Douglas T. Linde
Analyst · ISI Group
Thanks, Owen. Good morning, everybody. I am going to try and give some color to the numerical information that Mike is going to talk about predominantly about our 2014 guidance. So I'm going to describe what's going on in the portfolio, what's going on in the markets, but most importantly, all of these things are influencing our 2014 projections and they're all embedded in the guidance for 2014. So there's going to be a lot of facts and figures that I'm going to provide you, and I promise, I'll talk as slowly as I possibly can. I'm going to start in Boston or the Boston market. Cambridge, on the other side of the river, is probably the strongest office submarket that we have in the region. It's got both the biotech and the life sciences and the technology companies all in a very concentrated area. At this quarter, we delivered our expansion building for Google at Cambridge Center, which is going to hit this quarter but ramp up next year, and we also did our first early renewal. And I talked last quarter about the fact that we don't have any availability in Cambridge, which is in fact still the case, but we do have 14, 15 and 16 renewal opportunities. So the first one was a 67,000 square foot renewal and the markup was 75% on that space. Office rents in Cambridge are in the low 60s right now, which is about a 30% increase year-over-year. So, in 2014, we're going to get a full year of benefit from 17 Cambridge Center, that's the building that we delivered earlier this year to Biogen, we'll get a full contribution from the expansion for Google and net incremental revenue growth of about $7 million. Again with 100% occupied, we have a 140,000 square feet of late-2014 lease expirations and about 210,000 square feet of 2015 lease expirations, and there are significant opportunities for roll up in both of those assets. In addition, we are working with the City of Cambridge right now on the entitlements for a new residential project in Cambridge Center, it's probably about 200 units, $100 million, plus or minus, of investment that we hope to get started, assuming we get the approval, in the early part of 2015. And we are also working on additional density on -- at Cambridge Center, through an overlay district that the city has encouraged us to pursue. Across the river, in the Back Bay, the rents in the Back Bay Towers are in the mid-$70s at the top, starting rents in the lower portion of those buildings are probably in the high-$40s which interestingly is a discount to Cambridge right now. At the Hancock Tower, we are in lease negotiations with 5 existing tenants, which totals about 225,000 square feet on relocations or renewals in the building. This quarter, we signed 115,000 square foot relocation and an extension. So to date, in Cambridge -- excuse me, at the Hancock Tower, we signed 446,000 square feet of early renewals or relocations. Now the interesting thing is that 236,000 square feet of this isn't going to impact our revenues until 2015 because there's a prime lease with Manulife and these were all subtenants that are all going direct. But the roll up on all of this income is a minimum of $15 a square foot, or about 27% on average, in-place rents in the building. Again, really good embedded growth that we're going to get, we just haven't got it yet and we're not going to get it in '14. The remainder of our urban portfolio in Boston really has pretty limited opportunities for occupancy or revenue gains in '14. At the Pru Center Complex, we released our last full floor at 111 Huntington Avenue this quarter. And you have to remember that we signed a 15-year lease for about 310,000 square feet last year with Blue Cross Blue Shield, and they are going to be moving into 101 Huntington Avenue in the second quarter of 2015. Now, we're getting this space back in 3 chunks in 2014 and the revenue loss from the rolldown -- or rollover from the existing tenants until we get to 2015 is about $10 million. So that is again embedded in our projections for 2014. At Atlantic Wharf, we're 100% leased. And we will be at a full run rate in 2014. At 100 Federal Street, we're getting back 1 52,000 square foot floor in January and we do experience -- we do expect to have some downtime on that floor in 2014. Average rents in the downtown market are between $40, mid-$40s at the base of the building to the low-$60s at the top of the building. Our suburban Boston portfolio continues to be very active. Rents in Waltham are up slightly year-over-year and our deals with Bay Colony are all generally starting in the mid-$30s today. During the third quarter, we completed 71,000 square feet of leasing, bringing our total to about 300,000 square feet during the year. At Bay Colony, we have now completed 165,000 square feet of new leases and we are in negotiations with 2 more large tenants that will bring the total to 275,000 square feet of incremental occupancy growth that's going to start in 2014. These include another 55,000-square-foot life science company, our fourth at Bay Colony, as well as a large multinational software developer. There is a growing pipeline of additional suburban requirements and we continue to see strong activity in the Waltham market, really stemming from an expansion of life sciences and technology, as Owen described. Moving to New York City. Our third quarter New York City activity on the in-service portfolio was really an acceleration of the strong activity that we described last quarter. Demand from high-end small service -- small financial services firms really continued. During the quarter, we completed 18 separate transactions, totaling 168,000 square feet. We did 6 more deals at 540 Madison, bringing our total in that building to 14, and we have 3 more in negotiation right now. At 510 Madison, we've completed 2 more full-floor deals, bringing the total year-to-date to 5. So 510 Madison now sits at about 80% leased, not occupied vis-à-vis the supplemental, because the leases haven't commenced yet, but 80% leased. And our expectations for both buildings 510 and 540 are to be in the 90%s by the end of 2014. The acting and the taking rents at 540 and 510 really have not changed for us over the last year, and quite frankly, nor has the overall pace of market activity at the high-end market, which we defined as tenants who were prepared to pay over $90 a square foot, and we really don’t see much in the way of changes in that in 2014. Our pricing at 540 Madison is from the mid-$70s to the low-$90s, and at 510 Madison, it's from the low-$90s to the mid-$130s. The remainder of our in-service portfolio is 99% leased in Manhattan. We will be getting 1 floor back sometime towards the middle of 2014 at 767 Fifth, the GM Building, and we'll see how attractive that space is to the market, given the building is literally 100% leased today. Our predominant user and our target tenant for all of our available space in Midtown continues to be the small hedge funds and asset managers, advisers and the other smaller entities who are involved in the financial services industry. And again, the tenant activity for this market continues to be very encouraging. When we discussed 250 West 55th Street last quarter, we said we had a number of multi-floor prospects that we were considering and negotiating with, and that we had multiple tours but we really hadn't began to respond to proposals. Well, we've now signed Letters of Intent with 2 of these tenants, are in lease negotiations on space totaling an incremental 242,000 square feet. We've currently leased 468,000 square feet, so this brings us to 710,000 square feet or 72% committed, and it leaves us with 7 full floors and 2 floors of prebuilt, many of which you, I think, have seen in your tours recently. We continue to have an active pipeline of 1- and 2-floor prospects that continue to tour the remaining space. So the translation of this activity into revenues is as follows: we will commence revenue recognition on the 468,000 square feet in mid-2014; and the contributions to 2014 NOI is only $10 million. When the 2 leases that are under negotiation get signed, they will, along with hopefully other leases that we're working on, contribute in early-2015 and we expect to stabilize the building at an overall return of just above 6% in 2016. Mike will address the offsetting capitalized interest reductions in his remarks. In DC, the budgetary issues and the continuation of sequestration still is a factor. It creates an overlay of uncertainty in the private markets, as well as the public sector. In spite of all of that, we completed 2 major leases, totaling 368,000 square feet, during the quarter in Reston, with defense contractors, that covered 75% of our 2014 and 2015 leased expirations in Reston Town Center. Rents in Reston Town Center continue to be $15 to $25 a square foot, in excess of what can be achieved in buildings on the Toll Road. Our new apartment development, The Avant, is opening at the beginning of November, and we expect to generate a stabilized return on cost of over 7.5% as it leases over the next 14 to 15 months, stabilizing by early 2015. Now just before the government shutdown last month, we were able to sign a 125,000 square-foot 10-year lease with the Army Corps, to fully lease our new development at Annapolis Junction, which is adjacent to the NSA and the Cyber Command at Fort Meade. Again, revenue is not going to be able to be recognized until the second quarter of '15 because the tenant has asked us to manage a significant additional infrastructure investment. The Montgomery office market continues to be the softest in the D.C. area and we are continuing to execute on our decision to exit our holdings in the market. As Owen described, we have a suburban office building on the market right now and we really don’t anticipate much in the way of improvements in Montgomery County in '14. The absence of incremental demand from the GSA and the District; and changes in space utilization that we've talked about before; as well as the lack, to date, of any new demand generators, but there are people talking about changes to the city that will help that, are the headwinds that the CBD is still facing. So second-generation space is still plentiful and landlords have, surprise, surprise, expanded their tenant improvement packages to encourage tenants to relocate. And guess what, tenants are going to migrate to newer, more efficient installations in the CBD. We don't have any 2014 lease exposure but we do have some law firm relocation activity that we expect to happen in '15 and '16, but Ray and our team in D.C. is out in front of this and we're working on replacing tenants as we speak. Our D.C. portfolio continues to be 96% leased. At Carnegie Center, we continue to gain both occupancy and extend leases. During the quarter, we did 13 leases for 372,000 square feet. So in 2013, we've completed 11 leases with new or expanding tenants, totaling 179,000 square feet or a 9% increase in occupancy at Carnegie Center, and we continue to be in discussions with tenants for additional expansion. And while the life science sector is really at the core of the expansion at Carnegie Center, you saw our press release last night, and we've completed a 15-year build-to-suit negotiation with NRG, which is an energy company, for 130,000 square feet that's going to get delivered in 2016. NRG is going to be expanding from about 90,000 square feet today. So for '14, we will average over 90% occupancy at Carnegie Center. The majority of our activity in San Francisco this quarter was outside the city. We did 2 lease extensions with Genentech at our Gateway project, but it involved a 50,000 square foot of reduction in their occupancy in 2014, which is embedded in our guidance. Activity in South San Francisco continues to be slow and we expect to carry this pace for a while during 2014. Activity in the Silicon Valley during the third quarter started to shift from the large requirement to the 50,000 to 80,000-square-foot tenant that seem to be out in the space, given the IPO flurry and they're starting to ramp up their hiring and look for expansion. We are in the midst of a re-skinning of our Zanker asset in order to prove the marketability of those assets to those types of companies. We've experienced extended vacancy in those buildings because they were older and so we decided to go through and do a major re-skinning, which we expect to be completed in early 2014. Given that, we're not really budgeting much in the way an income in '14, and in fact, Lockheed Martin is going to be consolidating out of a 165,000-square-foot building in December of this year, so we're going to have about 438,000 square feet of availability at Zanker. In the San Francisco CBD, the lease expiration driven transactions from the traditional financial service law firm tenants are increasing. There's an 8% availability rate in the market and there is continued expansion from technology tenants. But there's still a gap between tenant's expectations and our expectation for the right rents for renewals and for new leases in the premier buildings. Last quarter, I suggested that there was a pretty wide gap, well it's narrowing, and deals are starting to be made. In fact, while the view rents are still in the $70s to the $90s, we are actually entering a lease negotiation now with a tenant for the 2.5 floors that we have available in the mid-rise of EC4, which we were waiting on patiently for quite some time. We believe that the leases will get done in the mid $70s and that the market really is starting to improve for the financial-services-type tenants looking for their next space in the CBD. In 2014 to 2015, mark-to-market at Embarcadero Center is going to run between 15% and 25% on a lease-by-lease basis. The overall pace of activity in '13 really is in line with the activity at this time last year which was about 5 million square feet of space for the first 3 quarters. Now last year did end with a million-square-foot expansion from Salesforce, so we don't have any expectations that, that's going to happen again. But we think 2013 is going to look very similar to the overall activity in 2010 and 2011, which is about 6.5 million square feet. Activity from the tech sector, as a percentage of tenants in the market, interestingly, has actually decreased from 2/3 of the demand last year to about half of it this year. It's not that the tech activity has declined at all, in fact, there are just as many tech users in the market. But the traditional financial services, asset management companies are now conducting searches as the wave of the lease expirations that we've talked about before, between 2015 and 2017, hit the market. We are negotiating a lease for all of our available space at the 50 Hawthorne building, 55,000 square feet, with a tech user, so the tech demand is still there. And 680 Folsom, 50 Hawthorne is going to be put in service in the second quarter of '14 and is expected to generate about a 6.1% return. The construction of 535 Mission Street is on schedule, steel is up to the 14th floor and we expect to be able to deliver space to tenants in the latter half of '14, with occupancy and rent revenue recognition starting in early '15. We're encouraged by the initial inquiries in fit plans for the tenants -- for the building. Remember, the building has 13,000-square-foot floors and we anticipated that it was going to be leased to a broad range of small and medium-sized technology and legal and financial services and other kinds of tenants. Just to give you a perspective on that demand set, for the market. In 2010, 2011 and 2012, there was about 2.5 million square feet of leasing activity under 25,000 square feet, but over 5,000 square feet, in 230 transactions. That's the market for 535 Mission. And those tenants typically make leasing commitments within 12 months of their lease expiration. So if the building isn't really going to be available until the end of '14, early '15, we think that there's going to -- and we anticipate that the activity for this building really will pick up during the first half of 2014. If we average leases with starting rents in the mid-$60s, we're going to deliver this building at a low 7% NOI return. I'm going to finish my remarks just with a little color on our second-generation statistics, because, unfortunately, each quarter, the devil is in the details. In Boston, the transactions are almost exclusively in the suburbs and the gross rent went from $31.50 to $29.62, or less than a $2 difference. In New York City, there was one deal of 60,000 square feet at 601 Lex, where the rent went from $112 square foot fully escalated, the lease was signed in 2006, to about $100 a square foot. That's the downturn there. And in Princeton, the decline included 12,000 square feet and the main negative was a 1-year holdover that went to a market deal. So a surprise when the tenants had holdover, they're paying an above-market rent. In San Francisco, a majority of the deals were small transactions in Embarcadero Center. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mike.