Marc Holliday
Analyst · JPMorgan
Okay. Thank you, good afternoon, and happy you're joining us today. I know that many of you have full calendars so we will keep our remarks brief and give everyone an opportunity to ask several questions with the goal of trying to be done by about 3 before we start to lose some of you folks. Our results for the second quarter, combined with a series of press releases this week, puts a capstone on a very successful and active first half of the year. There were a number of significant achievements for which we are very proud to have executed during the first half, notwithstanding the current market environment, which can best be described as neutral. These achievements include the recapitalization of 717 Fifth, major retail leases to Express and Sam Ash, completion of the sales of One Court and 379 West Broadway, the acquisition of 10 East 53rd Street and 304 Park Avenue South and major lease renewals with Viacom, Random House and the City of New York and 770 -- $775 million refinancing over 1515 Broadway. So there's obviously a lot there in a pretty compressed period of time and these major transactions keep us on plan to meet or exceed our goals for 2012. However, it is harder to read the tea leaves for the remainder of the year. There are mixed signals in the market that make it difficult for us to assess the level of activity for the remainder of 2012. Leasing momentum, which was very good in 2010 and '11, seems to be modestly decelerating, albeit, there are still a number of deals in the market that are getting done. There is more competition from landlords on newer projects in secondary locations, which is serving to restrain for now any further material growth in nominal or net effective rents, and this will probably remain the case for the balance of the year. Keep in mind that we are right in the middle of summer, which is traditionally a slow time of year for us and for the leasing market, generally. And we've also heard from a number of our tenants that they are keeping a watchful eye and a cautious approach on the upcoming election, which many see as pivotal towards their future leasing and growth activities. On the other hand, there are several measurable indicators that give us the confidence there exists pent-up demand that should reappear in the market when the confidence factor is higher, including growth in private sector jobs of nearly 70,000 employees, that's year-to-date, with half of those jobs, or 35,000 jobs, being created in the office-using sector. Furthermore, Wall Street profits projected by the city to be $10 billion for the year is tracking well ahead of this position with over $10 billion earned in just the first 6 months of the year. So you can see that this more positive jobs and earnings, financial sector earnings data, is somewhat inconsistent with what we're hearing from tenants who seem to be -- have taken a more cautious approach right now. And I think this will remain the case certainly for the next several months until we clear the election. When you get past some of these macro market measures and you drill down into our portfolio, what's interesting to note is that we have nearly 50 office leases that are either out for signature or in advanced stages of negotiation in excess of 480,000 square feet. Within that segment, I would put a very high probability of completion on those deals. Then on top of that, there is another 35 transactions that we believe will convert into leases, although not quite as high probability of level, and the square footage encompassed by those discussions or advanced discussions is about 680,000 square feet. So I certainly believe we are on track to meet our goals and objectives for 2012 with respect to occupancy levels, mark-to-market and same-store NOI increases. We are also emboldened about the future prospects given the large incremental revenues, we expect to create by redeveloping, repositioning in leasing the recently acquired value-add properties, which is expected to contribute about $1 per share of FFO whether or not the mark-to-market in rents is slightly higher or lower in where we stand today. While these incremental revenues were projected to phase in between now and 2015, we are already starting to see the positive effects of leasing up these embedded growth properties and expect those results to accelerate into 2013. I'm also very pleased with how we financed and capitalized these value-add properties over the last couple of years, notwithstanding the substantial upside in that portfolio and the capital we had to expend to take those into inventory. We've also substantially equitized other assets along the way such that we have stockpiled enormous liquidity and we carry a line balance at quarter end of just $80 million, which is the lowest it's been in about 6 years. We have also consummated a series of refinancings that is sequentially reducing our long-term cost of capital, while also lengthening out the duration of our liabilities. And Jim and Matt will go into those items and measures a little bit later. But at this point, I'd like to turn the mic over to Andrew Mathias, who will provide an overview of the Manhattan property markets.