Louis Haddad
Analyst · Robert W. Baird. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Mike. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. This morning we reported second quarter results $0.25 of normalized FFO per share, which was in line with our expectations. After successfully raising over $85 million in an overnight public offering in May, we have updated our per share guidance for the remainder of 2017. Before Mike takes us through the quarterly results, capital markets activity, and updated 2017 guidance in detail, I'll comment on our retail portfolio and a many exciting offers multi-family and student housing projects in our development pipeline. At a diversified rate, we invest in, develop, and build several different product types; office, multi-family, student housing, mixed use and retail. And we also generate additional revenue through our operating divisions. Due to our opportunistic rather than formulae approach to development, over the course of our company’s history the segment mix in our portfolio has fluctuated and will continue to do so. For example, just three years ago, office assets generated nearly half of our portfolio NOI and retail assets made up less than 40%. Through constant proactive and strategic portfolio management, the retail portion of our portfolio today stands at over 60% of NOI, they’re significantly less when combined with other income from our operating divisions. But it is important to point out, against the current backdrop of excessively broad concern regarding the retail segment, that our current mix is merely a snapshot in time. In fact, this is the highest value in the retail we’ve had as a publicly traded company. Upon stabilization of the multi-family, student housing and office projects in our development pipeline, we expect that retail will represent less than half of our portfolio NOI and even less as a percentage of our NOI and operating division income. Irrespective of these metrics, we remain confident and bullish about the retail assets in our portfolio. These properties continue to perform with year-to-date same-store NOI up over last year. As you know we don’t own malls, we don’t own department stores and shy away from big box centers. We own three types of retail properties. One, mixed use, destination assets; two, grocery acreage centers and three, power centers anchored by best-in-class retailers. The best example of our mixed-use destination retailers is our signature talent centre project in Virginia Beach. Talent centre is home to 8,000 square feet of office space, 800 residential units, two hotels and a performing art centre. Within the district, we own 460,000 square feet of mixed use retail, comprised of 25 restaurants and cafés, professional services, higher education facilities and boutique that support and drive the live, work, play atmosphere. Mixed use destination retail currently makes up about a quarter of our retail NOI. When it comes to grocery anchored centers, we invest in superior locations in our geographical footprint with high quality anchors which we believe will continue to perform well in an increasing competitive landscape. Roughly half our retail NOI comes from grocery anchored assets. The remaining 25% is in our power centers which are led by best-in-class retailers that are discount closures, pet supply stores, home goods and service providers along with typical outparcel users. In summary, our philosophy and approach to retail is simple. We develop and invest in places where people want and need to shop. So, despite the current perceptions facing the retail sector, we will continue to acquire a methodical approach that has worked for almost 40 years. While we remain upbeat about our retail assets, as is the case with our other product types, we continue to actively manage our portfolio to divest or expand when and where it makes sense. Along those lines, we may sell or repurpose a couple of our smaller retail centers in the coming quarters. With regard to active portfolio management, we recently closed on the sale of our two build-to-suit state office buildings at a nearly 40% profit margin over our development cost which once again exceeds our target wholesale to retail spread and demonstrates the value creation from our development platform. We use these proceeds to partially fund the acquisition of the outparcel space at Wendover Village in Greensboro, North Carolina for $14.3 million. This acquisition complements the primary phase of Wendover Village that we acquired a little over a year ago as part of our 11-property portfolio purchase. Moving on to the rest of the portfolio, as I previously mentioned, we anticipated that our three-year streak of positive same store NOI growth would come to an end this quarter and it has. The construction at Phase VI of Town Centre has impacted multi-family occupancy at the cosmopolitan next door and with a number of office tenant relocations within Town Centre we expect these impacts to continue until the end of the year. At the same time, we are confident about our ability to return Town Centre occupancy to its historical levels and contribute to future growth in same store NOI. I’ll now spend a few minutes on our projects currently under development and construction. By the end of the summer, we expect to begin construction on two students housing projects on the historic Charleston Peninsula located within one mile of the College of Charleston and in closed proximity to five other schools in the area. We continue to evaluate and explore opportunities to grow our footprint in this market. Design progress on our new build-to-suite office building for Huntington Ingalls at Brooks crossing is on track for an early 2018 construction start and 2019 delivery. This state-of-the-art facility is expected to house nearly 600 employees and serve as a catalyst for further development in its public private partnership with the city of Newport News. Our Harding Place project in Downtown Charlotte is well underway and we are very pleased with the rent growth and absorption that this sub-market continues to display. The construction of Phase VI of the Town Center Virginia Beach is now on the vertical space and is tracking for a delivery next summer. The 10-pillar block will have a variety of entertainment options as well as exciting new retailers and loft style apartments. The initial units at Annapolis Junction will be delivered next month and Point Street is on track to begin delivery early next year. Given their prime locations and compelling market dynamics, we are excited about these projects and fully expect to exercise our ad cost purchase options. Last quarter, we entered into an LOI for a significant block of the remaining office space at One City Center in Downtown Durham. These negotiations continue in earnest and assuming leased execution, the office component will be 90% pre-leased in advance of our expected summer 2018 delivery. We began preliminary discussions with our joint venture partner and Duke University about the next phase of this project. With almost $440 million of development in our current pipeline and our target wholesale to retail spreads of around 20%, we expect that these projects alone will add well over $1 per share of NAV. We continue to explore a number of exciting development opportunities in our target markets. For the growing stable of trusted and like-minded development partners, we’ve been able to increase our development run rate without compromising our core underwriting criteria. Premier locations, high quality anchored tenants, accretive returns and healthy wholesale to retail spreads. As a result, we continue to be highly selective and decline the vast majority of opportunities presented to us. The same as we used to evaluate whether to deploy our precious capital on our new project will continue to be exceedingly rigorous. All of these decisions are considered in light of management's decision as far away the largest equity holder in the company. This sheer volume of opportunities allows us to select only the most attractive projects for evaluation, after which only a small fraction of these opportunities are pursued in earnings. As an example, this quarter we entered into an agreement with S.J. Collins, a seasoned developer of high quality grocery anchored retail centers to deliver a whole foods center in Decatur Georgia. We are hopeful that this relationship will lead to more opportunities with both this developer and the exclusive retailer. Lastly, our construction company continues to exceed expectations and is on track for one its best years ever. This quarter, we substantially completed work on three new legal stores in South Eastern Virginia and look to expand this new relationship as their rapid Mid-Atlantic expansion continues. Our successful execution across all areas of our business, investment, development, construction and asset management and our rapid growth in both profits and market cap has led to our addition to the S&P small cap 600 index. This will likely expose our company to an expanded institutional investor base and continues to solidify our identity and brand recognition. At this time, I’ll turn the call over to Mike to discuss our second quarter results and updated 2017 guidance in detail. Mike?