Thomas S. Olinger
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital
Thanks, Hamid. This morning I'll cover 3 topics. First, our quarterly results; second, deployment and capital markets activity; and third, guidance for 2013. Starting with the results for the first quarter, core FFO was $0.40 a share, $0.01 ahead of our expectations. Net operating income was better than we forecasted driven primarily by higher occupancy. We'd expected occupancy to drop about 80 basis points sequentially in line with the higher lease roll that occurs at the beginning of each year. However, occupancy only declined 30 basis points from year end as leasing volume came in higher than forecast. Occupancy was 93.7% at quarter end. Q1 leasing volume was 35.8 million square feet, which was seasonally strong as Hamid mentioned. Rent change on rollover increased 2% for the quarter. Positive rent change was driven by space sizes 250,000 square feet and larger consistent with where we're seeing low vacancies and limited new supply. For the quarter, GAAP same-store NOI was up 0.3% and, on an adjusted cash basis, was up 1.8%. Cash same-store NOI should continue to outperform GAAP same-store throughout 2013 as we expect further benefits from contractual rent bumps and declines in the rent concessions. Switching gears to Private Capital. Our Private Capital revenues this quarter are up sequentially due to asset management fees from the J-REIT and Norges joint venture. Had both of these transactions occurred at the beginning of the quarter, our Private Capital revenue would have been almost 6 million higher. Following these transactions, about 80% of our Private Capital fees are now generated from perpetual or long life vehicles. Moving to our deployment activity. We had contributions and dispositions of $5.3 billion during the first quarter, with $3.3 billion in our share. The vast majority of this related to the closings of our J-REIT and Norges joint venture. We realized or monetized $247 million of development value creation in the first quarter, driven primarily by contributions to our J-REIT. As you know, our core FFO does not include any of these development gains even though we recognize real economic value from the transactions. To put the magnitude of the development realization in context, the development gains were $0.53 per share relative to our core FFO of $0.40 per share for the first quarter. Development starts were $313 million for the first quarter, with $218 million our share. We're continuing to see more development opportunities and, as expected, our land bank has proven to be a competitive advantage. We have very good visibility into our pipeline and are off to a great start this year for this early in the period. On the acquisition front, it was a light quarter. However, our pipeline is building as there are more opportunities coming to market. Now let me walk you through our uses of our net deployment proceeds. We used $2.4 billion of the proceeds to repay our senior convertible and secured debt, as well as paid down our credit facilities. We retained the remainder of the net proceeds and ended the quarter with $785 million in cash. Subsequent to quarter end, we completed the redemption of $482 million of our preferred stock. This leaves one series of preferred stock currently outstanding with a redemption value of $100 million. As a result of the significant disposition and contribution activity, we lowered our look-through leverage to 37.5%, a reduction of almost 600 basis points from year end, and we improved our net debt to EBITDA to 7.5x, down from 8.8x in the fourth quarter. And we also increased our U.S. dollar net equity to 66%, up from 58% at year end. Our long-term goal is to have this metric over 80%. It's important to point out that while we've significantly reduced our leverage, we've also been able to maintain our core FFO level of $0.40 per share on a year-over-year leases. Now for an update for 2013 guidance. For operations, we're maintaining our GAAP same-store NOI range of 1.5% to 2.5%. We continue to expect year-end occupancy to range between 94% and 95%. On the expense side, we're maintaining our net G&A guidance range of $220 million to $230 million. For capital deployment, our 2013 forecast continues to range from $1.9 billion to $2.4 billion. This includes $1.5 to $1.8 billion of development starts with our share at approximately 75%. Based on the pipeline we see today, we could be at the high end of this range. And $400 million to $600 million of building acquisitions with our share at about 35%. Turning to contributions and dispositions. We're maintaining our guidance of $7.5 billion to $10 billion for the year, with our share of the proceeds to be about 60%. With the activity completed in the first quarter, we're at about 60% of the way through our disposition and contribution guidance for the entire year. The balance of the guidance totals $2.3 billion to $4.8 billion with dispositions primarily in the U.S. and contributions to our co-investment ventures in Europe, Japan, Brazil and Mexico. We've revised our FX guidance and are now assuming the euro at 1.3 and the yen at 100 to reflect the strengthening of the U.S. dollar over the past quarter. This change has about a $0.03 per share negative impact on full year core FFO. We continue to expect 2013 core FFO to range between $1.60 and $1.70 per share. As we discussed last quarter, our core FFO guidance is significantly impacted by dilution from the timing and associated friction of redeploying the proceeds from our contributions and disposition activity. Relative to this, the average annual yield on contributions and dispositions is approximately 6.8%, while the average annual yield on our use of proceeds is approximately 4.2%. These use of proceeds consist of debt repayments, preferred redemptions and capital deployment. As a result of the redeployment timing and friction, core FFO will not be evenly distributed between the quarters for the balance of 2013. We expect second quarter core FFO to be $0.02 to $0.03 lower than the first quarter. Core FFO will increase in the back half of 2013, primarily driven by higher NOI from development stabilizations, same-store NOI growth and lower interest cost. Before I close I want to discuss 2 new disclosures in our supplemental this quarter. The first disclosure relates to our debt-to-EBITDA metric. As you know, development is a key business segment for us. However, its earnings or realized value accretion gains are not included in our core FFO or in EBITDA as I pointed out earlier. In order to correct for this misalignment, certain adjustments need to be made to our debt-to-EBITDA calculation to appropriately reflect our development business. These adjustments are detailed in our supplemental and include increasing EBITDA for stabilized NOI from the pipeline, increasing debt to fund the remaining cost to complete the pipeline and decreasing debt by the book value of the land bank. Using this methodology, our debt to EBITDA was 6.2x for the first quarter. This is the right metric to use to compare us to REITs, who do not have a meaningful development business. The second disclosure relates to G&A as a percentage of AUM. We use this metric internally to measure and manage our overhead cost. We provided 2 ways to look at this metric based on whether you want to use our AUM owned and managed or our share basis. Using owned and managed AUM, you need to include both our G&A and Private Capital expenses in the numerator. This results in 69 basis points. Using our share of AUM, you need to include both G&A and Private Capital expenses, but you must deduct our Private Capital revenues from the numerator, which results in 61 basis points. The traditional way of measuring G&A as a percentage of FFO is not applicable for us given our substantial Private Capital business. To wrap up, I'm very pleased with our results this quarter and the positive impact you now see in our financial position resulting from the progress we made on our strategic priorities. While we have a little further to go to reach our long-term leverage and foreign currency exposure targets, we're in a great position to take advantage of emerging opportunities and to profitably grow the company. With that, I'll turn it back to Hamid.