In April, we collected in our residential business about 97% of the cash that we would usually collect.
While no part of our country's economy will be immune from the coming recession, we feel that our portfolio of properties, populated with residents having average annual household incomes of $164,000 and often employed in technology and other knowledge industries, will fare relatively well.
So today, I'm going to provide a quick recap of operations over the past 45 days.
For us, this means that our more than 150,000 residents began staying at home 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
When we look back to March 15, we saw our traffic and applications drop 50% compared to the same period in 2019.
That being said, we continued to receive over 375 new applications each week through the end of March, which we see as a validation of the new leasing process.
Overall, retention in April and May has improved as we are now renewing in the mid- to upper 60% range, which is a 300 basis point improvement from last April and an almost 800 basis point improvement from last May.
New York is having the strongest renewal percents of nearly 70% for March, April and May.
Despite this good retention, our overall occupancy since March 31 has declined by 130 basis points.
At the beginning of April, we began to notice an improvement in demand, with both traffic and leasing activity rebounding by almost 30% and actually now trending on par with last year.
In fact, we had over 900 applications last week, which is a significant improvement compared to the 375 that we were averaging in late March and very encouraging for us.
Given the activity in the last 45 days, we would like to see that volume grow even more to help offset the lower demand that we experienced in March and to match the increased volume of applications that we usually get in May.
On Page 13, we reported the first quarter and included April monthly pricing statistic by market.
This is evident by the fact that we received a very strong 97% of the cash collections in April relative to our March collections.
This resilience delivered 5.4% delinquency, which is quite good given these unprecedented circumstances.
Notably, Seattle and Denver were our markets with the lowest delinquency at below 3% and Los Angeles was the laggard close to 8%.
Sitting here today, our base rents are down 4% compared to the same week last year.
We do so by providing April operational and collection statistics, by breaking out our same-store performance between residential and nonresidential, a practice that we would expect to continue as the performance from our main residential business, which makes up approximately 96% of total revenues, is likely to diverge meaningfully in the upcoming quarters for our much smaller nonresidential business.
This includes modifying the schedules on Pages 10 through 12 of the release.
This is a modest component of our business at 4% of total revenues and consists mostly of ground floor retail and public nonresident parking at our well-located apartment communities.
Ground floor retail makes up about 2/3 of this 4%, with public nonresident parking making up the rest.
This is evidenced by the 58% April collection rate for all retail that we disclosed, which, while certainly below what we would have hoped, may be higher than many other retail landlords.
With nonresident parking, we've seen an approximately 30% decline in parking volume for April, given the lack of public events and increased work-from-home arrangements.
We ended the first quarter with an incredibly strong net debt to normalized EBITDA of 4.9 times and nearly $1.8 billion in liquidity under our revolving credit facility.
Subsequent to quarter end, we improved this already strong position by closing on a very attractively priced 2.6% or $195 million 10-year GSE loan and by closing on the sale of an asset in the San Francisco Bay Area.
With these steps, we sit here today with over 84% of our total NOI unencumbered, about $150 million in commercial paper outstanding and readily available liquidity of over $2.2 billion under our revolving credit facility, which does not mature until 2024.

Summary:
Subsequent to quarter end, we improved this already strong position by closing on a very attractively priced 2.6% or $195 million 10-year GSE loan and by closing on the sale of an asset in the San Francisco Bay Area.