Victor Coleman
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets
Thanks, Kay. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter call. We had a very strong third quarter. On the leasing front, we signed over 460,000 square feet of new and renewal deals at 32% cash and 46% GAAP rent spreads. That brings our year-to-date leasing activity to approximately 1.5 million square feet at 41% cash and 60% GAAP rent spreads. Fundamentals across our markets remain strong, if not exceptional. While I'll touch on each market in a minute, it's worth noting upfront that our demand pipeline stands at 1.6 million square feet. That's elevated, in fact, from our last call and driven by increased demand for availabilities in our Silicon Valley assets. In addition to successfully executing our inaugural public bond offering, which Mark will speak on in a moment, in the third quarter, we've moved forward on several dispositions of non-strategic assets. In September, we put our 65% joint venture interest in Pinnacle I and II under contract to sell for a combined sales price of $350 million. Several factors led us to conclude our capital could be put to better use, including a joint venture partnership that had run its course, continued softness within the Burbank marketplace and significant near-term roll of two of the building's largest tenants. We expect the Pinnacle transaction to close in mid-November. Regarding dispositions, we're also exploring the sale of two of our Palo Alto assets, Embarcadero Center and 2180 Sand Hill Road, which are outside the sought-after Stanford Research Park, where the remainder of our Palo Alto holdings are concentrated. And should pricing prove attractive, these dispositions will also further our efforts to rebalance our portfolio in terms of ADR generated across our core markets. Now our markets. Let's start again in this quarter in Silicon Valley. Bottom line, demand for high-quality tenants remains healthy. Silicon Valley had 115,000 square feet of net absorption in the quarter and 1.6 million square feet of gross absorption. Vacancy did increase 60 basis points to 10.3% in the quarter, and rents were essentially flat at $57 per square foot. While this could be attributed in part to new deliveries and sublease availabilities, there's good activity on both. The 5.9 million square feet under construction in Silicon Valley is 70% pre-leased. We're also seeing significant absorption of large blocks of subleased space, which declined about 4% in the quarter. Since our last call, Amazon subleased 177,000 square feet from Ericsson at Santa Clara Square, WeWork's subleased 450,000 square feet at the Village at San Antonio Station in Mountain View and MapR took 80,000 square feet of Palo Alto Networks' Santa Clara sublease. Downtown and North San Jose have quickly become a magnet for major tech companies. And in addition to Apple's up to 4.2 million square foot campus and Google's bulk purchase of 16 properties for an urban transit-oriented village, Microsoft announced plans to build at least 380,000 square feet on a large site they recently purchased in those markets. We expect that over time, this type of owner-user acquisitions and development will displace existing and draw in smaller new tenants, which is ideal for our current assets in our portfolio. Small-deal volume has remained robust. Over 60% of Silicon Valley's deals this quarter were below 30,000 square feet. Our Techmart asset in Santa Clara is a good example of our ability to maintain leasing momentum despite larger block availability. In Q3, Techmart's leasing percentage increased nearly 500 basis points. Each of these deals averaged 600, 700 square feet. In fact, since acquiring the property and making select capital improvements, we've increased Techmart's leasing percentage by over 1,000 basis points, even while 54% of the square footage had rolled. While working diligently to position our San Jose assets to capture demand immediately and the market - as the market tightens, we completed our significant repositioning of Gateway about a year ago. Interior and exterior improvements, combined with the VSP or spec suites, which we built out as leases roll, had made that space very competitive. More than 66% of the square footage at Gateway has rolled since mid-2015, yet we still had 230 basis points of net absorption. We'd build out VSP spaces at our remaining San Jose lease-up asset, Metro Plaza. After seeing increased activity at Gateway, we're now pursuing plans to reposition additional common areas at Metro Plaza. Demand is also healthy further along north of the Peninsula. Quality tenants continue to enter the marketplace. A 2.6 million square feet under construction is 75% pre-leased. The Peninsula had its third straight quarter of occupancy gains, nearly 640,000 square feet of net absorption. And like Silicon Valley, vacancy rose 20 basis points to 7% because of new supply, but asking rents still increased 550 basis points to $72 per square foot. Next week, we'll hold our grand reopening ceremony for Palo Alto Square. Improvements of that asset include modernized lobbies and conference rooms, a new fitness center and upgraded indoor-outdoor amenities and common areas. Market conditions in Palo Alto are among the best in the nation, with sub-4% vacancy and $100 per square foot rents. But 76% of Palo Alto square footage has rolled since mid-2015, and with construction at the property, either anticipated or ongoing, it's been challenging to show our leased space. Those headwinds should now subside over the coming quarters. We've already seen an elevated demand in pipeline and, in particular, growing interest from tech tenants that previously overlooked Palo Alto Square. Broadening that asset's appeal was the key component to our repositioning efforts. Our other lease-up assets along the Peninsula, Peninsula Office Park in San Mateo and Metro Center in Foster City, 333 Twin Dolphin and ShoreBreeze in Redwood Shores share a common theme. Vacancy is being comprised of more outdated and are larger, say, 20,000 to 25,000 square foot spaces. So, we needed to upgrade and, in many instances, break up the space to appeal to robust small tenants' demand in those submarkets. Collectively, at these assets, we have good activity on about 50,000 square feet of VSP suites and about approximately another 40,000 square feet in the pipeline, which should hit the market between early December and the end of February. We'll reload our VSP suites as tenants vacate and lease-up continues. In San Francisco, large tech tenants are still driving demand in an increasingly supply-constrained marketplace. Asking rents were flat for the quarter at $72 per square foot. Vacancy dropped 40 basis points to 6.3%, in line with over 340,000 square feet of net absorption. Two breaking leases were signed: Facebook for 436,000 square feet and Dropbox for 736,000 square feet. Our stabilized San Francisco portfolio is now 98.5% leased. That includes 33,000 square feet with Snap at 875 Howard, which had 110% mark-to-market on rent, and our renewal and expansion with HotelTonight at 901 Market, which had a blended 84% mark-to-market rent. We have over 300,000 square feet of expirations in 2017 and 2018 combined, which are now 58% below market. Turning to Seattle. I'm pleased to announce a terrific addition to our team, Andy Wattula. Andy joins us as Senior Vice President of the Pacific Northwest. He most recently was with Beacon Capital, where he ran sales operations, asset management, acquisitions and development. And I'm confident Andy's expertise, relationship and Seattle tenure will give us a competitive edge as we push to grow our platform in that marketplace. And I suspect you'll all have a chance to meet him. You'll equally be impressed. Seattle's fundamentals continued to improve in Q3 as tech companies flocked to the city's urban core. Vacancy in Downtown Seattle fell 20 basis points to 8.8%, along with over 430,000 square feet of net absorption. And Class A asking rates hit $44 per square foot, up nearly 1% quarter-over-quarter. The 5.3 million square feet under construction is 54% pre-leased, with more than 1 million square feet delivered thus far this year is 99% leased. In terms of our assets, Hill7 is fully leased following our 54,000 square foot deal with WeWork for the bottom two floors. Likewise, our 20,000 square foot lease with Lyft at 83 King brought that building to 100% leased. And subsequent to the quarter, we leased 25,000 square feet at 95 Jackson and 21,000 square feet at 450 Alaskan. That brings Jackson to approximately 80% leased and Alaskan Way to approximately 70% leased. So, we're seeing great activity in all of our availabilities in that marketplace. Shifting to Los Angeles. Organic growth in media and tech and the convergence of those industries continues to fuel demand for office space. West Los Angeles office conditions remained very tight. Rents increased over 3% to $60 per square foot, and we saw a second straight quarter of net absorption north of 100,000 square feet despite having vacancy being up 130 basis points to 12.2%. Rising rents, in some cases, caused tenants to consider alternative submarkets, which has impacted demand to some extent. But even so, in Q3, we quickly re-leased all 44,000 square feet of our 604 Arizona building to ZipRecruiter at a 46% mark-to-market on rents. In Hollywood, vacancy is down 190 basis points to 13.2%, and Class A rents of $54 per square foot are up 2.5% year-over-year. And year-to-date absorption - net absorption of 515,000 square feet well outpaces other Los Angeles submarkets. We're tracking nearly 1 million square feet of demand for our newest Hollywood construction project, EPIC. These are all high-quality streaming content creators, and our ability to deliver premier office space and studio access makes our portfolio uniquely qualified to meet their needs. Amazon's recent decision to take 280,000 square feet at Culver Studios highlights the importance of access to soundstages and production offices for this user type. In terms of future development pipeline, we're finalizing designs for our entitled 106,000 square foot office development at Sunset Las Palmas Studios, and we expect to break ground as early as Q2 of 2018, with delivery of that project approximately 18 months to 20 months thereafter. We're also working on master plans for entitlements for an additional 823,000 square feet of office at Sunset Gower and Sunset Las Palmas, and approvals related to these two projects and additional square footages are approximately two years out. With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Mark, who's going to walk through our third quarter financial highlights.