Shankh Mitra
Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer at Welltower
Thank you, Matt and good morning everyone. I will review fourth quarter and the year and describe high-level business trends and our capital allocation priorities. John will provide an update on operational performance of our SHO and MOB portfolios, and Tim will walk you through our triple net business, balance sheet highlights and 2023 full year guidance. Nikhil, our newly appointed CIO is also on the call to answer questions.
While we are happy to bring back full year guidance after three years. I'll point out that many macro and business uncertainties remain. I would recommend investors and analysts to focus on 2023 exit run rate to understand the earnings power of this platform and not overly emphasize the calendar year guidance. I have mixed emotions as I reflect back on 2022. As I've described, during my prior calls, our results frankly underwhelmed our expectation during the first half of the year. While we don't like to fix that on short-term stock performance, as we believe, an appropriate window to gauge our performance is at least three to five years, you should throw tomatoes at us for generating an unsatisfactory return -- total return in 2022.
But remember, stock is a fractional ownership of the business and not a ticker. We view our fellow investors as partners for the long haul and continuously strive to improve the prospect for long-term compounding of this business. In spite of some of the headwinds that we experienced in 2022, my team and I are pleased with the underlying improvements we have seen in this platform and our talent base resulting in a strong rebound of performance in fourth quarter and further improving momentum being carried into 2023. Our recent progress is only the tip of the iceberg of many of our initiatives, will truly manifest themselves in the year -- next year or two, which I'll go in a minute.
While overall macro headwinds persist, we have seen a considerable improvement in the key indicators of the unit economics of the business as reflected by expense per occupied room or ExPOR or revenue per occupied room or RevPOR. On the expense front, we have seen significant progress on addressing certain challenges we have faced over first year plus, most notably on the agency and temp labor situation. In fact. ExPOR has moderated in Q4 to 3.4%, driven largely by a deceleration in compensation per occupied room or CompPOR to 2.6%, the lowest level we have seen in our recorded history.
At the same time, RevPOR, again the revenue per occupied room remain a consistent bright spot for us, increasing 7.5% in Q4, a clear reflection of strong pricing power resulting from our premier locations, product and operator base. As I mentioned on our last call, one of our largest operators pull forward January rent increases in Q4. Even without that, our Q4 RevPOR would have exceeded 6% plus and reflecting a broad-based strength across our portfolio. And while we achieved record RevPOR growth in 2022 of 5.5%, we expect to surpass this level of growth in 2023.
While we achieved an impressive 19% SHOP NOI growth in 2022 and expect circa 20% NOI growth in 2023, I believe we're only at the beginning of a multi year double-digit NOI growth resulting from a long runway of occupancy rate growth and operating margin expansion. And despite significant macro uncertainty, already weighing on the fundamentals of many other sectors, our confidence in future growth of our business is supported by the need-based nature of our asset class, along with a favorable demand-supply backdrop, which is getting better every single day.
I am pleased to report that 2023 is already off to a great start with January move-ins up 16% over 2019 levels, representing a meaningful acceleration from the fourth quarter. Forward-looking indicators are also showing promise in January with our total volume across our senior housing operating portfolio is up 25% year-over-year. I would be completely remiss to ignore perhaps one of the most important milestones in the 53-year history of our company and that is the private letter ruling we received, which permits us to both own and self manage independent living assets. The PLR provides us significant flexibility in operating our assets and its timing coincides almost perfectly with the build out of our industry-leading operating and asset management platform, which John and his team have been tirelessly working on.
We remain optimistic that further investment in our platform will not only result in a better margin profile of our assets, but also will meaningfully benefit the third-party operating partners across the senior living spectrum who we choose to do business with in the future. We continue to see a tremendous opportunity to professionalize and modernize the operating side of senior living business following our instinct, where there is mystery there's margin. And our PLR gives us significant ammunition to accelerate the pace for what Welltower 2.0 might look like. I want to thank Mike Garst, our tax team and many others, whose efforts have led to this game-changing treatment.
Before turning to investing environment, I want to highlight the addition of Retirement Unlimited or RUI to Welltower's roster of exceptional operating partners. RUI is one of the best performing senior housing operator in the East Coast with the highest quality programing and care centers. RUI has consistently maintained occupancy levels at north of 90% and with hardly any use of agency labor over past few years.
We announced today that RUI has assumed the management of our first community together in Alexandria, Virginia with plans to meaningfully grow our relationship in near term through acquisitions, transition and development. We're extremely excited and humbled to partner with the Fralin Waldron and and RUI otherwise All-Star President, Doris-Ellie Sullivan and welcome them to Welltower family.
In terms of growth partners, it was exactly a year ago when we announced our partnership with David and Simon Reuben, along with their acquisition of Avery Healthcare in the UK. As you know, Reuben Brothers is one of the most sophisticated forward-thinking and well-capitalized global investors with a reputation of attracting best-in class talent and technology platforms. Our thesis was validated when Reuben Brothers attracted Lorna Rose, one of the most well-respected senior housing operating executive in UK to join Avery as the company's CEO in December. Lorna has spent 25 years in the industry and was most recently with Barchester, one of the UK's largest senior housing platform.
Next on the capital allocation side, we have rarely seen a favorable environment across all our product types in all three countries we do business within. There are $20 billion plus of exit queue for core real-estate funds and perhaps even a longer one for non-traded REITs. This along with a challenging debt market give us an enormous advantage to buy the right product at the right location at the right basis. Please note that while we are under earning by more than $0.5 million of EBITDA from pre-pandemic levels, we just reported debt metrics that are better than Q4 of 2019, along with more than $5 billion of near-term available liquidity.
We have many avenues to access and deploy capital that I've described before and we remain busy on all fronts, but our north star remains consistent and simple. We strive to create par share value for our existing owners by compounding over a long period of time within our circle of competence, which we define as the area where we can assess and allocate capital with house odds rather than gamblers odds.
With that, I'll pass it over to John.