Tom Olinger
Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open
Thanks, Tracy, and good morning and thanks for joining our second quarter call. With very few exceptions supply in our markets remain in check and net absorption continues to be strong despite being constrained by limited availability. Market rents across our portfolio are growing faster than our prior forecast. We’re raising our estimates for full year global rent growth at 6.5% with the U.S. up 70 basis points to over 7% and Europe up 140 basis points to almost 5%. The spread between our in-place leases and market rents further widened in the quarter and now stands at 15% globally, and 90% in the U.S. extending the runway for strong same store NOI growth. Looking to results, we started the year with great momentum and that carried into the second quarter with core FFO of $0.71 per share. Our share of cash same store NOI growth was 7% and led by the U.S. at 8.2%. These results were exceptional as quality well located space remains in high demand. Our share of net effective rent change on roll was 20.6% and led by the U.S. at over 30%. Occupancy was up 60 basis points sequentially to 97.4%. Leasing volume totaled nearly 39 million square feet with an average term over five years. This includes a record 9.6 million square feet of development leasing of which 3 million was in China. Stabilizations in the quarter had an estimated margin over 40% and value creation of $240 million. So far this year, we’ve earned more than $220 million in realized development gains. Our second quarter disposition and contribution activity was light, but we expect our capital recycling to accelerate in the back half of the year. You'll note a significant increase in both our wholly-owned and fund assets classified as held for sale. Given that we have several major transactions under contract and escrow funds have gone hard. With respect to the pending transaction with DCT, their shareholder meeting has been set for August 20th, and we expect to close within a few days following the vote. The integration process is going very well and we look forward to adding their high quality assets to our portfolio and welcoming some of their employees to the Prologis team. We continue to expect $80 million in day-one synergies as well as $40 million of future annual revenue synergies and incremental development value creation. With one of the best balance sheets of business, we have access to attractive sources of capital. As we previously announced during the quarter, we issued $700 million of bond that had a weighted average interest rate of 4.1% and term of almost 19 years. We remain very well-positioned to self-fund our deployment and capitalize on opportunities as they arise given our $4 billion of liquidity, and over $6 billion in potential fund rebalances. Moving to guidance for the full year, I'll cover their significant updates on our share basis but for complete detail refer to Page 5 of our supplemental. Also note that our guidance does not include accretion from the pending DCT acquisition. We will be updated guidance to incorporate the impact from this transition, transaction after closing. Based on the strength of our second quarter results, we are increasing the midpoint of our cash same stores NOI range by 50 basis points to 6.5%. As a result of valuation gains in Europe, we now expect our net promote income for the full year to be higher by $0.01 per share and now range between $0.12 and $0.14 per share. Remaining net promote income can will be earned in the fourth quarter. With an expanding built-to-suit pipeline and accelerated lease of our perspective elements, we are raising our starts guidance by $100 million to now range between $2.3 billion and $2.6 billion. We're also increasing our contribution guidance by $150 million to now range between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion. We’re raising the midpoint of a realized development gains by 75 million to now range between $450 million and $500 million, driven by higher valuations across our development portfolio. At the midpoint, our share net deployment proceeds will be approximately $350 million which is $50 million higher than our prior forecast. As you think about our earnings trajectory for the back half of the year, you need to consider the lag between when sources are generated and when they are put to work primarily through development. As a result, we expect core FFO for the third quarter to be about a $0.01 down from the second quarter. Again, this does not include the impact from DCT. Putting this all together for the full year, we're increasing our 2018 core FFO range between $2.98 and $3.02 per share up $0.02 at the midpoint. To put this in context when we laid out our three year plan at our investor event in 2016, we called 7% to 8% annual growth, excluding promotes, at the midpoint of our 2018 guidance will average 8.7% for the first two years far surpassing our plan. Importantly, this was achieved while realigning our portfolio and reducing our leverage by over 400 basis points. As a reminder every 100 basis points of leverage translates to about 1% of core FFO growth. Looking ahead, the combination of our significant embedded rent upside, the build out of our land bank and leverage capacity will continue to fuel our sector leading performance. And with that, I'll turn it over to Hamid.