James M. Taylor
Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities
Thanks, Don, and good morning, everyone. As Don just covered the quarter's key financial operational results, let me pause and deeply highlight again that this quarter's bottom line FFO per share at $1.23 not only matched last quarter's record, which was up -- and is up 6% year-over-year, importantly, this bottom line growth was achieved with stable occupancy while we continue to invest in future growth. A year ago at our Investor Day at Assembly, we laid out for you a pipeline of $520 million approximately of value creation activity, that we either have delivered or will be delivering over the next 12 months, importantly, on time and on budget. And again, through this period of significant investment in future growth, we continue to deliver bottom line growth that's impressive for our sector. Our margins have remained stable as well as our G&A. That disciplined growth and consistency is truly unmatched, all while we achieved the key operational and development milestones that Don just highlighted. Before turning to our outlook for the balance of this year and next, let's look at our balance sheet as well as our acquisition and disposition pipeline. During the quarter, we raised $50 million under our ATM at an average price of $124.71. We raised an additional $10 million from our sale of Pleasant Shops, our asset owned in the JV with ING Clarion, which sale we highlighted on last quarter's conference call. We ended the quarter with approximately $24 million in cash and only $11 million drawn under our $600 million revolver. From a leverage perspective, our debt EBITDA remains low at 5.3x and our fixed charge coverage strong at 3.8x. We still, importantly, have less than 1% of our debt floating and the stated interest rate on our debt maturing over the next 2 years is high at over 6.5%. Given how favorable long-term rates are today, we see this as an opportunity to repay some of this nearer-term maturity and significantly term out our debt at opportunistic rates. Stay tuned, but expect that we will capitalize on this environment in the very near term. From an acquisition perspective, we are scheduled to close, later this quarter, on the acquisition of a 375,000 square foot shopping center in Mountain View, California. This infill center, which is anchored by Kohl's, Trader Joe's and WalMart, is adjacent to Caltrain on approximately 33 acres in a very vibrant area of Silicon Valley. The average demos and density put this asset in the top quartile of our portfolio. The near-term opportunity here includes rolling right to market and repositioning and retaining some of the shop and smaller cog space, while the longer term opportunity includes adding additional density to the site, which has been owned privately since it was built. We negotiated this acquisition on an off-market basis for approximately $60 million at a current implied cap rate in the mid-5 range. The acquisition will be funded through the assumption of approximately $20 million of debt and the balance in cash and operating in partnership units. Importantly, like the Metrovation portfolio we acquired earlier this year, this Mountain View acquisition is a testament to the compelling liquidity and tax planning alternatives we provide to private owners of generational real estate. Last quarter, Don mentioned the $200 million shopping center that we have tied up. We're still working through diligence and structuring issues and at this point, the probability of closing is about 50/50. Like Mountain View, it is being negotiated on an off-market basis. Beyond that, we continue to evaluate a number of opportunities primarily located in our existing markets. As most of you have heard, pricing remains extremely robust. To that end, we have received first-round indications on the potential sale of our Houston Street asset in San Antonio, which we are in the process of evaluating. Expect more on this early next year. Now turning to outlook. We increased our 2014 guidance from a range of $4.90 to $4.94 to a range of $4.92 to $4.94. This increase is in part due to less downtime on rollover in the third quarter on some larger spaces. Importantly, we've also included approximately $0.02 of transaction costs associated with the Mountain View acquisition in this range. However, we have not factored in any debt prepayment or interest costs associated with any early repayment of debt, as the timing of that has not been determined. For 2015, we've provided an initial guidance range of $5.26 to $5.33 per share, or 7.5% growth at the midpoint. Again, stop and consider this type of growth that we're delivering or expect to deliver, as we're also investing in a significant pipeline of value creation. As usual, much of our growth will be -- will come from our same-store portfolio, which we again expect to grow in the mid-3% to 4% range, including redevelopments, on an occupancy neutral basis. We have factored the impact of the Mountain View acquisition in our guidance range, which we expect a lot of [indiscernible] . And from a G&A perspective, we expect to be slightly up to a range of $31 million to $32 million for the year. As for the sale of Houston Street and its impact, expect us to provide more of an update next quarter. Now with respect to the development pipeline that we're delivering and in order to help you better model 2015, I'd like to provide some perspective on the openings of Phase I of [indiscernible], Assembly and Pike & Rose and how it will impact us during the year. Let's start in Rockville, Maryland, at Pike & Rose where we delivered PerSei, the 174-unit residential building in the third quarter of this year. The building represents approximately $40 million as a first stage total investment, and is above 75% leased and approximately 6% occupied. We expect this building to stabilize during the first half of 2015. The 140,000 square feet of retail in the PerSei has started delivering late -- in late September of this year, with the opening of Del Frisco's Grille and the iPic movie theater which opened this week. For those of you who haven't been to iPic, please come, I'll take you to see a movie. It's great. We expect the retail to be completely open by the middle of 2015. Pallas, the 319-unit luxury high-rise with Strathmore retail will open in mid-2015 and is expected to lease up over 18 months. This building represents approximately $110 million of our Phase I investment. On the office side, the 80,000 square feet that we're delivering is currently 50% leased to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, as previously announced. We feel good about the remainder of that space and expect to be fully leased by late 2015. Moving north to Assembly Row, we're over 95% leased on the retail, with 43 of the 59 retailers currently open, and expect the remaining retailers to open by early 2015. Based on these timing elements, we expect to realize a little under half of the fully stabilized POI during 2015 for the first phases of Pike & Rose and Assembly. In addition, as discussed in previous quarters, we also expect to continue to invest significant marketing dollars as we open these important projects and deliver this value. We are very excited by the important progress at both Pike & Rose and Assembly, projects that will provide significant opportunities for value creation and would set us well on our path to double our NOI in 10 years as we set forth at our Investor Day at Assembly last year. To that end, we plan to host an Investor Day at Pike & Rose in early April next year. So keep your eyes out for a save-the-date in the next few weeks. Before I conclude my remarks let me say that we're very excited that Brittany Schmelz has joined us to fill the very large shoes left behind by Kristina. We greatly appreciate all the contributions Kristina made, and wish her well in her new role at Intelsat. Brittany, who played point guard at college and has a Master's in urban planning, has gotten off to a great start. She looks like she may be a keeper. With that, we look forward to seeing many of you next week at NAREIT. And Operator, I'd like to now turn the call over for questions.