Steve Smith
Analyst · Cowen. Please go ahead with your questions
Thanks, Paul. I will be reviewing our overall new and expansion sales activities during the third quarter, and then I discuss in more detail our vertical and geographic results. Our Q3 new and expansion sales totaled $11.2 million in annualized GAAP rent comprised of 60,000 net rentable square feet at an average GAAP rate of $187 per square foot. Regarding the composition of our new and expansion leasing our deployment size we have added incremental disclosures in the Q3 earnings supplemental to give you more insight into the performance of both the core retail co-location leasing as well as larger leases. We're looking at new and expansion leases signed of 5,000 square feet or less, total annualized GAAP rent was $9.1 million in Q3, a company record for this category and an increase of 60% compared to the trailing 12-month average. This category represents our core leasing activity which tends to be more consistent from quarter-to-quarter. The larger wholesale deals which we opportunistically pursue tend to be signed in volumes which vary more greatly from quarter-to-quarter. The detailed disclosure around leasing by deployment size can be seen in the third quarter earnings supplemental on Page 15. Transaction count for the quarter was 162 leases, 9% ahead of the trailing 12-months average. Q3 new and expansion signings were again weighted towards our core retail co-location business, with 148 leases executed at less than 1,000 square feet each. We also saw consistent pace of leasing amongst mid-sized customer requirements in Q3 when compared to Q2 with 12 new and expansion leases signed are between 1,000 and 5,000 square feet and two leases in excess of 5,000 square feet each. Our overarching strategy remains intact as we continue our efforts to attract customers that value high performance, low latency solutions, which can contribute to and benefit from our diverse communities of interest across our data center platform. To that end, our targeted efforts to diversify and expand our customer base have been bearing fruit, with nearly 80% of our new logos in Q3 distributed across our four largest markets. As it relates to our vertical diversification, 66% of our new logos were in enterprise vertical. Included within this group of new enterprise customers was a large international financial institution, a leading national healthcare organization, and a leading international news agency. The other customer churn we added 10 net new logos in Q3 and 54 net new logos year-to-date. Beyond our new and expansion leasing, our renewal activity in Q3 was also solid as renewals totaled approximately 76,700 square feet at an annualized GAAP rate of $142 per square foot. Our renewal pricing reflects mark-to-market growth of 4% on a cash basis and 6.8% on a GAAP basis. Year-to-date our cash rent growth is 4.2% slightly ahead of mid-point of our guidance. Churn in the quarter was 2.2% which included 160 basis points of churn related to an expected customer move-out of VA1 where the customer's application had reached end of life. This customer's lease was set to expire in January of 2017 and we mutually agreed to accelerate that expiration to accommodate the customer's needs. We are also able to retain favorable economics associated with the initial lease while freeing out needed space at VA1 given demand in that market. Since then, we already have backfilled approximately 30% of vacated space and believe we will be able to release remaining space in a timely and profitable manner. Excluding those move-out churn would have been 0.6%. Regarding our vertical mix during Q3 network and cloud customers signed 90 new and expansion leases representing 56% of our total transaction count. In addition to the expansion of Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute connectivity announced earlier this quarter, another leading public cloud provider deployed new data node in our Boston facility. And another one of the top four public cloud providers established a new edge node in our Virginia campus enabling private, secure, low-latency, connectivity to its cloud platform. Also in Virginia, we signed an expansion for a new edge node with a leading video platform for the gaming community. Lastly, we signed an expansion with a large enterprise content management platform in the Bay area supporting its production operation. Once again, these applications reflect the best of our cloud service community, the robust number of participants, and the value of these leading cloud on our technology partners provide to the ecosystem and enterprise within our data centers. Regarding our network vertical, similar to Q2 and Q3 we saw strong performance with new and expansion leasing distributed across every market and almost every available data center. In Q3, the majority of our executive leases came from expansion of existing number of deployments which speaks to our ecosystem continuing to grow and provide opportunities for networks to deliver solutions to our enterprises, content, and cloud customers. We believe this trend reinforces the importance of network density as our non-network customers' benefit from the robust set of solutions and services available from the network community that we have built over time. Turning to our enterprise vertical, we saw strong performance in the quarter, with this vertical accounting for 44% of new and expansion leases signed. This strength was led by general enterprises and digital content including a large public utility which is relocating its existing private on-premise production data center to CoreSite's Los Angeles campus in order to gain better power efficiency, reliability, and higher densities for its refreshed infrastructure. In addition, we signed an expansion with a leading ad exchange and a new healthcare provider chose CoreSite in part to enable direct connection to IDM software at our Los Angeles campus. From a geographic perspective, our strongest markets in terms of annualized GAAP rent signed in new and expansion leases during Q3 were Los Angeles, Northern Virginia DC, and Silicon Valley collectively representing 87% of annualized GAAP rent signed and 73% of leases executed in the quarter. In Los Angeles demand was solid and we continue to see favorable pricing dynamics. Similar to last quarter, lease signings at LA2 accounted for 60% of new and expansion leases executed in Q3 in the Los Angeles market, while 87% of our annualized GAAP rent signed in Q3 was generated from this building. In terms of verticals network was our strongest in this market accounting for 36% of leases executed followed by digital content and cloud. Same way as occupancy across the LA campus was 9% at the end of Q3 up 190 basis points compared to Q2, while pre-stabilized occupancy increased to 15.6% from 3.6% last quarter. We currently have an incremental 4,700 net rentable square feet under construction at LA2 which is 100% preleased to a new enterprise customer. Turning attention to the Bay Area, it also remained strong with new and expansion leases signed in all of our buildings that have available space in this market. Stabilized occupancy across the Silicon Valley market increased 350 basis points to 95.6%. As Paul mentioned, SV7 opened in early Q4 had 62% leased. In terms of verticals, Q3 lease executions in this market were weighted towards cloud deployments followed by networks and general enterprises. In Northern Virginia DC, we continue to see very good transaction volume with 37 new and expansion leases signed across the market which is a record level in that market. Good demand among smaller requirements continued with 84% of new and expansion leases signed in this market below 1,000 square feet, with the remainder of the leases executed for mid-sized deployments. Demand was driven by enterprise customers followed by digital content and networks which continued new logo growth at the campus and reaching the overall customer community. Stabilized occupancy across the market now stands at 96.2%, a decrease of 70 basis points on a sequential basis primarily related to the customer move-out at VA1 I discussed earlier. In the New York, New Jersey market, we continue to see consistent demand for smaller requirements with all 11 leases signed in the quarter below 1,000 square feet. Leasing was driven by network customers followed by digital content and enterprise including three new enterprise logos. Stabilized occupancy across the campus increased 80 basis points sequentially to 85.2% with increases at both NY1 and NY2. Pre-stabilized occupancy at NY2 is now 44.4% compared to 27.8% last quarter. In summary, our Q3 sales performance was solid and we believe it demonstrates the strength and health of our core retail co-location business. We believe that CoreSite remains favorably positioned with our industry and that our supply and demand dynamics across our markets are ideally well balanced. We remain focused on enhancing our value to our customers, partners, and shareholders by providing network diversity, cloud density, and superior customer service in support of performance sensitive applications. With that, I will turn the call over to Jeff.