You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: Our featured speakers today are Mark Parrell, our President and CEO; Michael Manelis, our Chief Operating Officer; and Bob Garechana, our Chief Financial Officer.
Whether working on-site performing essential maintenance or concierge duties, whether you're engaging remotely with prospects using our new touchless leasing process, or whether you are working from home in the many corporate roles that make Equity Residential hum, you are keeping our company rolling.
Now turning to our business.
The best way I can describe it in the last seven weeks is resilient.
In April, we collected in our residential business about 97% of the cash that we would usually collect.
While no part of our country's economy will be immune from the coming recession, we feel that our portfolio of properties, populated with residents having average annual household incomes of $164,000 and often employed in technology and other knowledge industries, will fare relatively well.
Our operations team has also shown resiliency.
When the pandemic hit in full force in mid-March, Michael Manelis and his team quickly pivoted, and over a few week period, adjusted our leasing and service operations dramatically.
On the leasing side, Michael and his team were able to quickly create a touchless process that made our customers comfortable to lease.
And on the service side, we focused on essential maintenance tasks and cleanliness, which helped our existing residents feel safe and comfortable living with us through this pandemic.
Michael will give you more details about all of this in a minute.
When the lockdowns were initially announced, we saw our leasing activity decline significantly, but demand has since picked up, as we noted in the release.
We see our recent pickup in demand as a further indication that our properties and markets will remain attractive places to live for our target demographic.
All in all, we think our people and our properties have been resilient, with the capital R going through this crisis.
We have further fortified our already strong balance sheet, as Bob Garechana will describe in a moment.
We are also preparing in earnest for our properties to operate with fuller staffing as lockdowns across the country are relaxed.
We will keep in mind the safety of our employees and residents as we reengineer our business.
Equity Residential has historically performed well in these downturns, and we would expect this to be no exception.
We are optimistic that we will perform well operationally given these circumstances and that we will find opportunities to add high-quality assets for our platform as the economy works its way through this recession.
Finally, we did withdraw guidance in the release.
We are unable to estimate with precision the continuing impact of the pandemic and the timing and character of the reopening process on our business.
It makes it impossible for us to give you the high-quality estimates of where our business might go in the near-term that you're used to receiving.
We did provide a significant amount of information on April's preliminary results and hope that is helpful.
So today, I'm going to provide a quick recap of operations over the past 45 days.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were off to a very good start for the year.
Our occupancy was ahead of expectations, and we were well positioned for the primary leasing season.
And then COVID-19 hit, causing us to adjust our operations to this new unprecedented challenge.
Let me start by acknowledging the dedication and hard work of our employees during these unprecedented times.
They inspire me with their ability to quickly adjust operations while keeping an intense focus on our customers, properties, themselves and their families.
Shelter-in-place was mandated by governors in our markets in early to mid-March.
For us, this means that our more than 150,000 residents began staying at home 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In response to shelter-in-place, we made some key changes to our operations.
We closed our common area amenities, we increased cleaning frequency, we quickly modified our website and our artificial intelligent E-Lead responses to pivot the entire sales process to virtual leasing.
Capturing video content and conducting the sales process via video conversations allowed the business to continue uninterrupted.
This process would have normally taken us several months to accomplish.
We also locked the office doors to encourage social distancing but kept the business running as we implemented shift rotations of the staff to reduce the number of employees coming to the property.
When we look back to March 15, we saw our traffic and applications drop 50% compared to the same period in 2019.
That being said, we continued to receive over 375 new applications each week through the end of March, which we see as a validation of the new leasing process.
With reduced traffic coming through the front door, our focus has been on keeping current residents in place.
We are currently offering residents the option to renew without increase.
Overall, retention in April and May has improved as we are now renewing in the mid- to upper 60% range, which is a 300 basis point improvement from last April and an almost 800 basis point improvement from last May.
New York is having the strongest renewal percents of nearly 70% for March, April and May.
Despite this good retention, our overall occupancy since March 31 has declined by 130 basis points.
We expect the occupancy impact to be the most pronounced in the second quarter, setting a new base from which we hope it will improve as shelter-in-place orders are lifted.
Let me share some color on the performance in April.
At the beginning of April, we began to notice an improvement in demand, with both traffic and leasing activity rebounding by almost 30% and actually now trending on par with last year.
In fact, we had over 900 applications last week, which is a significant improvement compared to the 375 that we were averaging in late March and very encouraging for us.
Given the activity in the last 45 days, we would like to see that volume grow even more to help offset the lower demand that we experienced in March and to match the increased volume of applications that we usually get in May.
What is clear is that our high-quality, well-located portfolio continues to attract future residents.
While the pandemic is certainly a deterrent, people have life reasons that require them to move like changes in jobs or partners.
On Page 13, we reported the first quarter and included April monthly pricing statistic by market.
I would remind everybody this is only one month of data, and that longer periods of time are usually required to show definitive trends.
Mark mentioned the strength and quality of our resident base.
This is evident by the fact that we received a very strong 97% of the cash collections in April relative to our March collections.
This resilience delivered 5.4% delinquency, which is quite good given these unprecedented circumstances.
Notably, Seattle and Denver were our markets with the lowest delinquency at below 3% and Los Angeles was the laggard close to 8%.
The rest of our markets were centered around the average.
We have also taken a cut at looking at property type.
And in most of our markets, our garden-style or more suburban assets have experienced higher delinquency than our mid-rise, high-rise more urban locations.
As we move through the continued disruptions created by COVID-19, we remain strategic in our pricing efforts.
Sitting here today, our base rents are down 4% compared to the same week last year.
Let me give you some color on notable markets.
Overall, our strongest market is Seattle, which has shown great resilience, with limited delinquency and the best overall revenue growth performance in the portfolio.
New York is a bit of a mixed story.
On one hand, it has the strongest retention of any market, but it has also not shown the signs of recovery that other markets have with traffic and applications.
Long term, we expect the New York market to benefit from low new supply and technology firms expanding their presence in the city.
We are hoping leasing activity will improve as the hard-hit New York area gets through the worst of the pandemic.
Finally, we started 2020 anticipating that Los Angeles would have a very challenging year given the new supply pressure.
COVID will definitely add to this.
Despite recent improvements in applications, we expect this market to remain challenged with meaningful pricing pressure that will continue as supply is delivered.
So where do we go from here?
Well, we're now in the early stages of preparing our properties for the new normal.
We expect things to shift over time.
Right now, the new normal is going to be focused on increased deep cleaning standards at the properties; adjustments to the layout of common areas, including fitness and lounges to accommodate social distancing; balancing the capabilities of virtual leasing with the need to engage with our customers; and ultimately, staggering work shifts to ensure that we limit the number of employees on-site at any given time.
These are challenging times, but our business is resilient, and our teams are positioned to deliver.
Starting with our new disclosures.
We've modified our disclosures to help better present our business and where it stands today.
We do so by providing April operational and collection statistics, by breaking out our same-store performance between residential and nonresidential, a practice that we would expect to continue as the performance from our main residential business, which makes up approximately 96% of total revenues, is likely to diverge meaningfully in the upcoming quarters for our much smaller nonresidential business.
This includes modifying the schedules on Pages 10 through 12 of the release.
And finally, by providing an update on liquidity and balance sheet information.
In order to accomplish this, we've defined a number of key terms in the back of the release.
We hope that these definitions will provide specificity and clarity to our disclosure.
Part of the new disclosure includes a breakout of nonresidential operations for our same-store portfolio.
This is a modest component of our business at 4% of total revenues and consists mostly of ground floor retail and public nonresident parking at our well-located apartment communities.
Ground floor retail makes up about 2/3 of this 4%, with public nonresident parking making up the rest.
As you would suspect, a good portion of the retail tenants that rent our space have been significantly impacted by shelter-in-place orders.
This is evidenced by the 58% April collection rate for all retail that we disclosed, which, while certainly below what we would have hoped, may be higher than many other retail landlords.
The drugstores, bank branches and national chains that occupy a good portion of these spaces have, for the most part, continued to pay rent, while local small business owners have struggled.
With nonresident parking, we've seen an approximately 30% decline in parking volume for April, given the lack of public events and increased work-from-home arrangements.
We suspect that this may recover as shelter-at-home orders are eventually lifted.
Finally, a few highlights on our balance sheet.
We ended the first quarter with an incredibly strong net debt to normalized EBITDA of 4.9 times and nearly $1.8 billion in liquidity under our revolving credit facility.
Subsequent to quarter end, we improved this already strong position by closing on a very attractively priced 2.6% or $195 million 10-year GSE loan and by closing on the sale of an asset in the San Francisco Bay Area.
With these steps, we sit here today with over 84% of our total NOI unencumbered, about $150 million in commercial paper outstanding and readily available liquidity of over $2.2 billion under our revolving credit facility, which does not mature until 2024.
This liquidity is more than sufficient to address our modest level of anticipated development spend, minimal debt maturities in 2020 and to address our next significant debt maturity, which isn't until December of 2021.
Our balance sheet is in excellent condition to weather the storm and take advantage of opportunities should they present themselves.

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equity residential withdraws full year 2020 earnings guidance.

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