Chris Lau
Analyst · Haendel St. Juste with Mizuho. Please proceed with your question
Yep. Hey, Haendel and this is Chris. I'll jump in on the property taxes, and I'll talk a little bit about, what we're seeing this year and then tie it into next year as well. But as I'm sure you'll recall the third quarter is typically a really active period for us for receipt of property tax information. In particular, on the assessed value front we now have information on pretty much the majority of our portfolio. And I'm pretty happy to report some good updates, almost all the way around. Assessed values have come back modestly better than what our expectations were at the start of the year. We've actually seen a couple of municipalities end up reducing rates that we actually were not expecting. And then the deals program is going really well. So all of that combines into the new full year expectation that, we've been talking about around 4% or so, which as a reminder is about 50 basis points better than our expectations at the start of the year. And then on 2022, look it's definitely the right question. Of course, I'll tread a little bit carefully here as we're still in the middle of our 2022 property tax budgeting and forecasting process. But in general, look, we agree with you and recognize that we're in a strong HPA environment, and that's great for asset values, but it's obviously also a factor for property taxes. So again, I can't comment with specific numbers just yet. But given the strength, we've been seeing in HPA, this calendar year, and the fact that property tax is commonly run in arrears, we could see 2022 taxes being a touch higher than our 2021 estimate of 4%. But I wouldn't really expect them to be in a materially different ballpark. And as always, we'll leverage our robust appeals machine to make sure, we aren't leaving any dollars on the table. And then just to tie all this together obviously, your question was around expenses. But I would just remind us all to think about expenses coupled against, as we're thinking about 2022 coupled against what we expect to be another really strong year from a top line perspective for all the reasons that Bryan, was talking about, setting up real nicely for another year of occupancy and rate performance. And then you couple that with all the good stuff to come from our growth programs, and the AMH machine is just set up real nicely for another strong year in 2022.