Douglas T. Linde
Analyst · UBS
Thank you, Mort. Good morning, everybody. I wanted to start off by giving my thanks for the effort everyone made to either come down to Washington, D.C. earlier this month or listen to our presentation via webcast when we had our investor conference. We had some pretty simple objectives for that day. We wanted to showcase the depth of our regional management teams. Those are the people who are really doing all that heavy lifting on a daily basis, all the work as we call it. Although it's a lot of fun too. And to illustrate how we can both create and, as Mort suggested, protect value, particularly in the context of what has been a pretty weak macroeconomic environment. Now the corporate strategy that Mort has articulated, if it's coupled well with a strong financial strategy, we believe, supplemented by our operating platform which I -- we hope you got an appreciation of that a couple of weeks ago, really creates a very unique approach to the office building ownership and management business, and I really think makes Boston Properties a different kind of company. Our teams identify opportunities and challenges inherent in the assets that we have and maybe the assets we actually own or future developments or acquisitions. And then we try and develop the right plan and position those in the market place. And sometimes we make speculative capital investments either before we try and lease space or in anticipation of leasing space. And what we do is really management-intensive -- I mean, challenging but it's the way you make money in the real estate business. Execution is everything. It's the key to increasing your market share, and it's the key to superior financial performance. So we hope you came away with a better understanding of how we have both developed our brand and what we think is our unique approach to managing, leasing, developing and acquiring assets. So I just want to say thank you for the time and attention you gave us. We seem to, again, see a pretty good quarter from an earnings perspective from American businesses, sort of more of the same, I would say. And the one thing that obviously strikes everybody is that nonfinancial companies are holding over a trillion dollars on their balance sheets. And the percentage of cash that they're holding as a percentage of their total assets is really an unprecedented level, which obviously speaks to the confidence that the companies are having with regard to decision-making, but it also strings to the strength inherent in the tenant base that we have. This quarter, on the sort of new formation side, we again saw a pretty good venture capital, investing 29% up year-over-year. And one of the 3 big markets for venture capital investing, Silicon Valley, New York City and Boston. Those are the big 3. And interestingly enough, New York City surpassed Boston for the first time in its overall share of venture capital dollars. Largely, it was due to the fact that there was a pretty light life science investing quarter. But nonetheless, there are a whole host of technology and media-related companies that are being formed in New York City. And their long-term impact on leasing market is an important and we believe a really positive long-term trend for that market. During the second quarter, we leased about $1.2 million square feet of space, if you include our Mountain View assets. And while that absolute square footage was slightly below our sort of traditional third quarter average of about $1.4 million, we completed 86 transactions versus the average of about 74 over the last 7 years. I'm sure everyone noted that there was limited activity in New York City this quarter, and it really stems from, I think, 2 things. First is lack of availability. If you exclude Two Grand Central Tower, we're 98% leased. But it also stems from the fact that sort of speaking to speculative capital investing we decided to, earlier this year and really got underway this summer, aggressively target the bill pursuit prebuilt suite space in our buildings. So we are in the process right now of completing 7 prebuilt suites at 510 Madison Avenue, 5 at 601 Lexington, 4 at 599 and 2 at 540 Madison. And these are suites that are sort of ready for occupancy on a days notice. And the tenants that we're marketing to really want to see the finished product. And so we hope as we get towards the end of the year and these suites get completed that we're going to see a pick up in the actual leases signed. I will tell you that tenant interest in these spaces is really good. We're seeing tours on a daily basis. And we feel like the rent that we're asking are going to be pretty close to where we're actually taking deals. But they are -- these are going to be smaller deals. And again, it's based on the fact that the tenants that are really in the market making decisions are of a scale and size that's a little bit different than what our traditional portfolio tenancy is. And it's really what we're trying to marketing to you today. We do have one 40,000 square foot extension and expansion that's underway as well. So we are still doing the big ones. But quite frankly, it's really the size of what's available that's really driven our activity over the last quarter. Next year, we're going to have one big block in space at 399 Park. It's going to be available in the third quarter of next year, and we've just literally started marketing the space. We made our first proposal to a multi-floor user, actually yesterday at 2:00. And we do expect to get this space leased some time in 2012, but there's probably not going to be rent commencement until early 2013. And again, and you're going to hear this theme in my comments, we've -- we're transitioning tenants. So we're doing -- we have a lot of rollover -- and a lot of our rollover is associated with not renewals but new tenants. And when you have new tenants, you have natural downtime. And when you have natural downtime, you have revenue lapses and it affects your short-term earnings. Activity in New York City, I'd say, continues to be off the pace that it was in 2010 and even in the first quarter of '11. If you look at the number of transactions in Midtown that were accomplished over the last 4 months, sort of on a month-to-month basis, they're actually about 30% lower than they were over the last 6 years. And as opposed to the first quarter when sort of on a statistical basis if you look at those transactions, they were about 10% higher. We continue to have lots of discussions with large tenants with lease expirations in '14 and '15 for our space at 250 West 55th Street. The tenants will be moving. They will be making decisions, but the users are just feeling less pressure to make those decisions today. So it's just going to take a little bit longer, I think, for us to be reporting to you what our activity and our next lease is going to be at 250 West 55th. But we are continually talking and working on those deals. With regard to the other markets, Boston really led the way this quarter and made up 46% of the transactions we did. The highlight being the build-to-suit for Biogen, about 190,000 square feet. And we're actually having an official groundbreaking tomorrow morning or afternoon for that building. And then, we did 3 other leases between 40,000 and 50,000 square feet in suburban Boston. And all of these leases had a meaningful expansion associated with them. One of them was our first relocation to Bay Colony. We finally found a tenant that was ready to believe the dream of what we were trying to accomplish there before we actually got the work done. We've just literally started the repositioning efforts there. And we are trying to create large lots of pretty creative space at Bay Colony. And we're very optimistic that over time, the next year or so, we're going to lease up the significant vacancy there. Activity in Cambridge clearly is the market that is leading the region. I suggested that Biogen is doing a building with us. They're also doing a building with Alexandria. Pfizer has made a commitment to lease a lab building from MIT. And last week, we had our groundbreaking for the Broad's new building, their 250,000 square foot building in Cambridge. So the Cambridge market really is the hotbed of activity in Massachusetts these days. It's dominated by life sciences and technology companies. And there continues to be incremental growth. I think a lot of people thought when Genzyme was purchased by Sanofi-aventis that there was going to be a contraction. It's gone the other way. Sanofi is actually in the market right now looking for additional space. And Google, the other sort of large technology tenant, they entered the market pretty recently and is acquiring a company called ITA, which is a travel agency portal, again, is growing as well. We are still working real hard on the limited near-term rollover of the debt of John Hancock Tower. What we're actually doing is talking to tenants who have -- or the subtenants of Manulife and have lease extension or expansion proposals out in front of us for 2013 and '14 and '15. And we're probably going to do some of these deals in late '11 or 2012. Unfortunately, they're not going to hit our numbers. Why? Because we don't have the prime lease. And until the prime lease expires, we're not going to be able to achieve any contribution from an earnings perspective. But we are actually building strong contractual growth in that building as we speak. In Washington, during the quarter, we completed about 300,000 square feet. The first of the replacement tenants for the 240,000 square feet of 2012 availability at One Freedom was done. Next on to National is 72,000 square feet. We're negotiating leases with the second tenant, which we hope to close out in the next couple of weeks for 56,000 square feet. And we have another lease for a health club for the below-grade space. So everything gets done. We've leased 83% of the rollover for 2012 at One Freedom square. And there's been a pretty significant uptick in rents on the office side of that thing, so those transactions. We're in negotiation with tenants for all of the remaining space at One and Two Reston Overlook. Again, there's going to be downtime on those spaces, and Mike will talk about what the impact of that is going to be on our 2012 earnings. The activity from these tenants is not from the defense-oriented companies, in fact, but from telecommunications, digital marketing, construction and engineering industries. And they continue to prosper and importantly, they're prepared to pay a premium over the Toll Road commodity space to be in Reston Town Center. We have one other exposure in Reston, which is Patriots Park. And we're going to hear a lot about Patriots Park over the next 10 or 15 minutes. The DIA that's taking 523,000 square feet and there's one other building, which is currently leased by Lockheed Martin, and it's going to expire in May 2012. At the moment, we are in discussions with other governments and users about that space, but the budget issues surrounding the deficit-reduction committee seems to be delaying things pretty significantly. Again, the redevelopment of the buildings at One and Two Patriot Place and the possible downtime of the third building is going to impact our short-term results. You're going to hear me say that a bunch of times this morning. If we're able to complete all of the leases under negotiation, we will have released 92% of our 11 to 13 1 million square feet of rollover in Reston Town Center and 74% of the 700,000 square foot that we have rolling over in Patriot Park, and we have really good prospects for the remaining piece of that. We also completed about 110,000 square feet of renewals down on Springfield, which is dominated by GSA and other government contract users. And I would say that we have seen some instances again where the budgetary issues are impacting third-party procurements. We actually saw contractors exercise some contraction rights in their leases in the last quarter. In Springfield, on the other hand, up at 4 Mead, we've seen 2 immediate solicitations: one by a GSA tenant and one by a contractor, up at Annapolis Junction. So it's sort of hit or miss with what's going on vis-a-vis the budget in the GSA leasing requirements, particularly when it comes to defense-oriented users. In the Bay Area, the robust level of activity that's been prevalent on the Peninsula and in the Valley, it just continues. Combined opposite R&D absorption is now $7.7 million square feet to the third quarter. It's the highest it's been since 2000 and 2001. During the last quarter, Google signed another 700,000 square feet of space. Avaya took 250,000 square feet. Polycom took 200,000 square feet. Amtel took 198,000 square feet. Sanofi took 200,000 and 340,000 square feet. Apple is looking for 500,000 square feet. Sony computers committed to 450,000 square feet. YouTube committed to 100,000 square feet. The list is pretty extensive. And where we're feeling it? It's in Mountain View. We completed another 7 deals during the quarter for 167,000 square feet. And just last week, we did another 28,000 square feet. Our asking rents have moved from 16, 20 at square foot triple net to $27 over the last 9 months. The momentum is continuing North. And we are seeing strong interest in the space that we're going to have available at our gateway projects in South San Francisco in the first quarter. Just to talk about San Francisco in particular. The city during the second quarter, just to remind you, we did 22 transactions involving 165,000 square feet. And they had 4 full deal -- 4 full floor deals at Embarcadero Center. While market activity continues be steady, this quarter we did 17 small deals totaling 75,000 square feet. And in the last week, we signed 5 other transactions ranging from 1 floor to 5 floors, totaling 200,000 square feet, including more than 140,000 square feet, which covers the upcoming availability at EC 4 that we've been talking about for the last 1.5 years. Other than one cloud computing company, so there is a technology company that's going into EC 4, these 2 transactions involve the tenant in the financial services and legal industry. And very much the bread-and-butter types of companies that have always been in Embarcadero Center and have -- that's been a flight to quality and a flight to the better buildings again, as Mort described. Now, not to be a broken record, there's going to be a pause in our revenue stream in 2012 as we transition between these tenants that are currently there, and you're going to see a significant roll down as well, which we've been talking about in our second generation leasing stats in '12 and '13 because in San Francisco, the stays at EC 4 was currently at $93 a square foot. Now we're leasing in the low $60s which is, again, the top of our market but it is a roll down. So just remember next year, when these leases actually hit our stats, you're going to see the large decline in the leasing stats and the impact from these signed leases. It's going to all run through our supplemental and shouldn't be a surprise and it shouldn't be a concern. This is what we've been talking about for the past 1.5 years. There are times when the statistics in our second-generation supplemental can be really useful for sort of getting a sense of where the market is. And there are other times when it can't be because of when the leases have been signed and when they're actually bringing their ways through our stats. Unfortunately, this quarter, there's one of those deals that's an outlier that sort of skews things in a pretty significant way, which is in Boston. We did a 220,000 square foot lease at our core and property, which is sort of north of the city and is really not one of our core markets. It was originally a building that was a build-to-suit for a tenant that actually exited the market 18 months after the lease commenced for the 10-year build-to-suite lease, and they sublet the space. The original rent was $15.50 triple net. It stepped up to $18.35 at the end of the 10-year term. And we did a deal with the subtenant for $11 triple net. Clearly the market has had weakened significantly. And in exchange for no TIs, we provide the 18 months of free rent. And that deal dramatically skewed the numbers this quarter. If you eliminate it, the Boston number moves down to just negative 11.5% on sort of a lease-to-lease. And the number for the company is a negative 9%. It also brings down the average free rent down to 48 days from the 108 in the stat. In addition, in San Francisco, we had a floor at EC 4 that came through this quarter, 20,000 square feet. It was leased at $112 a square foot, and we relet it at $54 a square foot with no TIs. So again, very much a skewing of the numbers and really the reason for the negative downward trend you saw in our supplemental statistics. On average, our lease length on all these deals was up a little bit, about 18 months. And again, transaction cost have been pretty limited. We've been doing a lot of asset deals, a lot of suburban deals, and we're down around $21, $22 a square foot. Portfolio -- the office mark-to-market is still getting stronger, about a positive $1.41 per square foot. It was nice to be able to announce today in our supplemental aspect that we actually closed our sale of Two Grand Central. I would say I was a little gun-shy, given what our experience was with the New Jersey sale or lack of sales for the last couple of quarters. But we sold the building for $400 million, $617,000 a square foot. And if you look at the supplemental information for the third quarter on an annualized basis, the income is $13.9 million. But the building, again, is only 74% leased. So you can do the math and figure out what the conical cap rate is if you want to think about things in that way. The sale of this asset was really always a possibility ever since the initial acquisition. To be truthful, and I think a lot of you acknowledged this and commented to us, the building has a very different market position and leasing profile than the other portions of our New York City portfolio. And was distinct enough from that portfolio, that we just came to the conclusion that there was very little synergy to owning the building. And so we sold it when the time was right. With the sale and our recent refinancing, we sit on a pretty sizable cash balance. And clearly, it again is somewhat diluted to short-term results. We continue to spend lots of time chasing and underwriting assets. But again, our views on the operating fundamentals and the reality of what it actually takes to lease a vacant space today or covering the initial rollover don't seem to express themselves very well in the valuations that other people are paying. And so we just haven't been able to win deals. But we're going to continue to try, and we're going to continue to try and get our money put to work. Mike is going to go through our results and our 2012 guidance. During 2011, as I -- and I hope you got the sense of, we've done a lot of leasing to cover our major rollover in Boston and in Reston and in San Francisco. But again, it involves replacement tenants, not renewals. And there's a natural downtime between leases and given the makeup of our portfolio and the fact that we have some pretty large lease rollovers, it impacts 2012. Nonetheless, if you watched out the income we received from Patriot Place in 2011, which came from the hold over of Lockheed Martin, as their subtenant NGA moved down to Springfield to the Proving Ground, and that building is out of service substantially in 2012, that 700,000 square foot complex. If you look at the large change in our FASB 141 noncash item and the dilution from our sale of Two Grand Central, and you contrast that with the increased contribution from our development properties, again netting out the cessation of the corresponding capitalized interest, it really ameliorates the impact of all of these tenant transitions based upon the downtime. And it actually results in an increased year-over-year of our bottom line FFO. And I'm going to let Mike go through the details of that now. Thanks.