Earnings call transcript: Camden Property Trust Q3 2025 beats EPS expectations

Camden Property Trust (CPT) exceeded earnings expectations in Q3 2025, reporting an earnings per share (EPS) of $1.00, significantly higher than the forecasted $0.45. This EPS surprise of 122.22% contrasts with a slight revenue miss, as the company reported $395.68 million in revenue against a forecast of $398.81 million. Despite the revenue shortfall, the stock rose 2.5% to $99.29, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s strategic direction and financial health.

Key Takeaways

• EPS beat expectations by 122.22%, reaching $1.00.
• Revenue fell short of forecasts by 0.78%, totaling $395.68 million.
• Stock price increased by 2.5% post-earnings announcement.
• Full-year same-store revenue growth guidance revised down to 0.75%.
• Strong performance in high-supply markets like Austin and Dallas.

Company Performance

Camden Property Trust demonstrated resilience in Q3 2025, with core FFO reaching $186.8 million, or $1.70 per share. Despite a slight decline in blended rate growth and a reduction in full-year same-store revenue growth guidance from 1% to 0.75%, the company maintained strong occupancy rates, averaging 95.5%. Camden’s strategic initiatives, including the stabilization of Camden Durham and the completion of Camden Village District, contributed to its robust performance.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $395.68 million, slightly below expectations.
• Earnings per share: $1.00, surpassing forecasts by 122.22%.
• Core FFO: $186.8 million, or $1.70 per share.
• Same-store revenue growth: 0.8% for the quarter.

Earnings vs. Forecast

Camden Property Trust’s Q3 2025 EPS of $1.00 exceeded the forecast of $0.45, marking a significant beat. This 122.22% surprise is notable compared to previous quarters, highlighting the company’s effective cost management and operational efficiency. However, revenue fell short by 0.78%, indicating potential challenges in market conditions or competitive pressures.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, Camden Property Trust’s stock rose by 2.5%, closing at $99.29. This movement reflects positive investor sentiment despite a minor revenue miss. The stock remains within its 52-week range, with a high of $127.65 and a low of $97.17, indicating stability in market perception.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, Camden Property Trust anticipates a 1% decline in Q4 blended lease rates. The company projects improved market conditions in 2026, driven by reduced supply and potential rent growth of 3-3.5%. Camden’s strategic focus includes restarting development activities as construction costs decrease, positioning the company for future growth.

Executive Commentary

CEO Rick Campo emphasized the value proposition of investing in apartments, stating, "Apartments and our shares are on sale, but not for much longer." CFO Alex Jessett highlighted the company’s strong financial position, noting, "We have no significant debt maturities until the fourth quarter of 2026 and no dilutive debt maturities until 2027."

Risks and Challenges

• Market saturation in key regions could pressure rental rates.
• Potential macroeconomic pressures affecting consumer spending.
• Supply chain disruptions impacting development timelines.
• Competitive pressures in high-supply markets.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts questioned Camden’s strategy regarding share buybacks and asset dispositions. The company addressed concerns about the job market’s impact on demand and highlighted strong performance in markets like Washington D.C. Executives reassured stakeholders of Camden’s robust financial health and strategic positioning.

Full transcript - Camden Property Trust (CPT) Q3 2025:

Kim Callahan, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, Camden Property Trust: Good morning and welcome to Camden Property Trust’s Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. I’m Kim Callahan, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me today for our prepared remarks are Rick Campo, Camden’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Keith Oden, Executive Vice Chairman, and Alex Jessett, President and Chief Financial Officer. We also have Laurie Baker, Chief Operating Officer, and Stanley Jones, Senior Vice President of Real Estate Investments, available for the Q&A portion of our call. Today’s event is being webcast through the Investors section of our website at camdenliving.com, and a replay will be available shortly after the call ends. Please note, this event is being recorded. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I would like to advise everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements based on our current expectations and beliefs.

These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Further information about these risks can be found in our filings with the SEC, and we encourage you to review them. Any forward-looking statements made on today’s call represent management’s current opinions, and the company assumes no obligation to update or supplement these statements because of subsequent events. As a reminder, Camden’s complete Third Quarter 2025 earnings release is available in the Investors section of our website at camdenliving.com, and it includes reconciliations to non-GAAP financial measures, which will be discussed on this call. We would like to respect everyone’s time and complete our call within one hour, so please limit your initial question to one, then rejoin the queue if you have a follow-up question or additional items to discuss.

If we are unable to speak with everyone in the queue today, we’d be happy to respond to additional questions by phone or email after the call concludes. At this time, I’ll turn the call over to Rick Campo.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Thanks, Kim. Our on-hold music theme today was moving. This week, we completed the move of Camden’s Houston corporate headquarters from Greenway Plaza to the Williams Tower in the Galleria. This is a big deal. Camden has been in Greenway Plaza for over 40 years. We are excited about moving on and the new beginnings that it will bring for 2026 and beyond. As I was leaving my office for the last time, the thought that popped in my head was, "Don’t look back." That reminded me of a song by the classic rock band Boston. The first verse of the song captured my sentiment as I was leaving the building. "Don’t look back. A new day is breaking. It’s been too long since I felt this way. I don’t mind where I get taken. The road is calling. Today is the day." Team Camden is not looking back.

We look forward to welcoming you to our new offices, and we look forward to continued success for the next 40 years. Strong apartment demand continued through the third quarter, making 2025 one of the best in the last 25 years for apartment absorption, helping to fill up the record number of recent deliveries. The summer peak leasing season was met with continuing new supply, slower job growth, and economic uncertainties that led apartment operators to focus on occupancy instead of rental increases earlier in the season than usual. Apartment affordability improved during the quarter with 33 months of wage growth exceeding rent growth. Increased affordability improves apartment residents’ ability to absorb higher rents when new apartment deliveries are leased up in 2026 and beyond. Apartments and our shares are on sale, but not for much longer.

Resident retention continues to be strong, in large part because of living excellence provided by our on-site teams. Great job, Team Camden. The case for investing in apartments is compelling. Demand is high. Supply is falling to below 10-year pre-COVID averages, bringing balance back to the market. Rents are affordable. Apartments provide flexibility and mobility to residents. Rent versus buy economics favor renting more than ever. Demographic and migration trends both support new demand going forward. We look forward to moving to a stronger growth profile after the excesses of post-COVID supply environments end. Camden is positioned well with one of the strongest balance sheets and no major dilutive refinances over the next couple of years. Private market sales of apartments have been robust, with cap rates for high-quality properties landing in the 4.75%-5% range.

There is a clear disconnect between private and public market values for apartments. In the quarter, we bought back $50 million of our shares at a significant discount to consensus net asset value. If market conditions remain at current levels, we will continue to buy the stock. We have $400 million remaining in our authorization. This can be funded through dispositions of our slowest-growing higher CapEx properties. I want to give a big shout-out to Team Camden for their steadfast commitment to improving the lives of our teammates, our customers, and our stakeholders one experience at a time. Thank you. Next up is Keith Oden.

Keith Oden, Executive Vice Chairman, Camden Property Trust: Thanks, Rick. Camden’s third quarter 2025 operating results were in line with our expectations, with same-store revenue growth of 0.8% for the quarter, up 0.9% year-to-date, and up 0.1% sequentially. Occupancy for the quarter averaged 95.5%, consistent with third quarter of 2024, and down slightly from 95.6% last quarter. Year-to-date through September, occupancy has averaged 95.5% versus 95.3% last year. Rental rates for third quarter had effective new leases down 2.5% and renewals up 3.5%. Our blended rate growth was 0.6%, declining 10 basis points from last quarter and 40 basis points compared to the third quarter of 2024. Our preliminary October results reflect typical seasonality and a moderation in both pricing and occupancy as we move into our slower leasing season during the fourth and first quarters.

Renewal offers for December and January were sent out with an average increase of 3.3%. Turnover rates across our portfolio remained 20-30 basis points below last year’s levels, and move-outs attributed to home purchase were a record low of 9.1% this quarter. Moving into new office space is never easy, especially when it involves five floors and several hundred corporate team members. The end result was definitely worth the significant amount of time and effort invested by our design and special projects team. Our new headquarters look amazing. A big shout-out to Ben Mills, Chrissy Hopper, Luther Allenes, Kevin Neely, Amy Funk, Zeb Maloney, Teresa Watson, Blake Robinson, Pango, Derek, Aaron, and the entire IT support team. Finally, we want to give a special thanks to Camden’s team of executive assistants on a job incredibly well done.

We can’t wait for everyone to get a chance to visit. I’ll now turn the call over to Alex Jessett, Camden’s President and Chief Financial Officer.

Alex Jessett, President and Chief Financial Officer, Camden Property Trust: Thanks, Keith, and good morning. I’ll begin today with an update on our recent real estate activities, then move on to our third quarter results and our guidance for the remainder of the year. This quarter, we disposed of three older communities for a total of $114 million. Two of the three disposition communities were located in Houston, and the third in Dallas. These disposition communities were on average 24 years old. These older, higher CapEx communities were sold at an average AFFO yield of approximately 5%. We used the proceeds in part to repurchase approximately $50 million of our shares at an average price of $107.33, which represents a 6.4% FFO yield and a 6.2% cap rate. During the quarter, we stabilized Camden Durham and completed construction on Camden Village District, both located in the Raleigh-Durham market of North Carolina.

Additionally, we continue to make leasing progress on Camden Longmeadow Farms, one of our two single-family rental communities located in suburban Houston. At the midpoint of our guidance range, we are now anticipating $425 million of acquisitions and $450 million of dispositions for the full year, reduced from our prior guidance of $750 million in both acquisitions and dispositions. This implies an additional $87 million in acquisitions and an additional $276 million in dispositions in the fourth quarter. Turning to financial results, last night we reported core funds from operations for the third quarter of $186.8 million, or $1.70 per share, one cent ahead of the midpoint of our prior quarterly guidance, driven primarily by the combination of higher fee and asset management income and lower interest expense resulting from the timing of capital spend and lower floating rates. Property revenues were in line with expectations for the third quarter.

We are pleased with how well our property revenues are performing, considering the peak lease-up competition we are facing across many of our markets, illustrating the significant depth of demand in the Sunbelt. We did adjust our full-year 2025 outlook for same-store revenue growth from 1% to 75 basis points. Property expenses continue to outperform, particularly property taxes, coming in well below our forecast once again. As a result, we are decreasing our full-year same-store expense midpoint from 2.5% to 1.75% and maintaining the midpoint of our full-year same-store net operating income growth at 25 basis points. Property taxes represent approximately one-third of our operating expenses and are now expected to decline slightly versus our prior assumption of increasing approximately 2%. This is primarily driven by favorable settlements from prior-year tax assessments and lower rates and values primarily from our Texas and Florida markets.

For the fourth quarter, we are assuming occupancy will be in the range of 95.2%-95.4%. Blended lease tradeout will be down approximately 1%, and bad debt will be approximately 60 basis points, within 10 basis points of our pre-COVID levels. Almost entirely as a result of the decreased transactional activity anticipated in the fourth quarter, combined with lower floating-rate interest expenses, we are increasing the midpoint of our full-year core FFO guidance by $0.04 per share from $6.81 to $6.85. This is our third consecutive increase to our 2025 core FFO guidance and represents an aggregate $0.10 per-share increase from our original 2025 guidance. We also provided earnings guidance for the fourth quarter.

We expect core FFO per share for the fourth quarter to be within the range of $1.71-$1.75, representing a 3-cent per-share sequential increase at the midpoint, primarily resulting from the typical seasonal decreases in property operating expenses, favorable final property tax valuations and rates, and lower interest expense, partially offset by the impact of our anticipated fourth-quarter net dispositions. Non-core FFO adjustments for 2025 are anticipated to be approximately $0.11 per share and are primarily legal expenses and expense transaction pursuit costs. Our balance sheet remains incredibly strong, with net debt to EBITDA at 4.2 times. We have no significant debt maturities until the fourth quarter of 2026 and no dilutive debt maturities until 2027. Additionally, our refinancing interest rate risk remains the lowest of the peer group, positioning us well for outsized growth. At this time, we will open the call up to questions.

Conference Call Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press Star and then 1 using a touch-tone telephone. To withdraw your questions, you may press Star and 2. If you are using a speakerphone, we do ask that you please pick up the handset prior to pressing the keys to ensure the best sound quality. Once again, to ask a question, you may press Star and then 1. We’ll pause momentarily to assemble the roster. Our first question today comes from Eric Wolfe from Citi. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 4: Hey, thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering if you could provide any early thoughts on 2026 in terms of the building blocks, earning, any thoughts on other income or whatever else you can share about how you’re thinking about 2026 at this stage.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah, so certainly, we’re not giving guidance for 2026 quite yet. What I will tell you is the earning for us is probably going to be pretty much flat, which is going to be consistent with the earning that we had for 2025. Everything else we will give you when we have our next earnings release. I will tell you, if you look at just the broad environment and what’s going to be happening in 2026, it certainly does shape up much better than we saw in 2025 in terms of uncertainty that’s out there. If you think about when we were going through 2025, obviously, there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty around tariffs, around taxes, etc. Most of that should be worked out as we go through 2026.

The other thing that we think about is the significant amount of multifamily supply that was absorbed in 2025 that we will not have to absorb in 2026. As I said, we’re not going to give any guidance, but if you’re an optimistic person, there’s certainly things to be optimistic about when we look at next year.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Jamie Feldman from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 5: Great, thank you. You talked about the public-private disconnect around apartment valuations. I was hoping to get your thoughts on the current broader appetite for investment in apartments from private investors, especially for groups that can write the really big checks, given the growing concerns on jobs, immigration, the government’s focus on fixing the housing market. Are there any specific markets that stand out in terms of more interest, less interest, or even, from your end, more concerned or less concerned, given the macro overlay?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: The first thing I’ll tell you is there remains robust demand for multifamily. In fact, if you look at the amount of dry supply or, excuse me, dry powder that is there by asset class, multifamily absolutely leads all asset classes. Everybody is looking for assets. The challenge is there’s just not a lot out there. Stanley, I don’t know if you want to pine on this.

Keith Oden, Executive Vice Chairman, Camden Property Trust: Sure, Alex. Just a little bit of additional color on the current transaction environment. Like Alex said, the market is healthy. There’s a ton of debt and equity capital available. There’s really good bid depth and really strong liquidity in the market. With respect to volumes, 2025 is trending about the same as 2024, so still well below pre-COVID levels, which is to some extent being driven by lenders continuing to modify and extend loans. No meaningful distress in the market. From a pricing standpoint, cap rates have really stabilized over the last few quarters, with cap rates for Class A assets in our markets in the 4.5%-5% range, and in the Class B space in the 5%-5.5% range.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Let me add to that that there’s definitely been more sales on the coasts than there have been in the Sunbelt. The reason being that clearly coastal revenues, you can predict in terms of positive growth easier than you can in the Sunbelt, given the supply issues that we’ve been facing there. When you think about sellers, the seller in the Sunbelt is looking at the market saying, "We do know that supply and demand will be in balance. The question is when." There is a, to Stanley’s point, the lenders are not pressing people to sell. Why would you sell into a market when underwriting future growth is more difficult today just because of what’s going on in the marketplace? There’s less transaction volume in the Sunbelt.

I think what’s going to happen, however, there’ll be a pivot, and that pivot will probably happen sometime in, I would guess, mid-2026, and you’ll have a combination of lenders finally saying, "All right, we’ve extended. Now you need to do something." That is going to put pressure on sellers to sell. At the same time, once you get to the middle of 2026, based on Alex’s discussion a minute ago, you should have a more constructive environment, and it should be easier then for people to look out into 2027 and 2028 and see a very robust rental growth scenario given the supply dynamics that we have today.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Adam Cramer from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 6: Great. Thanks for the time here. Just wanted to ask about sort of how you see the fourth quarter shaping up relative to normal seasonality. I think one of your peers talked about sort of a relatively normal fourth quarter, maybe even a little bit better than normal seasonality in the fourth quarter. I think that was a little bit of a surprise just given some of the headlines, and some of that is a little bit sensational out there. Just wondering, within your portfolio, with absorptions data that actually, I think, still looks pretty good for the Sunbelt and even nationally, how do you see the fourth quarter shaping up in terms of lease spreads relative to typical seasonality?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. The first thing I’ll tell you is, if you think about our portfolio, and it’s important before we talk about the fourth quarter to go back and look at the third quarter. If you look at the deceleration that we saw from 2Q 2025 to 3Q 2025 on blended rates, it was only 10 basis points. I think that’s the lowest deceleration in the space. What that tells you is that we’re starting to get some footing here in the Sunbelt markets. When we go into the fourth quarter, what we’re anticipating, and what I said in the prepared remarks, is that we think our blend will be down about 1%. If you sort of think about that on a typical seasonality basis, this sort of is what you see in the fourth quarter.

This year, now, we did sort of hit the slower leasing period a month earlier than we typically would, but the fourth quarter is shaping up like a traditional fourth quarter.

Speaker 6: Great. Thank you.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Austin Worsham from KeyBank Capital Markets. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 5: Great. Thanks. Kind of going back and piggybacking on the last question, I mean, with this sort of re-acceleration now in lease rate growth, would you expect that to just carry into the early part of next year and into the spring leasing season based on what’s going on in the fourth quarter versus what you saw in the third quarter? Also, is it occupancy that’s the driver of that 25 basis point decrease to 2025 same-store revenue growth guidance?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Austin, thanks again for the 2026 guidance question. We’re not going to answer 2026 guidance questions quite yet, but what I will tell you is the main driver that we saw in the reduction, which is a very minor reduction in top-line revenue growth, was not occupancy driven. It was rate-driven. That is because we were making sure that we could get the occupancy to the level that we felt comfortable for going into the fourth quarter. In order to do that, we did have to drop rental rates slightly. I think the key takeaway that we’re going to give you for 2026 is based on Alex’s answer to the question maybe two questions ago, and that is there should be less uncertainty in 2026. The uncertainty that we have today, we know that tax reform is off the table. We know inflation is coming down.

We know the Federal Reserve’s lowering rates. We know that there’s a midterm election coming, which means that the administration’s going to do whatever they can to make sure the economy is good in November of 2026. The big tariff debates will likely be less of a debate during that period for obvious political reasons. We have a 25% reduction in new deliveries in Camden’s markets. With all that said, generally speaking, when you have a midterm election in this environment, you’re going to have a, unless something really comes off the rails, it should be a reasonable environment to improve demand and to create a more optimistic scenario in 2026. Now, obviously, there could be lots of slips that change that, but we’ll see.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Steve Sockwell from Evercore ISI. Please go ahead with your question.

Laurie Baker, Chief Operating Officer, Camden Property Trust: Thanks. Good morning. Rick, I guess going back to your question about the disconnect between public and private, I guess how big are you willing to lean into that on the share buyback and do dispositions? There hasn’t been many very large buybacks in the REIT space, and typically, they haven’t been overly successful, but I’m just curious, how much would you lean into this size-wise?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: If you go back in history, leading up to the bubble and the tech wreck in 2000, we bought 16% of the company back at that point. We could sell properties on Main Street for $0.75 or for $1, and we could buy our stock back for $0.75 on the dollar. Right now, with the current stock price today, it’s a 30% discount to Consensus NAV. It’s a mid-six cap rate. The market today is a 4.5%-5% cap rate. With simple math, that’s a 50-200 basis point positive spread to sell an asset and buy stock. We’ve always said that we would allocate capital in this way if we had a significant discount, I think 30% is pretty significant, and it was persistent, meaning that we had enough time to be able to sell assets to fund the buybacks.

We will not increase leverage to do that. It is a very typical capital allocation model. Over the last maybe seven or eight years, we’ve had opportunities to buy stock back, but it’s never lasted long enough. With the constraints that we have on how much we can buy in a day and that kind of thing, the opportunity has not lasted long enough to actually make a material difference. Today, we’ll see how long it lasts, and we’re going to lean in pretty well.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Michael Goldsmith from UBS. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 0: Good morning. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of direct supply and if there’s any way to quantify how that’ll improve? For example, are you able to provide how much of your portfolio is directly competing with supply now? How does that compare to last year? And if there’s an anticipated figure for next year? Thanks.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: I didn’t hear the first part of your question. You said direct supply?

Speaker 0: Yeah. How much of your portfolio is directly competing with new supply?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. Every part of our portfolio is directly competing with delivered supply. Between last year and this year, going into 2026, we’re going to see the highest number, the largest number of supply across Camden’s portfolio in the last 45 years. It’s pervasive. Obviously, some places are better than others, but everyone is dealing with some level of supply. The highest two markets in our world for supply and the impact thereof are Austin and Nashville. To various degrees, all of our markets are dealing with some level of oversupply. California would probably be at the very far end of the range, but still, there are supply issues and supply that we’re having to deal with there. To one degree or another, every market has been impacted.

The good news is, as Rick mentioned, we’re likely going to see a 25% decline in deliveries next year if we continue to see good demand that has continued across our platforms. Incrementally, it should be better in terms of the absorption making a difference for our ability to push rents and maintain occupancies. When we look at it, when we look at specific assets that are younger, that are directly in sub-markets where there is a tremendous amount of new supply, we are seeing significant improvements on that. Last year, when we first started talking about this number, we said that about 20% of all of our assets were directly competing with new supply. Thanks to the record level of absorption that we’ve seen in 2025, the good news is that number’s down to 9% of our portfolio today.

That is just going to continue to improve as we go through 2026 and into 2027. I think the other thing you have to think about, and I’ll just use an example like Austin, which is like the poster child or poster city for excess supply. In Austin, even the suburban properties that are older and kind of B properties in good locations are all feeling the supply pressure. The reason is not that they are so competitive with the new supply, it is just that consumers in Austin read the paper every day saying apartment rents are coming down, and they expect a deal.

You have a consumer sentiment issue in some markets like Austin, Nashville, and a couple others, where the consumers, even though there’s not as much competition in the suburban B properties, the consumer has this mindset that they have to get a discount, and then that just kind of feeds into the market, and you end up with a market where you can’t actually raise rents because of that sentiment. Once you have that pivot point, it changes dramatically.

Kim Callahan, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, Camden Property Trust: I would just add, Rick, this is Laurie, that if you look at Austin, which does have quite a bit of supply, a great example of a story where the tides eventually will turn is Rainy Street, and it can turn quickly. We are going from the lowest occupied community in our portfolio mid-summer to now the highest occupied community. It is starting to turn, and when it does, I think it will turn quickly.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Yana Gallant from Bank of America. Please go ahead with your question.

Kim Callahan, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, Camden Property Trust: Thank you. Good morning, and congrats on your move. I was hoping, can you provide some commentary on what your team is seeing in greater D.C., given it’s been such a strong performer this year and into the third quarter, with some of your peers noted less activity? If you could just comment on that.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. DC Metro remains our top market. If you sort of look at how it had progressed throughout the year, in the first half of this year, it was just an extreme outlier in terms of new leases and renewals. We think most of that was driven by the return-to-office movement, particularly on the government side. As we’re progressing throughout the year, obviously, we think most of those folks have returned to office and have now leased their apartments. Now it’s gone from being an extreme positive outlier to just being the best market we have, which we’ll still definitely take. If you look at it, in the third quarter, it’s our top sequential revenue market. It’s our top quarter-over-quarter revenue growth market, and it just remains incredibly strong.

When it comes to DOGE, because obviously, that’s what we talk about so much, I will tell you, we are still not seeing any evidence of our consumer being directly impacted by DOGE. What we’re seeing more is a shift in the market of the way our competitors are reacting and concerns about potential impact from DOGE, but we’re just not seeing it whatsoever. It remains an incredibly strong market. As you know, when we talk about DC Metro, we’re really talking about the DMV, and the trend continues where Virginia is, or Northern Virginia, which is where we have most of our real estate, is incredibly strong, followed by the district, and then followed by Maryland.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Rich Anderson from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead with your question.

Keith Oden, Executive Vice Chairman, Camden Property Trust: Thanks. Good morning. I understand the uncertainty or maybe lower uncertainty next year. I’m in the camp that I don’t know. I think there will always be a lot of uncertainty in the next few years, but we’ll see. In terms of supply and its impact on 2026, it’s not a guidance question. I just want to know what your history is with when guidance—excuse me—when supply delivers, what’s the typical tale of disruption from that asset or those collections of assets that come to market essentially vacant? Is it an 18-plus month sort of issue, and maybe the real growth story for Camden doesn’t materialize until 2027, or is it quicker than that? Maybe you can say something specific about your portfolio that makes it quicker or longer based on your own circumstances.

I just want to get some color on how supply might impact things next year, even though the deliveries are coming down. Thanks.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. They are coming down. I think in our portfolio, if you kind of look at the mix between Yardi and RealPage’s numbers, they’ve got supply in Camden’s markets coming down from 190,000 in 2025 down to about 150,000 in 2026. If you roll that forward to 2027 on their numbers, you’re going to be somewhere around 110,000 completions across Camden’s platform. The trick and the tale that you’re talking about, it’s always a little tricky because when something delivers, usually the data providers are talking about completed buildings. If they have the granularity to say that they’ve received their certificate of occupancy, that becomes supply. The reality is that people do not go to that level of detail on when an apartment community delivers actual leasable units.

If you think about the time it takes from the beginning of first apartments delivered, and I’m talking suburban walk-up type product, from that point forward, on a typical 300-apartment community, average lease up is going to be somewhere around 25 units per month. Call it 10-12 months. If things are kind of at a normal pace, you would expect to see all of those units absorbed over that 10-12 month period from the time that you first start turning your apartments. There’s just a lot of gray areas around when does that happen? When does construction end? Does that really matter? It doesn’t really. What really matters is leasable apartments that come online for the developer to be able to sign a lease on. That’s kind of what we’re looking at.

If you think about the average and coming down from 190,000 apartments to 110,000 over a two-year period, it is pretty significant. If the demand side of the equation stays kind of like it is today, does not have to get a whole lot better, just kind of in this zone, then you are going to see a significant impact, positive impact in 2026. There is no chance that that does not get better in 2027 because that cake is already baked on deliveries for 2027. I think we need to talk more about demand than supply because we know what supply is, right? When you think about demand, 2025 was the best year in 20-plus years of apartment absorption in spite of the incredibly high supply that came into the market. What is driving that is the same thing that has been driving apartment demand for a long time: migration, demographics.

Today, we have even a more interesting one, which is the retention. We are retaining more people than we ever have, which means that we do not need as many people coming in to lease new apartments when the people are moving out. You have this really interesting situation where people are staying longer everywhere. You have less mobility in America today for lots of different reasons, and it is really helping the apartment markets. If you pivot to home purchases and think about that, we have 9% of our people moving out to buy homes. That is not going to change anytime soon. You look at the math on homes, if you look at median income for a home or median home price plus interest at current cost, it is $3,200 a month compared to in 2019 when it was $1,750 a month.

What’s driving that clearly are three major things. One is home price appreciation is up over 50% since in most markets, some doubled since 2019. You had increases in interest rates, obviously, and increases in taxes and insurance. If you had a zero 30-year mortgage rate, the monthly cost for a medium-priced home today would be about $1,900 a month compared to $1,750 in 2019. The driver of that is not interest rates. The driver is home price cost and insurance and taxes. It’s going to be a long time before you have people moving out to buy houses. The other part of the equation, I think the median age of a first-time homebuyer today is 40, 40 years old. Before COVID, it was like 34, 35. There’s been a massive shift in the mobility of Americans.

The demographics continue to be in our direction, plus migration. I think that demand side is going to be much higher than people believe because of those equations. I think we need to focus on demand as much as supply, for sure.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Alexander Goldfarb from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 5: Sure. Hey, good morning. Good morning down there. Rick, we’ll stick with the 40 years of experience that you guys have. I was just looking at a stock chart of Camden, and I’m not picking on Camden, but REITs have had a tough go in the public world. Maybe the private world isn’t any better, but it just seems that in the private world, the assets are rewarded more than they are in the public world. I’m just curious, in the 40 years you and Keith took Camden public, what do you think is missing there? Do you think that the current setup where, as you just described, less home affordability, more propensity to rent, do you think it’s finally the time where we will see the REITs actually deliver what they’re supposed to?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: If you do take a look at the private values and public values over a long period of time, they’re pretty close. We have, for 40 years or 33 years as a public company, there’s times when the markets get dislocated like they are now. Generally speaking, it hasn’t lasted very long because once the market decides that the assets are undervalued, then smart investors come in and buy those stocks, so they drive the prices back closer to NAV. For me, being in the public market, I think it’s great. We have access to capital that none of our private competitors have. We don’t have the same sort of business model, which is, "I got to sell my properties in order to create value for my shareholders or for my owners." You’re constantly buying and selling and buying and selling or building and selling.

That’s a great business model for some, but for us, we buy and hold and create long-term cash flow and benefits for our shareholders. I think it’s a great space. Yeah. Alex, I kind of think of it like the playing field. The playing field over our 30-plus years as a public company, sometimes it’s been tilted in our favor. Sometimes it’s been tilted in the favor of the private guys. It can happen pretty quickly. If you think about kind of coming out of the COVID world or in the bottom of that time frame, the playing field got tilted pretty quickly towards the private guys because debt was free and plentiful. That’s never a good—that’s more interesting to private guys than it is to public companies.

For the last couple of years, in my mind, it’s sort of been tilted our way a little bit, certainly on the debt side, certainly on the balance sheet side of things, the ability to finance projects that private guys probably couldn’t have gotten done in the last 18 months. I think there’s still some of that out there, and I think that we’re going to continue to use that to our advantage. Let me just add one last thing because oftentimes people would ask me, especially when we get to a discount NAV like we are right now, they go, "Why are you public, and why wouldn’t you just go private? Just sell the company." We’re like, "Okay. I got that." There’s a disconnect, and it’s significant, right? It’s like $3 billion. Okay?

If somebody buys the company, then they’re going to make an expected rate of return on that asset that they buy. Ultimately, they believe that the prices are going to continue to rise, and therefore, we’re going to make a reasonable rate of return. At the end of the day, if the reason that we are at a significant discount to NAV is because people don’t trust management, we are a value trap, we really are a poor operator, and we just are awful, and you can’t really bridge that gap, then yeah, sell the company, move on because the market’s voting that you don’t deserve to be a public company and valued at least what your assets could trade for in the private market. On the other hand, if you have a dislocation in the market like we have today, right?

We have slow growth or flat growth, and you have uncertainty in the environment, you have an oversupply condition, and there is a lot of concern about when that supply condition is going to change, that will change. What will happen—the same thing that has happened over the last 30-plus years—is the market will recognize that the stocks are cheap, the stock will go up to or above its NAV, and you will be back. To me, the issue is, what is causing the disconnect, and then how do you get out of that disconnect? Ultimately, the market will figure that out, and it may take longer or shorter. It just depends on what is out there and what is the de jure of investors today. We feel pretty comfortable where we are.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Wes Goliday from Baird. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 5: Hey, yeah. Good morning, everyone. I just want to ask you about selling the assets that you’re doing. Are you able to shield the taxable gains there? And then one separate tax question. I believe you mentioned there was a big accrual, a big rebate you got from a prior year. How much of a headwind will that be for next year?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. The first thing I’ll tell you is, if you look at the sales that we’re doing, we are doing 1031 exchanges on those with the acquisitions. We’re doing reverses. We bought the real estate first, and then we’re selling the real estate. That’s what we’re going to do. Now, to piggyback to one of Rick’s earlier comments about buying back shares, we do have the ability to sell or to absorb about $400 million of gains where we do not have to do 1031 exchanges if we want to use those proceeds to repurchase shares. When you think about property tax refunds, here’s the best way to think about it. If you look at 2024, we had about $6.5 million of property tax refunds. If you look at 2025, that number dropped down to about $5.5 million. We are consistently good at getting refunds.

This is something we do. As we’ve talked about in the past, we contest almost every one of our valuations. If we go through a normal contesting process and we don’t win and we don’t feel comfortable with where we’re settling, we will file lawsuits. A lot of what you’re seeing is the settlement of those lawsuits. We have no reason to anticipate that in 2026 and 2027 and 2028 and going on forward that we won’t continue to have the same level of success that we’re seeing. I’m not anticipating any significant sort of headwinds associated with the refunds that we got in 2025, in particular, as I said, because the refunds we got in 2025 were actually less than the refunds we got in 2026 and in 2024, and we’re still showing a negative growth on the property tax side.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Rich Hightower from Barclays. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 6: Hey, good morning, guys. Covered a lot of ground this morning, but I believe that Camden sort of has an operational philosophy not to use concessions. Obviously, the market around you will use concessions and flex up or down based on the individual operator. As you think about or as we think about sort of market rents next year comping against sort of the net effective market rents in 2025, what’s the impact of concessions as far as you can tell? It’s a bit of a sneaky question on 2026, but just help us understand that component.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: I think what would be helpful for you is for Laurie to sort of give a rundown of what we’re seeing in the market, not for Camden, but in the market on the concession side.

Laurie Baker, Chief Operating Officer, Camden Property Trust: In our higher supply markets, we continue to see elevated concessions as operators work through the success inventory. On average, these markets are offering right around five weeks of concessions, approximately 10%. Those key markets include Austin, Nashville, Denver, and Phoenix. Where supply pressures remain most pronounced, that is what we are seeing. Despite these headwinds, we have been able to kind of navigate these markets pretty well, and we are outperforming the market average, each with kind of limited pricing power. Again, those are embedded into our net prices. Beginning in July, we actually initiated incremental price reductions so that we could prioritize our occupancy. That strategy has really paid off. While conditions remain challenging, we are taking a disciplined approach to really position ourselves to remain strong on the occupancy side as we head into next year.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: If you look at the concessionary impact in the market, if you look at the higher supply markets, we just talked about Austin, Nashville, etc. If they’re having 10% concessions or sort of think about effectively six weeks, that’s what needs to burn off in 2026. The good news is that those concessions are not being prorated mostly, and so they’re upfront, which means that the consumer is used to paying the appropriate rental rates. When they go to renewals, it shouldn’t be a big shock to them. That is what needs to roll off in those markets.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from John Kim from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 0: Despite the favorable supply outlook with deliveries going back to pre-COVID levels, you haven’t started a development project since the first quarter. I’m wondering why projects have not leveled out for you at this time, or do you plan to accelerate development starts as indicated on the last call?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. I mean, what I’ll tell you is today, you can buy real estate at a discount to replacement cost. If you can buy real estate at a discount to replacement cost, then that is a better use of capital. In addition, obviously, as we just talked about, we are using some of our capital to repurchase shares. Now, I will tell you, this is going to change. We are already seeing construction costs starting to come down. Depending upon where you’re building, those costs can be down 5%-10%, which will certainly help the math. The other thing I will tell you is we are very good developers. When we find land sites and we are actively looking at additional land sites, we’ve got land sites under contract as well.

When we pull the trigger, it’s because we believe that we can create value for our shareholders. We do believe with construction costs coming down, looking at what 2026, 2027, 2028 could look like in terms of revenue growth, that can make a lot of math work. Expect to see us get a little bit more active on the development side. In 2025, as I said, when you can buy at a discount to replacement cost, that just seemed like a better use of capital.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Linda Tsai from Jefferies. Please go ahead with your question.

Laurie Baker, Chief Operating Officer, Camden Property Trust: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Nice work with your 3Q blends being down only 10 basis points quarter over quarter. With your 4Q blends expected to be down 1%, is that all on the new leasing spread side? As it seems like the 4Q comparisons are a bit easier than 3Q. Just wondering if there are certain markets where you’re seeing more softness or if that somewhat reflects conservatism.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. The first thing I’ll tell you is I made the comment that as we were going through the end of the third quarter, we did make a push on the occupancy side. When we made that push on the occupancy side, that was at the expense of some new lease growth. When you sign something in the third quarter, you’re effectively seeing it in the fourth quarter. Yeah, we are expecting new leases in the fourth quarter to be the primary driver of what we’re seeing in terms of having a blended fourth quarter of just negative 1% approximately. That’s where we’re seeing it. Markets that we’re seeing additional softness, there’s no one market that jumps out. I will tell you that we are starting to see some markets that are doing the inverse, that are actually doing better than we had expected.

Call out a couple of those markets because I think we focus too much on the ones that are a little softer. Let’s focus on some of the good ones. We absolutely saw second and third quarter improvements in Nashville and Dallas and Charlotte and in Atlanta. Laurie can give some quick intel of what we’re seeing on the ground there.

Laurie Baker, Chief Operating Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah, absolutely. While we’ve experienced the elevated supply in these markets, we’re starting to see really some encouraging signs as demand rises. Or actually, I would say as demand really remains strong. On total rent gain for renewals and new leases, blended rents have actually turned positive in Dallas, Charlotte, and Nashville. We’re also seeing improvements in Atlanta. Some specifics just to give you a little color. In Dallas, for instance, blended rent gains improved quarter over quarter, moving from a negative 1.2% to a positive 0.6%. We also saw our average days vacant improve by 7 days, moving from 38 days in Q2 to 31 days in Q3. If you look at Charlotte, again, blended gains moved from negative 0.2% to a positive 0.5%. An improvement there.

We also saw 61 more move-ins in Q3 than we saw in Q2 just in Charlotte. Nashville, let’s talk about that. Another high-supply market, but we saw blended gains improve from a negative 1.3% to a positive 0.4% in the quarter. We also saw our renewals and transfers peak in August, again, with the highest they’ve seen in Nashville for the whole year. I’ll end with Atlanta. Blended gains increased from it was already positive, but it was positive 0.3%, and we improved to 0.7% quarter over quarter and recorded 96 more move-ins during the third quarter than the second quarter. Just some positive improvements, particularly with the blended shift in rents being strong.

Occupants teach friends or signaling just progress we’re making in managing these challenges in these kind of concessionary supply-driven markets and positioning ourselves for really a sustained recovery if all things remain the same.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. I just want to piggyback really quick because Nashville is an interesting market. Granted, we only have two assets in Nashville, but obviously, it is a market that we talk about supply quite a bit. Laurie had talked really briefly about how fast Rainy Street and Austin turned. In Nashville, when you look at the actual lease rates on new leases, that went up $61 from the second quarter to the third quarter. $61 is pretty dramatic. That tells you how fast things can turn.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Michael Lewis from Truist. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 0: Great. Thank you. I want to go back to the conversation about demand that came up in a few questions. I would not push back on anything you said. I agree with all of it, but I think you left out some points. Let’s pretend I’m not an optimistic person. I look at October, the most layoffs in any month since 2003, 22 years ago. Manufacturing activity down eight straight months. Inflation is now 3%, and the Fed’s going to be cutting. The ADP jobs number came out. It’s really just healthcare and education, not really adding jobs anywhere else. Why shouldn’t I be concerned about demand as we kind of move forward the next few months? I know you’re not giving 2026 guidance, but would it be completely shocking if same-store revenue was not materially better than it was this year?

Would that be stunning?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: I think, look, I put a, I think, a cautionary side of the equation and said the glass is half full, but it’s still half, right? It could be half empty if you do not believe that the economy will hold in there for the midterms. There are things to be optimistic about. There are also things to be worried about. You just mentioned a number of them, right? I think that at least for us, the good news is we do not need as much demand because we have less supply coming in, and we have retention rates that are at historic highs, right? We have fewer people moving out, so we do not need as many people to move in to offset those folks. I think these are definitely, your points are well taken, and we understand them.

I do not think any of us know what the economy will look like. I think we need fewer jobs than normal to have a reasonable apartment market in 2026 because of the other things we talked about. It is still an issue out there, obviously. Just one follow-up, Michael, on the idea of the stats that you gave about layoffs, etc. We have a very good barometer in our portfolio, given our platform, that we know immediately when people start losing their jobs because they move out. I mean, it is almost automatic. You lose your job, there is stress, maybe you stay a month. It is a really quick read-through for us. We are just not seeing people, we are not seeing that as an increase as a reason for move-out. I lost my job. Obviously, there are always people in the economy who are losing their jobs.

We have not seen what you are talking about, the read-through that would suggest that our residents in Camden’s markets are losing their jobs. That has certainly been a hallmark of the past. Our demographic is different. Our markets, given the growth profiles of our markets from end migration and the concentration of the jobs that are being created, being the preponderance in Camden’s markets, I think we have been pretty resilient in the past, and my guess is we will be in the future.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Omatayo Okasanya from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead with your question.

Speaker 4: Hi. Yes. Good morning. Just curious, portfolio-wise, have you seen any really big differences in performance in regards to your Class A versus your Class B or your urban versus suburban assets?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. I’ll tell you, and I think it’s entirely supply-driven. We are seeing our Class A assets do a little bit better than our Class B. I will tell you that in the third quarter, our urban assets actually did a lot better than our suburban assets. Once again, that makes sense to me because it’s just following where the supply is. If you think about the first wave of supply was very urban-focused, and then the second wave was suburban-focused. Now you’re seeing the supply disproportionately in the suburban markets.

Speaker 4: I believe you said your Class B is doing, your Class A is doing better than your B, but a lot of the supply is A, isn’t it?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: A lot of the supply is A. If you think about where most of our B assets are, most of our B assets are in the suburbs where the supply is.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Julian Lewin from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead with your question.

Keith Oden, Executive Vice Chairman, Camden Property Trust: Thank you for taking my question. Alex, on the second quarter earnings call, you mentioned fourth quarter blends would look a lot like the second quarter, but it sounds like guidance now for the fourth quarter is about 150 basis points below the second quarter. I guess when you sort of think of all the things you mentioned earlier, slower job growth, supply, economic uncertainties, what has changed the most in the last 90 days to drive that? Or is it just the posture of landlords sort of moving more aggressively than anticipated to prioritizing occupancy over rate?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: I think you nailed it. That’s exactly what it is. It’s really interesting to see because D.C. is a great example of that. As I talked about earlier, D.C. is incredibly strong. The reason why we saw a drop-off in the third quarter and an anticipated continued drop-off in the fourth quarter is just all of the talk about D.C. resulted in some reactionary actions from the competitors out there. I think when you sort of look at the uncertainty that we’ve talked about quite a bit on this call already, the uncertainty that defines 2025, I think a lot of competitors, when they were looking at where they were and realizing that they’re about to hit their slow season, which is the fourth quarter and the first quarter, really tried to go after occupancy. The way they did that is they dropped rates.

I will tell you that even though demand is very strong, when you have this amount of supply and you’ve got competitors that are dropping rates all around you, you do have to sort of move in the same direction. That’s exactly what we saw.

Conference Call Operator: Our next question comes from Alex Kim from Zelman & Associates. Please go ahead with your question.

Keith Oden, Executive Vice Chairman, Camden Property Trust: Hey, guys. Morning down there. Congrats on the move to the new office here. You’re down the street from one of my pocket picks, Kenny and Ziggy’s now. I wanted to dive a little into marketing costs here a little bit. This expense bucket has been elevated the past couple of years with double-digit year-over-year growth. I was wondering if this is somewhat reflective of weaker front-end demand that’s required more advertising to maintain leasing traffic and occupancy or something else entirely.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: Yeah. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s really two things. It’s number one, we’re really big into SEO, search engine optimization. We are buying the placements when people search for apartments. With the level of supply that is out there and folks are trying to obviously chase the same traffic that we’re trying to chase, what we found is that the cost of SEO has gone up pretty dramatically. Obviously, if you’ve got a lot of folks that are buying and trying to make sure that they’re the first name that appears, you’re going to expect to see some additional costs on that front. We’re absolutely seeing that. The second thing, which is in line with your question, is if you sort of look at, although demand is record high, supply is also pretty high.

We’re all fighting for the same prospects. Because of that, we absolutely are trying to make sure that we can generate as much traffic as we possibly can. That’s what you’re seeing. I would expect that once we get this supply absorbed, the SEO costs will come down pretty dramatically.

Conference Call Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, our final question today is a follow-up question from Julian Lewin from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead with your follow-up.

Keith Oden, Executive Vice Chairman, Camden Property Trust: Thank you for taking my follow-up. I just wanted to go back to something you mentioned last quarter’s earnings call, which was that Witton Advisors was telling you that 2026, you could see over 4% market rent growth across your markets. I’m just curious, are they still telling you there’s a path to that kind of market rent growth in 2026, despite the fact that the second half is maybe playing out a little bit weaker than we had hoped?

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: The numbers have come down a bit, but they still have 3% or 3.5% in 2026 and over 4% in 2027. They have moderated their numbers slightly, but it is not dramatic. It is likely to be more second half is what they have shown in their model.

Conference Call Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we’ll be ending today’s question and answer session. I’d like to turn the floor back over to Rick Campo for any closing remarks.

Rick Campo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Camden Property Trust: We appreciate you being on the call today, and we will see some of you in Dallas in December for NAREIT. So thanks a lot. We’ll see you then.

Conference Call Operator: With that, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll conclude today’s conference call and presentation. We do thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.

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