Welcome to Bank of America's 2024 Global Real Estate Conference. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Josh Dennerlein, and I cover the residential REITs at B of A. We're pleased to have with us Camden's President and CFO, Alex Jessett. Alex will start with a few opening remarks, and then we'll jump into Q&A. As always, I encourage audience questions, but I have plenty if you guys are feeling shy with it. Alex, I'll pass it over to you. Thanks, Josh. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Since we only have about 30 minutes for our discussion, I'll keep my prepared remarks brief to allow as much time as possible for Q&A. For those of you not familiar with Camden, we are a multifamily REIT with over 58,000 apartment homes located in 15 major markets across the U.S. We are an S&P 500 company with a total market cap of approximately $17 billion, and we've been operating as a public company for over 30 years. Approximately 75% of our portfolio is located in high-growth Sun Belt markets, with the remainder located in Washington, D.C., Southern California, and Denver. Within our markets, roughly 60% of our assets are located in suburban submarkets, and just over 60% would be considered Class B versus Class A in price point. Our strategy is to focus on high-growth markets, measured by projected employment, population, and migration growth. To operate a diverse portfolio of assets in terms of geography, A versus B, and urban versus suburban. Recycle capital and create value for our shareholders through acquisitions, dispositions, development and redevelopment, repositioning, and repurposed programs. Maintain a strong balance sheet with low leverage, ample liquidity, and broad access to capital, and deliver consistent earnings and dividend growth for our shareholders. Turning to operations, overall, our markets are performing as expected, with strength in DC Metro, Denver, Southeast Florida, and Houston, partially offset by softer conditions in markets like Austin and Nashville. Our results quarter to date are in line with our expectations and the guidance we provided last month in conjunction with our 2Q 2024 earnings release. We continue to balance occupancy levels with new lease and renewal rates across our portfolio in order to maximize revenue, and we are monitoring bad debt and delinquencies, which have improved significantly since the beginning of this year. Our 2024 guidance calls for core FFO per share of $6.79, and same property growth rates of 1.5% for revenue, 2.85% for expenses, and 0.75% for NOI at the midpoint of our range. Looking at fundamentals of supply and demand, demand for high-quality apartment homes is strong, given the population and employment growth in our markets, the shifting demographics of the country, the unaffordability of home buying, and the lack of existing single-family home inventory. Our resident retention remains high, turnover remains low, and move-outs for home purchases have been less than 10% over the past few months. New supply in our markets is peaking now, but should fall dramatically in 2025 and 2026, creating a very constrained multifamily operating environment, particularly in our high-growth, high-demand Sun Belt markets. As we look at our balance sheet and capital allocations, overall, the multifamily transaction market remains muted, but a few portfolios did recently trade at cap rates around 5% and below, reinforcing that demand for high-quality apartment homes is strong and private market cap rates remain lower than the implied cap rate of most publicly traded multifamily REITs. Our 2024 guidance calls for minimal acquisition disposition activity for the remainder of the year, but we are actively looking for opportunities to continue improving both the quality and geographic diversity of our portfolio over the next several years. We recently started two new suburban development communities in Charlotte, with a total projected cost of $317 million, and expect more development opportunities in 2025. We currently have $1.2 billion available on our unsecured line of credit, with only $290 million of debt maturing later this month and no maturities in 2025. And finally, we have one of the best balance sheets and lowest leverage ratios in the multifamily sector. At this point, we'll open up to questions from the B of A team and our audience today, so thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate that intro. I guess the number one question I field on Camden is just, like, the supply impact on your fundamentals and how that's gonna progress. I think a lot of people, and you flagged it, that we're probably at, like, peak deliveries, but I guess trying to figure out how things progress the back half of this year and into 2025. Could you kind of expand on your thoughts on how the supply is gonna impact your portfolio and where that pain's gonna potentially show up or not? Yeah, absolutely. So, we're peaking at supply right now, and a lot of folks, I think, have a tendency to hear peak supply, and they see that as a bad thing. I actually see it as a very good thing because what it means is that we've been absorbing the supply as it's been coming to us so far, and from this point on out, the supply number starts to come down. So if you think about it, things should be getting better as we go forward. Now, it's obviously gonna take some time to get through all of the supply, but that's why we feel very constructive on what it's gonna look like in the latter part of 2025 and feel very good about 2026 and 2027. If you think about the last time we had a situation like this, was coming out of the GFC, and when you look at the supply numbers, they had fallen off really dramatically, and the couple of years that we had right after the GFC were some of the best years in our business in terms of revenue growth. And so if you think about... Most folks believe that we're gonna get down to around 200,000 starts annually in 2025 and 2026. And I will tell you that I actually have a theory which we can go into later, but I think of that 200,000 starts, I think probably only a fraction of them, maybe half of them, are market rate that would compete with us. And so if you really have 100,000 market rate starts at any given time in a year in this country, that's a very small number, and that's gonna set us up very well for the demand-supply equation. Can you, can we explore that more? Because I think that's kind of new, at least to me. Just like, what, what's driving your thoughts behind that? So it's really interesting. If you think about. If you look at the starts numbers are down pretty dramatically. They're down about 30%-40%. However, every merchant builder that we talk to says their starts are down 80%. And if you think about the financing aspects, if you're a merchant builder, when it comes to starting a new multifamily asset, the first thing is that you have to get a construction loan. And if you're fortunate enough to get a construction loan, that construction loan is probably gonna be 50% loan to cost, and it's probably gonna be priced somewhere between 300 and 400 basis points over SOFR. So call it 8.5%-9.5% today. You're then gonna have to go get a mezz loan that's gonna take you from that 50% leverage point, up to probably a 75% leverage point. That mezz loan is gonna cost you somewhere between 12% to 14%. I have no idea what the equity component's gonna cost, but it better be north of the mezz loan component. If not, the equity providers need to be looking at a different type of business. So if you put all that cost of capital together, if you're a merchant builder, you have to develop something well north of 10% to just cover your cost of capital. So if you sort of think about that situation, and you think about, as I said, that all the merchant builders that we're talking to say that their starts are down 80%, the question you have to ask yourself is: Why are starts only down 30%-40%? Why are they not down something greater than that? So one of the things that we started to look at is we started to look very anecdotally about how many, we'll call them affordable tax credit, mission-driven starts are actually happening in the country today. And those are starts that in no way compete with us or compete with our multifamily brethren. Well, the answer is that nobody tracks what percentage of starts are made up of that particular component in of multifamily housing. They do track the percentage of completions. We know that traditionally, about 20% of all completions are affordable-based. We know that during the GFC, that number got around 50%. My gut is today, and obviously we need to prove this out, but my gut is, is that we probably have a very large percentage of starts today that have some affordability or mission-based component behind them. I will tell you that Camden actually owns a general contracting business. We build for ourselves, but we also, in Houston, will build affordable and mission-driven housing, and I will tell you that we're having a record year in terms of starts for us. If what we're experiencing is in any way indicative of what's actually happening nationwide, and if what we're hearing from the merchant builders that their starts are down 80% is true, then that leads me to believe that there's, as I said, a large percentage of the starts you're seeing today do not in any way compete with us. We do know that regardless of whether or not they are affordable or market-based, we think that starts will be 200,000 next year. As I said, you can then take that 200,000 number, and you can start to whittle it down to a much smaller number that is probably competitive with traditional market rate multifamily. Oh, interesting. Is there... Have you looked at, like, rings around your property to kind of find out what's competitive, where it is in the lease-up? Yeah. Like, just, I guess trying to decipher a little bit more on, like, the supply impact where you're seeing and kind of how it's heading. Yeah, no, that's a very good point, and if you have to remember, in the markets in which we operate geographically are very large markets, and just because you have supply in that market does not mean that it competes directly with you. So one of the things that we've done is we've looked at our portfolio, and we've said, "Okay, for each asset we own, which one of them are located in proximity to new supply?" And then the second thing we said is, "Well, if we have an asset that is an older asset, it's not gonna compete with new supply regardless. So let's look at which one of our assets are fifteen years or younger." And when we start to slice it that way, less than 20% of all of our assets are facing direct competition. 20% is a much smaller number, obviously, and a much easier number to sort of wrap your arms around. Then when you start to say, "Okay, well, let's look at how is that 20% that actually sees supply, how is it doing compared to the 80% that's not?" The 20% that is seeing supply is seeing new lease rates that are 200 basis points lower than the 80% of our portfolio that doesn't have supply. So that is exactly what we're seeing, but once again, the good news is, it's only 20% of our portfolio, which is a really easy, very manageable number. Why exclude the... Why, where does the fifteen years or younger kind of cut off- Yeah Come from? So if you think it gets to a price point differential, right? If you ultimately if somebody's building something new, and they're expecting to get $2 a foot of rent, or actually probably building something new, it's probably closer to $3 a foot in rent. If that's what they're anticipating, if we've got an asset that is 20 years old, and it's $1.50 per sq ft in rent, it's never gonna compete. Our $1.50 folks aren't moving up to $3, even if the $3 goes and puts two months free, three months free. It's still never something that they're gonna be able to move up to. So it is, it is very well insulated from supply, and we actually do see the proof of that when we look at the results, as I just mentioned. In last year, like starting, I guess kind of around now through the end of the year, supply, like we knew it was a problem, but it seemed like the merchant builders really reacted, like, in a big way, cutting, putting more concessions in place than cutting rent, or asking rents as well. Do you, is there a fear that that could happen again this year or something different? So I think the question is why is this different? And I'm gonna answer about why this should be different. The reason why it should be different is, think about where we all were this time last year. This time last year, there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty that was still out there, right? We had no idea whether or not we were gonna have a hard landing. If you were a merchant builder, you had no idea whether or not your lenders were gonna work with you. You had no idea. All you looked at is you said, "There's a tremendous amount of supply coming in, I don't know if I can absorb any of it." So now think about where we are today. Where we are today, most of us would recognize that a hard landing is probably off the table. Most of us recognize that rates are about to start being cut. We also recognize that we've absorbed most of the supply, and we know that the merchant builders that we talk to are saying that the lenders are all working with them. So that sets up a very different operating environment if you're a merchant builder today than a merchant builder a year ago. A merchant builder a year ago, there was so much uncertainty, and they reacted in a certain way. We would expect that they should not react the same way this time around. Now, that being said, I could never get inside the mind of a merchant builder, so we shall see. Questions from the field? You mentioned the second half of 2025 is when things should improve. What does improve look like to you? I guess, like, I just kinda wanna make sure we're calibrating correctly. Yeah, and obviously, I mean, we're not at the point where we're giving guidance for 2025, but here's what I would tell you. If you look, clearly today, we're in a situation where we have positive renewals. By the way, I just wanna address renewals for a second. Even during the GFC, renewals remained positive. You generally have a lot of strength around the renewal side, but we are in a negative new lease situation. A constructive environment to me is when you turn the corner from negative new leases to positive new leases, and I think we should shape ourselves up, or should be shaping up very well for that in the latter part of 2025. If you think about the last time we saw anything like this, once again, was coming out of the GFC, and coming out of the GFC, we had three of the best revenue growth years we've ever had in the history of our company, and that was because supply went away, demand remained strong, and that was incredibly constructive. We're shaping up for really a very similar situation. And then, sorry, you mentioned something on renewals. Mm-hmm. I guess one, where are you sending them out today? Just kinda, can you go over kind of the operating update on renewals, and- Yeah. Is there any kind of strategy at this point that you're taking? Yeah, absolutely. So we're sending renewals out, well, at least last month, last time we publicly reported, we're sending renewals out up about 4.6%, and we traditionally get them done within about 50 basis points of that. Does that vary a lot across the markets? You know, I mean, there's always slight variability, but it's not significant. Okay. Interesting. Then you know, I think a lot of your portfolio is in the Sun Belt, but you have DC, which I don't know if that's Sun Belt or not. And then SoCal, which I feel like is a little bit different. Just how are those two markets trending versus maybe the rest of your SoCal or Sun Belt portfolio? Yeah, absolutely. So both markets are doing well for us. So we'll hit DC Metro first, and notice I always say DC Metro, because what we're really talking about is Northern Virginia, Maryland, and the District. And in terms of performance, it follows that same pattern. Northern Virginia is the best market we have in DC Metro, followed by Maryland, followed by the District. And that's really a story of low supply, and demand remains fairly strong. If you go to Southern California, Southern California is a little different. We'll sort of bifurcate it and say San Diego. San Diego has low supply, demand seems pretty strong. We also have burn-off of bad debt working through San Diego, which is helpful for us. When you get into LA County and Orange County, what you're seeing there is more of a story of we're seeing pickup from the bad debt problems working through the system. How is the bad debt trending in those markets? Like, still painful, or- Anybody who doesn't pay is painful. That being said, I will tell you that we're have bad debt for the full year of about 80 basis points. 50 basis points is typical for us, and we would pretty much be at 50 basis points if it wasn't for California and Atlanta. The good news is that when I look at both of those markets, the bad debt percentage on a year-over-year basis, looking at the second quarter of 2023 to second quarter of 2024, is down about 50% in both of them. So we are getting there. My gut is that you just have to... You have a large sort of backlog going through the court system, and once we can work ourselves through that, which is probably gonna be at least another good part of 2025, once you're through that, there's potential upside to get us back to that 50 basis points traditional bad debt number. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned the transaction market, and you said you're seeing like, I guess, low fives and even in some cases in the fours. Mm-hmm. for actual or trades in the market. Could you maybe just expand more on what you're seeing and, you know, what gets you into a four cap rate these days versus like a five... Just kind of- What gets us into it? Or just like the market. Like, is there anything in particular? Yeah. Here's what I'm gonna tell you. Cap rates are sub five. They really are. If you wanna look at in institutional quality, multifamily real estate, it's a sub five. Now, you have to sort of think about what causes somebody to buy an asset that's sub five. Well, there's a couple of things that can go into the equation. One of the things that's quoted quite often is discount to replacement costs. You can think whatever you want about that particular metric, but some of these assets are trading at significant discounts to replacement costs. I think the second component is that people are looking at the math that I just laid out, which is if you end up with very low supply or very low starts in 2025, very low supply in 2026 and 2027, we may have some very, very good years, looking like years that we had coming out of the GFC. So you have to believe that there's some type of supercharged rent growth in that equation somewhere. I think that's all part of the math that sort of works through it. It's interesting because we were talking to a broker in one of our markets, and we said... I think it was Austin, and we said, "So let's talk about what are the cap rates in Austin?" And the broker said, "I've got a hundred buyers at five and a half, and I have no sellers." And that's the reality: if you want to be a buyer today, it is a sub five. Now, that being said, I think a company like Camden can buy something that's just under a five because we know that we bring certain enhancements to operating real estate that can very quickly turn that north of a five, and then obviously, you have growth potential on a go-forward basis from there. That's the thought process that we would have. Additionally, our cost of capital is a lot lower, right? I mean, we can borrow 10-year at sub 5%, which is different than a private person. But I assume when the private guys are working themselves through the math, that's what they're doing. They're looking at discount to replacement costs, they're looking at the assumptions of supercharged rent growth in the next couple of years, and they're making that jump. Questions from the field? Yep. Yeah, go. I was just gonna ask, how are the financing costs and how are private investors able to justify, like, that much of a negative carry if they're really buying in markets of sub five? You take negative carry the first year or two, and then- Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So if you went and got a Fannie loan today, a Fannie fixed rate is probably about 5.25%-5.5%. If you floated a Fannie today, it's 7.5%. So I assume that a lot of them are fixing it, and I assume that there's an assumption of a negative carry, but with the idea of what I just talked about, which is the belief that you're gonna get supercharged rents at some point in time, and that will end up creating the value. Now, your comments on the conditions that would be favorable to your markets, certainly see supply coming off or coming way down in your markets as well as across the country. The parallels you were drawing to GFC, post GFC, if you think about pre-GFC, the move out to buy, and it was probably the twenties. Correct. Today, you cited at 10%. So I guess how much of a tailwind was that versus as rates normalize? I don't think that 10% is probably sustainable long term either. How do you think about that as a headwind on the other side? Yeah, I mean, so if you think about our move -outs to purchase home, is traditionally or historically averages around 14%, and so we're at 10% today. If we got back to 14%, that's 14% of move -outs. Move -outs are about half of your total. You know, you have 50% turnover, so poten- Lower today, too. Yeah, and turnover is at record lows today. So theoretically, you could have about another 200 basis points of pressure on your turnover number, if you got back up to 14% on move -outs to purchase a home. Now, it's interesting because if you think about what's going on today, and I think the stats are that 80% of everybody with a mortgage has a mortgage sub 4%, and I think it's 60% have a mortgage sub 5%. And so part of the affordability issue is there's just not— In addition to the fact that interest rates are higher, there's just not the level of inventory that should be out there, and so that's causing pricing pressure. So I think rates have to come down quite a bit in order for people to really start moving out and buying single-family homes. I think some of the stats I saw is that it's 60% more expensive to own a home today than to rent a home. And so I think the 30-year mortgage has got to get down to somewhere around the mid-fives, and that's a long way to go before we get there. Now, I will tell you that if we do get there, and if people do start moving out, and if we do start having a more robust single-family environment, that actually would create a tremendous amount of jobs, which would actually be really good for us because jobs is one of the largest drivers of our business. But I think we've got a long way to go there. The other thing that I sort of look at just in general is if you think about the demographic shifts in this country, and I mentioned it in the prepared remarks, is in our markets, the reason why somebody moves out from multifamily to single-family is traditionally because they had a lifestyle change, which means typically they got married, and they had their first child, and they started to think about school districts and all those factors. If you look at our renter profile, our average renter is 31 years old, and 75% of them are single. They've got a long way to go before they hit that lifestyle change. It's interesting because if you just look at the demographics in this country, people are getting married later, people are having children later, people are having less children. All of those factors lead to people being multifamily renters for a longer period of time. How do you think the demographics? I get that people are starting families, getting married later, but at the same time, I believe, demographics suggest, like, the 31, 32-year-old has kind of peaked for a little bit, and I think, like, demographically, that becomes smaller. So, like, it's like you got the headwind but a tailwind too. Like, how does that kind of play out over the next few years? Yeah, I mean, if you look at just the percentage of young adults, it's actually fairly steady, and this is people ages 20 to 34 percent. It's fairly steady, right around the 68 million number, really going out through 2028. So I mean, I think we've got a fairly steady amount of folks that fall into that renter base. But the other thing is, you know, I've been at Camden 20, I guess, closing in on 26 years, and when I sort of go back and I think about 20 years ago, the average age of our renter, we didn't track it at that point in time, but I'm fairly confident that it was probably mid-20s, and today we're up to 31 years old. So they are getting older and older, which is what that's doing is that's grabbing more people into the demographic of your traditional renter, right? We used to say our traditional renter, and we still do, is 20 to 34 years old. That may soon, if these trends continue, become 20 to 40-year-olds. For the merchant builders, at what kind of rate would that make the math work for them? At what kind of interest rate? That's a wonderful question because if you think about construction costs, they're not escalating anymore, which is great, but they're also not really coming down. And land prices are coming down a little bit, but not much. And so, I mean, I think it's you really probably need to get. I mean, you've got to get your all-in cost of capital has to come in at least on the 70% that you're borrowing, needs to probably be south of 6%. That's got a long way to go. Either that or you really have to believe in some significantly supersized or supercharged rent growth. Any more questions from the field? I guess, where are you thinking about, or how are you thinking about the external growth opportunity? Like, is it attractive potentially to kind of buy stuff at maybe that, like, call it 5% mark, and you can get that uplift, development, sit tight? Just how are you guys thinking about. Yeah, I mean, listen, forever and ever, merchant builders had a cost of capital advantage. They do not have a cost of capital advantage today. So, we can borrow money sub 5%. We just started two new developments in Charlotte. If we deliver those in the 6% + range, obviously, we create value through that component. On the acquisition side, I think we're absolutely prepared to look at acquisitions, but we have to believe that they are going to be not negative leverage. And as long as we can get them up above a 5 pretty quickly, which, as I said, just adding on the typical value enhancements that Camden has, we can do that. And then we'll have some good growth rates and the growth rates of rents that come after that point in time, and that could set us up very well to create a lot of value. So I mean, we're absolutely looking at growth. Okay. And, I guess, one, maybe how far away do you think you are from, like, kind of, like, really accelerating external growth? And then strategically, is there areas you want to lean into on the growth front, whether it's geographic, asset type, like, how do you want to kind of help position your portfolio for the next phase? So I will tell you, we've got real estate investment professionals across the country, and they are charged today, as they've always been charged, of find the opportunities and bring them to us. So if our folks can start finding opportunities that will create value for us, then 100%, we're ready to go. What was the second question? I might have forgot too. No, that's okay. There was a big portfolio trade in the Sun Belt, Blackstone to EQR. Uh-huh. Was that something you looked at or interested in, you know- You know, we didn't look at it. It does seem like a good real estate. Happy for EQR, but I think what it does is it shows the multifamily value is absolutely there. Your other question was any markets or any product types you want to lean into. Right. So the answer to that is, suburban assets are absolutely outperforming. If you look at the two assets that we just started construction on, they are suburban. It's interesting. If you look at our markets, 70% of the 25- to 34-year-olds in all of our markets live in the suburbs. And so that's absolutely where we are looking today. We're about 60% suburban, and so you should expect to see that trend continue, if not increase. And then you do have the build-to-rent development community. Any update on that front, is that something you want to expand or still trying to figure out if that makes, like, sense or? Yeah, absolutely, so the question was on our build-to-rent. So we do have two build-to-rent communities that are in development today. One is in North Houston, one is in Southwest Houston. We really are treating these as test cases. One's 188 units, one's 189 units, so they're very similar. As I said, we're in lease-up on both of them. We're learning a lot. We were warned early on that lease-up is very slow for this product type. They are correct. It is very slow for this product type. I sort of think about our traditional multifamily renter. Our 31-year-old shows up, we give them a tour, they fall in love, as they should, with our real estate, and they sign a lease. What we're finding with this particular demographic, it's slightly older, it's more established, more children, and we're finding that they show up one time, take a look, they say they like it, they come back a second time, they come back a third time, they come back a fourth time, they start measuring bedrooms, et cetera. It takes them a long time to make up their mind. But when they do come in, right, my thought process is if it takes them this long to lease, they should be really sticky, and hopefully, they don't go anywhere. And so that's one of the things we've learned. The second thing that we really do need to learn, and we're not gonna really know that answer until probably mid part of next year, is what's it really like to operate this particular product type, right? Our hope is that we can operate it very similar to a traditional multifamily. We are also plan on nesting them, meaning putting them in close proximity to existing multifamily communities we own, and hope to use some efficiencies from that, and if we discover that we can't operate them in an efficient manner, then we will do more of them, and if it's determined that it's not a great product fit for us, then we won't. Any other questions from the field? So one thing I've been really focused on with, like, all REITs is just, like, their potential to kind of improve their platform and kind of, like, build out kind of some kind of, like, alpha on top of, like, the overall, like, beta trade for the sector. You know, are there any platform or initiatives that you are working on internally to kind of drive, like, outsized growth over the next few years? And, I mean, how could that play into, like, margin expansion? Yeah. So talking about what we can do to generate outsized growth, and I'm gonna really split it into the block and tackle components, so we'll call it sort of basic components, and then we'll talk about sort of external factors. So the very basic is at the end of the day, if you go lease at Camden, or you go lease at Mid-America, or you go lease at AvalonBay, and if you've never leased with any company like ours, your initial experience is just gonna be a leasing experience, and you're gonna make up your decision, you're gonna lease, and that's what it's gonna be. Where we really all set ourselves apart, and where Camden, in particular, sets ourselves apart, is the customer experience. And that customer experience is what enables you to have very high retention, very low turnover. That's really the best way that you can, in fact, drive revenue growth, is by making sure that you create that exceptional customer experience. And I'm gonna tell you that there's two ways to create that exceptional customer experience. One of them is a high-touch way, which is to make sure that every single interface, every single interaction that you have with your resident is very positive. So that's making sure that the maintenance requests are carried out in an appropriate manner. We've rolled out new technology that enables us to track all of those components, that enables us to make sure that we respond to maintenance calls in a very quick way, that enables us to make sure that we create perfect customer satisfaction on that component. The other one is to make sure that if anybody has any issues with you, and they put information out on the websites, on any type of review websites, that you are managing that, and you are responding appropriately. We use technology for this. We respond to every single review that comes out for Camden to make sure that we're having that really positive perspective, 'cause we all know that nobody wants to buy anything unless there's at least four stars. So those are some of the components that we can do, but we'll talk about. Those are sort of basics. Now, let's sort of talk about how you can use technology for some of this stuff. So AI, everybody likes to talk about AI. I will tell you that today, if you reach out to Camden online, you are gonna be greeted with a virtual leasing assistant. That virtual leasing assistant is named Birdie. We're the hummingbirds, so you have to have a Birdie, is the name of our virtual leasing assistant, and you are gonna have a really fantastic experience interfacing with this virtual leasing assistant. What that's gonna do is help to make sure that you actually will come in, that you actually will show up for your tour, et cetera. But it also works if you ever have any complaints or issues or anything that needs to be fixed. We make sure that we can respond to you twenty-four hours a day. The other factors that we look at is self-guided tours. Self-guided tours, everybody talks about self-guided tours. Let me tell you what it means for a lot of people, and let me tell you what it can mean for us. For a lot of people, self-guided tours means you show up to a leasing center, you're handed a key, and you're handed a map, right? Well, we knew that you can never really have true self-guided tours until you solve the access issue. The access issue is: how do you unlock doors, et cetera? And showing up and getting a key is not what you really wanna do. So we looked out and tried to see if there was a technological solution for this. We found there wasn't one, so we actually created our own, which was called Chirp. Chirp is a smartphone application where we can actually provision you to have access to open all the gates and to open up a particular unit for a certain period of time. Today, if you wanted to go take a self-guided tour at one of our units, you can actually do the entire thing online. You can fill out all the paperwork you need. We can provision you so that your phone will then open the gates, and will open the leasing center, will open the weight room, will open unit 201 for a certain period of time, and you can effectively do everything you want on your own. Why that's important is that there are people that... that's how they wanna shop, right? If we've learned anything from the automobile industry, if we've learned anything from retail, people - a lot of folks do not want that high-touch environment. And so if we can create that, which we are creating that for folks, what that's gonna do is that's gonna ultimately end up driving revenue. You know, it's so important because a lot of us, when we think about an exceptional customer experience, we have a tendency to think that that always needs to be tied to your interface with a human. Think about the last time that you got sent a debit card and, like, a new debit card, and it says, "Dial this number to activate your card." You dial this number, you hit something, boom! Your card's activated. Most of you would say that was a really exceptional customer experience. You never, ever dealt with a human. Well, the reason why that was so exceptional is because the technology works, and so you have to make sure that the technology is working in an appropriate manner. We've actually just added to our business intelligence group, a head of AI, and we've actually just added to our IT group, a head of AI, because we recognize there's gonna be lots of other opportunities like this along the way. Awesome. So we are out of time. Okay. But I have three rapid-fire questions. The first one is: Do you expect real estate transactions to increase once the Fed starts to cut? Yes or no? Yes. If yes, when do you expect them to pick up? A, for Q4, B, first half 2025, or C, second half 2025. B. How would you characterize demand for space today? Improving, steady, or weakening? Steady. Last year, the majority of companies at our conference stated they expected to ramp up spending on AI initiatives in 2024. How would you characterize your plans over the next year? Higher, flat, lower? Higher. With that, we'll wrap it up. Thanks, Alex. Great. Thank you, everybody.