John Kilroy
Analyst · BMO Capital Markets
Thanks, Tyler. Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining us. I'll begin today with a review of market conditions and follow with details of our recent leasing performance. Then I'll bring you up-to-date on our development and capital recycling activities. Conditions in our West Coast real estate markets remain very strong across a wide variety of industries. From Seattle to San Diego, the tight supply of available space, combined with significant demand for high-quality work environments, continued to drive rents. And Class A vacancy rates remain at frictional levels in all of our key markets. Technology continues to be a key driver. As I've said before, I believe we are still in the early innings of this new digital era. Advanced computing technologies, turbocharged by artificial intelligence, continued to influence health care, finance, retail and many other service industries that had proven difficult to disrupt in the past. Another key driver of demand has been life science. U.S. spending on health care exceeded $3.5 trillion in 2018, more than 18% of U.S. GDP. That spending represents a huge opportunity for life science enterprises, and it's driving new investment, new businesses and new collaborations. It is boosting demand and shrinking supply in traditional life science clusters, from coastal San Diego to Seattle, and we believe this growth story is still in the early stages. In addition, many of the majors we look to, to gauge the strength of the economic activity, remain healthy. West Coast job growth continues to surpass the rest of the nation. VC funding is at all-time highs. U.S. health care venture fundraising reached a record $21 billion in 2018. Big tech continues to buy little tech, which improves overall credit quality. And the IPO market is providing strong liquidity. On the ground, we're increasingly seeing a trend that the intersection of technology and life science is creating significant competition for office space in the same buildings across many of our markets. In San Francisco, we signed a lease with Dropbox, as you recall, for the Exchange, but we had both tech and life science users competing for the project. You may also recall last year at our 360 Third Street project, a life science company established 136,000 square-foot presence in what was a traditional office building. In San Diego, at our 9455 Towne Center Drive development project, we have been in discussions with both tech and life science companies for all of the project, and now we're seeing it at Kilroy Oyster Point. With the scarcity of new large, state-of-the-art, highly amenitized work environments, we find ourselves negotiating more and more frequently with both tech and life science companies that are in competition for the same space, and we expect this trend to continue. These conditions lay the groundwork for a terrific second quarter and first half leasing performance at KRC. We signed more than 2 million square feet of space in the first 7 months of the year, putting us firmly on track to another year of record performance. And that includes about 975,000 square feet in our development program, which scored more successes as Apple leased our entire project at 333 Dexter in Seattle and Cytokinetics leased more than 35% of the first phase of Kilroy Oyster Point, just 4 months after commencing construction. In our stabilized portfolio during the second quarter, we signed just under 900,000 square feet of new and renewing leases at cash rents that were up 41% and GAAP rents that were up net 69% from prior levels. Among the highlights, San Francisco tenants, WPP and Sony, both expanded their footprints in the city, signing up for 234,000 square feet between them at cash rents that were up 75% on a GAAP basis and -- excuse me, 75% on a cash basis and GAAP rents were up over 109%. WPP expanded its existing footprint by 70%, while Sony established a new presence in the city. In San Diego, two existing tenants expanded their space in our Del Mar portfolio by more than 90,000 square feet in the aggregate, with cash rents that increased about 12% and GAAP rents that increased 31% on a weighted average basis. We ended the second quarter with our stabilized portfolio 97.2% leased. We estimate that in-place rents across our stabilized portfolio at the end of the quarter remained more than 20% below market, the highest level in company history. Now let's talk about the progress across our in-process development program. Starting in Seattle, we signed a long-term lease with Apple in June for all 635,000 square feet at our 333 Dexter project in South Lake Union. 333 Dexter is our first ground-up development project in Seattle and its design, scale and location, one of the city's most sought-after submarkets, attracted attention from a variety of organizations. It's a great example of how our development program creates substantial value. Our cost basis in this brand-new state-of-the-art project is roughly 65% of where our older product has recently traded. And we've now locked in an attractive revenue stream with a high-quality tenant for the long term. In San Francisco, during the second quarter, we added 100 Hooper, a 400,000 square-foot project, to our stabilized portfolio. We also delivered the first half of the Exchange on 16th, a 750,000 square-foot project. In Del Mar, the retail portion of our One Paseo mixed-use project is now 94% leased and 72% occupied. The office portion of the project, which delivers in mid-2021 is 68% leased and 81% committed. Rents for both retail and office are setting records for the Del Mar submarket and for San Diego County. The project's residential units will begin delivering towards the end of the summer, and Phase 1 is already approximately 20% committed. Our success at One Paseo underscores the compelling attraction of the live, work and play environment we have created. In Hollywood, as previously announced, the office space at our on Vine mixed-use project is fully leased to Netflix. Both office and residential components of the project remain on schedule for a 2020 completion. Moving to life science. We have two projects underway, totaling 820,000 square feet. That's Phase 1 of Kilroy Oyster Point in South San Francisco and 9455 Towne Center Drive in the University Town Center submarket of San Diego. And I'm happy to report that we are in active lease negotiations for the entirety of the square footage. And just yesterday, we announced that Cytokinetics signed a 12-year lease for 235,000 square feet at Kilroy Oyster Point, taking more than 35% of Phase 1. In the aggregate, our $2.2 billion of projects under construction is 2/3 leased, excluding resi and retail. Upon stabilization, the 5 projects will generate an estimated cash NOI of approximately $140 million, roughly 80% from office in life science and 20% from residential. Before turning to the development pipeline, I'd like to recap our development track record in this cycle. Since 2013, we have delivered over $2 billion of projects at cost, 90% of which was office and 10% residential with a cash return of roughly 7.7%, generating more than $165 million of stabilized NOI. On the leasing front, 3/4 of the projects were started spec and 95% were leased prior to completion. Obviously, we're pleased with this performance. Now moving to the development pipeline. On July 18, we received unanimous approval from the San Francisco Planning Commission for our Flower Mart project. The next and final step is for the Board of Supervisors to approve the project's development agreement this fall. On the acquisition front, we continue to evaluate opportunities that could add immediate cash flow and other opportunities that would replenish our development pipeline. While we had not been large-scale buyers of operating properties in the past two years, we are seeing a few select properties in our key markets that could offer growing yields and other attractive metrics, including below-market risks and meaningful discounts to replacement cost. In our capital recycling program, we completed the disposition of a small property located along the 101 Corridor in Westlake Village for $18 million and have a second asset currently in the market. Together -- Westlake together with the Calabasas sale earlier this year means we've now exited the 101 Corridor completely. We now believe that other asset dispositions we are evaluating are likely to happen next year. With the new timing, we expect our total dispositions in 2019 to be about $150 million. I'll wrap up my comments with five key takeaways. Market conditions are the best we've seen in some time, and we are capitalizing on this across the portfolio, driving rents and increasing value. While we continue to believe development is the best way to create value and we believe 333 Dexter is another good example of that, we are underwriting acquisitions of existing assets with favorable valuation metrics. More to come on that. We remain disciplined in evaluating new development starts, replenishing our pipeline and pursuing other strategic opportunities. We continue to place balance sheet strength and financial flexibility at the core of our business strategy, and we have a highly experienced and talented management team up and down the West Coast that is well positioned to continue to create significant value for our shareholders. That completes my remarks. Now I'll turn it over to Tyler for a review of the financial results. Thank you, Tyler.