Marc Holliday
Analyst · assets today
Okay, good afternoon, and thank you, everyone, for calling in today. After releasing earnings last night, I retired for the evening, with our performance -- with myself being fairly pleased with our performance and that we had good results for the quarter highlighted by substantial leasing, demonstrated gains and harvesting, certain debt and equity investments, new investments in an array of value-add opportunities, additional originations and structured financial portfolio and continuing affirmative steps taken to strengthen the balance sheet. I woke up only to read a number of analyst reports stating that they perceived we had a different kind of quarter and we would certainly like to use the next hour or so to review our results and discuss the many achievements of the quarter, which I believe are indicative of a market in which we are still able to take advantage of opportunities and create significant value through the investment and repositioning and leasing of real property and also through continued gains in our core same-store portfolio. First I would like to specifically address the leasing results for our Manhattan portfolio in the third quarter and then convey some additional thoughts on the broader marketplace. Based on our internal budgeted projections and by historical standards, the 471,000 square feet of leases signed in the third quarter is, in our opinion, a very robust amount of leasing given that the quarter encompasses July and August, which are typically our slowest leasing months of the year. That's nearly 2 million square feet of leasing on an annualized basis, versus our original projections for the year of 1.5 million square feet of leasing. And further, such activity was dominated by new leasing filling existing vacancy. These leases were signed at starting cash rents, which were higher than previously occupied expiring rents and does not reflect the effect of the contractual base rent increases that we will be entitled to throughout the terms of the leases. This leasing volume was higher than I anticipated for the third quarter and I've been very pleased with the level of activity in our portfolio since Labor Day. Any notion that the third quarter leasing results underperformed our expectations would be inaccurate. Evidence of this success is our same-store NOI increase for the quarter of approximately 5%, which is consistent with the increases experienced in the first 2 quarters and puts us on the high end of the same-store increases in the office sector. As important, and in my opinion, as impressive as these statistics are, especially in light of the neutral leasing market, I would continue to point you to our pipeline leasing statistics as a very good indicator of where the portfolio is heading over the next 3 to 6 months. In the 25 days since the end of the third quarter, we've signed over 123,000 square feet of leases in 18 different transactions and we have another 53 leases in advanced negotiation covering some 435,000 square feet, much of this we will obviously hope to conclude in the fourth quarter. Most tellingly, there is another 745,000 square feet of term sheets in negotiation that we believe have a high probability of being converted to lease, much of which would occur in the first few quarters of 2013. In total, we have 1.2 million square feet of pipeline in the third quarter, which is actually greater than the 1.16 million square feet of pipeline we had at the end of the second quarter. You can see why I think our leasing results are reflective or slightly better than the general market conditions in New York where increasing office-using jobs are absorbing the supply on the market from several of the newly constructed buildings. A number of job statistics bode very well for New York City in 2013 and over the long term. Specifically, there are 73,000 more jobs today than there were at the prior peak in this market in 2007, of which approximately 43,000 such jobs are office-using jobs. While new job growth in New York has been steady through much of 2011 and 2012, we do see a slight deceleration in new office-using jobs, which rang in at only 6,000 in the plus column for the fourth quarter. However, while decelerating, the fact that New York has added 43,000 office-using jobs this year bucks the conventional notion that New York is losing jobs. This is simply not the case. Rather, I believe, what you're seeing is job growth, which is essentially keeping pace with new inventory, which has kept a lid on rents. Job growth has also been mitigated or absorbed by the efficiencies that many of today's tenants are looking for when rebuilding their spaces. So between new construction and forced efficiencies, I think that's why you've seen a fairly steady vacancy rate in the 9.5% range. However, the good news is that, at this current moment, there's about 1.1 million square feet of leases pending at 11x, 250 West 55th Street and the Coach building, such that much of this inventory will be reduced, if and when those transactions are finalized. Thus allowing for 2013 job growth to directly impact the existing commercial inventory. The vacancy in Manhattan, as I mentioned earlier, is about 9.6%, which is relative equilibrium, that's less than 2 percentage points of sublet space and the balance being directly offered. And we remain optimistic about the prospects for our portfolio over the next 6 months given our substantial leasing pipeline, given the job growth in New York City and given the reducing supply of new construction that was put in place over the last few years. We will be well positioned, I believe, in the balance of this year and next year, to take advantage of these market dynamics as we have a very modest amount of lease expirations scheduled to expire to the balance of this year, about 290,000 square feet and throughout 2013 only less than 1.1 million square feet set to expire. These amounts having been substantially reduced and chipped away at all year through our aggressive early leasing program to reduce these amounts to very, very small amounts relative to our overall portfolio. With the core portfolio stabilized and delivering modest but market-leading same-store NOI growth, the focus has been on leasing up the more recently acquired assets where we have been having enormous success and are tracking well ahead of original underwriting in terms of timing and economics. Notably this morning, we announced the signing of several additional lease transactions: 131,000 square-foot lease to The City of New York at 100 Church Street, bringing that building up to 97% occupancy, a long, long way from the 40% occupancy when we acquired the building just a couple of years ago; And additional leasing at 125 Park Avenue where we are backfilling the planned vacancy we acquired and now how that building's occupancy in excess of 80%. We will continue to focus 3 Columbus, where we also announced a substantial upsizing in the Young & Rubicam lease, bringing that building's office occupancy to an excess of 73%. So at this point, I'm going to turn the call over to Andrew, who will now discuss the capital and property market dynamics we see in this current environment and the activities we've undertaken and we've executed to take advantage of these substantial opportunities that present themselves to us. That will be followed by Jim, who will give a strategic overview and framework for our balance sheet activities, and then Matt will drill into some of the specific highlights of the third quarter results. Thank you.