Joe Margolis
Chief Executive Officer at Extra Space Storage
Thanks, Jeff, and thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. Before I report on our performance, I am happy to announce that we recently published our Annual Sustainability Report. We are proud to be a sector leader, not only operationally, but also in sustainability. I encourage you to review our report, which is posted on our Investor Relations website. Turning to results. The strong trends we experienced in the first quarter continued into the leasing season.
Year-over-year same-store revenue growth in the quarter was 21.7%, matching our first quarter growth rate. This is an all-time high for Extra Space Storage. Despite expense pressure on several line items, NOI growth remained very strong at 26%. This was achieved primarily through year-over-year rental rate growth, partially offset by a modest decrease in year-over-year occupancy due to elevated vacate activity. With manageable new supply and durable customer demand, we continue to operate at high occupancy with strong rates. Despite inflation and the potential effects of recession, we believe we are well positioned to continue to produce strong results due to our resilient need-based asset class, diversified portfolio, strong balance sheet and best-in-class team and platform.
We were active in each of our external growth channels. During the quarter, we invested $289 million in property acquisitions and we invested an additional $92 million in July, bringing year-to-date totals to $610 million. We have continued to focus on acquiring nonstabilized properties and, as we outlined last quarter, have started closing more transactions in joint venture structures. We started to see the market shift late in the quarter with increasing interest rates, reducing the number of bidders at the table and the bid-ask spread widening between buyers and sellers.
We are being selective with our acquisitions, and we are focused on transactions and structures that will be accretive for our shareholders. In the quarter, we closed $70 million in bridge loans, and we added 40 additional stores gross to our management platform. We also made a creative storage investment, purchasing an existing storage company named Bargold Storage solutions. This company has a different model than traditional storage. It is focused on leasing space and apartment buildings, primarily in New York and subleasing storage spaces to residential tenants. The acquisition of Bargold added over 17,000 units to our portfolio with an occupancy rate over 97%.
Due to the unique nature of its operations, we have retained their team and are keeping the entity running as a separate organization. We view this transaction as another creative investment in the storage sector which came to us through deep industry relationships. Our strong property NOI, plus our external growth efforts, resulted in core FFO growth of 29.9%. Our growth allowed us to raise our annual FFO guidance for the second time this year. It has been another great quarter, and we are well on our way to another strong year.
Storage fundamentals remain solid. While we expect our rate of growth to moderate in the back half of the year due to very difficult comps, we expect it to remain well over historical averages, with modeled year-over-year revenue growth remaining in the double digits through 2022. I would now like to turn the time over to Scott.