Tom Olinger
Analyst · Juan Sanabria with Bank of America. Your line is open
Thanks, Hamid. We began the year with terrific results. Core FFO was $0.61 per share for the quarter and increased to 24% year-over-year and driven by strong operating fundamentals and an increase in AUM. Starting with operations, occupancy in the U.S. was 96.6% at quarter end and 95.4% outside the U.S. Leasing volume for the quarter was a record at 46 million square feet. Just a quick reminder that my comments as I go through the rest of the operating and capital deployment activity will focus on our share. GAAP rent change on rollover was an all-time high of 20.1% led by the U.S. of 27.2% and 4% outside the U.S. GAAP same-store NOI increased 7.4% positive across all major geographies and driven by the U.S. at 9.6%. There are two items I want to highlight. First, as we previously discussed, the negative impact on GAAP NOI from the amortization of lease intangibles related to the merger burned off in the second quarter of 2015. As a result, this had a positive non-cash impact of about 170 basis points on GAAP same-store growth in the quarter. Second, expense timing drove an approximate 70 basis points positive impact. After adjusting for these two items, GAAP same-store growth was 5% which is attributable to the strong rental increases and year-over-year occupancy gains. Strategic capital fees were $50 million for the quarter, with the majority coming from our international ventures. Capital deployment activity is progressing as planned. There are two items I would like to highlight this quarter. First, that our stabilization had an estimated margin of 27%, and second, that build-to-suits comprised 42% of our development starts. Turning to capital markets, our leverage on a book basis was 38.1% at quarter-end and 33.9% based on market capitalization. Debt-to-EBITDA, including gains, improved to 5.6 times. As Hamid mentioned, we fully repaid the $400 million term loan associated with the KTR acquisition and liquidity remained strong. Last quarter, I'm sorry, this week we recast our global line of credit, lowering our spread by 10 basis points and increasing the capacity by 640 million. As a result, our total line capacity is now 3.4 billion further enhancing our current significant liquidity levels. We expect to see further improvement in our debt metrics throughout the remainder of the year, as our venture rebalancings were completed this month and the pace of dispositions accelerate. The continued strengthening of our balance sheet was acknowledged this quarter by both Moody's and Standard & Poor's upgraded our credit outlook to positive. We believe we are on the doorstep of an A rating. Before discussing guidance, I wanted to highlight enhancements to our earnings supplemental this quarter. The changes are based on the feedback we received from investors and analysts as well as to better align our disclosure with how we think about and how we run the company. As part of this, we revisited the classification of certain personnel cost in our income statement which had the effect of increasing expenses related to our strategic capital business by $17 million on an annual basis and reducing G&A by the same amount. There is no bottom-line impact on net income or core FFO. For context we completed a significant volume of co-investment activity over the past five years and almost doubled our third-party AUM. With this increase, we now have more full-time employees dedicated to our strategic capital business. Moving to 2016 guidance, we're maintaining guidance for most of our operating metrics, capital deployment, and strategic capital revenues, all of which you can see on Page 6 of our supplemental. On same-store NOI, we are increasing the bottom-end and narrowing the range to between 4% and 4.5% with the bias towards the upper half of this range. For net G&A, we are lowering the range to between $218 million and $228 million to reflect the reclassification I just mentioned. Related to FX, our 2016 earnings remain well insulated from foreign currency fluctuations, as over 95% are hedged. We continue to expect to generate $1 billion of total proceeds in excess of our capital needs in 2016. This consist $400 million in net deployment proceeds, $198 million of cash that we already received from the completion of the Facebook installment sale, and $400 million from the ownership rebalancing in our USLF and PTELF ventures which we will receive in a few weeks. Further we like what we are seeing in the disposition market and are likely to increase our volume. So while operating conditions are stronger than we expected, we are not increasing our core FFO given the potential dilution from increased dispositions. Therefore we are maintaining our 2016 core FFO guidance of between $2.50 and $2.60 per share. This includes $0.17 to $0.19 per share of promotes which were recognized in the second half of this year. If we assume normalized annual net promotes of $0.05 per share, our core FFO for 2016 would range between $2.38 to $2.46 per share. Core FFO will not be evenly distributed for the balance of the year given the timing of our asset sales and venture rebalancing. As a result, we expect core FFO to be $0.03 to $0.04 lower in the second quarter followed by an acceleration in the back half of the year from promote income. In closing, we are off to a really good start. Our focus for the rest of the 2016 is simply about capturing the significant spreads between inflates and market rents, generating profitable returns by putting our land bank to work, and continuing to strengthen our balance sheet. With that, I will turn it over to the operator for questions.