Shankh Mitra
Chief Executive Officer at Welltower
Thank you, Matt and good morning, everyone. I'll review first quarter business trends and our capital allocation priorities. John will provide an update. On the operational performance of our senior housing and outpatient medical portfolios. Nikhil will give you an update on the investment landscape and Tim will walk you through our Triple-net businesses, balance sheet highlights and guidance update.
I'm very pleased with the strong start to the year, as we delivered nearly 19% year-over-year growth in FFO per share with contributions from all parts of our businesses. But I remain particularly excited about our senior housing business, which continues to surpass our expectations. Despite continued uncertainty with respect to the direction of the economy and turbulence across many sectors within commercial real estate, the demand-supply backdrop for senior housing gets better with each passing day. We, along with our operating partners are proud yet humbled to provide an important solution for the rapidly growing number of seniors who make the choice to live in a curated and purpose-built environment. And while this demographic-driven end market demand continues to strengthen, the new construction remains extraordinarily difficult, pushing off any impact of new supply many years into the future.
In terms of our Q1 results, we posted another quarter of double-digit same store revenue growth coming in 10.3%, driven by strong occupancy and rate growth. While Q1 is usually a seasonally weaker period than Q4, same store occupancy grew 340 basis points year-over-year basis, which represented an improvement from Q4. This is the strongest growth we have seen in our history other than Q1 of 2022 when the comp year was a negative number as we lost occupancy in Q1 of 2021 due to COVID. We also saw outperformance on the rate side. Reported same store RevPOR or unit revenue growth of 4.8% was dragged down by the leap year impact of an additional day in February. However, adjusting for this extra day, RevPOR growth remained strong at 5.6%. Overall same store expenses were up 5.7% and unit expense or export was up 0.4%, driven by same store compensation expenses up 5.4% or just 0.1% on an occupied room basis. Reported ExpPOR was understated because of the leap year impact and otherwise would be up 0.9%. Regardless, we are very pleased with the underlying trends, as unit revenue growth far outpaced unit expense growth, resulting in another quarter of significant margin expansion. And this combination of strong revenue and moderating expense drove same store net operating income growth of 25.5%, marking one of the strongest quarter in our history. This growth was broad-based with all three regions posting year-over-year same store NOI growth in excess of 20% with growth in the UK reaching nearly 50%.
From a product standpoint, our independent living and wellness housing portfolios delivered another quarter of extraordinary growth, but our assisted living continued to continued a streak of strong outperformance. And as for our non-same store pool, we're even more pleased with the performance of these assets as numerous properties were transitioned within past year have seen a strong improvement in performance while some recent acquisitions have also outperformed. We continue to mine for opportunities within our own portfolios to effectuate farther Triple-net to RIDEA conversion or operate a transition in an effort to enhance the resident and employee experience where we believe financial performance will eventually follow. We're confident that this informational feedback loop created through this continual focus on employee and customer is a long-term driver of lower risk and superior operational returns. We don't always get the community and the manager combination right in the first go, but it is our responsibility to try again. Status quo is not an option for us.
Speaking of conversions, I'm pleased to inform you that we are in process of converting eight additional well-located communities from Triple-net to RIDEA. Despite short-term drag, we believe this action will be significantly additive to our full cycle stabilized earnings as we have demonstrated in our recent transaction with Ligand [Phonetic]. These capital-light transactions and others similarly made in 2023 will create significant growth for us in 2025 and beyond.
Speaking of transactions, the capital market backdrop remain very conducive to deploying capital. Since the beginning of the year, we have closed or under contract to close $2.8 billion of investments across 23 separate transactions, including $1.1 billion, which we spoke to in February, mostly made up of the Affinity transaction. These investments are predominantly with our repeat counterparties or existing operators. As excited as we are about this record level of activity, in just first four months of the year, we remain incredibly busy, parsing through granular opportunities in both the US as well as the UK. Our near-term capital deployment pipeline remains robust, highly visible, actionable, and squarely within our circle of confidence where we can bet with the house odds rather than the gambler swords as rates and credit space continue to march higher, our telephones are ringing off the hook as we are requested to provide solutions to institutions, families, operators and other sellers.
2024 will be a very active year for us. While I wrote extensively about our apathy towards entity level M&A transactions in my annual letter, our enthusiasm remains unbridled for tuck-in acquisitions, one asset at a time, where we can invest at an attractive basis with operational upside and irreplicable uplift from Welltower's operating platform. As we have said in the past, our goal is to achieve significant regional density, seeking to grow deep in our market, not broad. And with the help of our data science platform, ALFA, we're able to identify one asset at a time which not only have the strongest growth prospects, but also the strongest fit to our portfolio. Though we occasionally come across sellers who are disconnected from asset value as they appear to be living in a time capsule of yesterday's interest environment are simply hoping that we'll be back there soon. Many more pragmatic and smart institutions and families realize that perhaps hope is not a strategy, especially in face of a looming wall of debt maturities for the industry and dearth of financing options. We continue to provide solutions to counterparties who want a sophisticated and reliable partner who shows up at the closing table without a fail with cash and operating partners.
We at Welltower are in a handshake business and will remain so. Our stellar reputation is much more valuable to us than few basis points here and there that we may leave on the table. After all, our [Indecipherable] remains long-term compounding our per share value of our existing shareholders, not to maximize the deal or a quarter. In the end, time is the friend of wonderful companies that compound and the enemy of the mediocre.
With that I'll pass it over to John. John?
