George Carter
Analyst · Capital One Securities. Please go ahead
Thank you, John. Good morning everyone and thank you for taking the time to listen to Franklin Street Properties’ fourth quarter and full year 2014 earnings call. My prepared remarks today will follow my written commentary in yesterday’s earning press release. After my comments and others from FSP executives present at this call, we will open the call for questions. As John said, for the fourth quarter of 2014, FSP's funds from operations, or FFO, totaled approximately $27.5 million or $0.27 per share. For the full year 2014, FSP's FFO totaled approximately $112.5 million or $1.12 per share, which a 4.7% increase per share over full year 2013. FSP has grown its per share FFO over 33% during the last four years. Our directly-owned real estate portfolio of 38 properties, totaling approximately 9.6 million square feet, was approximately 92.8% leased as of December 31, 2014, and our comparative same-store growth totaled approximately 2.2% for the full year 2014. During the fourth quarter of 2014, we completed the disposition of our Centennial property located in Colorado Springs, Colorado for approximately $15,500,000. Centennial is a 110,405 square foot single story flex suburban office property that has been owned by FSP or an FSP affiliate for over 14 years. It was our only property in Colorado Springs. Currently, we are considering disposition of several other of our suburban office assets that we believe are no longer core to our long-term strategy and Jeff will talk about those in a few minutes. Also, in the fourth quarter, a single asset REIT affiliate of FSP, FSP Highland Place I Corp. or Highland completed the sale of its suburban office property located in the greater Denver, Colorado area. We had an outstanding loan with Highland, this is one of our single-asset REITs totaling about $3,395,000, and which was secured by a first mortgage on that property and loan was repaid in full. We acquired no additional office properties in 2014 primarily because market pricing metrics on properties we were interested in were too elevated to conform to our underwriting criteria. However, as 2015 begins, we are actively pursuing a number of new property acquisition opportunities within our primary markets; again Jeff will give more color on this in a moment. We anticipate additional property acquisitions this year and we are also very busy trying to finalize some potential anchor tenants and leases for our anticipated 2016 development effort in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota at 801 Marquette Avenue South and again, Jeff will talk about this. As we began 2015, as John said, we are again giving full year FFO guidance for 2015. Last year 2014 was our first year of guidance ever and our guidance at this time last year was $1.8 to $1.12 about a $0.04 spread on FFO for 2014 guidance. And again I want to reiterate our guidance really completely excludes any acquisitions, dispositions, debt financing or other capital market transactions. So when you look back at 2014, you really saw in our FFO performance sort of a static run rate of our in-place property portfolio. And after a very busy 2013, we really in 2014 had no acquisitions or new development and no big dispositions. We did actually disposed of about $32 million of revenue producing assets during the course of 2014, again, very small and came in sort of three main pieces, the Centennial project Colorado Springs for $15.5 million I just talked about and Highland place loan repayment of $3.4 million I just talked about. Also really earlier in the year, another single asset REIT Galleria was sold and our $14 million loan there was repaid. So about, $32 million of revenue producing assets were disposed in 2014 and to-date we’ve only reinvested about $11 million of that and that has been redeployed primarily into some of our sponsored REIT lines of credit loans et cetera. So about $21 million is not yet been reinvested of the proceeds that we received from those dispositions or loan repayments. So, even with the relatively – or even with a just small transactional activity, we did really sort of have a static run rate and we were able to come in the range of our original guidance in 2014 when we did during 2014 was simply tightened that initial guidance range as the year went along good news from bottom to the top. As we look at 2015, and which is our second year of guidance, we are talking about $1.3 to $1.8 per $0.05 range in FFO guidance and again, just to reiterate that’s a static run rate just like 2014 was at the start. And you will notice that drop in FFO from 2014 to 2015 that drop in FFO guidance is primarily from existing vacancy that we know of and planned for and certain leasing velocity assumptions surrounding that, Janet will talk a little bit about that in a moment. It is also from disposition proceeds which I just mentioned that we did get along with payment proceeds in 2014 which are not yet reinvested. We’ve put in some assumptions for some higher interest rate costs in 2015 on our outstanding revolving line of credit and as John mentioned, as our portfolio has grown larger, we have upped G&A cost and certain IT cost and so on to handle that increased portfolio and again to position for the future. There was one thing that I wanted to make sure that the investors in markets understood is that, while 2014 was sort of non-identical in terms of transactions in a fairly static run rate scenario, we do not anticipate that in 2015. We expect more dispositions and acquisitions in 2015 and of course, there is always the possibility of capital market activity if growth opportunities we see warrant it and obviously if the capital markets were in line. We would expect in 2015 to adjust our guidance ranges when and if transactional events occur and those guidance ranges will definitely move either up or down based upon transactional activity and we will do that as soon as we get a handle on what transactions are incomplete and what effect it would have on guidance. The other point I want to mark up to understand is that our company is in a process, a continuing process of really transforming our property portfolio from a mostly – at least originally acquired stabilized suburban office asset portfolio in numerous markets to a value-add urban infill CBD office asset portfolio primarily within our five core markets of Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Minneapolis. Our move which will be on ending to complete this transformation of the portfolio to reposition our portfolio is as I mentioned before on numerous occasions is surrounding our view of the US economy’s future, which we believe is going to be quite different from half cycles. We strongly believe that the US economy is in a very long slow growth up cycle and we are still in the relatively early innings of that long slow growth up cycle. And we think it will be longer and slower than most typical real estate cycles that we’ve seen in the past and consequently, positioning our portfolio’s properties in more long lived assets that are positioned in our five core markets where we believe there are very strong long-term macro growth drivers of employment and where we believe the in-place infrastructure surrounding these assets that we are acquiring and in-place infrastructure including transportation, housing, shopping, entertainment, all the things that go into infrastructure is really a way to position for this long slow growth up cycle. And as I said, we will continue that effort in 2015 and in the coming years. With that let me turn it over to Jeff Carter, our Chief Investment Officer to talk to you about some dispositions, acquisitions and development. Jeff?