Owen D. Thomas
Analyst · Green Street Advisors.
So I think that the direction that you saw in the third quarter was consistent with the direction that you will see in the fourth quarter and in early 2015. I think, overall, we would anticipate that the mark-to-market on most of our assets in San Francisco and in Boston are in the sort of 20, plus or minus, percent increases. The New York stuff is lumpier. As I have described before, we some of these larger scale re-leasing transactions that we're working on, where the rents are sort of flat. We have a couple of where there's a market increase in the rent, a.k.a. the wild got-you-alls of the world. And then there are a couple that, on a mark-to-market basis, are negative. I mean we have, for example, a couple of the floors that we're taking back this quarter from one of the tenants, the tenant was paying $130 a square foot on, and then the market rent is probably $95 to $100 a square foot. So net-net, New York City is somewhat muted. And so I think, depending upon the timing of those transactions, there'll probably be more variability in the New York City leasing than there will be in the Boston or the stuff that's going on in San Francisco. And then Washington, D.C., it's really interesting. The funny thing about Washington D.C. is it's not all in the leasing spreads. The rents, net-net, are not going down. They're not going up a lot but they're not going down. So you have 2 factors. You have the fact that Washington, D.C. leases traditionally have 1.5%, 2.5%, 2.75% annual escalations. So a rent was, at one point, $35 or $36 a square footage suddenly in the mid-40s, and the rent today is probably in the low 40s. So there is, potentially, a little bit of a muted impact on that. And then, where the weakness is really translated in Washington D.C. is on the concession packages. A new transaction in Washington, D.C., for our major law firm over 100,000 square feet, you're talking in excess of $100 worth of tenant improvement money and you're probably talking about 9 to 12 months of free rent. And those 2 things don't get factored into the rental rate. And so it gets somewhat muted there.