With new leaders at the helm and a renewed focus on the Sun Belt, Camden Property Trust posted a solid performance to start the year, according to its first-quarter 2026 earnings report.
The Houston-based REIT’s earnings and revenue for Q1 beat market expectations, according to Investing.com, although both metrics were down slightly from the same period last year. Its earnings per share stood at $0.40 at the end of Q1, up significantly from its guidance of $0.24 EPS.
Friday’s earnings call was the first as CEO for Alexander Jessett, who promised to continue his predecessor’s tradition of thematic music before earnings calls. He was promoted to the role in March alongside fellow company veterans Laurie Baker, to president and chief operating officer, and Benjamin Fraker, to executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer.
The new leadership will ensure the continuity of the firm’s family values, institutional knowledge and culture, Camden Executive Chairman of the Board and former CEO Ric Campo said on the call, as macroeconomic factors indicate an improving apartment business environment.
“New supply has peaked and has been cut in half in most of our markets,” according to Campo. “First-quarter apartment net absorption was one of the best since 2016, despite slow job growth and tepid consumer sentiment.”
Concessions are also coming down as supply continues to be absorbed, per Jessett.
“We are seeing concessions come down fairly meaningful in most of our markets. And once again, that's really tied to supply. If you look at the vast majority of our markets, new supply is down 50% from peak,” Jessett said.
BY THE NUMBERS
| Category | Q1 | YOY Change |
| Property revenue | $388.8 million | -0.5% |
| Net operating income | $248.7 million | -1% |
| Operating expenses | $140.1 million | 0.5% |
| Core funds from operations | $1.70 | -1.2% |
| Occupancy rate | 95.1% | -30 bps |
SOURCE: Camden
Renewals numbers are strong, and although the firm saw some “price sensitivity” in the early months of the year, it has since been able to increase rents, Baker said.
“Now we’re starting to see in our May, June, July, these renewals that are going out, that we're able to get a little bit more of an increase in those numbers,” Baker said. “And so as we have the opportunity to push in markets where we're getting a little more pricing power, we’ll continue to do so.”
Sun Belt hot
Camden leaders are feeling “pretty good” about how April is playing out and are anticipating a strong third quarter as supply comes down dramatically, according to Jessett.
“We're certainly seeing several of our markets that I would classify as showing green shoots,” Jessett said. “Markets that are jumping out to me would be Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, Nashville, Raleigh and southeast Florida, and we think those are going to be the markets that are going to really lead us in this sort of return to normalcy as all of this supply is absorbed.”
In February, the firm put its 11-building California portfolio up for sale and is doubling down on the Sun Belt. In the call, Jessett cited a potential uptick in domestic migration in 2026 to Phoenix; Austin, Dallas and Houston in Texas; and Orlando and Tampa in Florida.
“The decades-long trend of domestic migration to the Sun Belt normalized in 2025, not disappeared,” Jessett said. “Camden is in the right high-demand markets ready for the upcoming lower supply environment.”
As mentioned in its previous earnings call, Camden plans to redeploy capital from the California apartment sales into the Sun Belt. The firm also bought back some of its own shares and is open to buying more if the conditions are right, according to Fraker.
“The $271 million in repurchases completed in 2025 reflect our discipline and opportunistic capital allocation approach as our shares trade at a significant discount to [Net Asset Value],” Fraker said. “While we will continue to monitor our share price performance, our updated full-year 2026 guidance assumes no other share repurchases.”
Size matters
In light of a recent report that Camden’s peers AvalonBay and Equity Residential are discussing a merger, one analyst asked if the firm would have an advantage from a data perspective if it were to grow. Camden has been rumored as a potential M&A candidate among the six major apartment REITs over the years, despite Campo’s insistence otherwise. Jessett waved off the question.
“Bigger is not better. Better is better. And if you look at a long-term trend, there's absolutely no correlation between the size of the company and total shareholder return,” Jessett said. “I do not think that if we were in a situation where all of a sudden we were two or three times the size we are, that we would see any type of significant increase in our ability to collect data, analyze data, utilize data.”
In April, Camden reached a $53 million settlement in a major class-action lawsuit that accused the REIT and dozens of the country’s biggest landlords of using RealPage’s property management software to coordinate rent increases. Camden does not admit fault or liability, but said the payment allows it to “avoid the significant costs and distraction of protracted litigation.”
“We did come to an agreement in terms, but it's not entirely in the rearview mirror yet. We've got a little ways to go, and so hopefully we can stop talking about that in the next couple of quarters completely,” Jessett said. “We've all been using a ‘compliance software’ now for quite some time, and so feel good about the resources we have and feel good about the way we will price our real estate and do not have any negative impact whatsoever.”
Although Camden outperformed on some metrics in the first quarter, much of that was due to timing, leading the firm to maintain its revenue and expense guidance.
“We believe it is premature to extrapolate one quarter's performance into a full-year trend, particularly given market variability,” Fraker said.
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