety of different types of risks, but nothing consolidated in one body of risk. Our insurance prices are more favorable because our insurance premiums are more favorable because the insurance carriers recognize how we diversify risk. I think it's even more interesting when you look at it on a market level and how we operate the business. I'd like to use our Phoenix market as a case study. I'm pointing out Phoenix, which isn't even our largest market. You heard Dallas talk about Atlanta earlier, so I'm not poaching the most efficient market. I'm just showing you one of our larger markets. Here's the case study. From 2022 to 2025, a three-year period, we went from 9,700 homes to about 12,500 homes.
That's an increase of nearly 30% in terms of our homes under management. You'd think that we'd see the same amount of increase in the number of staff members in order to accommodate the management, but that's not true. During that same period, we went from 115 associates to 130 associates. It's only a 13% increase, again, compared to a nearly 30% increase in assets under management. I'd draw your attention at the director and above level, which is kind of our management layer in the market, we didn't have to hire anybody at that expensive hire overhead. Our only hires were at the distal end of the business where we can afford to hire more people at a lower cost point, the people that are actually serving the residents, again, at the distal end of the business. What does this mean in terms of overall efficiency?
On a homes per associate basis, we went from 84 homes per associate to 96 homes per associate. It's a 13.4% improvement. From a total payroll on a dollar per home basis, we reduced that by 13.5%. Again, this is a great example, a great case study of how we scale efficiently in individual markets. Look, we talked briefly about the natural advantages of runners. I'm going to pull that analogy again. The natural advantages of runners, right? Long legs, lean torsos, higher uptake of oxygen as they run. That's not the only thing that makes good runners good runners. Some people are just really good runners. They have great running mechanics. They train better. They eat better. They sleep better. That's also what makes them better. Similarly, how we operate is an advantage that's unique to us, and we operate in a unique way. It's funny.
The most common question that I get, in fact, I got it probably half a dozen times last week at a conference, at the NRHC conference. They say, "Tim, how do you guys manage 110,000 houses?" What's funny is my answer always confuses them. I say, "We don't really think about managing 110,000 houses. Instead, we focus on how to manage one house and care for one resident or the group of residents that live in that one house. Then and only then do we think about how to do that 110,000 times. That's the way to run this business." We look at the customer journey in a series of five distinct phases. First, we attract our customer. Then we convert them into residents. Then our goal is to retain them and then renew them. Unfortunately, sometimes people move out. We see that.
We have to have a good move-out process. Look, the most important part of this journey, though, is really the retain. We're really proud of our renewal rate. Our book of business on the renewal side is around 75-80%. We focus maniacally on the retain. Think about it. We're not like a hotel stay or an airplane ride or a meal at a restaurant where you need to be good for like an hour or three hours or 24 hours. Our residents stay with us for a year, for two years, for three years, for five years, for ten years. Our average resident right now stays with us nearly 41 months. We need to get it right every single day. We need to get it right when they move in. We need to get it right when they're paying their rent.
We need to get it right every time something breaks in the house. And so we focus on the retain a lot. Over the next couple of minutes, I'm going to tell you a little bit about a few areas of our business. I think you'll find interesting. It's how we price, how we offer lease-term flexibility, how we offer a unique package of value-add services. And lastly, I'm going to touch upon what I believe is best in industry maintenance. So let's get started. Look, pricing's interesting. Pricing's complicated. We're not like an automobile manufacturer or a clothing manufacturer where there's like a finite number of product SKUs that you need to price. We have 110,000 unique products at 110,000 unique locations that we're trying to price in an environment that's constantly changing with supply and demand fundamentals that are evolving real-time.
Let me walk you through how we price because I think it's a little bit different than others because it's a proprietary platform that we use. First, we take public rental listing data, emphasis on public. We get all the ILS data. We absorb that. We then, in our proprietary platform, compare each individual asset in our portfolio to the entirety of available homes in the market. We're looking at location and quality of the inside, quality of the outside, and other factors that differentiate each house. We then compare that to our house, to the larger set, and we come up with this estimated market clearing price. That's only half the problem, right? The other part of the problem is demand. We are constantly listening to the demand signals out there. Think about the number of times people say home for rent in Google.
Google search data, apartment.com data, Zillow data. Then we look at our own data, people, how often they're coming to our website, how often we are generating leads in our platform, how often people are going to show. We use that data along with our boots-on-the-ground experts in each market to evaluate those prices. In real time, we are changing those to make sure that we are meeting the market in an efficient manner. That's how we price. Let me get to the next one. This is the second of the four that I was going to tell you about. Just because it's complicated how we price using our proprietary platform doesn't mean we need to make it hard for our resident. It doesn't need to be complicated for them.
We offer them 13 different options every time they lease with us or renew with us. Those 13 options have prices that are unique, and we incentivize them to pick certain lease terms that line up with where we think the supply and demand is going to, where the supply and demand relationship is most important. What we've learned over the last decade plus is that most people actually lease in quarters one and two. From the Super Bowl weekend until early summer is the best time for us to be bringing product on the market. What we're doing is, again, we're incentivizing residents through flexibility, through transparency to really drive more leases into the first half of the year. You can see that we're able to manage that lease expiration curve. Very important part of our business.
The third of the four topics I'm going to present in terms of how we operate differently is our value-add services program. We believe we offer more than just a home. By a show of hands, how many of you have internet at your home or apartment? All right. So basically everybody. You know what? Our residents are not unlike you. They want internet in their house. We offer them a great package, bundled internet along with 200-plus channels of streaming television. We also offer them a smart home system. The smart home system includes remote access through lock set at the door. It includes a thermostat that allows our residents to control their temperatures and manage their utility bills. Lastly, it also includes a Ring Video Doorbell for looking out and seeing who's at their house.
Premise awareness is what we call it. We also have an Air Filter Delivery Program where we're delivering air filters to houses on a quarterly basis. Who enjoys shopping for an air filter? All right. Not as many hands I see. Our residents feel the same way. We deliver air filters to their house on a quarterly basis. This area of our business, we believe, over the next three years will generate an additional $0.04-$0.05 of incremental AFFO. This is a great program for investors, and it's a great program for residents. There's a saying that you can do well by doing good. This is a great example of that. The last topic in terms of how we operate that I think is different is our maintenance program. We don't look at maintenance just as a service.
We actually look at it as a loyalty strategy. It is the single biggest pain point in anybody's experience. Dallas talked about it earlier. I'm sure you experience maintenance needs in your homes or apartments. This is an area of the business that we have to get right. We have to get this right. How do we do that? We are super proud of how we communicate with residents. Communication is the number one thing that residents want when it comes to maintenance. They want to know what's going on. We offer an omnichannel solution that people can call our 24/7 call center. They can contact us through our online portal. Most importantly, they can contact us through our mobile app. Our mobile app's really interesting.
In a world where all digital experiences are being compared to Uber and DoorDash, I think that the maintenance experience that we offer through our mobile app is phenomenal. Do not take my word for it. Right now, if you were to go online, you would see on the.
You flip the switch, but your disposal is plain dead. Chances are you can fix it in a couple of minutes.
All right. What you are seeing there—so I will get back to what I was saying—what you are seeing there is interactive videos that are self-help for residents. When somebody has something that they are submitting and we have a self-help video, it helps them solve the resident before we submit. The AI-powered platform, again, I do not want you to just have to believe me. We have 1.2 million work orders that have been completed on this platform.
300,000 unique users have submitted and completed a work order through this. If you were to go on to the App Store, there are 13,000 unique user reviews, and it has an average score of 4.8 stars. It is really good. Again, this is a highlight of our experience, and we want to continue to make it so. All right. First half of my presentation is over. Second half, I am talking about where we are going and why should you, as investors and analysts, care. I think this is the exciting part of the presentation. All right. We are embarking on a journey right now to revolutionize our business. We are only 13 years in, but we are finding that there is tremendous opportunity to leverage technology and to leverage centralization to make the business move faster and to provide an even better experience for our residents.
As part of our efforts to modernize our service model, we're looking at every activity of every role in our field organization. We're looking at it through an interesting framework. The first thing we're doing is we're taking a look and evaluating whether there are activities that people are doing that they just don't need to do. You hear about it all the time where people realize, "Wow, I'm doing something that someone else is doing," or swivel chair from one system to another. There are things in our business that we don't need to be doing anymore. We're going to get rid of those. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to leverage technology. We're going to find ways to automate workflow, integrate systems because we've got a lot of opportunity there, and leverage AI.
If you start with, "Hey, we're not going to do the stuff we don't need to do," then if it needs to be done, if technology can do it, we're going to leverage technology. The next thing is, is it possible that someone else should be doing it and not us? Maybe somebody, either a resident or a vendor, should be doing something because they could do it better than us. If that's not the case, then the last thing we can do is, does the work need to be done in our local office? Do we need to be paying prices for Los Angeles workers or Miami workers when we could probably centralize that in somewhere like Dallas or Phoenix under a single manager and get things done more effectively, more efficiently, and be able to measure it more accurately?
The last part is centralizing or outsourcing for efficiency. Over the next couple of slides, I'm going to talk about three case studies. Three case studies where there's real savings that are either underway or we see in the future. The first one is this call center consolidation. One of the things we found was we had a bunch of call centers. We didn't need a bunch of call centers. It doesn't sound very efficient, does it? You would think that as we grew the portfolio of the houses under management, that we would have more phone calls, that the quality of the phone calls would go down, that our cost of service would go up. Let me tell you what happened over the last year. From 2024 to 2025, our home count increased by just over 4%. Our call volume, though, shrunk by 22%.
Our answer rate, quality of the resident experience, increased by 11%, our answer rate. Lastly, our cost improved by about $1 million. You might say, "Wait, how is that possible? That does not seem like the right direction for all these numbers." The reality is we consolidated call centers, first of all, and we also started looking at how the call center agents were using their time and looked specifically at tasks and identified whether or not they could resolve those issues instead of sending them to the field organization. The answer was there were lots of opportunities. That is what we did. We conducted significant training with our call centers, and we empowered them to solve more problems on the first call. First call resolution was driving this.
What we're excited about is that there's more savings here, and we're confident we're going to realize that over the coming year or so. All right. Case study two. We call this Digital Home Care Hub. It's interesting. When you think about the cost to maintain a house, there's three things that really drive it. The first is the price that we pay for stuff, right? The price we pay for flooring, the price we pay for appliances. The second thing is the decisions we make around what we're going to do when something's wrong. Do you repair something? Do you refresh something? Do you replace something? Do you renew something? There's lots of different options. So making the right decision is part of how we maintain costs. The last one and the most important one is the condition of the home.
Again, you've got pricing, you've got the scoping and decision. The most important one is the condition of the house. And who drives the condition of the house? The resident. Most people talk about property management in terms of tenants and landlords. We talk about it. Obviously, there are legal terms, but we talk about it as a partnership. A partnership where the resident plays an important role in helping maintain the condition of the house. What we envision in the future is this technology-enabled home care hub where it starts with moving, where the resident documents the condition of the house, not just us and the resident verifies it, but the resident documents it. They scan it with their phone. That way, there's a sense of ownership, and it will drive a sense of accountability because that's what's needed when you do not have on-site property management.
If you do that at the beginning of a lease term and upon move-out, you create, again, a sense of ownership and accountability. We also view HOA violations, municipal violations, as well as periodic just home scans as ways to drive this accountability where we do not have to always be there. We are still there because we are going to visit the house to take care of maintenance issues. Prior to somebody renewing, having them scan the house brings us closer. It collapses time and distance, and we believe that this will help us reduce our cost to maintain. The third case study that I would like to tell you about is this self-service mobile checkout. Remember I talked about self-service. One of the least efficient parts of our process, of the customer journey, is when somebody moves out. It is really interesting.
Obviously, we want to get to the house as soon as someone moves out so that the superintendent can scope it, and we can award that work to a contractor to get that turn started and reduce our days to re-resident. The one thing that we've found is that people sometimes move out before their last day. In fact, that number is as high as 35%-40% of residents that move out before their last day to the 2-2.5 days. Instead of us tracking them down by phone, by email, or by text asking, "When are you going to leave? Have you left?" we believe we can pull a page out of the hotel industry and have a mobile checkout using our mobile app.
That will allow us to deploy a superintendent faster to the house and start that turn and reduce days to re-resident. In total, I just talked about these three case studies. There's lots more here, but I would tell you that we believe that there's an additional $0.02-$0.03 of incremental AFFO by implementing these over the next two to three years. We're really excited about that. The last theme I want to talk with you about is this overarching theme of centralization. I've talked about the three case studies, but then there's this huge opportunity to centralize.
As we've embarked on this study of each of the roles in our offices, we've realized that there's a lot of work that's being done at the distal end of the business, meaning when you look at the local framework there, you've got a market leader, you've got a turn and maintenance team, you've got a property management team, and you've got a leasing and renewal team that's supported by the central national support team that focuses on policy, process, procedure, technology enablement in partnership with Virginia's team. The reality is a lot of the work that's being done at the distal end of the business are routine and repeatable processes, high-volume administrative tasks, things that don't require any specific market knowledge, and they generally are aligned with support-focused activities. Now, it doesn't make sense to be doing these locally.
We believe that there's an opportunity to create a central operations team. This is something that the multifamily industry has done in the past, but we're now just unlocking it. We believe that by moving those processes centrally, we can unlock further savings to the tune of 1-2 pennies of incremental AFFO. You might say, "Well, what are those areas of opportunity?" Here they are. It's rent collection and delinquency management. It's security deposit accounting. It's leasing and renewal administrative work, HOA and municipal compliance. Obviously, there's a component that would stay local, but there's a lot of just basic administrative work that can be centralized, resident event scheduling, and lastly, just general resident inquiries. Again, we believe we can do those more cost-effectively and provide a better experience if we do it locally.
This brings me to the end of my portion of the presentation. I want to leave you with just a couple of thoughts. Look, I've talked about our scale and density. That's our unique inherent advantage. I've talked about how we operate the business. That's our operating advantage. There's so much more here in terms of the growth of our value-add services, in terms of how we optimize our workflow and lend technology to make it more efficient, and how we centralize. We believe that in total, there's $0.07-$0.10 of incremental AFFO that we're going to unlock over the next three years.
Look, if our theme six years ago at the 2019 Investor Day was ready to run, I would tell you today, folks, that we are running, and we invite you to run with us because we are going places, and it is going to be really exciting. With that, I am going to turn it over to Virginia Solomon, who is going to talk about where we are going with technology.
Thank you, Tim. As Tim said, I am Virginia Solomon. I am the Chief Information and Digital Officer. And I am going to provide you with a little bit of a musical interlude in between the rest of the presentations. We are going to do that in the den. It is a real pleasure to be here today to share with you some of the things that we are focused on in technology at Invitation Homes.
As you heard from both Dallas and Tim, technology is foundational to one of the foundational elements of how we grow revenue, how we improve satisfaction, and as you'll hear from Scott in just a little bit, how we support sustainable growth. Today, though, while I have a broad remit for technology overall, I'm going to focus in specifically to share our thoughts and vision on the customer experience, including some of the work that we're doing with AI and cybersecurity. Our technology has truly evolved. Historically, apartments, REITs, and other real estate sectors have optimized around the asset and not the resident. As a result, our customer experience was somewhat fractured and generic. I joined six years ago. Actually, tomorrow is my six-year anniversary. What a place to celebrate with you all.
Six years ago, we did not have a clear and direct vision for how we were going to own the experience for the customer. Residents were pushed through white-label platforms like Rent Cafe by Yardi, and they often had to juggle up to seven different logins just to manage their lease and their home. We also recognized that we had a limited view of our customer information without a centralized CRM, and our associates were swivel chairing way too often between disconnected systems, creating inefficiency and frustration on both sides, associate and customer. Moving from fragmented to focused improved all of the items that you see here on the screen, but it also allows us to take a much more opportunity-based approach to what we automate and where we use AI.
In addition, this intense focus on customer need demands that I look at both best in industry technology, but also best in class AI advancements from our partners like Cursor or Salesforce, Microsoft, ServiceNow, etc., etc. Of course, we will continue to innovate internally using traditional technology development, including AI. I would be remiss if I stood up here and did not share a perspective with you on how I am viewing the technology landscape overall. I think that the days of technology settling in, like we saw with the last technical revolution, which was digital transformation, in some cases, people are dragging that one out a few decades too long, we used to see these large technical tranches of work followed by these valleys of business implementation. I really do not think that that works anymore. Our fast-paced world demands fast-paced changes in order to support the business.
As I'm certain you know, technologists rarely agree. We often sort of butt heads amongst ourselves. It has been amazing to see across the board, all technologists agree that AI is changing the landscape at a pace and scale that's just never been seen before. I'm really seeing two different paths that companies are taking. You might perhaps see in a very large company both paths happening, but by and large, the first path is real business problems being solved intelligently using a whole host of technology solutions, but with AI at the center. On the other side, the second side, I'm seeing overspending on shiny innovations that, frankly, complicate the business and minimize customer experience at the same time.
At Invitation Homes, we clearly want to stay in bucket number one, but we also believe strongly that we want to run the marathon of AI, not just the sprint. To do that, we're going to focus on managing our pace, being driven by a solid understanding of what problems we really are trying to solve. We really have come a long way. In the last six years, we've been doing more and more focusing, excuse me, more importantly, we're building for the future. I got so excited. I got tied up there. For our customers at the center of our approach, and we're using technology to unlock opportunities for our customers and our associates at every touchpoint. I believe in the domino effect of well-designed technology.
If we are enabling our associates to optimize their day around the customer, much like what Tim spoke of, what we will see is improved efficiency, which will in turn improve customer experience and satisfaction, which will ultimately drive more revenue. We see that through greater retention, customer advocacy, and sustainable growth. Let's talk a little bit more about what we are doing at each step of the journey. Customers are the name of the game. Without them, I'm not sure what we would be doing. In order to attract more customers, we are connecting the dots of attraction through both communication and technology. In the past, leasing was largely one-dimensional. Customers had to come to us through third-party solutions. Today, we are flipping that model on its head by meeting customers where they are.
We're using targeted emails and improving text messaging to reach prospects with the right message at the right time. We also have AI chatbots that provide instant answers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and a centralized customer mailbox that's accessible both on the website and in the app. This gives customers the freedom to engage on their terms, whether that's a quick chat, an email follow-up, or full self-service. Since the introduction of our AI chatbots, 46% of our interactions happen outside of office hours. That unlocks 79% of our applications to be submitted without human intervention. We believe a great home plus the right location and price, coupled with a superior digital shopping experience, is a customer win-win. We know when you lease, choice and control really matter.
It can shorten the leasing process and give our customers back what is most valuable to them: their time. We have replaced the rigid one-size-fits-all leasing workflow with the industry's first proprietary online leasing platform. This streamlines the leasing process for our customers to allow Invitation Homes to control future enhancements, which really aligns with the innovation and the possibility pillars that Dallas spoke of earlier. This mobile-first experience reduces application abandonment and accelerates time to lease. It has resulted in a 35% reduction in time to decision for all new lease applications. We are not stopping there. We are also focused on data to drive optimization for the things that we have already built. By using A/B testing tools, we continuously refine the customer experience. Industry benchmarks tell us that A/B testing can lift conversion rates by 10-15%.
That is definitely in line with the experiences I have had in my career. As you can see here, we are implementing a modern payment experience. Customers will be able to complete all needed payments from either our website or their mobile app. This offers more payment flexibility, which helps us drive down friction, improve satisfaction, and ultimately speed up cash flow. We are truly setting the standard in the industry for digital leasing conversion through API-first technologies, data-driven user experience, and frictionless payments. Together, these help us boost occupancy, shorten our vacancy loss, and expand our margins. Now let's talk about retention and renewal. Creating easy home management by offering self-service from our mobile-first resident portal unlocks the power of retention.
Invitation Homes is rolling out a central hub for our residents where they will be able to manage maintenance orders or property issues. They will be able to engage with us in real-time conversations, control their smart home technology, and enjoy self-service throughout their residency, including renewal and move-outs. Centralized self-service puts the resident in control, which research tells us is really imperative to success. This is intuitive to all of us because we are all customers in the digital age, and we all want self-service. It is also intuitive as a business. Increased resident self-service equals higher efficiency for the company. McKinsey Research tells us that 80% of value creation amongst high-growth customers comes from improving the experience for your existing customers. Forrester Research also shares that being customer-obsessed increases retention by 51%.
At Invitation Homes, we deeply understand that retaining our best residents requires a focus both physically in the home and digital in the palm of their hand. Our vision, our customer-centric vision, is unified, intelligent, and seamless. This allows Tim and I to really focus in on what matters most to our customers. When we do that well, the renewal experience can truly write itself. Simply put, we envision a future where customers connect with our associates by choice, not requirement. This really comes to life in our new resident portal, enabling key moments like finding a home, making a payment, or requesting maintenance. What ties this together will be its simplicity: one app, one login, one experience. For us, that means real-time data, brilliant service, and a direct line to people living in our homes. For a resident, it means control and convenience.
Customer-centricity at Invitation Homes isn't about technology for its own sake. It's about building trust, reducing that friction, and creating loyalty with our customers. Moreover, focusing on the customer experience accelerates growth in lower-cost channels, drives efficiency for operations, and strengthens the performance of our assets. We know satisfaction and revenue growth go hand in hand, and we believe that our focus on customer-centric solutions will give us a 2% incremental AFFO growth by 2028. Now, of course, I must do all of this with security at the foundation. We can't just have fun creating cool mobile apps. The cyber landscape is one of way more peaks than valleys. Unfortunately, the bad guys are really some of the most brilliant technology minds in the world. Everything we do is on a secure-by-design architecture. We also ensure best-in-class cyber approaches.
This includes things like our clou d-first environment, repeated penetration testing, recurrent engineering training, and external cyber validation with our partner Optiv. I would like to take us back to customer experience for a moment. I would like us to have a look at a video that shows how we are putting the power of technology into our residents' hands. I hope you enjoy seeing our vision come to life.
From first search to final farewell, Invitation Homes uses innovative tech and AI to elevate every stage of the resident journey. We meet customers where they are with the Invitation Homes mobile app, where an intuitive search experience finds the perfect home. A chatbot powered by AI with a human in the loop builds customer confidence and hands off to a live leasing professional right on cue. Curated push alerts prompt action and shopping success. The leasing process could not be easier.
Prospects apply online and track status in real time, at home, or on the go. Approved residents are notified instantly. This calls for a celebration. From day one, residents are empowered to make their home their own. A personalized move-in checklist ensures a smooth start, while the resident dashboard organizes reminders, resources, and communications in one place. Mobile wallet and autopay options make payments timely, effortless, and secure. Maintenance requests take just seconds to create, with predictive AI helping resolve issues before they become problems. Smart technology adds value to all of our homes. AI thermostats learn preferences for comfort and energy savings. Smart locks enable secure, keyless entry. Everything runs through the Invitation Homes mobile app, creating a connected living experience. As leases approach renewal, residents receive timely in-app prompts and communication. AI support guides them through options and streamlines approvals, making renewal fast and frictionless.
When it's time to move on, a step-by-step checklist, clear communication, and transparent refund tracking ensure a positive final experience they will remember long after moving out. All the while, associates have a bird's-eye view of the entire leasing pipeline with AI support for repetitive tasks. We are creating the future of living, powered by AI, delivered through technology designed for people by people.
All right, we're ready now to begin the first of two Q&A sessions. Joining us on stage, please, let's have Dallas, Tim, and Virginia to address your questions. For those here in the room, please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to be brought to you. For our online audience, submit your questions through the webcast portal. We encourage questions relating to the topics covered in the first half of today's presentation, including our business fundamentals, operations, and technology initiatives.
Who would like to ask our first question? Hand down.
Here comes the mic. Do we have a couple of mics?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Thank you. Hi. Fantastic presentations. Thank you. Question may not be fair, but I'm going to try anyway.
I would expect nothing.
Do you expect, and when do you expect these enhancements and optimizations, the $0.14 and $0.20 of AFFO you laid out, to allow you to sustainably generate 70% operating margins, something that your apartment peers seem to have been able to do? Curious on kind of how you're feeling about the optimization tailwinds and if that'll help you get to 70% margins.
Why don't I start? If you want to add anything, feel free to jump in. Taking a step back, margin's different by market, right? Because of the property tax load. We get lower margins in Florida but higher growth.
We get really good margins in California, but we have capped sort of fundamentals on growth, right, with renewals and things like that. It'll definitely be a market mix that sort of plays into whether we ever hit 70% or not. We feel, I think, really comfortable saying that we know we're in the high 60%, and we've been there for a while, and we think we can maintain that. Some of it will have to do with the way we asset manage the portfolio over time. As far as the earn-in, the $0.14-$0.20, look, I wouldn't expect a lot of it to be next year, but a lot of it will start to come in towards the end of the year and into 2027. We think we can be on this run rate by 2028. That's the goal.
That's the target that we're setting for ourselves. Ultimately, there'll be puts and takes along the way. We'll probably unlock some things that seem like higher priorities as well, or maybe not. Or we could hopefully accelerate some things or slow down some things if we see an opportunity that's strategic around M&A or things like that. We're really good at piloting, getting it right, working it through a market or two, and then rolling out. I don't know, Tim, would you add anything else to that from a field perspective?
I think if you look at 7-10 cents of the 14-20 cents, it's coming from some of the stuff I presented, process optimization being one, centralization being another, and then value-add services being the third. The bulk of it's coming from value-add services.
We feel really confident because there's a lot of earn-in that's left on the programs that we have in place, meaning the internet, smart home, as well as some other programs. That's earn-in. We've got some other programs that we're working on right now. If the bulk of that $0.07-$0.10 is from those value-add services, we feel really good about those. Let me tell you, we're at the early, early innings of our process optimization and centralization. We just see a ton of opportunity there as we look around. We just haven't gotten to it. Historically, we've run a decentralized model primarily for speed, right? As we accumulated the portfolio, executed the business, now we're shifting over to this run centralized for efficiency and for control. We feel good about the path we're on.
Would you add anything to that?
I think the only other thing I would add is that we do continuously look at the short and long. It is important, especially in technology and with customer experience on the digital side, that you are looking really long-term. You have got the CRMs and building that. If we only do that, then we are missing the short. I think to your point, some of the optimizations will be long-term, but we are smartly looking at, so what are the short-term ones we can do, whether that is directed by customer feedback, whether that is optimization for operations. The balance of those two things, I think, is creating some real magic and power for us right now.
Great. Next question, I think we have got Steve. If you do not mind, say your name and firm, please.
Sure. Steve Sakwa, Evercore ISI.
Can you maybe talk about the capital costs that need to be invested to kind of get to this $0.14-$0.20? How much of that's been invested already? How much of that's to come? And then what's sort of the ongoing cost to sort of keep driving that efficiency?
I'm trying to think how to best answer that. Some of it's already in the can as part of this year's spend and prior year's spend. Some of it is in our strategic planning for next year and the year after. I would say that, and I want to be careful because I know Jon wants to give a full guide in February the right way. And he's like right now biting his lip saying, "Here he goes." I would just say it's nothing that has shock value to it in terms of what we got to spend.
We have so many processes that are ongoing. We have things we're doing with lease automation right now that will be kind of a Q1 lift that we're trying to work through that could create massive efficiencies that we could see next year. I'll let Jon sort of in his Q&A, he can revisit this question if you want, and he'll give you a little bit better answer. It's nothing out of ordinary course sort of CapEx of how we're thinking about things.
Okay. Tony, up front.
Thanks. Tony Pallone, JPMorgan. Two-parter, first one, just more of a clarifying item since you're talking about AFFO pennies throughout the presentation. Is there any difference between that and core FFO? Is there a reason it's AFFO just as a clarifying point?
Do you want to?
Yeah.
Do you want to wait for?
I can tackle that.
We typically guide to both core FFO and FFO. We feel as a company that AFFO is really the best measure that's most reflective of our performance. With these measurements, I think they're more or less the same for this purpose.
All right. Just wanted to check that. Just my real question, Dallas, you started on one of your earlier slides about build-to-rent supply coming down about 73%. I noticed in some of those markets, they started to come down a few years ago, and then it popped right back up, and now it's down again. I guess what gives you confidence, excuse me, that that's going to come down a bit more sustainably, or what are you seeing in terms of the folks building these out there, their access to capital returns and so forth?
It's a really good question.
I was actually one of the markets up there, Tampa, has that little kind of secondary spike, and then it's come back down. I was there last week. I was touring product, some of our own, and then looking at some new community opportunities in Daytona Beach, of all places. I spent time with two different master plan developers, groups we don't do business with today, just to sort of gauge market intel. It was totally in line with everything I hear from our own partners, which are, like in Florida, or call it Central Florida, starts are probably going to be down 20-30% this year versus last year. All the data that we see on the delivery piece of it, we've been hyper-focused on it since last summer.
I can't say it's 100% perfect, but I would, with a high degree of confidence, tell you that when we say peak deliveries were at 24,000 units and have come down to 12, and we expect those to be at 5,000 in the coming quarters, I feel really confident that generally the BTR that we can see, that we track through Burns and other sources of information, it all checks the boxes and has been consistent with what we've seen over the past few quarters. Now, that being said, if there was a bull run out of nowhere right now and people wanted to build a bunch of BTR, which we're not seeing, we're not seeing it in the permits to the point I made earlier, we're actually seeing sort of the opposite.
I think the setup's actually pretty favorable that about a year, year and a half from now, we're going to feel a real pinch in terms of new supply probably. You've seen what they're doing in Multi. Multi has a much clearer line of sight and kind of chugging through some of that, in my opinion. SFR is always going to be a blend, I think, between the BTR piece of it, what we see out of the publics and the regionals in terms of starts and deliveries. That all feels like it's a real setting up to be a tailwind. I said this on the earnings call. I'm not ready to call a bottom on some of the supply noise that we've had over the last four or five quarters, but it definitely feels a little bit better in a few markets.
We're seeing that Jacksonville-Orlando, Southern Florida specifically, Tampa and Phoenix, I still think have a little bit of time. Those are kind of our big four or five where we have obviously a lot of supply, and we've been active, and we want to continually be building there at the right price points and at the right time.
Rich, I think I saw you had a question.
Yep. Hi, Rich Hightower, Barclays. Thank you guys for putting this together. Going back to Tim's commentary, I think you stopped short of calling something algorithmic pricing kind of in the midst of your presentation, but I think you do call it sort of proprietary pricing comp model. What are the limitations around how you price the product?
Maybe from a regulatory perspective, if anybody else wants to comment, what's the latest potential set of risks as far as that goes?
Yeah. It's not algorithmic. It is really just a proprietary pricing model that uses public data. I want to emphasize that point. It's public data. We're looking at listings that are on the ILS, and we're using all of the characteristics of those homes. We're looking at the home that we are marketing and basically looking at those characteristics. Also, like I said, layering in the demand fundamentals that we're seeing, kind of keeping an open ear for home search on Google, home search on Zillow, home search data from apartments.com, and blending that together, leveraging real-time feedback from our offices in each of the markets where we operate. Again, totally above board how we're operating using public data.
Let me just jump on that too. I mean, you do have, it's important to remember in SFR, you have fair housing rules. So we can't offer a home in Orlando at a different price to somebody in LA than we offer it to in somebody in Orlando. You can do that in other industries, not in housing. It is totally transparent at the end of the day. If a home's listed too high or the market's a little soft, like we talked about this on our earnings call, it sits on the market, right? And so we've actually talked about this. We've been a little bit more aggressive in Q4. We figure let's try to lease some product versus just sit and watching it sit days on market.
As much as people think there's some algorithmic ninja that figures out pricing for rental properties in the U.S., I promise it's not that way. It's pretty simple. If you're overpriced, it sits. If you're underpriced, it goes too quick. It's basically that simple.
It's the speed of looking at any individual asset compared to the market and constantly staying in tune with the data you're seeing and being able to do that at scale. That's where it gets hard, and that's what our system allows us to do because the market is efficient, as Dallas said.
Yeah.
Great. Up front, Jon.
Jon Pawlowski with Green Street. I have a question on the value-add revenues. The chart on page 34, $20 million in gross value-add services revenue grown to $80 million.
If you double-clicked on those bars, are there any services where you're seeing basically retention issues and so that the air filter deliveries, et cetera, people adopt it, and then three years later, you have declines in revenue? Are there any holes in the bucket in that ramp-up we're going to see restrain the growth going forward? Things that are more capital-intensive, smart home, is there a CapEx cycle to come to basically update the software, et cetera?
Yeah. There's not really a leakage. We do allow our renewal specialists and our leasing specialists to negotiate where they need to. We're trying to obviously keeping the portfolio occupied is really important, and renewal rates are very important for our business too. When you look at the different services, you mentioned air filter. I got a random question. How many people know their air filter size? Yeah.
Okay. Bunch of analysts.
Bunch of analysts, right. Wrong group to ask that, but it was less than half, right? A lot of people actually value the service that we provide because it's regular, it's recurring. It takes the hassle out of renting and out of shelter in general. We do not see people opting out at any rate of concern. On the internet service, our package is great. Our package is phenomenal. We have partnered with Charter, which is Spectrum. We have partnered with AT&T. We have partnered with Cox. We are expanding that to other programs. Right now, that has a lot of earning left. We are about 35% of the portfolio has internet right now. We have kind of 65% to go.
On the smart home, yeah, there is an upfront cost, but residents really appreciate the peace of mind that that program brings from an ability to allow family members into their homes remotely through the lockset, remote lockset. They really value the Ring Video Doorbell. It is not security, but it is certainly what we refer to as premise awareness, so peace of mind. With expenses the way they are, people are mindful of how they are spending money, and utility expenses are top of mind. The ability to control your temperature using the remote thermostat controls is very valuable. We actually see people, the feedback we get is that they really like the program. We are not seeing any concerns on that front, Jon.
By the way, if anyone has more particulars on that, Paul and Bill, maybe raise your hand.
That sort of lives in your guys' universe, on ancillary and some of the breaks.
I'll just add one more thing on the software. All of the software and the firmware is updated remotely through Wi-Fi. We do not have to do any major events to maintain that.
Y ep. Michael in the back, I think.
Mike Gorman, BTIG. Thank you. You talked a lot about resident retention and the customer experience. When you look at 78%, as you think over the next three years implementing some of these new programs and technologies, do you expect to drive that higher? What does the average resident tenure look like in 2028? What does the average resident retention look like in 2028? Is there upside there, or may that even normalize a little bit?
Thank you. It's funny. I'll start. Feel free, guys.
When we underwrote the business back in 2012, we underwrote 36 months would be sort of average length of stay. I think we're just at 41 months based on things we're measuring as people move out. Or here inside that, right, Scott? 40, 41 months? Yes. California is much longer, much stickier. There, people don't move out as frequently because the spread between ownership and lease is much more dramatic in California. I would say my own view on this with the customer is the stuff Virginia and Tim talked about, if we nail that, I mean, guys, the app-based stuff that we have, we didn't have that 36 months ago. The fact that we can respond that much quicker, the fact that people are doing mobile checkout themselves, we learned a ton during the pandemic about using I actually had the same thought yesterday.
We're getting on an American flight to come over here, and the lady who scans your ticket is just using her iPhone now, not even some big bulky machine, right? That's where we see the business going, to where this just gets so mobile and so fast and so convenient that there's likelihood that people retain longer. We saw last year, we had many months that were 80%, 81%, 82% in terms of renewals. There will probably always be a flavor of whatever's happening in the world. We built the business in a super low mortgage rate environment. We know that if mortgage rates go to 2% or 3%, people retain mid-70s. We've seen that act before.
I think as the service gets better, as the merchandising, as Bill talks to us about this as a business, if we merchandise beyond just the home better in a way that makes it convenient, and we've been talking about this for a couple of years now, driving down the cost categories for people, whether it's internet or some of these other things, there's no reason not to be stickier, in my opinion, unless you have a life event, which is totally fine. I mean, we still have 15%-25% of our customers move out to buy a home. We totally support it. We think it's great because there's people lined up that still want that location and want that product. Our goal is to make it as convenient, flexible, and easy. We talk about easy all the time.
Tim said to us, "We're not that easy yet. Even though we're pretty good, we can get a lot easier." We have to make this simpler over time and make it to where somebody goes, "I really only want to move if I'm going to go buy a home."
The other thing I'll add is you sort of asked the question around based off of where we're at today. I come from an industry that's much older. Before I came into Invitation Homes, a 100-year-old hospitality plus company. What I learned there is the cycle of these cohorts. As people age and move on, the next cohort, the next generation coming through, the behavior is slightly different. It is both a defensive thing to do customer experience in the way that we're doing it to ensure that the current customers retain with us.
We're also looking forward to what is the next cohort coming through. What are they going to demand? We all know they're all digital natives. The next generation that's coming through is 100% digital natives. If we do not have these things in place, we do not want to see a decline in all the things we do well. It is really to ensure both we are driving for innovation and pushing forward, but also a defensive move to ensure that we are maintaining what we have today.
Great. Yep. Jamie. Sorry. Buck.
Yeah. Thanks. Hey, Buck Warner, Raymond James. I want to go back to the BTR question for just a little bit. Specifically, I think the Burns data you cited really focuses on purpose-built BTR communities, large master plan type structures. How do you think about the accidental BTR supply this year?
As home builders, we know have basically overshot the demand levels for this year. They're in inventory clearance into year-end. How much of that are you seeing potentially come back as accidental rental supply from various builders? You've got Lennar kind of really leaning in with this Lennar marketplace marketing to mom-and-pop investors. How do you think about that going into next year's leasing season?
Yeah. I mean, we pay attention to all the listing data. Tim and I talk about this all the time. I think for-lease listings are up, what did he say, 8% year over year or something like that, US-wise. And then it's obviously fragmented bigger in some of our markets.
Different market.
I would say it's sort of a tale of two or three different types of product.
I do not want to steal too much of Scott Eisen's thunder, but he'll hit some of this, I think, when he talks about BTR. There are two transactions we've been looking at that somebody's trying to sell in the marketplace right now, one of which is probably going to trade at a low five cap. It's super stabilized, really infill. It feels a little toppy on price for us. We could not be that competitive. There is another group that has a number of communities they're trying to package up. They cannot move them at the cap rate. They cannot get a high five cap right now because of location.
I think you have to lock in on where you want to be and why long-term because then maybe a little slower market, Buck, to your point, if there's a lot of homes for sale in that part of the, wherever it is, that geography, and they're not moving, I don't think your pricing power is as effective. We've been pretty active on the one-off sort of stuff as long as it's kind of anchored in on that strategy of what we call more infill. Now, we're not buying downtown New York. I mean, we know that, but we don't want to be an hour outside of Atlanta either, right? Buying scattered shot stuff in a community that may take a while to build out. We want to sort of find that sweet spot, be inside the ring, but not too far outside. I think there's a balance.
I also think that will fluctuate. That will sort of pendulum swing from time to time, right? A year and a half ago, they were not setting up websites to sell to mom-and-pop owners. There was a reason for that, right? They could still buy down a mortgage to a really cheap rate. There is plenty of healthy demand. Maybe things are a little bit slower. They want to move some inventory. It is a great off-ramp if it makes sense. Now, people better be good at how they underwrite rents and how you think about that. We have done well on that, and we have been burned on that in the past, right, as a company. You have to be pretty judicious about how you think about what market rent is on any particular product and then how you are going to serve and meet the needs of the customer.
If we can't run the Invitation Homes operating playbook, then we're probably not interested in that location or that market. Scott will get a little bit more into that. We are clustering some things and seeing some good opportunities where we can take scattered. It basically just adds to our own scattered business, which we love.
All right. We've got time for one or two more. Reminder, we will have a second Q&A session as well. I know we'll do Jamie and then Eric.
A lot of pressure. This better be good. Jamie Feldman with Wells Fargo. You talked a lot about the structural demand, tailwind, sticky tenant base, but we do have an administration that's very focused on whether it's mortgage rates or getting the cost of for-sale housing down. I think there's generally an overhang on the sector.
People worried about what does happen if mortgage rates move or housing costs decline. What can you say to give people comfort that you still will have a very sticky tenant base? Or what are some of the data points that you can point to that could give people comfort even if we do see those changes? Or maybe you do not think those changes are happening, and that is a fair answer too.
Look, it is hard to predict the weather, right, in terms of what could happen, what happened. I would say this. We are fans. We have no problem saying this publicly. We are fans of cheaper mortgage rates and more home transaction volume. It is a good thing for the business. It is a good thing for overall housing health. I think right now what we have is a little bit of a challenge.
A huge percentage of the country is locked at a sub-6% mortgage rate with no real intention to really do anything because if you move from this house to that house and your mortgage rate's 100 and something basis points higher, that's a big payment change. By the way, tax, insurance, all that stuff's gone up pretty dramatically since 2020. I would argue that we would like to see more homes transacting generally. Just like macros, the way we think about housing health, four, four and a half million transaction years isn't enough. We'd like to see that at five and a half, kind of six, where it sort of was steady state from, call it 2016 to probably 2020. It got totally thrown out of whack.
On every earnings call, I felt like we kept saying, "Trees won't grow to the sky." I think right now we're having that moment where you kind of come off and things get back to normal, and there's some uncertainty, and nobody can really sort of play it out. We still have a couple of years left of pretty good mortgage security for a lot of homeowners. It's like 60% or 70%. I can't remember the number, but it's sub-6%, and then an even smaller, like 50% or sub-5%. I mean, it's really healthy in terms of your current mortgage rate. I think Secretary Turner, HUD, is doing some really good things. I've been a fan of things he said publicly in and around sort of housing and how to think about it.
As a company, we have no problem if mortgage rates get cheaper in our view. We think cheaper mortgage rates equal more transaction volume, impetus to create more housing units, which the country needs generally, and ultimately home price appreciation, which is a proxy for where rents typically go. That gives better pricing power. I think that's how we think about it broadly in terms of regulation, this and that. It's felt a lot better, candidly, with this administration than maybe the last. That's not to pick sides. It just felt more intense in the last version.
Okay. Eric, do you want to take the last question for this session? Get your mic here.
Eric Wolfe, Citi. It's actually related to what you just said there a second ago about HBA being a good leading indicator for rents.
If you look at that chart that you had in there, the cost to rent and the cost to own were pretty much on top of each other for a long period of time. It has really separated a lot lately. Curious, why do you think it has separated so much? Do you think that cost to rent can kind of accelerate a bit to bridge the gap between cost to own?
Yeah. Look, when they were sort of on top, I remember some of our earnings calls kind of right after we went public, we would, I feel like, and Scott and Greg might have to keep me honest here, but a few of our earnings transcripts, we were like, "The difference is $300, $400." There was some it was much narrower, to your point.
Still had excellent rent growth in our portfolio, and it was because it was sort of more in line with where home prices are. You can look at kind of the elasticity that happened in the pandemic with values. Then we had a couple of years of pretty intense rent growth. We saw it in multifamily. We saw it in single-family. That feels like it's sort of moderated back to some normal levels, but there is still a delta that's pretty significant. It's not just home prices, though. Let's be clear. It's insurance. Homeowners insurance is totally different from where it was three or four years ago. Has nothing to do with home prices. I mean, maybe to some degree, has more to do with fires and wind and storm and some of these other things. Melrose, HOA issues.
There's just some stuff that makes that cost to own that much more sort of painful on that side of it. Look, your rents can't go to the moon every year, but I do think we have a lot of room in terms of that differential between ownership and lease. We've got quite a bit of cushion in terms of where you could see natural rent demand. There are markets. Scott may talk about this in a second with Salt Lake City. There are markets where you've had insane home price appreciation over the last several years, and you haven't seen rents really move yet. You have to believe that rents are going to come off the floor kind of where they've been for a while as the cost to live in some of these other pockets gets that much more expensive.
All right. Thanks, everyone.
That wraps up our first Q&A session. We'll now take a short 15-minute break. Refreshments are available to your right, and swag can be picked up to your left if you haven't already. Restrooms are out the door and on the right. Please return by 2:55 so we can start on time for the second discussion. Thank you.
Welcome back. Did you guys enjoy the treats we had over there? We're sorry we didn't order pizzas. I just got one delivered to the front of the New York Stock Exchange, so during the break, if anyone wants to get some at the end, we'll have it brought upstairs. Listen, hope you guys had a moment to recharge here. We're kicking off the next segment here. We're calling this the garage.
Here we have an example of a house where we have a 500 sq ft house with a 500 sq ft garage. I'm not entirely sure if this house is on our disposition list, but I'm glad that the IR team found this house so we can emphasize the garage for this part of the presentation. Why the garage? It's because this is where our ideas are built, tested, and tuned. In our business, it's where our engine drives external growth. We unlock new investment channels, new markets, and new opportunities. It's growing with discipline, generating long-term value for our shareholders. Let's buckle up and open the garage door, cue the engine revving in the background for everyone in the room here. All right, as a reminder, I joined Invitation Homes two years ago.
I've worked closely with the team to execute our growth plans while staying true to our mission of owning great homes in attractive markets with first-rate customer service. I'm going to cover three aspects of our investment strategy today. First of all, I want to talk about portfolio optimization. We're going to discuss our disciplined, data-driven investment framework and our capital allocation process. Secondly, we're going to talk about external growth. We can grow through multiple investment channels and pivot our investment strategy depending on where we are in the housing cycle. Lastly, we're going to talk about our third-party management platform as an engine for capital-light earnings growth and a way to enter new markets. With that, let's move on. Portfolio optimization. We optimize our portfolio through a rigorous analytical framework. We have three types of data we look at when we go through our investments process.
We look at economic market data like GDP growth, income growth, population growth, and employment growth. We look at housing market data like home price appreciation, the cost of renting versus owning, new permits, BTR supply, etc. Obviously we have our own Invitation Homes proprietary data on the 110,000 homes that we own or operate today. We analyze this data, we establish our capital allocation plan, and we ultimately optimize our portfolio to make an investment decision, whether to buy, hold, reinvest, or sell a home. We have a disciplined investment framework. It starts when that investment is sourced through the originations and the single asset transaction team. We then assign that acquisition, whether it's a community, a bulk deal, or an individual house, to our underwriting team to go through key assumptions and returns.
It's next assigned to the due diligence team who then works with the underwriting team to approve and close the acquisition. We are very experienced at closing individual homes. We have reviewed millions of homes since the inception of this company. Ultimately, we have either bought or sold 130,000 homes since we started this company. Post-closing, when we close on an acquisition, we move it to our rehab and turns team who brings that home up to the Invitation Homes standard. It then goes to our marketing and leasing team where we secure a long-term resident. Through a combination of both boots on the ground and our data analytics, we're set up to drive strategic and creative growth. Let's talk about where we're allocating capital today. We allocate capital to long-term high-growth markets. We think about our markets as core growth markets, new growth markets, and core established markets.
For example, we're long-term believers in some of our core growth markets like Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Florida. At the same time, we're increasing our allocations to some new markets for us like Nashville and Salt Lake, which we'll talk about at the end of the presentation. At the same time, we're also invested in our core markets like Seattle, California, Chicago, and Minneapolis. We've not been allocating capital to those markets recently because we've been challenged to find investment opportunities that meet our returns and our cost of capital. Over the next three runs, our capital allocation plan is to approximately attempt to allocate capital 30% to Western markets, 20% to Central markets, 20% to the Southeast, and 20% to Florida. We consistently reevaluate market conditions and pivot our capital allocation plan to reflect the on-the-ground market realities. We're also reinvesting in our portfolio through our ReVex program.
Like a lot of other residential REITs, we have a program to renovate existing homes. We typically do interior upgrades that will generate attractive risk-adjusted returns and drive higher values. We typically invest about $7,500 a home in revenue-enhancing upgrades like new appliances, countertops, cabinets, etc. These are homes that we could lease as-is, but we believe that these investments we make can enhance long-term returns. We've consistently done between 4,600 and 6,000 homes a year, and we've achieved a return on investment of somewhere between 10% and 15% on the ReVex program. These are high-risk-adjusted returns, and we expect to continue this reinvestment over time. We are also optimizing our portfolio through dispositions to end users. We have a unique ability to sell individual homes into the end user market at a premium to institutional SFR pricing.
Our reasons for disposition include a couple of different things: non-core sub-markets, high rehab costs, selling homes where we want to de-risk environmental exposure, and honestly, homes where we just think the low long-term risk-adjusted returns. More than 30% of our dispositions in 2025 will be in California, with the balance of those sales in Florida and Atlanta. We are on track to sell more than 1,400 homes this year for $500 million of proceeds in a mid-5% cap rate. Let's move to our external growth strategy. Our external growth currently is focused on three primary strategies. First, we have developed great relationships with our national and regional homebuilder partners to purchase BTR communities. Second, we are really excited, as Dallas talked about earlier, with our recent success buying scattered-site new construction homes from the same homebuilders off of their inventory tapes.
Third, we recently launched our construction lending program that is broadening our relationships with developers and giving us access to future acquisition opportunities. Lastly, we are also evaluating alternatives to add development as another growth channel, whether through merchant-build partnerships or in-house development capabilities. A quick note on our MLS channel. We are not buying significant volume on the MLS right now. We are closely monitoring resale home pricing. We are very attuned to where the resale market is. We are standing by to see if this market becomes actionable and accretive to our cost of capital, but volumes have not increased materially, and we have not seen a move in cap rates yet, but we are watching this closely. The rise of homebuilder supply is leading to acquisition opportunities for us.
As you can see here, homebuilder standing inventory per community has risen to 2.5 homes per community, which is the highest level of inventory you've seen with the homebuilders since 2011. With mortgage rates at 6%, with the high cost of insurance, the cost of ownership to own a home is still unaffordable. Homebuilders today, as we said, they're working through excess inventory. They're slowing down their future commitments. We are acting as a liquidity provider to the homebuilders the same way we acted as a liquidity provider to the resale market 10 years ago. The current market is providing some very attractive entry points for us to deploy capital at strong risk-adjusted returns. We have multiple acquisition channels where we can pivot with the cycles. Here's a chart that shows the new home price premium versus resale pricing since 2010.
You'll notice from 2010 till about 2020, there was a 25-40% premium of new home prices relative to resale prices. Starting in about 2020, that gap shrank to 5-10%, and today is around 0%. Now let's discuss our acquisition strategy over the last 10 plus years. During our first eight years in business, we bought resale homes when they were trading at discounts to replacement cost. This included buying auction purchases and also buying homes off the MLS. In 2020, when new home prices became more attractive on a relative basis, that's when we started buying new construction homes. In 2021, that's when the team did our first forward purchases with Pulte, and since then, we've expanded it to 10 different homebuilders with whom we've done forward purchase agreements.
In the last 12 months, as that gap has gotten tighter and tighter, we've also expanded our new home investment strategy to purchase homebuilder inventory and recently launched our construction lending program. We've built an agile investment platform that evolves with the cycles, and we can pivot to different strategies to capitalize on changing market conditions. Our first growth strategy is to partner with national and regional homebuilders to buy, build, and rent communities. Again, in 2021, we launched this program. Since then, we bought 3,000 homes in BTR communities that have been purchased from national builders, regional builders, and our development partners. Our focus is finding the right homes in the right communities where we already have an operational presence. Typically, we buy these homes on a forward purchase basis. We try to buy them 6 to 12 months before first delivery.
Our goal is to take down somewhere between 8 and 12 homes a month and try to aggregate homes somewhere between 50 and 200 homes in any given community. Let's talk about the benefits. Benefits for the homebuilders: predictable deliveries and earnings for them. They can supplement their sales to end users with an institutional counterpart so that they can have sales in both strong and weak markets, and they get cost savings on marketing and sales. The benefits for Invitation Homes: discounts to retail home pricing, control over product design and delivery pace, and an ability to purchase within a master plan community. Obviously, the benefits to our residents are the ability to live in a new home in a master plan community with a garage, with a yard, with more living space, close to schools, close to great retail. The approach is a win, win, win.
Through our purchases of BTR communities, we have also expanded the scattered-site operating model to also begin to manage BTR communities. Three years ago, we had about 1,000 homes that we would call BTR. Since then, through acquisitions and growth of our third-party management platform, we've taken ourselves to 8,000 homes that we either own or operate with about another 1,000 in the backlog here. This is about 7% of our home count today. Over time, we have built the Invitation Homes community operating model as an enhancement to our existing SFR operating model. This includes adding in-person leasing during lease-up when appropriate, an eyes-on-asset program to monitor community area maintenance, and enhanced physical and digital marketing. Our scattered-site operating model enhances our ability to operate BTR communities. I often get asked, "What is a BTR community? What does it look like?
What is it shaped like? People are a little confused on how to define these things. Tim earlier talked about our power of scale. Our power of scale enables us to have a differentiated operating model for BTR communities. We define BTR communities three different ways. You've got scattered-site communities. This is literally we own homes scattered throughout the master plan. The second type of community, we call it a pod. And a pod is where we might have anywhere from 50 to 200 homes within a master plan, but it might be five contiguous blocks. It might be the northeast quadrant of the master plan community. So we're part of a broader community where you have owners and renters together, but it's not a separate and distinct community.
Third, you have full standalone communities with at least 100 homes where we would control the HOA and the amenities. Let's be clear. We compete head-on with multifamily operators for full communities in the BTR space. The typical multifamily operator runs the multifamily playbook. They've got four to six people on site. They tend to gravitate towards these full standalone communities, and they are operating it with their model. In our model, our competitive advantage is to be able to operate diverse community types with a lower expense model from things like maintenance. We can leverage our mobile maintenance techs. We can have off-site personnel who simultaneously service our SFR homes and our BTR homes. Leasing. We can utilize the central call centers that Tim talked about earlier to take leasing staff off-site for the new and renewal process.
We are just starting to scratch the surface on the upside to our BTR operating model. We just launched the eyes-on-asset program for common area maintenance. We are developing capabilities to cross-market leads between BTR and SFR. We are very early in our revenue management process to refine the pricing model and to try to manage rate on premium floor plans within any given community. More to come. Here is a case study of a BTR acquisition that we did with Pulte, where we were uniquely positioned to outperform. In 2021, we purchased 150 homes from Pulte at a 10-15% discount to market. Our discipline underwriting focused on both yield and long-term value creation. We were drawn to Westfield for its location. It was close to grocery stores. It was close to schools. It had easy access to major transportation nodes.
We love the community amenities, the pool, the cabana, the playground. The surrounding area had 175,000 people in a 10-mi radius, and we already operated 1,100 homes in that area. It provided meaningful scale and efficiencies for us when we bought this community. We also liked that we were acquiring a pod, so we were part of a master plan that allowed for seamless integration into the Invitation Homes platform. Deliveries began in 2023. We took down about six to eight homes per month in this community. Given the strong performance of the community, we actually expanded our commitment with Pulte in 2024 to take down another 56 homes, bringing the total community to 206 homes. Here we are today. We've got about $2,200 a month, and we've got a 6% yield on cost on this community.
Our flexibility towards community design allowed us to buy a well-located community in a format that might not have worked for other operators. Now let's bring our community operating model to life with the following video. Our BTR model is designed to elevate the resident experience while driving greater efficiency across our communities. We're excited about the progress to date, and we look forward to expanding this approach to deliver even more value for our residents. Let's take a closer look at this video.
Invitation Homes was born from a simple belief that home is the most powerful place on Earth. Together, we've unlocked that power, one home at a time, and have proudly become America's number one single-family home leasing company. Being the best is just the beginning. Now we're dreaming even bigger, even better, even broader. Bigger, as in thriving, full-scale rental communities under our care.
Better, through a best-in-class differentiated community operating model, a bold, innovative framework designed to fuel our future growth. Broader, with 75-plus vibrant communities owned or managed today and many more to come.
What comes next? We will grow our business to offer a best-in-class model that will not only operate individual homes but also communities of homes.
We will lead in building and nurturing sparkling communities with playgrounds, parks, and other desirable amenities nearby. By embracing the values of genuine care, we're delivering the superior resident experience our community operating model is based on. Our shared success shines through in every prospect or renewing resident who chooses us with confidence. Every family that sees the value in the lifestyle we offer, and every resident who feels truly at home and proudly shares that feeling with others.
This is an exciting new chapter in our company's history.
We are the best at operating single-family homes, and we are now well-positioned to grow our community operating model.
We are unlocking the power of community, and the journey has just begun.
Sorry, I went too far. I always want to rent the model home. They always look so good in all these videos every time I visit one. Listen, as we refine our community operating model, we will continue to grow through other acquisition channels. The second growth strategy we're highlighting today is one that gained real traction in 2025: homebuilder inventory. By homebuilder inventory, we mean scattered-site, new construction homes purchased directly from builder inventory. We've always received these tapes. When I started two and a half years ago, we were getting these tapes. We did not really see anything at the time that was attractive to us. The prices were not right.
Frankly, the builders were not willing to deal with us. To date, we have seen tapes and standing inventory of 160,000 homes. Now let's be clear. Those homes, they are not in IH markets. They are not in the IH buy box. That is the entire universe that we see. What we really did is we took those tapes of 160,000 homes. We narrowed it down to about 19,000 homes that were actually in our buy box. Then there were about 6,000 homes where we made offers. This year, we will close on 525 homes for more than $180 million of invested capital. We are purchasing these homes at 20% discounts and a cap rate underwritten around the 6%. We typically make bids on anywhere from 2-15 homes per community. These homes are delivered in under 30 days. They are rent-ready. We can have a tenant in place in 60-90 days.
We get an instant feedback loop on pricing. We get an instant feedback loop on the purchase. We are much closer to where the current market is in terms of both underwriting the house, sizing the rents, and getting it leased up as quickly as we can. Buying scattered-site, new construction homes is plug and play for our existing operating model. Our operating platform was just built for this. Our third growth channel is the construction lending platform that we announced in June. Over the last two years, we met with a lot of developers about trying to put in place forward purchase agreements for BTR communities. When we met with those builders, what we realized is they, of course, wanted to work with us on forward purchases, but what they really wanted was equity and debt from us.
We realized that there was a scarcity in the market of construction lending. These builders were building in the same markets where we had an operational presence, and we had a good understanding of the market fundamentals. I think to date, since we launched this program, we've probably received over 200 opportunities from developers, whether it was directly from a developer or through the brokerage network. There was probably about 85 transactions to date we've looked at that really kind of fit within our buy box. Where we stand today is we've either closed or in final negotiations on three loans totaling more than $100 million. We're targeting yields on these loans somewhere between 8-10%. We're hoping that these loans, when they become stabilized communities, could become future acquisitions as we have options to purchase many of these communities upon stabilization.
We're hoping to grow this program to around $1 billion over the next three to four years. We think we can achieve $0.03-$0.04 per share of incremental AFFO by 2028 from this program. Lastly, we are exploring opportunities to add homebuilding capabilities to our platform. We entered the build-to-rent space in 2021 with our first investments with Pulte. Since then, we've purchased 3,000 homes. We now operate 8,000 homes. We are enhancing our construction management capabilities through our construction lending program. We are evaluating next steps, which may include buying or building development and general contracting capabilities. We believe that controlling our own destiny on product design and delivery pace, location, pre-leasing, etc., will enhance our investment capabilities and return objectives. Let's address the obvious question. Why now? Builders are reducing home starts. Finish lot prices are becoming more attractive.
Construction cost inflation is moderated, and we can lower our basis 10-15% through something like this. We're exploring alternatives. We'll share more specifics when we're in a position to do so. For now, we see development as a natural extension of our growth strategy, another arrow in our quiver, and a way to further leverage the power of scale of our operating platform. Our joint venture and third-party managed platform is what I want to close with today. It's a best-in-class engine for capitalized earnings growth. We launched the program in 2024. We added three major new customer contracts last year. We're up to 24,000 homes that are joint ventures and managed homes in our program. As Tim discussed earlier, our power of scale enhances our operational capabilities as we add more homes to the platform. 3PM also creates a future pipeline of acquisition opportunities.
We had some of our customers this year wanted to lighten up a little on some of their homes. They thought about selling them in the market to end users. We actually made a bid. We actually closed on 70 homes this year directly by having discussions and purchasing them directly from our partners. We currently generate revenue from this program from several sources: asset management fees, property management fees, performance fees, and disposition fees. This year, we're on track to generate run-rate revenue of approximately $85 million from our third-party management platform. There are also opportunities to grow this platform over time. We obviously onboarded a lot in 2024, right? As we build up our capabilities in terms of how to service and perform for our third-party customers, we look at where we are in the market today.
There are more than 35 subscale operators who are currently operating SFR homes. These operators manage more than 125,000 homes that could be consolidation opportunities for Invitation Homes. Our current property management customers have actually enhanced their operating margins by 300 basis points on average since coming onto the Invitation Homes platform. In the future, we expect that every 3,000 homes we can add to the platform can add a penny per share of AFFO and 2-4 cents by 2028. We will also work with our third-party management customers to enter new markets, which we'll cover now. Our re-entry into the Nashville market is insight into our 3PM growth. You may recall that we actually originally were invested in the Nashville market after we did the merger with Starwood Waypoint.
We always liked the market, but we kind of just did not own the right homes in the right submarkets at the time. We exited the market, but then in 2024, we had the opportunity to re-enter Nashville as a result of some of our new third-party management customers. Since then, again, we had some new third-party management customers. We added 600 3PM homes. Since then, we have purchased 200 homes directly from builders and developers and another 100 homes through our joint ventures. We are at nearly 1,000 homes in Nashville and growing. As we evaluate new 3PM opportunities, this is also an opportunity for us to enter new markets. I am also excited to announce our entry into the Salt Lake City market. Here is another example of how we are expanding into new markets through 3PM.
We're currently managing about 100 homes for a 3PM customer in Salt Lake and now taking a larger foothold. We're excited about Salt Lake as a growth market: 2.6 million population in the MSA, 11th largest GDP. Look at the cost of ownership: $1,600. Dallas talked earlier for the rest of our company. It's about $900. It's obviously a market where renting is attractive relative to the cost of ownership. Look at new job growth in that market: 5.7x new jobs per single-family permits, right? We've actually met with the top 10 homebuilders in that market. We've been evaluating several opportunities over the last 12 months. We've committed to three projects on a forward basis for about 147 homes for $50 million of committed capital with deliveries over the next 12 to 18 months.
We hope to allocate $100 million to Salt Lake over the next three to four years as we expand our presence. In conclusion, we have three segments to our investment strategy. We're optimizing our portfolio through a disciplined, data-driven investment framework. We're growing externally through multiple channels, whether through BTR forward purchases, homebuilder inventory purchases, and our construction lending program. We're evaluating expansion opportunities through development, and we're going to continue to grow our capital-light third-party management platform. As the largest owner-operator of SFR, we are uniquely positioned to deliver on all these growth strategies over time. We think for all this combined, we can generate $0.05-$0.08 of incremental AFFO growth between now and 2028 from these initiatives. We will continue to optimize returns and create value for our shareholders. Thank you for your time. Now on to Jon Olsen for the Home Office.
Hi everyone. Appreciate you being here. I'm excited for you to join me here in the Home Office, but I'm going to warn you, similar to real life, what goes on in the Home Office is nowhere near as exciting as what happens in the rest of the house. It's important to remember that it's what goes on in the Home Office that facilitates and makes possible the exciting vision that Tim, Virginia, and Scott just walked you through. Today, I'm going to focus on a few specific areas of our business and highlight a few thoughts that I want to make sure you walk away from today's session with. First, the strength, quality, and flexibility of our balance sheet. Second, the variety and quantum of funding sources available to us. Third, property taxes, including some big picture thoughts on where we are versus where we've been.
Fourth, how we think about key revenue drivers and how those interplay with NOI and some of the operating metrics that we talk about pretty frequently on our earnings calls. Lastly, I'll wrap up by recapping some more details on the opportunities that Tim, Virginia, and Scott walked you through. Let's start with the balance sheet. Today, we have a fortress balance sheet. Not too long ago, it was a very different story. In March 2017, at the end of our first quarter as a public company, our net debt to EBITDA was 9.9 times. Almost 60% of the homes we owned were included in the collateral pool for one secured debt instrument or another, and 75% of our debt was maturing in the next three years.
Fast forward to our last investor day six years ago, we'd made pretty good progress on addressing our maturity profile and unencumbering assets, but our net debt to EBITDA was still 8.5 times. Today, net debt to EBITDA is 5.2 times. Over 90% of our assets are unencumbered, and less than 21% of our debt is maturing in the next three years. On top of that, in 2021, we received investment-grade corporate credit ratings, and we've subsequently been upgraded at least once by all three of the rating agencies that cover us. Why do we spend so much time talking about our balance sheet? Why did we spend so much time and energy and focus on completely reshaping our debt structure and working down our leverage profile? There are three reasons. First, and most obviously, to improve our access to and cost of capital long term.
Second, to maximize asset management flexibility. Why is that important? A portfolio of Single-Family Rental assets is unlike any other real estate property type out there. The granularity, geographic dispersion, and diversity of our assets simply does not exist elsewhere in commercial real estate. The ability to raise debt in the unsecured market is hugely beneficial from an asset management perspective when you contrast that with the collateral restrictions that exist in various secured debt instruments. Third reason, to maintain and maximize optionality. By reducing and then operating at lower leverage, we leave ourselves capacity to increase leverage if a compelling point in time buying opportunity presents itself. Why is that important? Think back to how this company and this industry were born.
Additionally, by bringing leverage down, that gives us the flexibility and the conviction that we can use excess operating cash flow and disposition proceeds to repurchase our shares if our share price is trading at a level that is materially dislocated from underlying asset values. If those types of interesting opportunities do present themselves, what then? Let's talk about funding. We are very fortunate to have a variety of sources of capital available to us to pursue whatever type of opportunity may arise. First, we have a large revolving credit facility. Our revolver, which was undrawn at the end of the third quarter, has capacity of $1.75 billion, and it bears interest at SOFR plus 87.5 basis points, or roughly 4.8% today. Having a large, attractively priced revolver gives us a lot of flexibility to quickly access capital and fund our growth and other strategic initiatives.
Second, we have the ability to sell between $400 million and $600 million of non-core assets each year. We believe that our ability to sell non-core assets into a highly liquid end user market at cap rates well inside where we can either deploy capital or where our stock is trading is a unique capability within the real estate sector. Third, our portfolio generates between $250 million and $300 million of operating cash flow year in, year out after the dividend. That cash flow is available to fund capital reinvestment, technology initiatives, share repurchases, or external growth opportunities. Fourth, we have a number of existing joint ventures that are not yet fully deployed. Those joint ventures have approximately $380 million of committed but uncalled equity capital. With leverage, that gives us another $1 billion of buying capacity on top of what we can do on balance sheet.
Lastly, let's talk about low probability, high impact scenarios. Now, these are hypothetical, but what if meaningful fractures emerge in the housing market? We certainly don't root for that scenario, but again, it is important to remember how this company and how this industry came into being. We were born out of point-in-time distress in the housing market, and by bringing down leverage and maintaining great access to capital, we put ourselves in a fantastic position to take advantage of whatever opportunity presents itself. If history repeats itself and we see a meaningful opportunity to buy assets at values and yields materially better than today's, we have the capacity to add approximately $2 billion of incremental debt before we start to bump up against six times net debt to EBITDA, which is the upper end of our stated leverage target profile and the rating agency's stated downgrade triggers.
Taken together, our current liquidity position and access to capital put us in a great position to be opportunistic and take advantage of whatever opportunities present themselves. Now, let's shift gears from the balance sheet and talk a little bit about the P&L. All right, let's start with the largest expense line item on our P&L. Property tax makes up more than half of our same-store operating expenses. Three states, Florida, California, and Georgia, account for more than 70% of our total same-store property tax expense. Now, the bad news is the magnitude of this line item, coupled with the fact that two of those three largest states I just went through, Florida and Georgia, typically don't mail out property tax bills until late in the third quarter or early in the fourth quarter.
What that means is we often do not have a clear picture into our property tax expense outcomes until pretty late in the year, and that does create potential for some nasty surprises late in the year. We saw that in 2022 and 2023. The good news, we continue to see moderation in the rate of increase of property tax growth. We now expect that to be no more than 5% in 2025, which is the best we have seen since 2021. We are obviously thrilled to see that. What is driving that moderation? Let's start with what we are seeing today. First, the rate of home price appreciation in our markets has moderated somewhat, right? That is good news for property taxes, but I think it is important to point out that assessed values and market values do not move in lockstep.
In fact, assessed values track what happens with market values and the change over time, but with a lag, and there are some jurisdictions where that lag can be longer than others. Second, homeowners are voting with their pocketbooks. Affordability is top of mind. Legislators and policymakers are increasingly sensitive to that, and we're seeing that pocket—excuse me—that pocketbook issue stimulate discussion of interesting property tax policy initiatives in a number of states where we operate. Third, moderating inflation means that there's less pressure on counties to increase tax revenues to keep pace with cost increases. What does that all mean as we look to the future? There are no crystal balls, but we do feel much more confident that the worst is behind us.
As we get farther away from the frothiest days of pandemic-era bidding wars, we expect to see more moderate rates of growth in assessed values. Now, at the same time, we're also conscious of the fact, and I think I've talked about this on a few earnings calls, that assessors have become more willing to use millage rates as a plug to achieve their revenue objectives. That said, going forward, while we'll continue to be conservative in how we budget for property tax, our expectation is that the rate of increase does continue to decelerate. All right, so that's property taxes. Let's take a minute and talk about some other elements of our P&L. I'm going to preface everything I'm about to say by pointing out something that's fairly obvious, I think. The majority of our cost structure is non-controllable in nature.
Non-controllable expenses make up approximately 65% of our total cost structure, and as I just talked about a minute ago, property taxes make up between 50-55% of our total cost structure. When you have a large non-controllable cost structure, what do you do? We spend a lot of time thinking about how to optimize revenue growth in order to maximize NOI. Now, we often talk on earnings calls and at conferences about the trade-off between rate and occupancy, so I thought it'd probably be worth spending a few minutes to talk about the relationship between NOI and a number of the operating metrics that we reference pretty frequently. First off, let's talk about occupancy. As you all know, occupancy is a function of two variables: turnover rate and days to re-resident.
Interestingly, every one-day change in days to re-resident has about the same occupancy effect as a 50 basis point change in turnover rate. However, when you think about the NOI impact, turnover rate has a materially greater impact on NOI because, unlike days to re-resident, it impacts both occupancy and our turn costs, right? There is a revenue and an expense impact. From an operational perspective, it becomes clear why we place so much emphasis on maintaining a resident experience and a high renewal rate, right? In a market where new lease rate growth is challenging, the benefit of keeping existing customers in place becomes even more pronounced. All right, let's talk about collections. We have had good success in reducing bad debt over the last couple of years, primarily because Tim and the field team have ratcheted up their focus on collections.
Every one basis point change in bad debt has roughly the same revenue impact as an equivalent change in occupancy. So we can benefit simply by focusing efforts on collecting that which our residents owe us. It's pretty simple. All right, lastly, let's talk about rate growth. As we've discussed with most of you, renewal rate growth is materially more impactful than new lease rate growth for us, and that's because we renew approximately 75% of our leases. Taken together, what do these little factoids suggest for NOI optimization? A few things. One, we're almost always better off avoiding a turn. That being the case, there's always going to be some degree of bias towards negotiating with existing residents on a renewal, especially when new lease rate growth is more challenging.
Two, if we're taking an NOI maximizing approach, we're almost always better off trading some amount of new lease rate growth for shorter days to re-resident. A one-day decrease in days to re-resident more than swamps the effect of a 10 basis point decrease in new lease rate growth. Optimizing revenue growth to maximize NOI is a big part of how we approach maximizing value for our shareholders. What are some other ways that we're trying to maximize value? Let's wrap up by recapping some of the other value creation opportunities that Tim, Virginia, and Scott have already walked you through. Okay, as I mentioned at the outset, what goes on in the rest of the house is more exciting than the Home Office, so I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about what we spent time in the rest of the house doing.
We started off in the kitchen with Tim, where we heard about the first three initiatives you see up on the screen. First, how we think our value-add service offerings can grow over time and add to the resident experience while at the same time contributing an incremental $0.04-$0.05 of AFFO per share simply by providing the services that our residents tell us they want and care about. We think that our value-add service offering is a true brand differentiator, and we're excited about what it can do over time. Next, Tim talked about process improvements. By consolidating certain activities, leveraging technology, and constantly refining our property management playbook, we believe we can unlock another $0.02-$0.03 of incremental AFFO just through an unswerving commitment to continuous improvements and driving efficiencies by getting better at what we do, right?
It's the technique piece of his running analogy. Lastly, Tim talked about centralization. By centralizing certain tasks and functions currently dispersed through the field, we think we can improve consistency and manage routine high-volume administrative tasks more efficiently, and in the course of so doing, drive an incremental $0.01-$0.02 of AFFO per share. Next, we spent some time in the den with Virginia. Virginia talked about how we're leveraging technology to improve the resident experience by addressing pain points, reducing friction, and driving continued high retention rates while also improving the efficiency with which we operate. Seems pretty straightforward, but we believe that by continuing to focus on elevating that customer experience, we can drive another $0.02 of incremental AFFO per share over time.
Next up in the garage, Scott outlined how we go about optimizing our portfolio and how and where we think about investing it and how we're opening the aperture to find new exciting opportunities. Scott walked through the ways we're seeking to drive capital-light earnings growth in our third-party property management business, as well as why the size of that opportunity and the value proposition we offer leads us to believe that we can drive another $0.02-$0.04 of incremental AFFO by growing that business over the next 18-36 months. Scott also talked about how we can leverage our cost of capital to supplement our growth strategies in partnership with developers. We believe we can grow our loan book substantially over time and anticipate that that development lending business can contribute an incremental $0.03-$0.04 of AFFO.
Together, we believe the growth in our third-party property management and developer lending programs can contribute an incremental $0.05-$0.08 of AFFO by 2028. Taken together, the opportunities Tim, Virginia, and Scott have walked you through represent $0.14-$0.20 per share of incremental AFFO on top of the growth from our core portfolio. Let that sink in. We spent a lot of time talking about our core business. What we wanted to do today was talk about the things that are on top of. Now, I want to be clear that some of this incremental growth is back-end loaded, and it won't earn in radably over time, but nonetheless, we think this is incredibly exciting.
Now, I know that was a very quick recap, and we're going to have time for some more questions in our next Q&A session, but before we wrap up, I want to walk everyone back out to the front porch and hand things over to Dallas for some closing thoughts.
Good job. It's a tall drink right there, isn't it? You did a really nice job. Thank you, Jon. Thank you, Scott, for your comments. Thank you for staying with us today as we get into the conversation. We've covered a lot of ground. Our goal is to demonstrate our commitment to staying best in class.
Before we wrap up, let's just remember the three things we really want people to take away today: innovation—we're going to continue to do the hard things that make our business more efficient, help create enhanced margins, and ultimately better returns; growth—the multi-channel approach that Scott talked about, especially leaning in on capital-light initiatives; and the possibility. Some of the other things that I know the teams are actively working on that we believe are also going to lend to this outperformance. They're not just ideas for us. We put them to practice. Everything I talked about at the beginning of the presentation, we feel like we've delivered on in terms of setting a mark for ourselves as a business and an organization. We're doing it once again by saying, "This is where we are currently.
This is where we want to go, and we're going to hold ourselves, and we hope you hold us accountable to this as well. This is the foundation of how we plan on continuing to evolve, lead, and ultimately win from the front. Innovation will keep us best in class. Growth will continue to drive that discipline expansion that we all want, and possibility will ensure that we're continually leaning in on the future. Today, you heard from Tim, Virginia, Scott, and Jon in sort of all of these categories, and I think we've enjoyed really thematically understanding the things that the company is focused on. At the heart of what next is continuing our effort around genuine care. We talked about connecting the dots, aiming true, raising the roof, and embracing the journey. As a company, these aren't just statements for us.
We actually try to live by them, both in how we approach our resident, how we think about operating our business. Rather than just talk about it, I thought it'd be fun, why don't we close hearing directly from our residents on what an Invitation Home has meant to them.
My name is Joshua, and we've been with Invitation Homes for 11 years now. Same house. Six years. Seven years. About five years. That was the only house that we toured and saw, and we were like, "This is going to be our home." I was just doing some really vague Google researching. Properties for rent and lease, and they popped up first. I'm a firm believer in shopping for where you want to live, and Invitation Homes really gives that opportunity because they're actually everywhere. It was really easy working with Invitation Homes.
They got me in quick. The viewing of properties is fantastic, and just being able to book your own viewing and go there yourself. It was a really nice outline. Do this, do this, do this, do this. Once I got everything done, it was very easy. I was looking for something that I would be able to rent, a home that was secure, that was gated, nice area, but also had maintenance. My best friend passed away in 2020, and we adopted her kids, and we urgently needed a place to stay. I'd say my favorite thing about living there is definitely the neighborhood. It reminds me of the neighborhood that I grew up in, where my kids can go outside and play. There's always people walking around our neighborhood, which is always a good sign for us. Very quiet, very joyful.
Everyone's pretty nice and respectful. We don't want to move. We like our neighbors. We like our community. We like the home. I have a fur baby named Sierra and a fur baby named Mickey. We have a Doberman German Shepherd. My son has a fish tank. My daughter's got a gecko tank. They love to go out there. Sierra loves to bark at everybody that walks by. I like the fact that they do have the maintenance capabilities and that you can go onto the portal 24/7. There is somebody there, and they respond to me immediately, or they try and troubleshoot the problem for me. I've gotten pretty quick responses. I'm talking 30 minutes to an hour. My favorite part of my home would probably be my living room. It's super cozy. Although we enjoy every room in the backyard, the kitchen's where it's at.
Invitation Homes is great value for the money. My job as a teacher, I do not have the economic stability in order to buy a home. I have special needs kids. They really help me out in regard to allowing the rate to maintain an affordable rate that I am able to afford being a mom of five. Invitation Homes has given us access to be in a neighborhood which is so beautiful and somewhere that is so safe and calm and somewhere that I have always wanted to be. I have recommended Invitation Homes, and I will continue to recommend Invitation Homes because they helped me when I felt like I had nowhere to turn. Oh, I always recommend Invitation Homes to others. I definitely will recommend Invitation Homes to my friends and colleagues. We renew typically every two years. I just renewed for another two years.
If I had to describe Invitation Homes in three words, I would go with convenience. Caring and comfort. Camaismo. Happiness. Invitation Homes unlocked the power of home for my family, my large family.
These are the voices that remind us why we do what we do. With that, we're going to close and hand it over to Scott McLaughlin for our next Q&A. Thanks.
Am I staying up? All right. Thanks, Dallas. We're ready now to begin our second and final Q&A session. Same guidelines apply as before. Joining us on stage are Dallas, Scott, and Jon to address questions regarding growth, financial results, and our future outlook. Volunteer for the first question. Let's go to Yana, please.
Hi, Yana Dallas from Team America.
A question on the external growth.
Curious if you think there's potential for the industry to kind of go back into the consolidation phase, maybe with some of the 35-plus portfolios you laid out as potential candidates for third-party management. Would you expect those to trade at premiums or discounts given the importance of scale?
Yeah. When we talk about those consolidation opportunities, the way we look at it is, look, there are a number of LPs that put capital to work with various operators over the last 10 years, but very few people have the size and scale that we do as a platform. I think we look at these opportunities as opportunities for us to, whether we're entering as a third-party manager in a capital-light way, maybe we make a very small investment in the portfolio. Could it lead to consolidation over time?
Obviously, there's a bid-ask in the market right now to, obviously, where our stock price trades, where we see portfolios trading. It is hard to say that there's a consolidation opportunity in some of those cap rates, but I think we definitely see an opportunity where we can add value to an LP out there where maybe they're partnered with a subscale operator today, but there's an opportunity to partner with us instead from a management perspective. I think that could potentially lead to consolidation over time. I think we really see the opportunity for us as more in taking over some more third-party management opportunities, and then could that lead to consolidation over time? It is just like we did with our three new partners last year, and we think there's opportunities to do more of that over time.
All right. Next question. Middle of the room.
Hi. Thank you. Jason Sabshon from KBW. You've laid out these process improvements and top-line expansion opportunities as incremental to baseline growth in AFFO. I'm curious, what do you view as a reasonable baseline growth assumption? Thanks.
I knew someone was going to ask for 2026 guidance. Look I'll say this. We've been very clear that we think the renewals portion of our business should be able to generate consistent rent growth in, call it the high 3-4% range to the low 5% range. If we can do three-quarters of our book at, call it a 4% plus renewal rate growth profile, I mean, that sets us up really nicely to continue to drive blends in the mid-threes, which in a market where growth is not setting anyone's hair on fire, that feels pretty steady-edy.
Now, the good news is the absorption backdrop that we're experiencing now and some of the softness that we're experiencing just based on new supply, those are temporary scenarios. That product will get absorbed over time. Better pricing power will return. For those looking for a view on 2026, I'd say it's still a little bit early. This is a dynamic environment in which we find ourselves. We are going to wait and see kind of what our jump-off point is going to be for 2026. I would say that while 2026 certainly has some potential to feel a little bit better than 2025, I don't know that I think it's going to be a massive sea change in terms of growth year over year.
I just think 2026 is setting up to look more similar to 2025 than if you turn back the clock a few years before that.
All right. Adam in the Oh.
Thanks. Adam Kramer from Morgan Stanley. Thank you very much for having us today. Just wanted to ask a little bit about the, I think, Scott, you sort of mentioned maybe getting into in-house development and do not want to put words in your mouth necessarily, but it seemed like that was something maybe under consideration, whereas in the past, I do not think it necessarily was. I guess, what would you sort of have to see or not see to maybe drive that decision about getting more into in-house development? Could an acquisition of a home builder sort of achieve whatever goals you guys have? Could that be sort of the avenue that you go about this?
Maybe just unpacking a little bit that decision tree around the development.
Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, look, as we've talked to market participants, I mean, I think we clearly see two ways to do it. First is there's a potential for us to partner with people that are developers, that they have their own merchant-built capabilities, and we could be a capital allocator to folks like that. The other way of doing it is obviously in a similar way to our competitor that has in-house construction management and general contracting capabilities. We kind of are in the process of evaluating both of those alternatives for us. Clearly, we've looked at this as a basis play. I think we've bought a lot of BTR and a lot of new construction homes at a very attractive basis.
Anyway, you look at it through self-performance, we do get a lower basis, and a lower basis leads to higher shareholder returns. I think since I joined two and a half years ago, we've talked about where we are on the spectrum. When we bought our first homes from Pulte in 2021, we were on one side of the spectrum, which was a forward purchase. We took denominator risk. We locked in the price of the home. We took numerator risk in terms of where we would be able to set rents when we bought a home. That was on one side of the risk spectrum.
As we've gotten more comfortable with the build-to-rent product, as we've gotten more comfortable operating build-to-rent communities, I think we have a much better understanding of what projects look like, how we should be underwriting them, what the right costs are. Through our construction lending program now, we have line of sight into other people's budgets and other people's construction costs. Every time a deal comes to committee, I can see construction cost budgets for 20 different transactions that are in market. I think as we've built out our in-house knowledge, our in-house expertise, as the team has gotten more reps in understanding different parts of the spectrum, I feel like we've built the in-house capabilities to at least understand this a lot better than we had in place three or four years ago.
Any process we go through to decide to enter the development business, whether it is through merchant building or in-house GC, is building all of these building blocks that we spent the last four years doing. I think we are now at the point where I think we have got a little more view on where we can take it from here. Thanks for the question.
Great. Yeah. Michael. In the end.
Michael Goldsmith, UBS. We touched on a lot today. The biggest bucket of the incremental AFFO per share comes from the value-add services bucket. Does that come predominantly from additional services, or is that an opportunity to push price on the existing services that you are offering?
Yeah. I think the majority of that comes from continued penetration of our existing offerings. There is a little bit of potentially adjusting pricing there.
We haven't done that in a number of years. There are a couple of new things, but the vast majority of that is simply by continuing to roll out the services we're offering more broadly. That's what we think is so exciting. You don't really have to buy into some sort of grand vision. It's really just a function of us continuing to do what we're doing and continuing to build on what we've learned so far.
Yeah. Front. Austin.
Thanks. Austin Wurschmidt with KeyBanc. Just curious, Jon, the $2 billion of debt capacity you have today, when are you thinking about the right time to tap into that? You've got the dispositions kind of funding the various other initiatives. How does that $2 billion to you kind of, how are you thinking about using that?
To be clear, I'm not thinking about using it.
What I was illustrating was that there is potential for us if large-scale opportunities present themselves to take advantage of them. The backdrop was, why were we so focused on bringing down leverage? Why are we so focused on remaining unencumbered, giving ourselves maximal flexibility? It is because in the back of our minds, we are always conscious of how we got here and wanting to make sure that when opportunities present themselves, we are able to take advantage. Let me be crystal clear. I have no intention of layering on an incremental $2 billion of debt onto the balance sheet. My point was we have that capacity and we have that headroom if a really compelling opportunity comes along. Jon, maybe talk about how we think about using cash generally. Yeah.
I mean, one of the great things, again, about sort of bringing leverage down over time and operating at lower leverage is we know for a period of some number of years, every free dollar of disposition proceeds or operating cash flow was applied to paying down debt. We were hyper-focused on bringing in leverage, getting to an investment grade. Thank you. An investment grade credit rating. Today, that's all done. Those disposition proceeds, that operating cash flow is available for either compelling growth opportunities, and by that, I mean a growth opportunity with a yield that is really going to be accretive to sort of NOI and earnings growth, or alternatively, if the shares continue to trade at a place that we do not think makes sense relative to underlying asset values, we can apply that cash to share repurchases.
The way I think about it is about $200 million of share repurchases at $30, just for easy math, works out to about half a penny of accretion to earnings.
Great. We have time for maybe one or two more. Yeah. Sanket in the back.
Hi. Sanket Agrawal with Evercore ISI. We had a question around value-enhancing CapEx. I think it was about 50% in the first nine months of this year. Is it all the expenses that are related to innovation initiatives flowing through that line item? How should we think about that going forward, like over the next three years or four years?
Yeah.
Within that line item is both value-enhancing CapEx designed to bring assets up to our sort of uniform standard, as well as something that Scott talked about a little bit, which was revenue-enhancing CapEx, where we are focused on, okay, how can we better align an asset to demand drivers in that particular sub-market? Sometimes it is hard surface flooring. Sometimes it is a kitchen or bath upgrade. The idea being, okay, how do we either bring our expenses down or drive a more premium rent? As Scott talked about, it is a pretty attractive return on investment there. The issue is not so much the return profile as the quantum of homes that sort of fit that bill, where there is an opportunity to go in and apply some additional capital reinvestment to drive better outcomes.
Great. Yes. Go ahead.
Just want to ask about jobs.
Before COVID, were jobs like a key demand driver for SFR rent? Has that relationship kind of changed now where the demographic change or the housing affordability become like a bigger driver?
I would say that, I mean, to earlier point, I think affordability is probably only helping for our business model today, this gap between the cost to own and the cost to lease. We have not seen anything too fundamental change in our current customers. Those that are going through an application and getting approved, it has been pretty steady, almost the same numbers for the last year or two. That being said, we have seen less quantum, but that sort of makes sense with migration patterns and everything else. I would say there is nothing on the jobs front that we directly see in our data.
We're obviously paying attention to it and looking at all the headlines and just trying to understand if immigration and some of these things could create some challenges. So far, we haven't seen too much flow through in any of our sort of customer underwri ting.
Great. Thank you, everyone. This concludes the Invitation Homes Investor Day. Thanks to everyone here in person, as well as our folks online, along with the New York Stock Exchange for being wonderful hosts today. We look forward to seeing many of you next month in our hometown of Dallas, Texas at May Reese. We'll end the livestream now. Thank you.
Thanks.