Hey, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the InterRent REIT Q1 2021 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star-zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to our speaker today, Sandy Rose. Welcome, everyone, thank you for joining InterRent REIT's Q1 2021 earnings call. My name is Sandy Rose, and I've recently joined InterRent as Director of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Leading the call today will be Mike McGahan, CEO; Brad Cutsey, President; and Curt Millar, CFO. The team will present some prepared remarks covering the most salient points of the quarter, along with an update on market conditions, then we'll be pleased to open the floor to your questions. Before I hand things over to Mike, I want to remind listeners that certain statements about future events made on this conference call are forward-looking in nature. Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to the cautionary statements on forward-looking information in the REIT's news release and MD&A dated May 11th, 2021, for more information. During the call, management will also refer to certain non-IFRS measures. Although the REIT believes these measures provide useful supplemental information about its financial performance, they are not recognized measures and do not have standardized meanings under IFRS. Please see the REIT's MD&A for additional information regarding non-IFRS financial measures, including reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures. Mike, the floor is yours. Thank you, Sandy. It's been a crazy year. I guess a long 14 months, feels like five years. I have to say that I'm so proud of our team. They've been so diligent. They've been keeping our residents safe and secure, healthy, and they've worked so hard for all of our shareholders and all of our stakeholders, for that matter. I just have to say, the team's done such a great job. I am very proud of what our team has also done for our community. They've supported many great causes. We've actually supplied PPE to, I think it's three or four hospitals. We've also helped out many charities, many small businesses. I think it's, on numbers, almost 200 small businesses. As a team, we've contributed over CAD 300,000 to these different endeavors. CAD 100,000 came from the REIT itself, and the rest came through our executive team and many team members. I'm just so proud of what they've done. We really are, and we want to be, community partners. We realize how lucky we've been. Again, it's been a tough, long year for a lot of people, and we're very lucky for our positions that we're in. I'm going to use one of the endeavors that we've done. We've actually contributed to one of the food banks, and we gave them money. What they did is we put them in touch with one of our local restaurants and gave the food bank money, and they would buy the food from the restaurant. We actually got, I guess, a double-fold lift for both of them. That's just one of the endeavors we've done. Just again, our team has done yeoman work on helping out in our community. On the business front, it's not been as great as year we've had before, and going back to obviously going through COVID and the pandemic. I do see some light at the bottom of the, I guess, the crack in the door. We have stabilized our occupancy, which everybody is, again, going back to the team, they've worked really hard in achieving. We are starting to see a little bit of modest rent growth, which we've always had along the way. As everyone knows, we had a strategy, and we said we would never buy occupancy. We always said that we would not do that, and I think our strategy is going to prove out to be very successful at the end of the day. Obviously, the last Q, and I believe Q2, I think we'll be lucky to see here, and I do believe we'll see it at the end of Q3 and especially Q4. I think we're going to see that this strategy has proven to be the right strategy along the way. I'll tell you, we had a lot of internal discussions, and I've had people saying they thought it might have been the wrong move, but as a team, we made it collectively, and we really believe that this will be the best go-forward strategy for all of our shareholders. I want to give a little bit of a cautionary tale or cautionary point. I know that you're seeing that we've got high vacancy in Vancouver. That's obviously going to be just very temporary. We are just in the process of rebranding those properties. Great properties, unbelievable locations. Happy that we transacted on that deal with Crestpoint. We are rebranding them. We're doing work in the common areas. We're doing work in the suites. Again, we want to capture the right side of the market. I think we're going to see that starting to happen. I know we'll see it because we're starting to even get lots of calls, even though we're really not in the rental mode yet, but you'll see it in Q3. I just would say on Ottawa. Right now, I'm a little concerned about. Not really. Concern is probably not the right word. I just don't think Ottawa may get the same immediate lift here in the end of Q3 that I really see in the other markets. It's still going to get a lift. I think Ottawa, just because it's federal government-based employees, and the federal government, doesn't seem right now that they've got the impetus to push the people back into the offices, which is a drag on all the local businesses and the whole downtown community. I'd see, that may not be transact fully. Again, I'm going to say, it'll be much better, but it won't transact fully until probably 2022, and I'm hopeful in the first Q of 2022. I guess I should also point out is that how positive it is with all the people getting vaccinations. I think that's really lifting the rental traffic. I think as we go through, again, I'm very confident that we're going to see some good rental numbers here for the end of Q3 of this 2021, and really going into the Q4 of 2021 and onward. Also with even having the schools announcing that they're going to have in-person classes, I think is going to be tremendous. You'll see more students going and living around the universities, and that switch is terrific. I know I have a couple of kids that are planning on moving out. I think on our last call, I said I had four kids at home. I've got two that are very committed to leaving here this summer. I think everything's kind of going back into the proper and right direction where it was before. I'm going to go now on to just what's going on in investment market and acquisitions. There's a ton of product out there. It is getting bid up. We're seeing cap rate compression across the board, and quite frankly, even not just primary markets, but secondary and tertiary markets. I see there's just like a wall of capital. There's so many people interested in multifamily. They really see it as a safe harbor. If you look at, again, like what our collection rates and even when we kind of talk about, yeah, we're off a little bit on our occupancy, but all of us could be full. It's just a pricing game. Everybody could be full. We're really seeing this as a safe harbor. Obviously, everybody else sees it too. There's people that invest a lot of the institutional players now in private equity. There's a lot of people looking for multifamily. We're going to have to stay disciplined in our approach. We'll have to make sure that nothing veers from what we've done in the past. I do see that we will end up transacting like we've transacted all the way through this pandemic. I see that we'll be continuing it on as we go forward. There will be obviously some growth in our company and in our portfolio, but we will be disciplined. I also would like to point out, too, is one of the things that we have been talking about, too. We will be probably doing some small dispositions, and those are just smaller properties on a primary basis that we'll sell. We just think it doesn't fit completely into our portfolio anymore. We will also be looking at more JVs, potentially. We've been really happy with our JVs to date. We've had two excellent partners. Actually, more than two. They've been great to deal with. I think what it does is it really gives us the great opportunity to leverage our platform. By leveraging our platform, it really increases a lot of opportunity for our team. It also helps our bottom line, and it's great for our partners, too. It's a win all the way around. We'll be continuing on with that front. The last items I really want to go over is on our development side. You'll have seen that in our MD&A that we put out. 473 Albert. Great location. 158 suites we're going to be building there. Was a former office building. That construction is going to start in the start of Q3 2021. We're hopeful that it'll finish in the end of Q3 2022. Again, really excellent location. I'll tell you, the design work I've seen has been fabulous, and I think we'll do extremely well there. The next one will be 900 Albert. 900 Albert is a very large opportunity for us. Again, we're a partner in that. We've got great partners there, too. At 900 Albert, we're going to be putting up approximately 1,241 suites plus some commercial space. We are looking at the whole project. We want to make sure that we get the most out of this opportunity. It is right at the T of the LRT here in Ottawa. Fabulous site. Very excited about it, but we are working through We really want to be mindful to make sure that we get the most out of this opportunity. The third project is again in Ottawa, and it's Richmond and Churchill. In Richmond and Churchill, there's 184 suites that we'll be putting in. We're hopeful to be starting that in Q1 2022. I just want to point out, these are all premium locations in Ottawa. I think at the end of the day, location, location always wins the day. We will be mindful of making sure we don't kick off too many properties at any one time. We know that these are great opportunities. Though we think there might be a little bit of lag in the occupancy in Ottawa, I don't see that as prolonged, and by the time we get through these buildings, we'll be in great shape here in Ottawa. We're very confident about where we're going here. The last one that we've got is at Fairview in Burlington. That's a JV too. That property should consist of over 2,000 apartments and condos. We hope to start that in the first half of 2022. Fabulous site. Feel very bullish about it. We're working through the city, and the city's been great so far to deal with. We're really excited about that opportunity, and we see really good things coming there in that area. In saying that, I guess, I just want to sum up that we're really sticking to our core strategy all the way, and I think we're going to see some really good success here at the end of this year. I'm going to pass this over to Brad now. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone, from my side of the wall. I'll take you through the operations update for Q1 before I hand it over to Curt to talk through our financial position. I'm going to start with occupancy because I know that's the topic on everybody's mind. At the end of March, we're sitting at an occupancy of 91.3% for the overall portfolio and 92.1% for the same property portfolio. As Mike mentioned, we're pleased to see that the overall occupancy has stabilized for year-end. As we discussed during our Q4 call, we have seen occupancy hit hardest in our urban core properties in Ottawa and Montreal, which typically have a high proportion of students, coupled with young professionals, many of whom have moved back in with their parents. We continue to view the occupancy pressure as temporary, and for some of the reasons outlined earlier around the vaccination rollout and current announcements regarding universities' reopening plans. We're optimistic about seeing an uptick in occupancy for these properties in Q3, and more meaningfully into Q4. Also, our contactless rental process and virtual property tours seem to be getting traction. Our email leads were up 18% in Q1 versus the same period last year, and the numbers for April saw an even bigger jump by more than 100%. Web traffic also is on the rise for 49% of the quarter and up 61% in April. Our app-to-approval conversion are holding steady in and around the 80% range. We'll find all this to be very encouraging as a source of future leasing demand. As you know, we have an extensive reposition program, which means that our occupancy is likely never going to hit 98%. We're hopeful that we can gradually return to more normalized run rate in and around the 96% target that you've become accustomed to over the course of 2022. On the rent side of things, we're seeing a strategy to prioritize price over occupancy bear fruit. We are pleased to report an average rent in March of CAD 1,325 per suite, which is up 4.3% from CAD 1,270 last March. This result's even better when looking at our same property portfolio, where March average rent per suite came in at CAD 1,328, showing growth of 4.6% over last year. On the external growth front, we've added 1,242 suites to our portfolio since Q1 2020. As usual, these units initially came into our non-reposition portfolio and expected to contribute to driving our organic growth in the years to come as we work through repositioning upgrades. Overall, these results have contributed to reporting operating revenues of CAD 43.1 million for the quarter, a 9.4% increase over Q1 2020. Moving to NOI in Q1, we generated CAD 26.5 million in NOI on our overall portfolio, leading to growth of 7.2% over Q1 2020, mainly on the back of external growth and average rent per suite improvements that I've just outlined. For our same property portfolio, however, NOI growth was -1.8% for the quarter. As the occupancy pressures we've highlighted continue to outweigh strong underlying rental growth. This resulted in a slight NOI margin dip on the same property portfolio from 62.8% in Q1 2020 to 62.5% for the first quarter of 2021. For your reference, though, normalizing occupancy to the same level last year, our same property NOI growth would have been 6.5%, and our NOI margin would have been 64.3%. NOI margin for the overall portfolio stood at 61.5% in Q1 2021, reflecting the lower operational efficiencies of recent acquisitions and a non-reposition portfolio. We believe this part of our portfolio offers a significant opportunity for the REIT to execute on its value add strategy in the years to come. Let me now turn things over to Curt to share our financial update. Thanks, Brad. Good morning, everyone. Mike and Brad have done a lot of the heavy lifting, providing color on our Q1 results, so I'll jump straight to FFO. We are reporting FFO of CAD 16.2 million for the quarter, nearly 12% increase over Q1 last year. On a weighted average unit diluted basis, FFO was CAD 0.114, down marginally from CAD 0.115 in Q1 2020. As Brad mentioned earlier, the increased vacancy in rebates impacted our NOI and therefore FFO. Normalizing this to the same level as Q1 2020, our FFO per unit growth would have been 13.9% year-over-year for Q1. Our distribution for Q1 2020 was CAD 0.0814 and represents a 71% FFO payout ratio and an 80% AFFO payout ratio. Relative to Q1 2020, the REIT has increased its distribution 5% quarter-over-quarter, demonstrating our objective to provide unit holders stable and growing distributions, as well as our steadfast confidence in the REIT's outlook, despite some short-term challenges. During the quarter, we spent CAD 174.2 million on acquisitions and invested CAD 15.6 million into the standing portfolio, mainly for value-enhancing initiatives. For the first quarter of 2021, we recorded a fair value gain on our investment properties of CAD 97.6 million, driven by the NOI improvements in our same-store portfolio and a 10-basis point of cap rate compression relative to Q4, leading to a weighted average portfolio cap rate of 4.06% for Q1 of 2021. Given the current market conditions and in discussions with our external advisors, we expect further cap rate compression in Q2. The REIT is in a very healthy financial situation. Our debt to GBV at March 31 was a comfortable 32.7%, up slightly from 31.1% we reported in December, following an increase in our mortgage debt from our Vancouver acquisition. At March 31, the REIT had mortgages of CAD 1.1 billion at an average term to maturity of 4.7 years and a weighted average interest rate of 2.47%, reflecting a 9 basis point reduction from year-end. 73% of InterRent's mortgages are insured by CMHC, which provides for favorable interest rates given the reduction in refinancing risk for lenders. At the end of Q1 2021, the REIT had CAD 285 million of available liquidity, which, along with its current debt to GBV ratio of 32.7%, offers ample headroom to finance future capital programs, development opportunities, and acquisitions. In closing, I would also like to thank Sandy and welcome her to our team. I'm sure many of you will get to know her in the coming months if you do not know her already. At this point, I'd like to pass it back over to Mike to say a few closing words. Thank you, Curt. We're not really happy with our results to date, we understand, obviously, these are challenging times. Our team has responded incredibly well. I have to tell you that now that some of them are getting their shots, I can just see that they're really starting to get bolstered. I really believe that we're going to achieve some really great results as we go forward. We're really looking forward to getting back on track. We will be back on track. I can see great things coming forward. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. We'll now hand it back to the operator to open the floor to your questions. Your first question comes from the line of Jonathan Kelcher from TD Securities. Your line is open. Thanks. Good morning. First question is, I guess just on Ottawa. You talked about it being maybe a little bit slower than other markets, but there is going to be the positive impact of students coming back there. How much of your portfolio would you say will benefit from students coming back versus be a little bit slower from a slower return with the government? Hi, Jonathan. How are you? We've got a chunk of properties that are the downtown core and then Sandy Hill that will suffer. We are seeing leasing activity right now. I'm just being cautionary about Ottawa. I do see that it's going to improve, but I just would rather think that it's going to be I don't want people to put in it's going to bake in like the other markets where at least I feel the other markets look a little bit more positive, I guess, traffic right now. Faster growth in the other markets, and then Ottawa trailing by a quarter or two is kind of a good way to think about it? I'm hoping not. I'd rather underpromise, hopefully you're right, and hopefully we'll overdeliver. We just don't know. We don't know enough of what's going on. We're all seeing what's going on here with vaccinations and everybody's mindset changing. I can tell you, I have two of my kids, as I said before, will be moving out, and they'll be moving into the downtown core. Okay A lot of their friends are, and I think people are getting more and more positive. The only thing is I do worry a little bit. Ottawa is not, I don't want to say paint Ottawa as only a government town. It's really diversified now. I am a little concerned with that part of the workforce, that they may not come back as quickly as some other segments. That's all. Just to add to that, we had a little hike in vacancy going in, Jonathan, into Q4, Q1, as you know, in the National Capital Region. One of the reasons, and you've seen this a lot in the media, is Ottawa's housing market has performed quite well, so that we did lose some to homeownership, and that's had a little more of a prevalent factor, I would say, more so in Ottawa than our other core regions. Okay. That's helpful. If we look at, you said you're going to start 473 Albert hopefully in Q3. Do you have an estimated cost for that development? We haven't put that out there yet. We know that we've done all of our work on it. It will be very accretive for us. It's something that we'll be mindful of putting out potentially next Q. Okay. Then just generally speaking on your development program and I guess also your repositioning program, how impacted do you think you'll be from construction cost inflation? It's something that we've got to be very mindful of. There's no question. We've got to be careful with that, and it's something that we'll be watching as we go forward on some of these new projects that we're looking at doing. Some of them are not going to hit until I think, as I said, it'll be into 2022. I have heard chatter that they think costs will come down once the supply chain comes back to a little bit normalized. I mean, nobody knows for sure. We'll have to see that as it bakes out. I mean, if anything looks like it's offside, the cheapest time to own a property, a development site is when you haven't put a shovel in the ground, right? We know they're all premium locations. Not concerned about it. If we have to hold off a little bit, we'll hold off. Okay. That's helpful. I'll turn it back. Thanks. Your next question comes from the line of Mike Markidis from Desjardins. Your line is open. Good morning, everybody. A couple of questions from my end. Just first, congrats first of all on stabilizing your occupancy. I think it's great to see. I was wondering if you could just chat or give us some comments on how your traffic changed in one Q versus the prior several quarters, and to the extent you were a little more aggressive on incentives in one Q versus the others. Maybe I'll start. Brad will jump in, I'm sure. You know what? It's really more art than science to an extent, though we have tried to make it a lot more science-based of what we're doing. We're just really watching, and I'll tell you it's almost like a bit of a push and pull. We are seeing the traffic increasing. I like to think it's because of our-- and I want to give full kudos to our marketing team. Our marketing team's done really amazing. They've really stepped it up over this whole process. I like to think that they're doing a great job in identifying who our key customers are and spending appropriately. Well, again, it looks like things are, I guess, more positive. People are getting in a lot better frame of mind. I'll tell you I think we've improved a lot in our whole digital approach. That's one thing that kind of brought us forward about five years. Probably me, about 10. Anyways, I think that we've done some really good improvements as a company, so we're benefiting from that. You got to remember, last year when we got to about end of February, man, it was just off. Went to zero, our traffic too, and all. We went into that way all the way through spring. I think people are feeling more confident and almost unfortunately, a bit of the normal is the life we're living right now, so. Okay. That's helpful. Thanks. Mike. And just- Yeah, the only thing that I'd add, just I think the world is, to Mike's point, is getting more encouraging for vaccinations. I think the fact that schools are out there saying that they want to be back on campus in class learning. Back to Mike anecdotally, just in his own home, seeing some of his own kids wanting to move out and have some of that kind of year one, year two experience in university. I think there's a lot of positive optimism that things will be back to somewhat normal. We're not banking on it, but somewhat normal, and I think that's leading to increased electronic traffic. As far as the rebates, they're up just slightly. The incentives are up just slightly over the Q1. Okay. Thank you. The Vancouver portfolio, elevated vacancy there as you had telegraphed. With respect to the in-suite work that you plan on executing there, is this a lot of heavy lifting? Is it more of a light touch? Wondering how that might impact your CapEx spend in the next couple of quarters. I'm going to start. Dave Nevins is here too, our Chief Operating Officer. Dave's been out to Vancouver numerous times. I don't know if, Dave, do you want to say a couple of comments, please? Yeah. I would say for Vancouver, I know it's probably a variety because we inherited some good properties from the previous owner. We have a lot of good product to work with, but we do have several units that we are repositioning in order to achieve top rent in the area. We've been working hard at that for the last couple of months. Yeah. They're excellent properties. Dave's been out there. I've been out there two times for very extended stays. Dave's been out there about five times, four or five times now. We're really happy with that portfolio. We think we got it at a great time, so we're really happy with that transaction. Okay. Last thing for me before I turn it back, you've given some, it's not a precise science, as you say, but you've given some pretty good color in terms of how you expect occupancy to trend over the next, call it, three to four quarters. Do you think the AMR growth picks up in lockstep with that or will it be a little bit more delayed before you get back to sort of that normal annualized pace that you were at? It'll be a little bit of a delay. Again, I want to make sure it's crystal clear, I don't expect there to be much change here in Q2. It's really like in the last, I think once we get to September of this year, that's when I think we'll really see a change. I don't want anyone to be baking in anything for the next really quarter or two, right. I want to be very clear to everybody in the market. We do see we're going to get some growth. Yeah, we feel actually very strong of where the market will be going. Okay, noted. Thanks very much, and I'll turn it back. Your next question comes from the line of Brad Sturges from Raymond James. Your line is open. Hi, good morning. In terms of the commentary about looking at a small amount of asset sales, can you provide a little extra color in terms of what the quantum of that program might look like this year? Is it just simply exiting some of the smaller markets, or would you include some assets in your larger target markets? It might be a little bit of a mixed bag. We're kind of going over it right now. I just didn't want anyone to be surprised, to be frank with you. We've got some smaller properties in some of our core markets. We just think it might not be a bad time to transact on them. It'd just be a lot more efficient for us. We also have, I'll tell you, some non-core markets that have, and I'll give specifically Trenton and Elmer are really performing extremely well. You know what I mean? Trenton especially. I'll give Trenton, not just because I was born in Trenton, but the guys are laughing in here. Anyways, Trenton's done really well, like incredibly well. We've been talking about disposing of that asset for the last two, three years, and anyways, it's done amazing. Okay. In terms of the cap rate compression you're seeing or expecting to see, can you provide a little bit of context in terms of what your expectations are there and how that may relate to future IFRS value gains that you could record over the next few quarters? I think in our discussions, we've always been really conservative with our FMV model, with our cap rates. In our discussions with our external appraisers and also just what we've seen in the market being active on the acquisition front. Realistically, we could probably see another 10 basis points of cap rate compression. Which, if you do the math on what's disclosed in the financials, probably brings in over CAD 80 million of FMV gain just from that, regardless of what happens on the NOI improvement front. Sure. Last question would be on JVs. You mentioned that you could be looking to enter into at least another one. Is that a function of looking at additional new markets or just portfolio sizes in terms of what you're looking at for acquisition? What would be the driver of looking at another JV? I'm going to be crystal clear. We're not looking at any other markets right now. We're sticking to these markets. We think they're really strong markets. When we get out of this, we think we'll see some very good growth for everybody. Sometimes it could be portfolio size, there could be different matters of how you go about it, but we just think it's really favorable, and to this date, we've been very, well, not even very, extremely happy with the way it's worked out. Okay, great. I'll turn it back. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Joanne Chen from BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open. Hi, good morning, everyone. Just on the fair value gains and the capital compression this quarter, could you maybe comment on specifically whether driven by any particular markets? A little bit more granularity would be great. Yeah, it was pretty even, to be honest with you, Joanne. It may be a little higher in the GTHA market, and would maybe trend down a little bit towards some of the other markets, but it wasn't like it was driven by only one market in particular. Got it. We've been pretty active on the acquisition front. There's been lots of deal flow in just about every market we operate in. We see these cap rates as still being, like I said earlier, still being pretty conservative given the deal flow that's happening in the private side. Got it. Yeah, no, for sure. Maybe just on that then on the acquisitions front, would the kind of focus in terms of your target right now be on kind of the smaller off-market deals? Would you be any interest in any of some of the larger portfolio sales that are being marketed right now? We've looked at all of them, to be frank with you, we look at everything that comes through. Quite frankly, we even do work-up on markets that we're not in right now, just so future touch points for going forward. You got to look at each one, and you take a look at the merits of each individual property that gets marketed. We also look, again, off-market deals. We spend a lot of time on that too. Those usually tend to be easier transactions than fully marketed deals, to be frank with you. A lot less brainpower that gets lost on that stuff. Anyways, I hope that answers your question. For sure. I know there's a lot going on out there right now. I guess maybe just one more question on the occupancy front. Not to drill too much into it, but given that we're still kind of in this weird phase right now in Q2, could you potentially be willing to let occupancy slip a little bit in the anticipation that really in Q3, later into Q3 and Q4, that it will come back quite strong and just kind of keep holding market rents steady? We're going to keep watching it, to be frank with you. We've been pretty mindful of how far we want to take it down. Again, we don't want to sacrifice too much in the short term. We're looking at it, I won't even tell you it's day to day, and everybody knows in this room, I probably look at our rental report probably every hour if less than that. We're watching it really careful because it's really, really important, and everybody watches it. Dave's been very on top of it, and his whole team has done a great job in balancing the whole how much do we let it slip. Again, we feel very positive as we get into September, but nobody has that crystal ball, right? Yeah. We all wish we did. We do believe we're in a good spot right now. Got it. What I would add is why we want to expectation for Q2, you've got to appreciate the fact that we're still in this third lockdown. All indications prior to the lockdown were very encouraging, Joanne. We're trying to manage that. We don't have a lot of clarity because there has been this third lockdown, and we think a lot of people have deferred their purchasing decisions to a later date. We all feel very encouraged given what we've seen pre this latest lockdown and what we've seen during it, that all indication leads to a strong back half and most likely going to be stronger as we get into the fall. For sure, yeah. The immigration early numbers too, was also quite positive and hopefully that will continue. Maybe just on a broader, bigger picture question on the regulatory side of things. Like you said, no one obviously has a crystal ball and our government's been anything but predictable to date. I guess just what are you thinking in terms of right now with respect to, I guess, the potential for the extension of the new rent freezes and restrictions into 2022 right now? We've heard no indication of that at all. We're really hopeful that things again, will turn back to normal once we get the vaccinations. As we see everything kind of get back to normal as we get into September and you get kids going back to school, all those good things. I think, we're hoping that this, whatever we want to call it, the five alarm that we got going on is going to come down significantly. I would add, too, I think, and I'm looking at Mike and Dave when I say this, but I think this year was the first time ever that there wasn't a rent increase imposed by the Ontario government since rent control then. It shows you what an anomaly that is, right? Okay. Well, that's good to hear. Okay. Well, that's great. That's it for me. I'll turn it back. Thanks, guys. Your next question comes from the line of Mario Saric from Scotiabank. Your line is open. Hi, good morning. Just a couple of questions on my end. First off, maybe delving into the same property occupancy expense decline of 40 basis points year-over-year this quarter. Can you provide a bit of color in terms of what drove the 6% decline in property operating costs year-over-year? How sustainable in this environment do you think that type of year-over-year same property operating expenses over the next couple of quarters? It's not going to be easy, obviously. We're trying to get as efficient as we can. We're looking at every little area that we can to try to, I guess, be as efficient as we can all the way through. Even our procurement's been going on for a long time. Do I think it can go on forever to keep coming down? No, you're going to get to a point where it's going to stop. We're happy with our improvement. I would also maybe, potentially, and I'd have to go back and read through the numbers. We might have a little bit of elevation from our initial PPE bought in the start of the year two, right? There are some things that we will be seeing, too, that as we look forward, there could be some wage pressures until the government kind of starts slowing down the programs. Also a little mindful of, again, insurance potential pressures, because it seems like every time there's anything that goes on, the insurance company loves to pass on. This is the reason why we can increase our rates no matter what happens. It's across the board, even if it doesn't really affect them so. Got it. I guess the genesis behind the question is if I look at your year-over-year same property expenses, Q2, they're up 2.8%, Q3 up 4.6%, Q4 up 6.3%. The negative 0.4% is a marked deviation from that. Just kind of curious in terms of whether you get back to those types of year-over-year increases. I'm hoping not again, Mario. I think a lot of it was attributed to we had some temporary wage increases too last year. I don't expect you to see. If anything, it may be just flat or something like that. We're really watching everything. We had pretty heavy duty PPE costs, right? It was pretty crazy, to be frank with you. Trying to keep all our residents feeling safe and secure along the way. It was a big expense for not just us, all of our peers. They all went through that too. Yeah. It's crazy. There's a lot of moving parts in that between the PPE, between some of the credits we were giving for the rental where we were a self-imposed sort of credit cycle we had gone through helping our tenants out. We had pushed some of that through the OpEx back in Qs 2, 3, and 4 also. There's offsets going the other way. We all know that a lot of the utility costs are going up and insurance costs are going up. Overall, I think we can actually probably do a little bit better than we did last year, just because last year had some anomalies. There'll be some competing pressures between those items I mentioned, and also as we continue to invest in technology and our CRM platforms and other platforms, some of that'll flow through. I would expect it to not get any worse than last year. Continue to improve a little bit, but I wouldn't expect a significant delta there. Right. Okay. Maybe Curt, sticking with you just on the IFRS cap rate. One clarification. Of the 10 basis point decline quarter-over-quarter, how much of it would've related to the Q1 acquisitions? None of that would've related to the Q1 acquisitions. In the first quarter where we acquire a property, we don't fair value it during that quarter. We bring it in at the transacted price because at that point in time, that feels like the proper fair market value. You just transacted on it. Then once we get a little more knowledge around what we can do with the rents and other pieces of the CapEx and stuff that's going to go into it fully, once we get into the second quarter of owning it, that's when we run it through our FMV model. None of that change would've been a result of Vancouver in Q1. Got it. The 4.06% disclose excludes the Vancouver purchase cap rate. Correct. Okay. Just maybe on some of the acquisitions during the quarter, specifically in Oakville and Mississauga, the price per doors were a bit higher than what we typically see. Presumably that's buying newer product. What's the investment thesis for those three assets? Really triple premium location, we feel. The two in Oakville, to be frank with you, probably two of the best buildings that we've purchased as far as minimal CapEx going forward in the future. Really just love the location. Location's amazing. When we bake in our whole thesis, this made a lot of sense. The Mississauga one, again, a great location near GO Train. Again, we believe and what we've seen out there, we think that we're going to see potentially more cap rate compression. A lot of people, and not just us, feel that we're going to see much better times as we get through the end of this. As far as rentals go. Okay. Rather than repositioning, the game plan here is the ex- Mario, just to provide a little more color on that. We've said this before that often our properties require heavy lifting on the repositioning. We have, in certain times in the past, found properties that are well-maintained, but just maybe the marketing corridor, landscaping, and the way it's sold is not sort of representative of what you could do in the market. You can get pretty significant lifts sometimes just out of those areas. Got it. Okay. Just maybe on the repositioning, Curt. The number of non-repositioned suites fell 180 suites quarter-over-quarter, despite the addition of 728 suites from the acquisition during the quarter. Net net would suggest that the repositioning portfolio fell at 908 suites during the quarter. I know that the classification of these suites is more based on when you bought the suite as opposed to kind of the full completion of the repositioning initiatives. Can you maybe provide a bit more color in terms of those 900 odd suites that dropped out of repositioning in Q1? What contribution of NOI is coming from those suites relative to your expectation of fully stabilized NOI? Are you done with the repositioning in those assets, or is it just simply because you bought them three to four years ago that they've been repositioned or reclassed? Yeah. I don't have the specific numbers just for those exact suites in front of me, but I can say that typically, knowing what's in there, generally, there's still more upside coming out of that. We market through that cycle at the four-year mark. In this environment, especially with one year being COVID and the reduced turnover, I guess, in some assets, you're not going to get through the full extent of the repositioning when your construction is done. You're still going to go through a few months on that one. A few months of marketing and sales work and a few cycles of that, because once you finish the CapEx work and all the program that you're rolling out, if you're doing 25%-30% turnover, you're still looking at two to three more years before you get through all that. Yeah. Okay. I know a couple of properties, specifically, Mario, and yeah, there's still upside in those things. It's just a timing issue as far as- Okay. My last question just relates to the disclosure change, combining the GTA with Hamilton this quarter. Just curious in terms of what drove the decision to change the characterization, and then can you clarify whether St. Catharines is in Other Ontario or in the GTA bucket? I think GTA is taking over all of Ontario, it seems, when you're driving through it. Anyways. No, just joking. Hello, Curt, you want to answer that? Yeah, sure. I can do it. The change was a couple of things. One is as we've continued to expand into other markets, a lot of those regions existed prior to us going in, even to Montreal. Now that we're into Vancouver, you were getting a bit of a disconnect between the sizes of some of the markets and others. We felt like grouping them into our three core areas and then Other provided a little more clarity around that. Two is it allows us to do a little better analysis in regards to these versus CMHC, because these now tie into the CMAs from CMHC, so it allows us to do a better comparison on that basis, on an overall for the different regions. Three is it just, quite frankly, provides a better comparison with many of our peer groups, so we try to align that to give people an easier time to see how that stacks up. Got it. Okay, St. Catharines would be Other Ontario or GTA? St. Catharines would be Other Ontario, yes. Okay. Sorry. No. I apologize, Mario. St. Catharines is included with the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. Okay. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Matt Logan from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Thank you. Good morning. Just following up in terms of your acquisition capacity, could you talk a little bit about how high you would be comfortable taking up your debt to gross book value ratio? Would you consider issuing equity for potential transactions at the current unit price? No. Right now we're not looking at that at all. We don't have a problem with bringing up our debt a bit. We've built ourselves for these times, to be frank with you. Yeah, I think we've done really well in our transactions along the way. We'll always be mindful of keeping our debt on a controllable level. If we saw something that was pretty exciting that we could create some value for our shareholders, and if we hit like the low 40s, maybe 40, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Knowing that we could probably grow out of it over a few quarters, too. We would probably do that. Anyways, again, we're looking to grow, but we're not going to grow just for the sake of growing. Up to the low 40% range, and if there's a bigger deal, then perhaps that's where you bring in a JV partner? We're going to balance it all. It's not like that's not where we're ideally going to, you know what I mean? It's something that we wouldn't be too concerned about going there if we saw we could create value along the way, if we saw something that was an exciting transaction. We've always been very careful of keeping our debt down. We've de-levered, as you know, over the years, quite a lot, to be quite frank with you. We always wanted to do it just because we were always concerned about potential storms on the horizon, and we never called this storm, that's for sure. Nobody called the COVID one coming at us. In the short term, I think we would definitely look at doing it. Makes total sense to me. When we change gears and think about your total CapEx spending for 2021, could you give us a sense for a general range of including maintenance CapEx as well as the value add spend? Sorry. You're asking me the CapEx for 2021, Matt? Yeah. Yeah, so- Total CapEx for the year. Yeah. The first Q was down a little bit, and some of that just has to do with some of the work you'd often do, whether it's carpets or hallway paintings and stuff like that, given everything going on with the lockdown, sort of got delayed a little bit. I think we were about 200 per door in Q1. We were about 249 last year and my expectation for the year will probably have us in around the 925 mark. If we include the value add CapEx, that would be? Total CapEx probably looks to be around CAD 70 million in totality, which would include that. Okay. Great color. Yeah, for Q2 through Q4. Last one for me, just in terms of your outlook, you gave some good color on the various markets and how you expect they'll perform. Do you have a general sense for the occupancy and how that might trend for the overall portfolio, say, by year-end in mid-2021 or 2022? Excuse me. Could you just repeat that quick? Sorry, I apologize. Just trying to roll up your occupancy guidance for the whole portfolio. Just wondering if you could give us a sense for where we could be at year-end and the middle of next year? I can't really predict year-end. I'm hopeful where we're going to be. We've always guided we're going to be between 3% and 4%. That's really what we've always been looking at because we never wanted to be, as you say, fully baked as far as our occupancy. We like to keep pushing and creating value for our shareholders and our stakeholders. I'm hopeful that we will be there again next year. That would be our hope, and I believe we will be. I feel very strongly about it. I think that general mood out there, I think, is that we're all very restless being under these lockdown conditions. I think people are getting more and more positive, and they see again, as I said, the light under the door, and I think at some point, the door's going to get opened. I think you're going to see Honestly, I think it's going to be incredible times in our industry. For us, that's just my take on it. The 3%-4%, was that vacancy, Mike? 3% or 4% vacancy. Sorry if I wasn't clear. I apologize. Yeah. Basically, we're at 8.7 today, and maybe by the middle of next year, we get back down to a normalized level of 3%-4%. Yeah. I think you're going to see more rent growth, too. Excellent. Matt, just so we're clear, too, that's what we have in our MD&A, and we've sort of said to people that's what we sort of look on a repositioned property basis, that's where we look to be. We do not provide guidance on that number. Appreciate it. Thanks, Curt, Mike. I'll turn the call back. Sorry. I just want to provide clarity before we jump back. Mario's question earlier about St. Catharines. Apologize, Mario. It's actually in other Ontario. If you look at page 31, 32 of the MD&A, given that we changed how we group properties this Q, we added some additional disclosure in the MD&A. You can actually see specifically which properties, which suites make up each of the regions. Thank you. There are no further questions. I turn the call back for closing comments. I'd just like to say thank you to everybody for joining us today. Appreciate that. I appreciate all the analysts. I know it's been a very tough time for yourselves. Again, I hope we were very clear of what we said, what we see in our horizon. Again, things are changing on a daily and hourly basis, but we feel very strongly that our program that we talked about and debated a lot about from, I guess, right when the pandemic started, is the right program to stick to. I think we'll see the fruits of our labor for everybody. I want to say thank you again, really, to our team, to Dave's team. Dave's team's done a tremendous job. Brad has worked extremely hard the last while. We've driven him off his feet, and so has Curt, and the whole financial team has done amazing during this whole time. I could cover every end of our side of our business. I feel extremely proud and very humbled to be a part of this team. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it. Hope everybody has a fantastic day. Look forward to great times coming forward. That concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.