President and CEO, Ben Schall. COO, Michael Manelis. CFO, Kevin O'Shea, and investor relations, Marty McKenna and Matt Grover. I'll turn it over to Ben for opening remarks, and then we can jump to Q&A.
Thank you, Jana. Thank you, Jeff. We're thrilled to be here. This is our first investor conference as Vivmark Residential, so we're excited to be back in front of everybody. Great to see the room. Start off with some prepared commentary, talk a little bit about who we are, just to remind you that, where we're headed. Provide an integration update, where we're progressing, and then talk to some of the highlights as we think about our momentum heading into 2027.
So thanks for being with us. Our vision at Vivmark is to be the most trusted and best performing rental housing company in this country. For our investors, that vision, and it definitely comes with an ambition, is to utilize our scale and capabilities to drive structurally higher earnings growth and superior returns for shareholders.
I do want to emphasize, and if you've listened to me before, this has been one of our key themes, we are building a new company. The objective here is to build a new and fundamentally stronger company. At its core, thrilled to be here with Michael, at its core, it starts with a superior set of operating capabilities. Our commitment to investors is that we will be the most efficient operator in this industry.
As Michael will discuss, key ingredients include unmatched technology, including AI, vast amount of proprietary data, our market density, and when you combine that with our best-in-class teams, we will drive superior operating results and superior cash flow from our existing portfolio.
You can think about that operating prowess and that operating leadership as the first rotation in our flywheel, which we've termed The Vivmark Effect, and it's going to generate more cash flow and more earnings out of our existing portfolio. It's also going to allow us to generate stronger returns out of new investments.
Those new investments include new development, where our ambition is to become the most active and most profitable developer of rental housing in the country, providing both needed housing for the communities in which we operate and delivering a unique source of external growth for investors. You put the two together, and we are confident that that combination of superior internal cash flow growth and superior external growth will translate into an even lower cost of capital, and this gets to the next turn of the flywheel.
Those two together, that lower cost of capital, we can then utilize to fuel further and further growth. You think about it from operations to investments to a meaningful cost of capital advantage. That is what we have termed The Vivmark Effect and is what will drive superior earnings growth, dividend growth, and returns for shareholders.
On the integration, I do want to start by thanking our Vivmark team members. Our primary goal for day one was to provide a seamless experience to both residents and prospects, and that team delivered. We launched our new company from announcement to closing in 88 days. It has been a tremendous amount of work. It makes me even more confident. Looking at what that team was able to accomplish makes me even more excited about what we are going to accomplish together going forward.
It makes me more excited about the impact that we are going to make on the communities in which we operate. It makes me more excited about the impact that we are going to have on this industry. For investors, on the integration front, we are making strong progress on our upfront synergy capture and are very confident in our ability to deliver on the $175 million of gross synergies that we communicated at announcement. We are going to achieve those synergies over an 18-month period with 85% in place by the end of 2027. I want to emphasize very clearly, that is just the start.
In terms of other activities over the last 30, 60 days, we have completed our process of organizational redesign, talent assessment, and are now pleased to have our leaders across all of our business functions and all of our regions in place, which provides the clarity for us now to fully execute our plans. Some early wins. Here with Kevin.
Day one, awesome to see S&P upgrade us to an A rating. We are now one of only four REITs with an A rating from S&P. Related to the synergy front, we have also communicated that transaction costs are trending lower than expected, primarily related to lower transfer taxes than expected. Before turning it to Michael, I do want to call out three Vivmark specific tailwinds as we head into 2027. First is the upfront lift and accretion from the synergy capture.
Second is our operating momentum, which Michael hit on more. We are really building on the operating momentum from the first half, both legacy portfolios, and that we displayed in our operating update yesterday that carried through peak leasing season. The third tailwind is Vivmark has just a tremendous amount of development NOI coming online in the second half of 2026 and into 2027.
In total, we are talking about over $120 million of development on NOI coming online, projects that have already been paid for, generally completing construction, and we are now at the point of harvesting that income as we go through the lease-up. As we launch, super excited about what we are creating, super excited about the power, and we also feel like we have got a number of tailwinds in place that give us that extra boost coming out of the gate. And for my first official time, I am pleased to turn the mic over to Michael.
Thank you, Ben. I am going to start by saying I have been in this business for 27 years. I have never been more excited about the opportunity that is in front of us. We have just brought two of the best companies together, and the amount of talent, capabilities, and operating experience that we have is unmatched.
I have been joking inside the company, we have been at this, what, three and a half weeks, four weeks, that we have been able to really go deep. I feel like a kid in the candy store. Every single category that we have looked at and gone deeper immersed more opportunities or bigger opportunities than we originally thought. And it is a very exciting time to be in the company.
When you think about some of this, it is just very obvious when you look at a map and you start to just place the dots of these two amazing portfolios together. 95% of our NOI is in overlapping markets right now. That density, combined with 184,000 homes, gives us tremendous opportunities around procurement, centralization, insourcing, how we organize labor at the neighborhood level. And really, we have this tremendous scale in what I would say, a very fragmented industry.
Together, we are only 2% of the stock, and nobody else in our space has anywhere near what we have just created. As Ben mentioned, we are very confident in the net synergies that we have identified. These dollars are actually tied to very specific initiatives with clear owners and clear accountability and clear deadlines.
We are building one operating platform right now, and it is an operating edge that will get stronger as we grow with the company. As he said, we are just getting started. We are going to use our scale, technology, AI, data to lower the cost to serve while enhancing the experience to our residents. And for us in the operations, we have a very simple goal right now. We want to make Vivmark the easiest company for prospects and residents to do business with.
So no matter what area of the business we are talking about from an operations standpoint, we want to become known as the easiest to do business with. I am super excited about the data. We have 1 million data points of lease transactions. We have many millions data points around service requests and customer insights.
Literally, these are two sophisticated operators that have been using data for the last several years to drive different strategies. When we started to peel back the layer, we're like, this is like we've been conducting a massive A/B test between the two portfolios. Now we're starting to compare and contrast to figure out which synergy, which strategy made the most sense, and apply that to the other entity. Just a super exciting time.
Most importantly right now, we're starting all of this from a position of strength. The momentum from the first half has carried through the first quarter, our third quarter, giving us confidence in this 2% full-year same-store revenue outlook. Sitting here today, occupancy is just under 96%. Roughly 60% of our residents in both legacy portfolios are renewing, so continued strength in the renewal performance.
Our asking rents, our net effective pricing in the marketplace today, is still up 3.6%. All of this right now is very much in line with what both legacy companies expected to happen at the end of Q2 when we put out those releases. Turnover trends remain favorable across both legacy portfolios. Concession usage, while elevated in certain markets, has actually been starting to trend down as we see some of the new delivery supply be absorbed.
That's been exciting for us. If we look at just across the markets, at a high level for us right now, Northern California and New York remain the strength in the portfolio. Seattle, the Mid-Atlantic, are starting to show modest signs of improvement late in the peak leasing season. These are two markets that have been underperforming year to date. We're starting to see some positive momentum.
Los Angeles remains in line with both of our companies' muted expectations. Most importantly, I think conditions are starting to stabilize in what we see are newer markets right now. That's where the new supply is being absorbed. But Denver and North Carolina remain very challenged markets for us. When I look ahead, I'm very excited about the equation from both sides of this thing. We have a healthy underlying business.
We have supported by good demand, a stable job employment, declining new supply backdrop heading into next year. At the same time, we have this extraordinary opportunity to use Vivmark's density, scale, data, and talent to become the most efficient operator in this space. This is something that's going to only get better as we get bigger. Those are the reasons, sitting here today, after 27 years, I can say I've never been more excited.
Great. Thank you so much, Ben and Michael. Starting with the operational update and what both portfolios accomplished in the first half of the year. Just curious, your thoughts as you approach 2027 on kind of earn-in that's been achieved thus far.
Yeah. I think what I would tell you is we're not going to release kind of what an embedded growth or what earn-in is going to be. But sitting here today, the markets are acting the way both companies expected them to act. We had different strategies, different approaches for occupancy and rate that we put out relative to the kind of the enhanced guidance.
Both companies raised guidance by about 20 basis points. There's that continued strength that we felt in that first half continuing through what I would say now near the end of the third quarter. We don't expect the markets to define normal seasonality. If you went back and you looked at that net effective asking rent chart, you can see how that fourth quarter tails off a little bit. That is embedded in our models.
Sitting here today, we like that position. We do think we're in a position of strength with the occupancy, where we are with rate growth today, the confidence we have in our renewal process that both companies kind of had their own solutions in place. That setup for us feels really good heading into 2027.
Jana, just for painting kind of the picture of what's to come from us from an investor disclosure perspective. As part of the Q3 results, we do plan to provide Q4 earnings guidance. We also plan to update our same-store 2026 guidance, across our same-store metrics, and then to provide some of the building blocks for 2027.
Jeff.
Michael, you mentioned that you're learning from best practices from both companies and choosing the best one for the go-forward company, the new company. Can you give us a couple examples of what you've seen?
Sure. I'll start with occupancy. Right now, sitting here today, I shared that the combined portfolio is running just under 96%. Legacy EQR is up at 96.4%. Legacy AVB on a physical occupancy standpoint, 95.2%, somewhere low 95s. Again, we had two companies. They reported economic. We used physical. Legacy AVB has put up stronger new lease change than Legacy EQR.
We're now going into each one of these markets to say, what is that pricing approach? What is that strategy between the trade-off between rate and occupancy? Both companies are in line with what they expected to set out to do in the third quarter. But now we have this unbelievable opportunity to figure out, okay, which one is going to put the most money in the bank?
What's funny is I did my first tours yesterday as did Mark here in New York, got to see some Legacy AVB deals. Both portfolios sitting here are in the high 97% occupant. This market is a market that the strategy is very much aligned between the companies. But when we started peeling back the layers, we're like, we got some different approaches that we get to now see which one is going to make the most money for our shareholders.
Another example, there's tons of these examples. Another one in a critical system is revenue management systems. We got together for the first time and got kind of under the covers and start talking about where we're headed with our revenue management systems. We find out that both Legacy AVB and Legacy EQR were getting ready to pilot both of their own proprietary revenue management systems the same month.
Now we have the opportunity to actually compare where both of those systems were going, build a new system, with more investment, and populate it with double the amount of proprietary data. This is going to crystallize how different that looks sort of before and after in terms of the heft that we'll be able to get out of that new system. That is where this industry is going, right? People are moving at the larger scale.
Operators are going to have their own proprietary revenue systems. So us to be able to invest in ways that others can't and populate it with much more data than anyone else, that is a true strategic advantage.
Not part of the original underwritten synergies. Because again, pricing and all of that was off limits until we closed. So we had no clue what that opportunity could be in front of us. Like I said, the synergies that we've identified are tied to very specific initiatives with owners and all that. So now we're into this growth plus mode where we're peeling back the layer and seeing newfound opportunities in front of us.
Maybe just one more high level. Just listening to you've obviously accomplished a lot in a short period of time. You have your vision. You'll learn a lot over the coming months. You're ready to run. The newer markets are starting to stabilize, it seems. How fast can you run here, on the external side in terms of acquisitions? Over the coming months, is the main focus going to remain on the combination, achieving the synergies maybe beyond the development? Or can you start to leverage the platform to look to grow elsewhere?
It is very much both. The language that we're using internally is we need to get the core right. That's going to give us the leverage to be able to utilize our scale to generate the outsized returns. At the same time, given our scale, we are seeing opportunities, and we want to be able to take advantage of them. So, in current stage, we're 30 days post-close.
Most of the effort and most of the energy is in and around integration. But we are starting to plant the seeds as we think about what additional growth opportunities could look like for the company. While we're on the topic of growth on the development side, we've got our regional developers and those asset teams. They know the mandate. Baseline is double the level of development activity. As we've talked previously with investors about how we achieve that.
There's got to have the right teams in place, which we're adding to. You have to have the right opportunity set, and having a more powerful operating platform allows us to write, effectively achieve greater yields, or have a greater pool of potential opportunities that underwrite. Capital. This company's got double the amount of self-funded capital to put to work. All three of those are significantly stronger from a Vivmark perspective, and that we are leaning in to be able to be in a position to have substantially more start activity next year.
It will still need to meet the requirements that we need to prove out the right value. We are still focused on achieving that at 100, 150 basis points of spread between the development yield and both underlying cap rates and market cap rates. Given our scale, given the operating prowess, we think that's achievable. We're definitely leaning in there early in our Vivmark days.
Maybe following up on Jeff's question. Both prior companies had kind of a strategic imperative to the expansion market strategy. I guess now, you talk more about a national portfolio. I guess, what's that outlook for more of the Sun Belt exposure
Sure
that you previously were looking for?
Part of taking this step at Vivmark, and I'm going to try to push the industry here, is we are at the point where we're going to break the dichotomy between coastal and Sun Belt. Vivmark is going to allocate capital for shareholders to where we can achieve the strongest risk-adjusted returns. That will change through a cycle, change market, sub-market product.
That is going to be our approach, and that's how we're going to talk. Coming out of the gate, we're roughly 90% in the coastal regions, 10% in the expansion regions. I expect we'll continue to be growing in both. I expect we'll continue to be recycling capital in both in order to have a portfolio that is optimized for earnings growth going forward.
Could that also extend into markets where the public REITs traditionally haven't been in, like the Midwest or maybe Chicago?
I would not put that on the radar at this point. It takes a step, Jana, towards where we go in the future. There is the prospects of building a private capital platform as part of Vivmark, really utilizing our scale. There should be no one better, from our perspective, to take capital allocated both as an operator, developer, and investor than Vivmark. I could see if we can find the right structure to do that to the benefit of earnings for Vivmark shareholders. I could see that potentially taking us to kind of a broader set of horizons. But we're not at that juncture at this point.
On the development, doubling the development, is that development pipeline right now still in the coastal markets, or doubling that development is also in the newer or maybe even some newer cities? I don't know.
Yeah. Let me address it first. In terms of where we're leaning into development activity right now, probably the heaviest shift has been increased start activity on the West Coast, given the market momentum there. We have a number of projects there. We're seeing very good buyouts. We're using that momentum to be able to execute a set of projects on the West Coast after a number of years of just having very hard economics make sense there.
East Coast also continues to be fairly fruitful, a little bit more kind of market specific. Right now, Sun Belt development is tougher given the dynamics we're kind of all aware of. From a pipeline perspective, we've got each of our regions out hunting hard at this point. We also have our developer funding program where we provide full capital to third-party developers. Traditionally, that's what we've used to be able to ramp up development. We've also generally oriented that to the Sun Belt type of markets.
Maybe stepping back into the strategic rationale for needing additional scale. I think that everyone would agree both prior companies were very efficient and scaled well in the markets where they operated in. I guess what made this the right time? Was it the advancements in technology currently? Is it what you see happening in the future?
Yeah. I'll start off at a high level, and Michael maybe will provide some details. It's the right question to ask. It's probably the one you're getting the most often. Which is, "Weren't you guys already super efficient? How could there be more or less to harvest?" I tell you very flatly, there is a ton left to harvest.
It does relate to the industry is at this inflection point where scale is going to matter more over the next 5-10 years than it has over the last 10. It's for the reasons you were getting at. The reason both these companies came together is we're seeing it. We've been seeing it over the last couple of years. We were able to get together and actually underwrite it.
This ecosystem of technology, centralized services, the power of data, and the power of market density. We put those together, we are able to say, "Now, this is what is going to generate structurally higher growth. This is why we are going to be able to capture these upfront synergies, but then be able to increase and improve our operating margins year after year to be able to generate better returns." We are at that inflection point. Given what we have lived through over the last three or four years, what gives us the confidence we will be able to execute on the plan. You want to go a little deeper?
Yeah, I can go a little deeper and just say both companies over the last several years have worked really hard when you think about the neighborhood concept or sharing resources across assets. We did what we could do based on where the opportunity set was based on dots on the map. Now we are like, "Oh my God, we got another opportunity in this sub-market to make that a bigger neighborhood." That is unlocking the obvious things that you get with the map.
The other areas is trying to disintermediate ourself from what I would say inside the service side of the business, using contract labor, third-party labor. We at Legacy EQR, we were building internal teams to go after things like carpet cleaning, HVAC replacement, all that, and you staffed it based on what you could for the volume of work you were going to have.
Now we are looking at this new opportunity where we have more assets. We are going to save millions of dollars by doing it this way, and that is an opportunity that neither one of our companies could go after by itself, and it goes after every single category you think about where we are buying something from somebody. The scale advantage that we now have is tremendous, and our ability to negotiate pricing, whether that is at a local sub-market level or national, has changed just by putting these two companies together.
I think most of us would agree we could see the benefits on the expense side. I do not know if you could point to maybe some other revenue line items or where you can see it on growing the top line.
Well, we talked a little bit about the top line. When we think about the synergies that we publicized, it was $60 million in NOI synergies from the on-site same store portfolios. That number, believe it or not, is like $45 million + is the expense. There was very little put to the revenue because revenue was kind of off-limits for us.
That is why I was saying that is the growth plus kind of concept. I can give you some examples, even inside, let us say we were chasing $12 million - $15 million of other income. Legacy AVB did a great job with furnished units. On their website, they are netting a couple million dollars. Legacy EQR didn't have that. We are adopting that program right off the bat.
Both companies, we looked at our renters insurance programs, and we thought we would be able to negotiate a deal between one of our two vendors and deliver about $1 million or so in incremental savings. Last week the teams did the deep dive.
We are actually picking a whole different scenario than what either one of us were doing, and we think we are going to deliver about $4 million in synergies. Every time we are peeling back the layers, it is not necessarily just adopting. Some of it will be like the furnished, but it is putting great minds together and say what is possible now that we have this amazing portfolio, and that is what we have been seeing.
Every step on the, I want investors to understand this because this is part of what makes this integration hard, but it is part of the power on the other side. Every process, every system, every decision is an evaluation of how did Legacy AVB do it, how did Legacy EQR do it, and is there a third way which potentially is better? We are also incorporating that decision-making framework, what is going to allow us to scale going forward so that the next additional unit, the marginal cost of bringing that community onto the platform is super low.
I assume these benefits also will help with development and how you negotiate there as well.
They do. Yeah, there's definitely a scale component related to think about development. One, just our market presence. You're a land seller now, you're coming to us. Our ability to execute in those markets, the buying side of it, those relationships definitely carry through. We talked about it earlier, but I want to make sure I make the emphasis, which is the market density for new development matters a lot.
Actually, in the presentation we posted yesterday, we had a case study of a project in San Diego where just that additional density allows us to underwrite at additional yields. In a market like this, that's a fine line. So our ability for Vivmark to continue to get an outsized share of likely what's going to be a smaller pie of sort of overall industry starts, gets driven by this market density and its operating uplift.
Then maybe just going into the integration planning, I think we've seen some very successful apartment mergers in the space, but maybe the first year was a little bit rockier. If you could maybe talk through these first 100-day priorities and-
Yeah. I'll start. Michael, add on. One, outside of the apartment industry, we went to some of the leading firms that have been active on the integration front and asked them for, and said, "What are your best practices? Give us your playbooks." They were gracious, provided those to us, so we were able to go through in a lot of detail like, "Listen, these folks have done this well before.
What are the steps? What is important?" At the top of that list for those firms was making people decisions as quickly as you can. The leadership team here upfront said to both the legacy organizations, for the vast majority of the corporate roles, we are going to tell you by closing what your role is.
So that allowed us to go through the organizational design process, the talent assessment process, and arrive at who the leaders are in each of these business functions. So out of the gate, I'm going to turn it over to Michael. You think about who's got their hands on and got their controls over the operating business. He's got clear leaders.
The designated leader on his team going forward. Not to opine on what happened with the other apartment industries, but in a lot of M&A transactions, not having that leadership clarity effectively just freezes the organization, and people take their hands off the wheel because they don't know who's in charge. That was priority number one, and we accomplished that.
Yeah. On the operations front, the key to unlocking all of this is to have one way of working. Whether that be on the service side of the business or the sales side of the business, we need both organizations looking at it and running on similar kind of systems and similar processes. Everything we've been doing right now for the last several weeks is sequencing change.
The first thing that we're doing, I think if you listened to Legacy EQR's call in Q1, you heard me say we were deploying a brand-new service AI software through the portfolio. We deployed that in three and a half months. At the same time, unbeknownst to us, but when we peeled back the layer, Legacy AVB was also looking at new software for service.
They learned what we did, what worked well, what didn't, and now they're expediting. Right now, we will be done by October with a rollout. By the end of this year, Vivmark will have one way of working in the service side of the business that then allows us to go unlock a lot of these other initiatives. Everything we're doing is we're saying, okay, which part of the synergies are tech dependent? If so, let's figure out how to layer in that change.
What's possible from a technology standpoint? Which certain items we don't need the technology. It's aligning policies, it's aligning best practices, and those we can go fast on. We're just trying to sequence in the amount of change and being very thoughtful about it. Every time we peel back the layer, like I said, we come up with something new.
My analogy of the kid in the candy store, you see all those jars. Eventually, the hand's going to get slapped, and it's going to be said, "That's enough." You can only have five or six of them. We haven't found that yet. We haven't hit that point yet.
When we think about rental housing, there's a few different verticals right now. Are you strictly focused on multi-family? At some point, would you be interested in single-family rentals or manufactured housing or what are your thoughts there?
Yeah. In our vision statement to be the most trusted and best performing rental housing company, we did very consciously choose rental housing company and not apartments. It was twofold. One is the peer set. Who we think about competing against. We do think about it as a broader universe in terms of us being at the top of that heap.
The second one is where you're going, Jeff, which is part of the excitement and the power of Vivmark is we do very much think the aperture is just wider. There is more that we can tackle and to bring our capabilities to. Both legacy companies had been spending more time in and around BTR. Avalon has been developing a lot of townhomes for rent. I continue to think that there's a need there.
There are not overly active developers or operators of that type of product. I can see us continuing to lean into that type of activity. Then you get into adjacent sectors, which I put on the radar. Again, I wouldn't put those day one, but I think about the growth path for Vivmark relative to the growth path of either of the two legacy companies. That is now on the potential aperture.
I wish we had more time, but unfortunately, I have three quick rapid fires before we let you guys go.
Okay.
Number one, if long-term rates stay higher for longer, which has the biggest impact on your sector's earnings: higher refinancing costs, lower transaction activity, or less new supply?
Less new supply.
Over the next three years, will third-party capital become a more important source of growth for public REITs than balance sheet capital?
I wouldn't say more important, but I will say important.
For your sector, will 2027 same-store NOI growth be higher, the same, or lower than 2026?
Higher.
Thank you very much.
Yeah. Thank you, guys.