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: I'm here with Joe Russell and Tom Boyle.
We do ask that you initially limit yourselves to two questions.
Of course, if you have more beyond that, please feel free to jump back in the queue.
Before we begin, we continue to wish everyone good health as we all face the many impacts from the pandemic.
As you know, on May 3, we are hosting an Investor Day virtually and hope you can join us.
We will share our key strategies and introduce you to the executive leadership team that will drive our growth in the coming years.
Looking at Q1, a number of historic metrics played through.
Customer demand for self-storage has remained elevated.
We continue to see consistent customer behavior across all markets with increased move-in rates, extended customer length of stay and more latitude to resume traditional rate increases to existing customers.
The band has been tied to both historic drivers coupled with a longer lasting impacts from more consumers needing storage.
This includes work from home, study from home, elevated home sales and remodeling and the migration in and out of metropolitan markets.
With the economy improving and additional government stimulus, consumer balance sheets are healthy and our customers' payment patterns remained strong.
Both same-store and non-same-store assets are performing well, with lease-ups particularly in non-same-store assets outpacing our projections as NOI grew by 46%.
To investments, 2021 is shaping up to be a robust year of acquisition activity.
With the addition of the recently announced ezStorage portfolio, our year-to-date 2020 acquisition activity either closed or under contract is $2.5 billion.
Of note, since 2019, we have acquired, developed and redeveloped approximately 22 million square feet and have expanded our portfolio by 13% having invested $4.3 billion.
In regard to the ezStorage acquisition, I would like to mention a few highlights of this significant transaction and how it matched four specific areas tied to our unique capabilities.
First, the integration of the assets into the Public Storage brand and operating platform will be seamless as we already had a broad presence in these markets with 115 assets.
We now enjoy even stronger presence with now 163 assets with unmatched brand presence across the Mid-Atlantic region.
Second, eight of the ezStorage assets are poised for expansion along with one that has begun ground-up development.
The Public Storage development team has taken lead on these opportunities and is ready to execute on each one of them, allowing us to expand the portfolio by approximately 10% over the next 24 months.
As you know, Public Storage has the only development team among the self-storage REITs and is well poised to unlock more value from this portfolio by virtue of our unique development capabilities.
Third, our ability to fund a large acquisition and close in a very short timeline, in this case six weeks from selection to close, was due to our efficient and prime capital structure.
This transaction is immediately accretive to FFO and NOI.
And fourth, our well-earned reputation of being a buyer of choice in the investment community.
Looking to fall 2021, we are encouraged by core customer demand, our well located portfolio, the strength of our balance sheet and the quality and dedication of the 5,000 plus team members at Public Storage, all of whom are committed to enhancing the leading brand in the self-storage industry.
With that, let me hand the call over to Tom.
I'll start with financial performance.
Our financial performance has improved steadily through the second half of 2020 into the first quarter of 2021.
In the same-store, our revenue increased 3.4% compared to the first quarter of 2020, which represents a sequential improvement in growth of 2.6% from the fourth quarter.
There were two primary factors contributing to that improvement.
First and foremost, move-in rates were up double-digits, while move-out rates were roughly flat year-over-year leading to improving in-place rents.
Secondly, occupancy also increased through the quarter with move-in volume down, but move-out volume also lower.
Now on to expenses.
The team did a great job driving same-store cost of operations down in the first quarter.
Lower expenses were driven by property payroll, utilities, marketing and a timing benefit on property taxes.
Of property tax, specifically, we will expense our estimate ratably through the year leading to a benefit in the first three quarters and reversing to a headwind in the fourth quarter.
This will lead to more stable quarter-over-quarter property tax in the future.
The benefit this quarter was worth $0.05 of FFO.
Some of the technology and operating model evolution we'll discuss on Monday at our Investor Day showed up in our first quarter numbers with property payroll down 13% in the quarter given efficiency improvements.
We look forward to sharing more on Monday.
In conjunction with the line by line commentary in our supplemental, it's a guide to our outlook and the key drivers of our business.
And as we started 2021, we've seen continued strength, as Joe mentioned, in customer demand with occupancy is up 260 basis points and in-place contract rent per occupied square foot turning into positive year-over-year territory in January.
We anticipate same-store revenue to grow from 4% to 5.5% in 2021.
That outlook is supported by good customer demand and moderating supply.
That said, we do see risk to move-outs going higher as we move through the year comping against what was really extraordinary existing tenant performance in 2020.
Our current expectations are for occupancy to be down 100 basis points plus in the fourth quarter compared to 2020.
We expect continued strong expense control in the same-store in 2021.
Our expectations are for 1% to 2% same-store expense growth.
Property tax expense growth will pick up this year with our expectations around a 5% increase for the year, again recognized ratably through the year.
Our guidance includes the acceleration of our external growth initiatives with ezStorage and will add to FFO growth through our non-same-store portfolio this year and next.
In total, our outlook is for core FFO per share of $11.35 to $11.75 for 2021.
I'll now shift gears to the balance sheet.
As Joe mentioned, we used our growth-oriented balance sheet to fund the purchase of ezStorage, entering the bond market the day after announcement and having fully funded the transaction within two days.
The offering comprised of three, seven and 10 year tranches with the weighted average cost of about 1.6%.
After effect of the transaction, we have the longest duration balance sheet in the REIT industry with one of the lowest cost profiles.
And we remain in a great position to continue to use the balance sheet to fund our growth initiatives, and we'll share more at our Investor Day on Monday.

user
sees 2021 core ffo per share $11.35 - $11.75.

assistant