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Text: Now, turning to our business.
In reviewing 2020, prior to the pandemic, ACC was off to an excellent start.
After delivering nearly 5% earnings growth in 2019, the Q1 delivered NOI that exceeded our expectations for each of the three months.
Additionally, our velocity for fall 2020 lease-up was over 3% ahead of the prior year with rental rate growth trending well relative to targets.
New supply for fall 2021 was also near decade lows.
The fundamentals in our sector were strong and all facets of our business were exceeding our internal expectations.
With COVID- 19 being declared a pandemic, the student housing sector like most businesses faced unprecedented and unanticipated disruptions.
The U.S. Higher Education System was dramatically impacted by the governmental shelter in-place orders put in place across the country.
Over the last 3 quarters of 2020, we responded by attempting to do the right things on behalf of all of our stakeholders, while continuing to provide a central housing services to students all across America, all the while attempting to mitigate long term negative impacts to our business and providing thought leadership in action to help universities return to a sense of normalcy.
Despite the negative financial impacts to our business in 2020, we were encouraged by students' strong desire to be physically present in their college environment, demonstrating that the desired educational experience is much more than simply attending a classroom lecture.
Ultimately fall 2020 enrollment levels at Tier 1 universities we serve remained relatively consistent with 2019, and most students returned to their college towns for the fall term, regardless of whether their university was holding in-person classes or providing them online.
This was evidenced by the fact that our portfolio achieved approximately 90% occupancy for fall of 2020 with the sector as a whole being over 88% occupied.
As we look forward, 2021 will be a year of transition on the path back to normalcy.
While the virus continues to have a lingering impact on the student housing sector, we are seeing signs of improvement.
During the fourth quarter, we saw an increase in collection rates, a diminished necessity for on-campus rent refunds and a reduction in request for rent relief under our resident hardship program.
We also had strong demand for spring leases signing over 3600 new leases commencing in the spring term, 50% more in the prior year.
While the current transitionary environment causes us to believe there could be softness in our ability to backfill May-ending leases at historical levels and that we may not return our summer camp and conference business to normal levels.
We are cautiously optimistic regarding the 2021-2022 academic year commencing this fall.
In discussions with our university partners, the vast majority are indicating that admission applications are up over the last year and many are projecting strong enrollment growth for fall 2021.
There is also incrementally positive news in terms of universities planning to return to in-person classes for fall of 2021 as exemplified by the recent announcements by both the University of California and Cal State Systems as well as several other major universities who have been fully online in the current academic year.
With regard to their statements, they will be returning to in-person classes.
Also, Arizona State University, our largest university partner recently announced plans for full availability of in-person classes in fall of 2021 and encouraged students to register early and at this time, they expect to reinstate their on-campus housing expectation for first year students.
Although, we cannot yet give you a reasonably accurate estimate of fall 2021 occupancy levels, these are certainly encouraging signs.
As we fully expected and consistent with what has been reported by our private peers and in third party market research, across the industry pre-leasing for the 2021-2022 academic year is tracking behind the traditional historical pace.
We did see accelerating leasing velocity in the weeks after students return from winter break and there will be significant acceleration in April, May and June, which we expect to compare favorably relative to those months last year when leasing activity dramatically dropped off during the height of the pandemic.
Finally, the new supply picture continues to provide tailwind for the sector as a whole as fall 2021 deliveries are flat compared to 2020, which as I mentioned earlier was at the lowest amount of new supply in the past decade.
Turning to our ongoing development at Walt Disney World.
As we discussed last quarter, with the current suspension of the Disney College Program, we did commence in earnest [Phonetic] marketing and leasing of the project at Disney cast members and employees of operating partners in late Q4.
With the holiday season in the start of the New Year, being a slow leasing period for conventional multifamily, we have signed 88 leases to date and anticipate the velocity will accelerate through the remainder of the year as cast members' current leases expire.
The original pre-COVID proforma projected Disney College Program to deliver approximately $14 million in operating income after ground rent in 2021.
However, based on a standard multifamily leasing stabilization trend of 25 to 100 leases per month, we now expect 2021 to have a net operating loss after ground rent between $2.7 million and $5.4 million.
As Disney brings the DCP intern program back online, occupancy will increase more rapidly than the current conventional market leasing velocity.
Disney continues to be fully committed to the full reopening of Walt Disney World as soon as possible, evidenced by their continued investment in the parks and resorts, including the continued construction of Flamingo Village Crossing Town Center, a 200,000 square feet mixed used entertainment center set to open in fall of 2021 across the street from our community.
And as Disney discussed on their recent earnings call, they have significant demand for attendance at the parks and are very pleased with future bookings, and as they stated at this point, it's only a matter of the rate of public vaccination that will allow them to start to see a return to normal levels of operations at the parks with corresponding increases in cast members and ultimately DCP participants.
Although the timing and velocity of the reinstatement of the Disney College Program continues to be influx at this time, we currently expect the completed project to be fully stabilized and pro forma occupancy and rents within 12 to 24 months of the originally anticipated date of May 2023 at its originally targeted stabilized yield of 6.8%.
Now looking to transactional activity in the student housing sector.
As with many sectors, 2020 volumes were down significantly, with CBRE reporting student housing transactions decreasing approximately 20% versus 2019.
While deep interest from capital sources looking to invest in the sector held cap rates in line with pre-COVID levels, pricing has been lower as valuations have been impacted by COVID's disruption to historical revenues and NOIs.
Based on our discussions with the investment community, we expect transaction volume to remain low in the first three quarters of 2021, with potential improvement later in the year, as lease-ups are finalized for the upcoming 2021-2022 academic year.
As it relates to our capital recycling plants for '21, we will continue to monitor the market to assess the optimum timing to maximize our own asset valuations and we'll update the market at the appropriate time.
Turning to on-campus public-private partnership, P3 opportunities, as universities are expecting a return to normalcy in the fall, they are now beginning to refocus their efforts to modernize on-campus housing.
We started to see progress with regard to our projects awarded pre-COVID that are in pre-development as well as a pickup in new pursuits.
We continue to believe that P3 opportunities on-campus may well be greater in a post-COVID environment, given the significant financial impacts universities experienced related to the de-densification and consumer rejection of older community bath residence halls coupled with the funding and budget cuts university space in the post-COVID environment.
As the recognized industry leader, ACC is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this expanding opportunity.
Currently, we are tracking over 60 universities that are evaluating potential on-campus projects.
With respect to guidance, while we believe the student housing sector has exhibited impressive resiliency, despite the significant disruption the pandemic has had on the universities of students we serve, and while we see many encouraging signs of a steady return to normalcy, the range of potential financial results for 2021 is still too wide for us to provide full year earnings guidance, with a reasonable and useful range.
Instead, we'll be providing guidance for each forward quarter until we can provide an estimate further into the future, that we can stand behind.
As such, we're providing Q1 FFOM guidance in the range of $0.54 to $0.56 per share.
As we look beyond Q1, we would encourage everyone to review the normal quarterly seasonality of our business and further take into consideration some of my earlier comments, regarding the fact that the transitionary environment causes us to believe that there may be softness in our ability to backfill May-ending leases at historical levels, and that we will likely not see a return to normal summer camp and conference business in 2021.
We also expect to see significantly higher same-store operating expense growth levels than normal, as 2020 presents a tough comparison year given that operating expenses were approximately 6% below our original 2020 guidance for expenses.
This will be especially notable in Q2 and Q3, as we anticipate more normal expense levels that will be compared to the same periods in 2020, when many expense activities were halted.
This could lead to expense growth in the high-single digits in Q2 and Q3 of this year.
In closing, I'd like to convey our excitement related to the recent appointments of three new outstanding independent directors to the ACC Board.
These three new directors have extensive real estate and capital allocation experience and bring valuable diverse perspectives that will serve the interest of our shareholders well.
Ed has helped oversee our company's transformation from an owner of only 16 student housing properties at IPO to becoming the industry leader, and we'd also like to congratulate Ms. Cydney Donnell, who will be assuming the role of Board Chair up on Ed's departure.

user
sees q1 ffo per share $0.56 to $0.58.

assistant