Christopher Marr
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets
Sure. Thanks for the question. So let's do take a look under the hood at the New York MSA performance during the quarter. So in the back half of last year, New York MSA performed exceptionally well, which made it more difficult to generate outsized growth this year. And then as you touched on, there are a few other factors to evaluate. We've got the impact of Ida and new supply, the performance of our nonsame-store pool and the consumer demand picture. If you start with the rain, the heavy rain from Ida. We had water damage at 9 of our stores in the MSA: 2 in Queens, 3 in the Bronx, 2 in Westchester County and 1 each in Brooklyn and North Jersey. Unfortunately, the nature of that storm led to isolated pockets of water intrusion, and it was largely as a result of the source systems in capability of absorbing that much rain that quickly. So those 9 stores, we really experienced no new demand during about a month or so as we cleaned up, but we did experience the resulting vacates because sadly, many of the customers' possessions were at a total loss. So we had a bit of an occupancy decline at those impacted stores. And so that was one factor for the quarter. On the supply side, we've been consistent in our messaging regarding the impact, especially in Brooklyn and Queens, which was as expected and factored in our expectations. So while our same-store results in Brooklyn and Queens are outperforming our expectations on occupancy rate revenue much like Washington, D.C. and Nashville MSA, they're dealing with the headwinds that we're not experiencing markets, not seeing new supply. I think the upshot to this is that the new development stores then continue to lease up in those markets, particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, well ahead of our expectations. So the customers that we can't accommodate at our highly occupied same stores, we're getting them at the lease-up stores in the boroughs, and those stores are experiencing physical occupancy revenue higher than planned. Our acquisition last year in the fourth quarter of the Storage Deluxe assets are well outpacing our underwriting. Those are in the same-store pool. So I think you got to look at this holistically. And then looking at the consumer demand picture, demand remains very solid. We obviously have all-time high physical occupancy. I think it's basically 95.5% in the outer boroughs. We do see the returning population to New York City impact on the vacate side in our Manhattan store and then some of the immediately adjacent stores. We view that actually as a long-term positive. Near term, we're seeing some vacates from people who would have stored at the beginning of the pandemic long term, that returning population and what we're seeing on the multifamily side, particularly in rate on the multifamily side, we view as a long-term positive as people return to the city. So I think when you factor in the exogenous factors that I described and then the endogenous factors, we're encouraged by the overall results for the quarter and year-to-date. So hopefully, Todd, that gives you some helpful context.