Scott Stubbs
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Extra Space Storage
Thank you, Joe, and hello everyone. As Joe mentioned, we had another good quarter, beating our internal FFO projections by $0.04. The beat was driven by better-than-expected property net operating income, lower G&A and higher management fees and tenant insurance. Interest income and interest expense, both came in modestly lower than modeled generally offsetting each other. Achieved rates to new customers have been improving sequentially since bottoming out in November. In January, year-over-year rates improved to approximately negative 14%, in February, they were negative 11% and in March, they were negative 3%. We did see lower rental volume in March at those rates, and in April, our pricing algorithms dropped rates modestly with average achieved rates in April, closer to negative 7% year-over-year, contributing to higher rental volumes in April.
Turning to the balance sheet, we completed a $500 million bond offering of five-year notes with a coupon of 5.7%. We used the proceeds to reduce our revolver balances to less than $100 million at the end of the quarter, leaving over $1 billion in revolving capacity. We reduced our floating interest-rate exposure to 22% of total debt, net of variable rate receivables. Shortly after the announcement of our proposed merger with Life Storage S&P Global updated our rating to CreditWatch Positive confirming its view that the proposed transaction is credit enhancing, given the increase in scale and potential synergy opportunities.
We reaffirmed our guidance ranges for same-store growth expectations and core FFO, which do not include the impact of the proposed merger with Life Storage. We made modifications to our 2023 outlook to capture the SmartStop preferred investment, delays in bridge loan closings, the impact of our bond deal on interest expense, and other adjustments to tenant insurance in G&A. Property net operating income in the first quarter was modestly ahead of our expectations as we progress through the leasing season, we will monitor achieved rates to new customers, rental and vacate trends, web traffic and top of funnel demand before revisiting these guidance ranges after the second quarter.
As mentioned on our fourth quarter call, our guidance assumes positive same-store revenue growth for and throughout the full year. It assumes the growth rate moderates more quickly in the first half of the year due to exceptionally difficult first half comps, troughs in the summer and modestly reaccelerates late in the year. Much of our NOI growth is offset by the first year headwind of our investment in non-stabilized properties which carry approximately $0.23 of dilution, the modification of the NexPoint preferred investment and higher interest rates. While each of these headwinds slows, our 2023 growth, we believe they will result in stronger long-term growth rates over a multiyear period for our shareholders.
We are off to a great start in 2023. We believe storage as an asset class is among the most resilient in the REIT space and that the sector will continue to produce healthy albeit moderating year-over-year growth. We believe our operating platform and highly diversified portfolio will become even stronger through the Life Storage merger and are well positioned for another solid year.
With that, operator, let's open it up for questions.