Dean Shigenaga
Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead
All right. Thanks, Peter. Dean Shigenaga here. Good afternoon, everyone. I want to briefly cover first, our inaugural Corporate Responsibility Report, for the third time NAREIT Gold Award for Communications & Reporting Excellence, second quarter results and significant revenue and cash NOI growth, our continued strong internal growth, provide a brief overview of our highly leased value-creation pipeline, cover our balance sheet and improving credit metrics, and I'll close out with comments on our updated guidance, importantly on our $0.03 increase in the midpoint of our FFO per share growth. Corporate responsibility, just wanted to thank Jennifer Banks, our co-CEO and General Counsel, Vince Ciruzzi, our Chief Development Officer, Ari Frankel, AVP of Sustainability & High Performance buildings and his team, and Katie O'Brien our Executive Director of Corporate Communications for their excellent work on our inaugural Corporate Responsibility Report that we issued in June. This report captures our efforts focused on important environmental, social and governance matters, and our goal of making a positive and meaningful impact on the health, safety and wellbeing of our tenants, stockholders, employees and the communities in which we live and work. This report also includes our 2025 sustainability goals for ground up development, environmental impact, reduction of the energy, carbon, water and waste and healthy building certifications. We are again very honored to have been selected for the third time as NAREIT's Gold Award winner as the #1 in the large cap category by an independent panel of judges for Communications & Reporting Excellence to the investment community. So a huge congrats to our entire team. Thank you, guys. We reported very strong second quarter results that highlight excellent and efficient execution by our team on our strategic and operational goals. Total revenues for the quarter were $325 million, up 19% over the first quarter of '17. Cash NOI for the second quarter annualized was $818 million, up $125 million or 18.1% over cash net operating income for the fourth quarter annualized. FFO per share diluted as adjusted was reported at $1.64, and up 9.3% over second quarter of 2017. We reported continued and strong internal growth that reflects the strength of our real estate and life science industry fundamentals, and our unique and differentiated business strategy. Occupancy remains very strong. It was up 50 basis points to 97.1%. Briefly on One Kendall Square, our team is well ahead of timing for capturing the mark-to-market opportunity for below market leases. To-date, our team has executed 280,000 rentable square feet of lease renewals and releasing of space for approximately 3x the leasing that we had originally anticipated by June 30. However, this accelerated leasing did result in temporary vacancy at One Kendall Square with occupancy dipping to 80% for a couple of months before rebounding to about 88% as of June 30. Rental rate growth on leasing activity continues to remain very strong. Over the past 4 years, rental rate growth on leasing activity has ranged from 20% to 28% on a GAAP basis and 10% to 14% on a cash basis. Rental rate growth for the second quarter was 24% and 12.8% on a cash basis in line with this trend and puts us on track for updated full year guidance on rental rate growth. On our early renewals, Steve touched on this briefly, but roughly 2/3 of our lease renewals and releasing of space in the first half of the year really related to early lease renewals. 1/3 of these related to expirations in '21, '22 and '23. Now that we're about halfway through 2018, we really have better visibility on the portion of early renewals, including the renewals that were executed in the second quarter and have increased our full year guidance for rental rate growth. Additionally, as we look back at value-creation leasing by our team in the first half of '18 that really highlights truly amazing execution, over 1 million rentable square feet related to new Class A properties undergoing development and redevelopment, including 594,000 with Uber in Mission Bay, 133 rentable square feet with several very high-quality venture-backed biotechs at 399 Binney Street in Cambridge, 104,000 rentable square feet with Verily, that is a subsidiary of Alphabet at 279 East Grand, 61,000 rentable square feet with a really exciting DNA synthesis company at 681 Gateway in San Francisco, 34,000 square feet with several Ag biotech entities at 5 Laboratory Drive and Research Triangle Park, and then very recently 26,000 rentable square feet with Lonza at 9900 Medical Center Drive and Shady Grove. The first half same-property NOI growth was very strong and in line with our guidance for the full year of 2018. Our second quarter same-property cash NOI growth was also solid, but also reflected the temporary vacancy at One Kendall Square that we mentioned earlier, and also reflects no cash growth benefit from our recently completed development project at 75/125 Binney Street since full cash rents commenced on April 1, 2017. Importantly, we remain on track with all the same-property performance for both the 6 and 12 months ending December 31, 2018. Peter had briefly covered our pipeline in detail, just to provide a brief overview of summary. 3.5 million square feet targeted for delivery in '18, '19 and '20. 2.6 million of that is really targeted for '18 and '19, that's 1.8 billion at completion, 84% leased that will generate very strong yields of 7.3% and 6.8% on a cash basis. And right behind that, we have about 908,000 rentable square feet undergoing marketing, while we execute on preconstruction activities to reduce the time to deliver these projects. Turning to our balance sheet. We completed the issuance of $900 million of unsecured senior notes at a weighted average rate of 4.35% and a weighted average term of 8.8 years. $450 million of the notes were related to our sustainability initiatives with proceeds allocated to fund certain eligible green development and redevelopment projects that either have or expected to receive LEED Gold or Platinum certification. In July, we also partially repaid $150 million of our outstanding construction loans. And then later this year, we anticipate repaying the remaining $200 million outstanding under our 2019 unsecured term loan. So as you look back over 2017 and including the full year of 2018, we will have refinanced over $940 million of variable rate level based debt further strengthening our balance sheet and our credit profile. We have just recently commenced an amendment process to our line of credit and our 2021 term loan, which is really focused primarily on extending the maturity date to 2024 with an opportunity to slightly improve pricing and increase the overall capacity under our line of credit. We expect to close this amendment in the third quarter and will provide more details shortly after closing. We also remain on track to achieve our key credit metric goals and remain committed to continued improvement in our credit metrics each year, including fourth quarter annualized net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA as our goal for 2019 and 2020 is to move closer to 5 times. Unhedged variable rate debt is targeted to be less than 5% at the end of this year, and we are reviewing our options to cover our remaining equity capital for 2018 from additional real estate sales. And additionally, we do expect to file a new aftermarket offering program at some point over the next 1 to 3 quarters. So in closing on guidance, we did update our guidance for earnings per share to a range of $2.87 to $2.93 and FFO per share as adjusted to a range of $6.57 to $6.63. This represents a $0.03 increase at the midpoint for FFO per share as adjusted, and the key drivers of the increase really is a combination, continued strength of our core operations combined with growth from our recently announced acquisitions. And I should point out that this $0.03 increase follows the $0.02 increase in our midpoint from last quarter. We also increased the midpoint of our guidance for occupancy up 20 basis points to a range of 97.1% to 97.7%, and rental rate growth of 400 basis points and 200 basis points on a GAAP and cash basis for each range. So our range for GAAP and cash rental growth is now 17% to 20% and 9.5% to 12.5%, respectively. And just as a reminder everybody, we have a large pool of same-property assets that drive growth in net operating income. $0.01 in bottom line FFO per share growth only increases same-property NOI growth by about 15 basis points. So as a result of the improvement in our outlook for occupancy and rental rate growth on leasing activity, it is really reflected in the strength of our range of guidance for a strong same-property growth for 2018. So with that, I'll close it out and turn it back over to Joel Marcus.