Greetings, and welcome to the Piedmont Office Realty Trust Second Quarter 2015 Earnings Call. At this time all the participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Robert Bowers, CFO for Piedmont Office Realty Trust. Thank you sir, you may now begin.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to Piedmont's second quarter 2015 conference call. Last night, we filed our earnings release and a Form 8-K, which includes our unaudited supplemental information. Both are available on our website piedmontreit.com, under the Investor Relations section. On today's call, the company's prepared remarks and answers to your questions will contain forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements address matters, which are subject to risk and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those we discuss today. Examples of forward-looking statements include those related to Piedmont Office Realty Trust's future revenues, operating income, and financial guidance, as well as future leasing and investment activity. You should not place any undue reliance on any of these forward-looking statements, and these statements speak only as of the date they are made. We encourage all of our listeners to review the more detailed discussion related to risks associated with forward-looking statements contained in the company's filings with the SEC. In addition, during this call, we'll refer to non-GAAP financial measures such as FFO, Core FFO, AFFO, and same-store NOI. The definitions and reconciliations of our non-GAAP measures are contained in the Supplemental Financial Information available on the company's website. I'll review the three month and year-to-date financial results after Don Miller, our Chief Executive Officer, discusses some of this quarter's operational highlights. In addition, we're also joined today by various members of our management team, who will participate during the question-and-answer portion of the call. I'll now turn the call over to Don.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today as we review our second quarter financial and operational results. We're pleased we a lot of activity to cover on this call today, so I’ll jump right in. First of all, our leasing activity across most of the portfolio during the second quarter was strong. We completed leases totaling approximately 572,000 square feet during the quarter with over half of that or 325,000 square related to new tenant leases and we achieved a positive roll up in both our cash and accrual based rents. The largest new lease for the quarter was 108,000 square foot, 13 year anchor lease with Continental Casualty Company at 500 TownPark in Lake Mary, Florida. With the signing of this lease we will proceed with the development of 500 TownPark on a portion of the developable land that we purchased late last year. Other large noteworthy leases this quarter included AT&T; Illinois completed an approximately 78,000 square foot, 12 year lease renewal through 2029 at AON Center in Downtown Chicago. Norris McLaghlin & Marcus signed an approximately 62,000 square foot, 13 year new lease at 400 Bridgewater Crossing in Bridgewater, New Jersey substantially backfilling the 76,000 square feet of space that is expiring in 2016. Coworker [ph] signed a 40,000 foot, 17 year new lease through 2033 at 60 Broad Street in New York. In Washington DC we completed a 38,000 square foot 10 year renewal with the International Republican Institute and a 19,000 square foot, 10 plus year new lease with the Economic Policy Institute both at our 1225 Eye Street building, and then also in the Washington Nixon & Vanderhye renewed for approximately 47,000 square feet for 10 plus years at Arlington Gateway. These are just a few of the more significant transactions…

Thanks Don. While I will discuss some of the highlights from our financial results for the quarter, I again encourage you to please review the earnings release and supplemental financial information, which were filed last night for more complete details. In general, I believe our reported operating results for the quarter are largely in line with expectations. The major transactional events discussed today will primarily impact future reporting periods. For the second quarter of 2015, we reported FFO and core FFO of approximately $60 million or $0.39 per diluted share, an increase of $0.02 per share over the results for the same period last year. The commencement of several significant leases as well as the burn down of certain operating expense abatements over the last 12 months were the main drivers of the increase. AFFO for the second quarter of 2015 was $0.30 per diluted share and reflects the items I just mentioned, as well as the decreased non-incremental capital expenditures and the effects of straight-line rent adjustments as a result of the completion of certain large tenant build outs and the expiration of rental abatement periods during the second quarter since last year. As Don mentioned, our total lease percentage was approximately 89% as of June 30, that's up 100 basis points compared to year-end and up to 200 basis points compared to the second quarter of 2014. And our weighted average remaining lease term was 7.1 years as of quarter end. As has been the trend the last several quarters’ property NOI and same-store NOI improved, both with an 11% increase over the second quarter of last year, reflecting the occupancy gains and the continued burn down of abatements. Our same-store forecast for the year for the current in-service portfolio was north of 10%. And when reflecting the…

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Dave Rodgers from Baird.

Hey good morning guys. Don maybe dive a little bit deeper on some of the DC vacancy, I think on the last call you said that the velocity there picking up, I saw that you did some deals in the quarter, but maybe talk about the remaining vacancies and what you are seeing in terms of demand and economic?

Okay, Dave, glad to. I’ll start and Bob Wiberg may want to jump in. I think we are seeing very solid improvement in activity in DC as we speak. In fact I think every quarter we’re seeing a little bit more getting done there. We’ve had some good activity on some of the vacancies that we've got going on in the market right now and we would anticipate a pretty steady stream of announcements over the next two quarters for occupancy pick up in the market. Probably the highest level piece of data that is encouraging to us at this point is, as you remember we’ve been pretty bearish on that market for some time now, is the 12 month job growth number of 68,000 that we reported in the last few days, I think was far in excess of what people were expecting, and the best news within that 68,000 job growth number was the fact that a big percentage of those jobs were in professional services, which tends to be in in the DC area lease government contractor. So I think all of that bodes well for the future for future activity in DC, but let me turn it over to Bob for a second and see what color commentary he’d like to add. A –Robert Wiberg : Sure, I think I’d just say that the East Dan market has been very active. Our other markets are increasing activity certainly as well, particularly Arlington and interestingly the 250 East Street building has seen a lot more government procurement activity. They really backed up a lot of their requirements over the past several years, so there are a lot of pending expiration and we have considerably more activity there than we have had previously, particularly with the government entities.

Great. That’s helpful. And maybe a multi-part follow-up if I could, but I guess what I’m trying to figure out is kind of how you feel about acquisitions versus the share repurchase today, how you’re thinking about allocating the capital between those two choices if you think you’ll split it, if there is enough acquisition activity out there that you can go that route or if your appetite is really around the share buyback continuing?

Dave, great question. That’s the $64,000 question for us this quarter; obviously we are putting a lot of thought into where we’re heading with that. I think in a perfect world, we’d like to buy some assets and be able to redeploy those assets into large strategic markets. On having said that if our share price stays low we’ll have to seriously consider buying some shares back, so I think all options are still on the table. In a perfect world, I think we’d have some of both maybe, but at this point it’s really a little too early to tell and the good news is that we’re 90 days away from having to make any decisions probably because the closing of the deal probably doesn't happen until sometime in the month of October, likely late October, rather than early October, so we’ve got some time to noodle on it and we’re working hard at making sure that we have our [indiscernible] in terms of how we place that money. Let me step back, I think we probably ran into a bus throughout the day because Boston Properties is doing their call at the same time, we are, so we don't have a lot of question activity. So Dave, what I may do is also try to address a question I think that most, was on a lot of people's minds relative to the difference between gross and net sales proceeds on AON, so everybody can get clarity on that as well. We reported a face number of 712 gross sales price, which obviously is accurate. Of course the deal hasn’t closed yet, so we want to be respectful to the buyer in terms of how much we disclose. But the difference between the 712 and the roughly 640 of…

[Operator Instructions] We appear to have no further questions. I will turn the call back over to Mr. Miller for closing comment.

Well this will be a good lesson for us, we’ll make sure we don’t overlap with BXP and our quarterly call going forward, but obviously I’m sure there is going to be a lot of questions from people related to the sale of AON and our use of proceeds. I’m sure some of you will follow-up and we’ll try to give some color commentary to the extent we can around those decisions going forward. So thank you for your time and interest and we look forward to talking to everyone. Take care. Bye bye.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.