Boston Properties Aktie

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Bank of America's 2026 Global Real Estate Conference. I'm Jana Galan, BofA's office REIT analyst, and we're thrilled to have with us BXP's Chairman and CEO, Owen Thomas; President, Doug Linde; CFO and Treasurer, Mike LaBelle; and SVP Finance and Capital Markets, James Magaldi. I'll turn it over to Owen for opening remarks, and then we can jump into Q&A.

Great. Jana, thank you for having us, and a couple of opening things from me, which will suggest to you what our priorities are. A year ago this month, we had our Investor Day and we outlined 3 execution priorities for the company: leasing space, selling assets and advancing our developments. And I just want to give a little bit of a -- I want to give a report card to all of you on how we're doing.

So on leasing, the first 2 quarters of this year, we leased 3 million square feet of space. This quarter, we're at about 950,000 so far. So that's going very well. Our occupancy at the end of the second quarter was 88.4%, and we gave you a target or a goal of 89% for year-end '26. So we're well on our way. And all of our major markets are very strong in terms of leasing, and they're all improved over where they were a year ago and we have a high degree of confidence in our continued success in leasing, given our strong pipeline.

Sales, we're also doing great. We have closed $1.3 billion in sales. We have $200 million of additional sales under contract. One of those deals, which is about half of the $200 million, we think, is going to close this week. So if all that gets done, we'll be at $1.5 billion. We have another $400 million that's in the market. Our goal, as you might recall, for a 3-year period of time ending last September was $1.9 billion. So we're well on our way to accomplishing our goals. And as a reminder, a significant component of our asset sales are land and apartments that we're selling at low cap rates. And so the sales activity is less dilutive than selling office buildings at higher cap rates. And then lastly, we've had a lot of excitement and success in our development pipeline.

We have in the pipeline right now about 3.5 million square feet and about $3.2 billion of BXP investment. This is reasonably consistent to levels that we carried even before COVID. We announced recently the delivery of 290 Binney Street in Cambridge, which is 100% leased to AstraZeneca. This is a very large project that we sold a 45% interest in. We delivered that project at an 8.9% development yield on cost, which is very high because of our execution, the savings we accomplished in the development and also the sell-down that we did.

We have a major project going here in New York, as you know, 343 Madison, $2 billion. If you walk by the site, you'll see steel coming out of the ground. There's a couple of tower cranes up. We're now 56% leased. We launched this spec 13 months ago, and we have a letter of intent with another firm to take the bottom 5 floors. And if we get that done, we'll be at 70% pre-leased after only 13 or 14 months.

We also signed a 320,000 square foot lease with Boston Dynamics on an empty building that we had in Waltham, Mass. So we've added that to the development pipeline. Boston Dynamics is a hard tech company. So this is a great win for us. We have 2 buildings, one of which is under construction in D.C. and one we've committed to do. And by the way, these are back-ended developments. We're not buying sites and taking risk. We're pre-leasing these developments before we even buy the real estate and we have a third one that is well along, although we haven't announced it yet. So anyway, if we continue down this path and we continue to have this success, we think we will accomplish our ultimate goals, which are to grow our FFO per share, reduce our leverage, all of which we think will be positive for our share value.

Great. Maybe jumping into the leasing, the 950,000 quarter-to-date, super impressive. Maybe if you could walk us through any latest leasing color across the region.

Sure. So when we had our call at the end of the second quarter in July, we said we had 1.3 million square feet of "active" leases under negotiation. So that number as of today is 1.8 million square feet. Of that 1.8 million, 950,000, as Owen said, has been executed. To break that those numbers down a little bit more, about 400,000 square feet of that 1.8 million is vacant space. When we lease vacant space, it all has flowed through to the bottom line, and that's where we gain from an occupancy perspective.

About 250,000 square feet of that 1.8 million is '26 and '27 expiration. So that's the renewal conversations that we're having.

170,000 square feet is part of the 343. So we've executed our third lease at 343, which was a 2-floor transaction in the lower stack of the building. That's 55,000 square feet. And as Owen said, we have another 120,000 square foot client that is looking at another portion of that lower stack of the building.

So that means the rest of the space are deals that we're doing on leases that are '28, '29 and out to 2030, early renewals or takedowns of space that we -- that are known expirations. As an example, Owen said, we're doing these 2 transactions in Washington, D.C. The first one is a building called 725 12th Street. That building is anchored by McDermott Schulte. McDermott Schulte is moving out of a building that we own called 500 North Capitol. We have now backfilled 100% of the space that they're moving out of with Google, who's going to be moving into that building for 220,000 square feet as soon as they move out, and we're actually getting them to move out of a few floors early, and then they're going to be moving to the rest of that space in 2028 when McDermott moves out of that space. So those are the -- most of our activity on a going-forward basis are going to be leases associated with 2028, '29, and '30.

From an overall perspective, Midtown is so tight for us that we have very little left to do in our existing portfolio. In our Midtown East portfolio, we have a floor at 510 Madison, which I believe you all visited yesterday, where we've leased a tremendous amount of space. And then we have a floor at 599 Lex. We have no space at the General Motors building. We have no space at 601 Lex. We have no space at 399 Park until C. V. Starr moves out when they relocate over to 343 at the beginning of 2029.

In San Francisco, we've been highly successful leasing our space at 680 Folsom Street, where we had almost 300,000 square feet of availability at the beginning of 2025. There rents are starting to accelerate, like they are in Manhattan. So everyone talks about the frothiness of the Park Avenue submarket, where rents are increasing at significant rates. As an example, we were leasing space at 510 Madison at the top of the building at $125 a square foot a year ago. now we're asking $175 to $200 a square foot, that kind of an increase.

At 680 Folsom Street, we were doing transactions in the mid-60s a year ago, and now we're doing transactions in the mid-80s. So that's a market that has a 25% availability rate still and yet that submarket has gotten strong enough where we, as an organization, have been able to start to push on the economics. We are also starting our first round, believe it or not, of lease rollover at Salesforce Tower. So the building was leased up between 2014 and 2016, and we have a 2027 and 2028 expiration. In both of those cases, we expect a cash ending rate versus the new rate to be 30% to 50% higher. So we're going to have a roll up of between 30% and 50%.

And then finally, on our Boston and our D.C. portfolios, in Northern Virginia, we are almost 98% occupied and leased, and we are now working on '28 and '29 exploration. We have 1 available floor coming due in 2027, in a portfolio of about 4 million square feet. And then Boston, we are doing all-time high rents in our Back Bay portfolio at 200 Clarendon Street and 888 Boylston Street in the Prudential Tower, where again, we are virtually fully leased. And so it's a very strong picture across the entire portfolio.

That's great. And maybe if you could just give us some context given that today, you're talking about the '28, '29, 2030 renewals, how common is that or relatively when do tenants, previous to this tightness in the market, approach you?

Yes. So I would say larger organizations that consider new space, so build-to-suits typically come out to the market 3-plus years before their expirations. I would say there is a little bit more urgency right now with tenants that are a little bit smaller than those who would be looking for build-to-suit. So these are tenants who are, call it, 100,000 square feet, plus or minus. And there is no question that the lack of new product in a market like Boston or a market like San Francisco, and the lack of availability of big blocks in all of our markets is encouraging our clients to be more aggressive about timing. And so -- and we are -- we encourage them to ask for proposals, and we will try and make deals. And yes, we have a hard time figuring out what rents might be in 2030, but we figure it out.

When we look at where new development costs are, we look at potential increases on an annualized basis, and we try and come to a good outcome for us and for our clients. And obviously, there's risk associated with doing nothing. And so we factor all that in as we make these decisions.

Could I ask that would you set the rate now?

Yes. We've fixed the rate today.

[indiscernible] markets that are pretty tight as well as they are in Asia, and they're agreeing to set a rate for 2032?

Yes, we are doing that. I mean, in fact, we have one example right now with a 75,000 square foot tenant who has a lease expiration in 2032 that asks for a 10-year renewal proposal today starting in 2032.

One thing I would add to what Doug said, when he talks about the pipeline, there's always a lot of focus, obviously, on what's been signed that is either leased or in near-term expirations, which makes sense because that has real near-term impact on FFO and occupancy. But one of the reasons why we have such low rollover in '26 and '27 is because we've been doing early renewals in prior years. For example, Mass Financial at 111 Huntington and Ropes & Gray at the Prudential Center. So even though we -- that's in our leasing statistics and it doesn't have necessarily a real near-term impact, it helps us keep these rollovers low and helps us push the occupancy of the portfolio on a near-term basis.

Great. Maybe jumping to the San Francisco market and the AI-driven momentum we've seen this year. Curious how much demand you're seeing directly from AI versus more traditional tech and how much activity is the growth in AI also generating for more demand from finance, law and professional services.

Yes. So it's a hard question to answer because it's unclear to us what is traditional tech and what is AI at this point because everyone is, sort of, saying they're in the AI business, if you will. What I would say is that we are doing some leasing, not a lot to direct AI organizations, and that has been at 680 Folsom Street and actually in Manhattan at 360 Park Avenue South. And now we're starting to see some of that come to Embarcadero Center, which is a great opportunity for us in terms of improving our occupancy there. We've also had, what I would refer, to as some spill up. So what do I mean by that? So we have a -- we did a transaction with Dropbox. I don't consider Dropbox a "AI company" but maybe they do today.

And the reason they were looking for space is because OpenAI took their space in another building. And so Dropbox needed to find a new home and they came to us to do that. So there's that kind of activity in the market as well. So the expanding large language models are basically resulting in the movement of other organizations in that marketplace.

In a market like New York, there is no question that the AI infrastructure build-out is impacting law firms and financial services firms and some of their growth has to be around all the transaction volume there. That's really not going on in San Francisco per se. I'm sure there is some legal work that is being done by some of these firms with a San Francisco presence, but the bulk of those employees on the law firm and the financial service firm are all New York-centric in terms of their locations.

And interestingly, San Francisco is really now a tech-dominated market, meaning once upon a time, San Francisco was considered to be the financial center of the western part of the United States. All the banks are done and anybody in the long-only asset management business has moved to another location. I mean there are a few unusual companies like Dodge & Cox who were there, but for example, the pod shops, some of whom may be in this room; the presence that they have in San Francisco compared to the presence they have in New York City is minuscule.

And I just think that the San Francisco employment market has just focused much more on technology. And so what we're seeing today is a much more granular tenant in the market demand profile, lots and lots of smaller VC-backed or friends and family-backed companies that are growing at rapid rates.

And the thing that is distinguishing us from our perspective, what's this sort of cycle in technology versus others is just this rapid revenue growth that these companies are having. If you look, sort of backtrack for software companies and how long it took them to get to, call it, $100 million of revenue compared to these new companies, it's exponentially different today. I mean it's taking them 1 to 2 years versus 10 years to get there.

And so the revenue model associated with what is going on is a very different picture. And quite frankly, it gives us some confidence in James at the end of the table, sort of as our chief underwriter and as he thinks about how do I think about underwriting these credits? He gets a lot of confidence in what the revenue potential is.

James, how do you underwrite these tenants?

You had to say that, Doug. I mean, look, I think it's -- there's -- you have to understand that there's a difference in AI companies that we're doing business with. Some of them are application type companies that have a product that they're actually selling. Bank of America, I'm sure probably uses some of those products from companies like Rogo that create these pitch books for your clients. So that's a company that has revenues and we can actually get in and look at their financials and understand them from a more traditional sense.

I would say that we do a significant amount of business. As Owen had mentioned, we've done a deal with Boston Dynamics in suburban Boston and Waltham. That is a hard tech technology company. They are backed by Kia and Hyundai. So from a credit perspective, there's somebody standing behind that business line, and it's a very different type of business line. It's not necessarily application, it's hard tech.

We've done deals with major defense subcontractors are in drone technology. And this is not the pilot drones. This is new wave, AI technology as it relates to military applications, which we are all very much acutely aware of globally. If it's a smaller start-up application, we're looking at their bank account, we're getting a big security deposit.

So those are the things that we have to evaluate when we make decisions regarding entering into long-term financial commitments with our clients.

And spec suites are becoming more popular with speed to occupancy becoming an important criteria for many tenants. How much are you leaning into this across the portfolio?

We are full bore plowing ahead with spec to those suites, particularly in San Francisco because we've been so successful. So we started with one spec suite, a floor at 680 Folsom Street, and we've leased all of the floors above 1, and we have a proposal today to lease that last floor with an organization that looked at our spec suite and said, "we want that." And so we're about to do that.

At Embarcadero Center, we're actually doing 6 full floors, full floors, not spec suites, but full floors. The first one was completed last 2 weeks ago when we signed a letter of intent on Friday with an AI company to take the entire floor. We're doing a variety of different configurations. We have the law firm, professional services firm build-out, which is stacked with perimeter offices and a few conference rooms. We have more open office floors, which is like the one that we just got an LOI on.

And then we are also doing some smaller spaces. Where we have built space, we have leased the space. And so it's been a very successful strategy. And it also is economically advantageous because one of the friction points is time to getting to yes on the space and then building it out. And if it's already built, once when that lease is signed, revenue commences and the tenant moves in and the whole free rent component becomes a much less important part of the equation.

And so economically, it costs us less in terms of downtime and capital to build a floor. And we're also building floors that we have designed that we believe are somewhat credit risk-prone in terms of our ability to -- if we have a credit problem, provide another organization with that suite that will work for them as well as opposed to a bespoke kind of an environment where people are choosing colors that may be very unique or they're building out unusual office configurations or different kinds of conference rooms that are not necessarily "generic" and so it's a risk mitigation tool from a credit perspective as we think about it as well.

How do those spec suite build-outs per square foot kind of compared to TIs for some of those more...

So we can build a suite for -- in San Francisco, as an example, for somewhere between $160 and $220 a square foot. And if we're doing an 11-year deal in San Francisco, we're giving $185 to $220 a square foot. So the money that we're spending is about the same. The tenant unusually spends a lot more than that allowance. So we can do it more efficiently, but they tend to do these bespoke kinds of configurations and they hire architects who tend to have a different design aspiration. And so that just costs money. And so we can be more efficient than "our" tenants on their own.

And then maybe if we could just touch on, kind of, Los Angeles and Seattle, which have been a little bit weaker, also much smaller markets for BXP. But 2Q earnings commentary was trending a little bit more positive. If you can just kind of talk through those.

Sure. So -- and they're actually very different. So in Seattle at Madison Center, where we have available space, we have at least 3 vacant floors to AI companies over the last 2 quarters, really quickly. We've built the floors and they've taken the space immediately on an as-is basis. And then we also just did an early renewal, another one of these, call it, 2028, '29-ers with the large law firm and the tenant, Davis Wright, who has over 100,000 square feet of space. So I would say Seattle is continuing to perform as it has in the past, which is it's behind San Francisco, but it tends to have the same kind of organizations looking for space.

And if you've read about it, OpenAI and Anthropic have done a new beachhead expansion in the Seattle market in Downtown, Seattle, aka not Bellevue. And then Bellevue itself has really recovered quickly, again, with a lot of technology companies who may or may not consider themselves AI companies.

West L.A. is from a demand perspective, challenged. There are more tenants in the market but it's all musical chairs. There is no growth at the moment in the West L.A. marketplace. You have movement from tenants that are moving from different parts of what we refer to as the Mosaic of L.A. into Century City. That's the predominant place where activity is. And then you have a smattering of consumer products companies and other where you would refer to as media tech companies. Some of them are in the gaming, some of them are in the actual media content creation business that are out looking for space. None of them have a sense of urgency, but they are in the market looking, there's -- but there's not much in the way of growth in that marketplace.

Curious any -- go ahead.

So incredibly positive perspective, except maybe the West L.A. comments. What are the weaknesses in the portfolio?

So we've put out a trajectory of gaining 200 basis points in 2026 and 200 basis points in 2027, which sort of gets us into the 91% range. As Owen, sort of, suggested, we're likely to be above 20 basis points for 2026. The next opportunity we have in terms of occupancy gain is really coming from San Francisco. So we have a decent amount of available space at the basis of Embarcadero Center 1, 2 and 3 and we have about 150,000 square feet of available space in Mountain View, and there is a lot of activity on that portion of space. That's close to 1 million square feet, which is 250 basis points of potential additional occupancy.

Once we get through that, the next, sort of, logical place for there to be upside is in our urban Boston portfolio, with Urban Edge portfolio, which is really our suburban portfolio in Boston where we have a couple of hundred thousand square feet of availability.

And then in Northern New Jersey and our Princeton portfolio, the difference between those 2 markets and everything else is that the rental rate structure is much lower. And so the contribution from those will be less. So if the rents in San Francisco are $80 to $100 a square foot and in Mountain View, they're $70 to $80 a square foot, they're $40 to $50 a square foot in Suburban Boston, and the $35 to $40 a square foot in the Princeton market. So it's half the contribution.

After that, the problems, if you want to call it, that we would describe are we have a block of space in Brooklyn, New York that we can't seem to move in a place called Dock 72. We have rollover exposure coming in a building in West L.A. that Hulu currently occupies in place called Colorado Center. And then we have a pending lease expiration in 2028 at Safeco Plaza with Liberty Mutual. That's what I would refer to as sort of the problem areas. In all of our projections and all of our conversations, we have taken into account that portfolio as being the last thing that we're going to ultimately see a recovery on. So everything that you hear about from us ignores the contribution from those assets. And it's why what we're saying is our stabilized occupancy for the portfolio somewhere between 93% and 94% because we're acknowledging that we have those other assets that are going to take a long time to see a recovery. I mean we may have different plans for those assets.

One other thing I would add to what Doug said is one of the themes that he touched on was that, in general, the suburbs are weaker than the urban locations. And that is true, I would say, post COVID with the work-from-home phenomenon because I think the return to office is a little bit different in the suburbs than it is in urban areas. So though we are working to lease our portfolio and have some great successes like the Boston Dynamics thing, we are changing our portfolio. So a lot of the sales that we've been doing have been suburban buildings because we want to reduce our exposure in the suburbs.

And second, we haven't talked that much about this yet, but we have entitled thousands of multifamily or residential units in Lexington, Waltham, Weston, West Windsor Township, Fairfax County, Santa Monica. And in many of these cases, we are either tearing down office buildings or we have sites that we don't think are geared towards office development, and we're maximizing their value through residential development. So we are as a firm taking action to change our portfolio or to adjust it based on the impacts that we see in the marketplace.

Maybe following up on that capital recycling and the progress you've made on the disposition plan for the year. Being so active in the market, can you talk a little bit about the buyer profiles out there, the interest levels and pricing?

Yes. So our sales are in 3 buckets. So it's land, it's apartments and it's office, primarily suburban, although some urban. So just quickly to touch on that. So in the land, we found different uses and users, industrial development, a city bought one of our sites, but the most important value creation exercise that we have done is going to communities that need housing and getting them to entitle housing that in many cases, they had not done in a very, very, very long time. And as a result, we have residential entitlements that are extremely valuable in the market. And generally, what we do when we get those is if it's a for-sale product, we will sell the land to a homebuilder. That market, we have robust auctions, and we're getting good prices.

And if we can make the numbers work, we'll hold on to the multifamily land, bring in a financial partner for 80% of the capital, we'll basically contribute to land. In many cases, we actually take out money as well and then we have a 20% interest, we get the development fee and then we build a building.

So that -- the residential sales are the most accretive to the firm, and we want to do more and more and more of those. The pacing mechanism is our ability to get entitlements and go to the process and bring those projects to market. But you're going to continue to -- you're going to see us continue to do that.

Second is selling multifamily. So we have built apartments. Historically, we actually -- we own 100% of these projects. More recently, we've been using outside capital. So we had over 2,000 units that we owned 100% and we held on to those because with interest rates going up, the cap rates went into the 5s, and we were growing our NOI on these projects at 3% or greater, but in the last year, cap rates came back down.

And so we ended up selling 3 of our large apartment complexes, 4.5%, 4.6% cap rates, which we think particularly now with higher interest rates, was excellent execution and given our look through cap rate, that's also an accretive disposition for the firm. So I would say that market continues to be strong. We have a couple of additional assets that we may test -- we could test the market on in the next year.

So coming lastly to the office. Look, I think the office sale market, there are not a tremendous number of what I'd call premier workplaces that have been selling in the market. And most of the buyers are not traditional institutional investors in real estate, they are -- or at least a core investors in real estate, they are opportunity funds, family offices, a lot of it is driven by higher yield expectations buildings that are in lease-up, buying buildings at large discounts to replacement costs and achieving higher IRRs.

There is not very strong or we haven't seen, what I'd call, kind of, core institutional bid at least for the buildings that have come into the marketplace.

And maybe turning to your development of 343 Madison. Great to hear about all the leasing progress. Curious kind of the construction loan, maybe just, kind of, an update on kind of the next milestones you're looking to achieve there?

Yes. Well, so probably the most important thing right now is we want to sign this lease and get to 70% leased. So then that will leave us 2 floors in the base and 5 floors in the tower and we have a number of clients that are circling those 2 floors in the base already. So I'm not -- I'm not concerned about those. And then the tower floors, you asked earlier about a time that clients consider leasing space. Well, this doesn't deliver until '29 and so those floors are about 22,000-some feet, and they probably -- we'll probably get the most value for them by doing them individually. And I think the rents continue to go up in New York. So we're not in a big hurry to lease those at the moment, and we think we're going to exceed our budgets for the rents. We're already exceeding the budget that we put forward for the building in the base that we certainly should exceed in the tower. So we have very high rent expectations for that. And then the second priority is the recapitalization. And James, you might talk about what's going on there with the equity side.

Yes, sure. So we have been conducting, I would say, a very selective process for some time. We've been very particular about what we think the appropriate prices, meaning we've added tremendous value with 343 Madison both from a development perspective, we're underway under construction. We're going vertical with the steel. We're largely derisked from a pre-leasing perspective as Owen and Doug had commented, we're hopeful to be 70% pre-leased over the near term and we're close to closing on an equity sale of 10% of the equity in the deal at terms that are favorable to us with a partner that is like-minded in terms of long-term investment strategy and thesis. So there's potential there that we could upsize with that partner prior to the end of 2026, potentially 15% to 20% of the equity in the deal.

And then beyond that, we'll see. I don't think that we're under a tremendous amount of pressure to move that forward, but we could potentially sell a proverbial C round at a different price point at some point in the future in 2027 up to 40% of the equity in 343.

How much of a discount do you have to take for selling it now versus selling it today [indiscernible] when it's 100% leased.

I don't really think we're taking a discount. We're actually getting a price that we think is reflective of the fact that we've added value to the project based on those things. It's, again, largely derisked from a leasing and a development perspective. You're suggesting discount from the exit.

Realized value [indiscernible] leased of that 90%.

Yes. Yes. Our -- so I would think about it this way. Our basis, which is the A round, is about an 8% yield. We're raising capital today at about a 7-yield, maybe 7.25. And I think when it's completed, and there's debates about this, but I think it's 5.5% to 6%.

So do you think your building is inferior to One Vanderbilt?

No -- well, it is different. It's not of the same scale. One Vanderbilt is probably twice as big from a square footage perspective. The location is, I think, identical, arguably maybe better because it's on 42nd Street.

They got -- they've got low rate quite a while on that asset that has value to it. That was part of the competition.

It's fee.

Pardon me.

We're a ground lease.

Maybe can you touch on the joint venture build-to-suit opportunities? You mentioned on the second quarter call, provide some more details there.

So we're doing a build-to-suit for 2 law firms at 725 12th Street doing a build-to-suit for another law firm at 2100 M Street. And then this third transaction, which is also in Washington, D.C. would be another distressed piece of real estate that has been taken back by a pension fund, and that pension fund has said to us, "geez, we saw what you all did with finding a client and buying these other pieces of real estate, could you do this here?" And we said, "Yes, we probably can," and we actually have procured the tenant and we are negotiating a joint venture.

And so if both of those things continue on, we'll have a third. This one, however, will have a third-party capital partner. We are also in the market as we speak, for equity for 725 12th Street because we actually have a fourth one of these that we've been approached by the client. So these are all brand-oriented transactions.

Law firms in Washington, D.C. are calling our team and saying, "can you build us a building?" And we will pay replacement cost rents. And oh, by the way, replacement cost rents in Washington, D.C. are 2 plus X times the rents that you can see, achieve and receive in an existing high quality but not new building.

So you can lease space in Washington, D.C. in a very good building for $45 to $55 a square foot triple-net. And we are going to be generating rents that are well in excess of $100 a square foot on a triple-net basis for all of these new developments because we need an 8-plus percent cash-on-cash return. And interest rates are now a little bit higher.

And so the cost of capital has gone up. And so all of that figures into what our cost basis will be, and therefore, that's what we need. And these organizations keep coming to us and saying, can you do this for us? And we have a cost issue. And if we can find third-party joint venture capital for that, we will do that. We are also, as Owen said, about to start 2 more residential projects. One of them is in Weston, Massachusetts, where we have a 280-unit development that has been permitted. And the second is in Santa Monica, where we have 380 units. And both of those, we are now in the market looking for third-party JV capital.

Just as a refresher, we did a transaction with PGIM a few years ago, and we've done 2 transactions now with Northwestern Mutual, where they are the 80% partner and we're the 20% partner. So this is, kind of, our approach to building these residential stick frame multifamily units.

Yes. I think I would just put a fine point on what Doug said this Washington, D.C. opportunity. I mean this doesn't happen in real estate. I mean, the development -- a development firm usually has to go take a lot of risk to do a project. You have to buy a site, you have to get it entitled, you have to spend money on it. And then you have to -- in some cases, you have to build a building and before you even get a tenant. And in this case, what's going on now, given there's so little capital that's going into development, there's so many fewer people doing it. We're actually -- we have clients coming to us asking us to build them a building and then we don't even have to commit any capital to the project until we know we have a signed lease. That's extraordinary.

Yes. And just building on each of these cases, we don't even have a drawing for a building, right? These tenants are saying to us, we trust you that you will design a Class A office building with a floor plate that will work for us, but we're prepared to sign a lease and commit to going in there without seeing any of that.

And maybe quickly on refinancing headwinds inbound?

Sure. I mean, we've talked about a lot of the positive things that are going on. We talked about occupancy growth of 400 basis points, which will have a lot of growth to it mark-to-market because the rents are growing in our markets. So I think that's going to become a bigger factor for us on a positive side. And then the development delivering is going to be positive. But we do have interest rates that are much higher than they have been. So we do have refinancing that we need to do. And to kind of moderate that, we're coming up with various strategies. Last year, we did a convertible note execution to refinance a bond that was coming due and we were actually able to reduce the debt coupon by doing that, that convertible note was about a 2% coupon with up 40% on the strike price. So that's an available structure for us.

This year, what we did is we had a $1 billion loan coming due, unsecured bond coming due. We're paying it off in October. We decided to do a $700 million refinance in the unsecured bond market because we've got excess liquidity from asset sales and from retained cash flow that we utilized to do that. So that reduced our debt, reducing the leverage, which is something we want to do over a period of time. Next year, we have 2 kind of major refinancings we did deal with. One is a secured mortgage on the General Motors building.

As Doug described, the General Motors building is 100% leased. It's in great condition to do a long-term CMBS loan in the SASB marketplace. That SASB marketplace has improved over the last 18 months. We've been out in the market pricing it. We can't refinance it until next year. It expires in June of next year. But we believe that based upon current index, we could do a 10-year financing somewhere in the 6% range.

The current GAAP interest rate on it is in the mid-3s. So that's a headwind for us. It's about 250 basis points. Our share of that debt is $1.4 billion. So that is something that we're going to have to swallow and will be a headwind to the tailwinds that we have on the occupancy side. And the other one we have is a $750 million unsecured bond comes due in December of next year. We pay it off 90 days early, and that's at 6.75. So that actually may go the other way because right now, we could issue 10-year unsecured bonds at kind of 6.30 or so. So we'll see what we do with that. And we have ready access to all of the debt markets to handle our refinancings. And again, we anticipate reducing our debt modestly. And as our income grows from the occupancy growth from the developments coming online, we expect that our leverage is going to come down from the high 7s into kind of the 7 range.

It could even get into the low to mid-6s, although we'll probably have new investments, right, that we'll want to do over the next few years that will, kind of, make it go the other way. But I think keeping it and around the 7 to 7.5 range is a good place for us.

I wish we had more time, unfortunately. I have to go through 3 rapid fires. First question, if long-term rates stay higher for longer, which has the biggest impact on your sector's earnings, higher refinancing costs, lower transaction activity or less new supply?

I think the financing costs.

Refinancing.

Certainly.

Over the next 3 years, will third-party capital become a more important source of growth for public REITs than balance sheet capital?

Yes.

And for your sector, will 2027 same-store NOI growth be higher, the same or lower than '26?

We haven't given a forecast.

Oh, sector, higher.

Thank you very much.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to BXP Q2 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Helen Han, Vice President, Investor Relations.

Good morning, and welcome to BXP's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call.

The press release and supplemental package were distributed last night and furnished on Form 8-K. In a supplemental package, BXP has reconciled all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure in accordance with Reg G. If you do not relieve a copy, these documents are available in the Investors section of our website at investors.bxp.com. A webcast of this call will be available for 12 months.

At this time, we would like to inform you that certain statements made during this conference call, which are not historical, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Although BXP believes the expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained. Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements were detailed in yesterday's press release and from time to time in BXP's filings with the SEC. BXP does not undertake a duty to update any forward-looking statements.

I'd like to welcome Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Doug Linde, President; and Mike LaBelle, Chief Financial Officer. During the Q&A portion of our call, our regional management teams will be available to address any questions. [Operator Instructions].

I would now like to turn the call over to Owen Thomas for his formal remarks.

Thank you, Helen, and good morning to all of you. BXP delivered a very strong second quarter, both operationally and financially. FFO per share exceeded both our guidance and consensus estimates by $0.08, and we raised the midpoint of our 2026 FFO per share guidance by $0.05. We also made meaningful progress against the business plan we articulated at last year's investor conference. Leasing results were strong, in-service portfolio occupancy increased significantly, additional asset sales progressed and our development pipeline was active with project deliveries, launches, leasing and capital raising.

Our first business plan priority is to lease space and improve portfolio occupancy. We had a great quarter, completing nearly 1.8 million square feet of leasing 29% above our 10-year historical average for the second quarter. Year-to-date, we've leased over 3 million square feet and our in-service portfolio occupancy also rose materially and for the third quarter in a row. This outcome reflects strong execution by our leasing teams as well as a very healthy environment for leasing premier workplaces.

AI continues to be enormously beneficial to BXP's leasing activity. Our current and prospective clients are generally experiencing increasing earnings in an AI-powered U.S. economy are more often expanding than contracting their space requirements and in many cases, are also upgrading their space. We are leasing space to AI companies in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Seattle, to companies displaced by growing AI firms and to our core financial, legal and business services clients that support the AI industry.

While AI's long-term impacts remain difficult to predict, research shows that technology advances historically increased the share of office-based jobs, Additionally, AI will likely exert a greater impact on less adaptive back-office workers, and these roles make up a smaller share of employment in knowledge center gateway markets and in premier workplaces. Further, it is reasonable to believe non-office using remote jobs, which generally have more process and analytical content than interpersonal requirements will be more disrupted by AI.

Lastly, companies winning in an AI-enabled economy will be more profitable and face more intense competition for talent, leading to less price-sensitive demand for easily commutable and desirable workplaces for their employees. For all these reasons, we believe premier workplaces located in gateway market knowledge centers are positioned at best to benefit from and at worst to be the most immune from AI impacts on the labor force.

As proof, the premier workplace segment of the office market where BXP is a clear leader continues to materially outperform the broader office market. Premier workplaces represent roughly the top 14% of space and 8% of buildings in the four CBD markets where BXP has a major presence. Direct vacancy for premier workplaces in these four markets is 8% versus 13.5% for the broader office market, while asking rents for premier workplaces continue to command a premium of more than 60% of the non-premier buildings.

With an 8% vacancy rate, positive net absorption and limited new construction on the horizon, premier workplaces and BXP's core markets are set up for material rent increases which has already commenced in many submarkets. Given these positive market forces, we are well on our way to accomplishing our 2 percentage point occupancy gain goal in 2026, reinforcing our confidence that our target of 4 percentage points of total occupancy improvement over '26 and '27 remains very much on track.

Our second business plan goal is to raise capital and optimize our portfolio through asset sales. At our investor conference, we communicated an objective to generate in aggregate $1.9 billion in net sale proceeds by 2028 from the sale of land, residential and nonstrategic office assets. We continue to make progress in the second quarter and are well ahead of schedule. We have raised $370 million in total net sale proceeds so far this year and more than $1.2 billion since our investor conference.

In addition, we have six assets under contract for sale with total net proceeds of approximately $240 million, $180 million of which is scheduled to close in 2026. Two of the assets currently under contract for sale are office buildings in Washington, D.C., which are scheduled to close this quarter.

We are also in various stages of marketing several additional assets, including [ 7 ] Times Square in New York City. As of now, future net proceeds from dispositions possible in 2026 could aggregate up to an additional $500 million, bringing our total net proceeds from asset sales to $1.7 billion by year-end, and we continue to explore additional capital-raising opportunities.

Supporting our disposition efforts, office transaction volume in the private markets remains reasonably healthy with financing available at scale, particularly in the CMBS market. In the second quarter, significant office sales were $12.6 billion, down 13% from the first quarter and essentially flat from the second quarter of 2025.

Though there continue to be very few premier workplace assets trading. There were a couple of transactions in the quarter with relevance to BXP's portfolio. One Marina Park Drive located in the Seaport District of Boston is under agreement to sell for approximately $435 million which represents pricing of nearly $900 a foot and an initial cap rate in the low 7% range. The asset comprises 495,000 square feet is 99% leased with above-market rents and is being sold by an adviser to the operating arm of a non-U.S. pension plan.

Further, Tower 1 at West Maine located in downtown Bellevue, Washington is under agreement to sell for approximately $340 million, representing pricing of around $930 a square foot and a 6.75% initial cap rate. The 365,000 square-foot building is fully leased to Amazon on a long-term basis and was sold by a local developer to an adviser.

BXP's third business plan goal is to grow FFO through new developments selectively with office given market conditions and more actively for multifamily with an equity partner. For office, we have and expect to allocate more capital to developments and acquisitions due to the materially higher yields available.

This quarter, we delivered into service 290 Binney Street, a 570,000 square foot lab building fully leased to AstraZeneca located in the life-science nexus of East Cambridge. The project is a great example of BXP's development skills, creating value for shareholders where we establish development rights through executing a complex infrastructure enhancement, we fully leased the asset before commencement, we sold a 45% stake in the property at a profit to a financial partner and we delivered the project $20 million below budget and 2 months ahead of schedule.

BXP's $488 million investment for its share of the project is yielding an 8.9% unleveraged cash return and a 10.3% GAAP return. BXP's largest development underway is 343 Madison Avenue, our premier workplace tower in New York City with direct access to Grand Central Terminal. This past quarter, we signed 148,000 square foot lease with McDermott Will & Schulte at the bottom of the high-rise bank of the building and [ Star ] expanded by 2 floors in the mid-rise bringing us to 50% leased. Further, we are in lease negotiations with a [ 2-4 ] client in the podium, which, if completed, would bring us to 56% leased.

Lastly, we are exchanging proposals with another client requiring 5 floors at the base of the podium, which would bring the project to nearly 70% leased. So we have received single floor inquiries for the 7 floors remaining at the top of the building. We expect continued rent appreciation and will likely lease these floors closer to delivery given their ability to command market-leading rents.

We have procured 94% of the construction cost on budget, leasing economics have been at or above forecast and our projections remain on track for a stabilized unleveraged cash return of 7.5% to 8% upon delivery in 2029.

Yesterday, we closed a 60% loan-to-cost $1.2 billion construction loan for the project on attractive terms and have a letter of intent with an equity partner for an $80 million investment, representing a 10% interest in the project with a basis above our costs. We expect the equity investment to close this quarter, and our marketing efforts continue with the goal of ultimately monetizing a total of 30% to 50% of the project over time. The value of the development continues to rise as we lease space and get closer to delivery.

This past quarter, we launched the development of our World Gate multifamily project, comprising 359 wood frame residential units located in Herndon, Virginia. The project's budgeted cost is $132 million, and we have secured a financial partner to supply 80% of the equity as well as the construction financing. BXP originally bought into the World Gate property, which comprised an empty office building and parking garage on 10 acres in 2023. The project was rezoned for residential. The for-sale component is under contract for sale to a homebuilder and the apartment development will entail demolishing the office building and utilizing the structured parking. BXP will earn a profit from the total monetization of our investment in World Gate and has reinvested our share of the proceeds from the contribution of the apartment land back into the development joint venture for a 20% interest. We have additional residential projects in Western Massachusetts and Santa Monica, California that we are intending to launch next year.

This past quarter, we also signed a 320,000 square foot long-term lease with Boston Dynamics, which will create a state-of-the-art robotics and AI center at Reservoir Place a 360,000 square foot office building, BXP had taken out of service in Waltham. We will invest $87 million to retrofit the building and expect to earn an initial cash return of over 10% and including an inferred value for the existing improvements. The project is expected to be delivered into service in the second quarter next year.

BXP's current development pipeline comprising seven office and residential projects underway totaling 3.5 million square feet and $3.2 billion of BXP investment will continue to deliver external growth over the longer term.

So in conclusion, BXP is set up well for success. New construction for office has virtually halted already leading to higher occupancy and rent growth in most submarkets where BXP operates. Debt capital is readily available for premier workplaces at attractive credit spreads. The BXP continues to capture market share, driven by our stability, reliable client service and lighter competitive landscape across many markets. BXP remains comfortably on track with our business plan, which, if successful, will lead to increasing portfolio occupancy and FFO per share, deleveraging external growth from development and a more AI-enabled gateway CBD premier workplace concentrated portfolio in the years ahead.

Over to Doug.

Good morning, everybody. Owen did a really great job of articulating our theory on why AI is so critically important to the demand picture. Equally important, perhaps as a public company, the rhetoric and the conjecture around the impact of new AI technology on the future of office using jobs has gotten much more balanced than constructive. What has changed from where we were in February of this year.

In each of our markets, our portfolio has seen a pickup in demand. In our best markets, that demand is coming from clients that are expanding across a wide spectrum of industries, ring by market, technology, AI, defense and cybersecurity asset management, financial services and professional services. In our other markets, the demand is due to decisions around operating space or changes in geographic preference as our clients look to maximize the desirability of their space for their associates, it's all encouraging for the premier office product.

BXP had great top line revenue results this quarter, and I want to focus my time on the improvements in our occupancy, which drove much of that outperformance. In June, when we were with you at NAREIT, we told you that we believe that our leasing progress was ahead of schedule relative to our anticipated occupancy pickup. We ended 2025 at 86.7% occupied, we finished the second -- the first quarter at 87.4%, and as of 6/30, 26 were 88.4% occupied. So we've gained 170, up 200 basis points that we originally expected for 2026. We had guided to an average occupancy during the year of 88.2%, and we're ahead of plan.

While the individual transactions may be very granular, the simple explanation is that we lease space more quickly than we expected. Most importantly, we continue to lease vacant and near-term expiring space. In the first quarter, BXP's total leasing volume was 1.14 million square feet, and we executed leases on 700,000 square feet of vacant space. In the second quarter, we completed 1.76 million square feet and covered an additional 380,000 square feet of vacant space and renewed or backfilled 600,000 square feet of '26 and '27 expirations. 190,000 square feet of our activity this quarter was at 343 Madison and as Owen mentioned, 322,000 square feet was with Boston Dynamics at Reservoir Place. All vacant space, but those are not in-service properties.

We start the third quarter with a signed but not occupied portfolio of about 1.3 million square feet with 1.1 million expected to commence in 2026. The remaining calendar year '26 known expirations are down to 300,000 square feet. So this means we're going to pick up 800,000 square feet of occupancy or another 170 basis points and close to the year closer to 90% than 89%.

Our 2027 expirations currently stand at 1.77 million square feet. We have known vacates of about $1 million and have good clarity on about 550,000 square feet of either renewals or replacement tenants for those expirations. We also have 250,000 square feet of signed leases that we expect to commence in '27.

Our pipeline of leases either executed or in negotiation after the second quarter, stands at 1.3 million with about 350,000 square feet of that involving vacant space. In addition, our active discussions is approaching 1.7 million square feet, and that could impact another 450,000 square feet of current vacancy. In total, this in-process activity is about the same level it was last quarter, and it reinforces our confidence in our year-end '27 occupancy expectation of 91%.

Our leasing spreads this quarter were up significantly in Boston and New York and down in D.C. and on the West Coast. A couple of insights on the data.

In Boston, this quarter, all of the activity emanated from our CBD portfolio. In New York, about 25% of the square footage was in Princeton. Our Midtown Manhattan properties were up 14%. In San Francisco, 40% of the square footage in the statistics this quarter was in Mountain View, where the new leases reset at rents of about $45 triple net. And in Seattle, 7% of the square footage came from a low-cost expansion with a technology company at Madison Center, i.e., very little in the way of [ TI ].

This quarter, we executed 21 leases over 20,000 square feet in the in-service portfolio, 48% of the square footage was renewals, extensions or expansions and 52% was with new clients. Existing client expansions encompass 275,000 square feet of that activity, and we had about 50,000 square feet of current clients contract.

In the BXP portfolio, Midtown Manhattan, the Back Bay of Boston and Western Virginia continue to have the tightest supply and, therefore, the most landlord favorable market conditions. While San Francisco and Manhattan are dominating the landscape when it comes to technology, aka AI demand, it doesn't mean we're not seeing it elsewhere.

We completed about 170,000 square feet of leasing in our Back Bay portfolio. We're also starting to see our first wave of renewals at the 888 Boylston Street, where the embedded market rent growth is somewhere between 20% and 25%. First of those deals happened this quarter. The highlights of this quarter in the Boston region was this 322,000 square foot lease with Boston Dynamics, which illustrates our point on and around AI leading to increased demand.

This facility will house Boston Dynamics advanced robotics and AI center. Along with the least, they announced expected hiring of over 1,000 new employees.

In our Urban Edge portfolio, we continue to see lackluster demand around the lab space market. While the life-science capital markets are very active with a series of Boston area IPOs and several big pharma acquisitions of Boston Bread Biotech, capital raising around the start-up sector continues to be slow. It's the series BCD companies that eventually move out of incubators into proprietary space that's still missing in the market. We continue to make progress at our core asset, our largest availability in the Urban Edge, where we are in lease with a 50,000 square foot client, another life-science company that's building 100% office space in our facility.

In New York, at 360 Park Avenue South, we are at least the last floor again from an expanding AI tech company, which will bring the building to 100% occupied. This quarter, we completed an extension and expansion with [ Rugo ], a client that develops AI tools, specifically or financial institutions that also announced job expansions. Across Madison Park at [ 200 Fifth ], we're in lease for the remaining available space and when complete, will be 100% leased there as well. These two assets had almost 750,000 square feet of available space at the end of the first quarter of 2025.

Our activity north of 42nd Street in Midtown this quarter also included expansions from financial advisers, asset management firms, firms that totaled 100,000 square feet. We also did 10 transactions in Princeton totaling over 100,000 square feet. In San Francisco, the most significant momentum in our portfolio continues to be at 680 Folsom and 50 Hawthorne. During the quarter, we executed a 63,000 square foot lease and we are in discussions now with an applied AI company for a 35,000 square foot floor and we're talking with an existing AI client about expanding into the final available floor at 680 Folsom.

We've also had success with smaller technology companies expanding at 535 and at Embarcadero Center. We recently completed two transactions are in discussions with three more. We are approaching our first significant initial lease-up expirations at Salesforce Tower in '27. Here, we believe current market rents are 30% to 40% higher than the expired rents in the building and still would be a significant discount to new construction economics. It's really hard to find holes in the San Francisco demand picture when you've had 3 million square feet of positive absorption over the last 2 quarters. However, the one soft spot continues to be incremental demand growth from traditional financial services, professional services and legal firms. That's sort of where the action is the least exciting.

In Mountain View, we've completed 190,000 square foot of leases, vacant space made up of 50% this activity and we're in discussions with new clients for another 70,000 square feet of vacancy in the park. And in Seattle, we completed over 100,000 square feet of leasing on vacant space this quarter. This included a 44,000 square foot expansion by strike following on our demand theme another floor with an AI company that expects to grow its head count four times in 2026.

And finally, activity in D.C. this quarter was concentrated in [ Reston ], where we leased over 125,000 square feet of 27 expiring leases to defense contractors, cyber security firms and a financial firm. In the district, we're in negotiations to lease 100% of the space that McDermott will be vacating to 500 North Capital in late 2028 when we deliver 725 12th. With the expected sale of two office assets, we are shrinking our district portfolio prior to adding our newly leased developments.

In an interim, the DC team continues to field inbound requests from law firms that want us to identify sites and develop new projects like what we've achieved at 725 12th and 2100 M. In fact, working with an institutional owner to organize a JV, 1/3 of these projects and hope to have a lease commitment before the end of 2026.

In summary, our assets are seeing strong demand growth. We are leasing space more quickly. And as Mike will describe, it's impacting our bottom line.

Great. Thanks, Doug. Good morning, everybody. Today, I'm going to cover our financing activities as well as our strong results for the second quarter earnings and an update of our full year 2026 earnings guidance.

As Owen mentioned, we closed a $1.2 billion 5-year construction loan to fund approximately 60% of the development cost of our 343 Madison project. The loan was competitively bid, and we experienced strong demand from our largest banking partners. The demand allowed us to achieve very attractive pricing and terms relative to recent deals in the office construction loan market and it demonstrates the engagement of institutional lenders to finance premier quality office projects with our strong sponsorship.

The pricing is floating at SOFR plus 250 basis points with a reduction to 225 basis points upon the achievement of project milestones. And the interest expense will be capitalized into the project cost, so it will not be included in our interest expense until completion in 2029. This is an important milestone for 343 Madison and it provides us with an additional capital source and financial flexibility.

We are also focused on the upcoming refinancing of $1 billion unsecured bond that carries a GAAP interest rate of 3.5% and expires this October. While rates markets have been volatile, the bond market has been very active with credit spreads near all-time types. Our 10-year credit spreads are trading in the low 100s, and if we were to issue a new bond today, it would likely price around 6% based on the current 10-year treasury rate.

With the success of our asset sales program and the financing of 343 Madison, we may elect to use available cash to reduce the size of this financing by up to $300 million to minimize dilution. We also continue to evaluate all the refinancing alternatives available as we seek to optimize our debt capital structure and mitigate the impact of the elevated interest rate environment.

Now I would like to turn to our second quarter earnings results. We had a very strong quarter and reported FFO of $1.78 per share that exceeded the midpoint of our guidance and consensus by $0.08 per share. Importantly, nearly all of our outperformance came from better results in portfolio NOI. Our revenues exceeded our expectations by $0.04 per share comprised of $0.03 per share of higher rental revenues and $0.01 per share of higher service income.

Robust leasing activity drove higher rental revenue and occupancy this quarter. The leasing demand is broad-based across the portfolio and very granular in nature. The revenue lift reflects earlier-than-anticipated occupancy, and I do not expect it to compound into future projections.

As Doug described, our leasing activity has beaten our expectations with occupancy climbing by 100 basis points to 88.4% this quarter. We've increased our expectations for average occupancy for the year by 65 basis points to 88.9% and we now expect to end 2026 at closer to 90% [indiscernible]. All very positive results from the healthy leasing activity and client demand we are seeing in our markets.

We also generated $0.04 per share of outperformance from lower operating expenses in the portfolio. About half of this is from lower repairs and maintenance expense that I anticipate will be deferred to later in 2026 and is embedded in our expense guidance for the back half of the year. The rest came from lower utilities expense related to lighter energy consumption in the Northeast, where we are working hard to fine-tune our buildings to lower consumption and cost every day.

We also had lower real estate taxes from the receipt of real estate tax abatements this quarter. We continue to aggressively appeal our real estate tax assessments throughout our portfolio and are seeing positive results in certain locations.

Looking at the full year 2026, we are raising our guidance for FFO by $0.05 per share at the midpoint by bringing up the bottom end by $0.09 to $6.99 per share and the top end of our range by $0.01 to $7.05 per share. Strong leasing performance across our portfolio is giving us increased confidence in our growth outlook. In our same-property portfolio, we are increasing our assumption for our share of NOI growth over 2025 and by 30 basis points to between 1.8% and 2.6%. The increase mirrors the accelerated occupancy growth that Doug detailed.

And in our development portfolio, we are increasing our assumptions for NOI by $0.03 per share based on faster lease-up and lower expenses. At 360 Park, as Doug mentioned, we signed 50,000 square feet in the quarter, and we're now in negotiations to lease the last available floor.

On the expense side, we started capitalizing expenses at Reservoir Place where we commenced redevelopment this quarter with the signing of our lease with Boston Dynamics.

We've been extremely successful in executing our asset sales program, which is raising capital to fund our developments and reduce debt. As Owen described, we are ahead of the expectations we laid out last year at our Investor Day, not in the total volume of asset sales, but in our timing. The accelerated sales timing has a slightly more dilutive impact than the prior guidance that we provided, including the impact of lower net interest expense from deploying the sales proceeds to reduce debt, we expect a foregone NOI from our sales to reduce FFO by approximately $0.02 per share when compared to our prior assumptions.

Lastly, we raised our assumption for fee income revenue by $0.01 per share from higher construction management fee income and leasing commissions earned from our joint venture portfolio.

So to summarize, we've increased our guidance for 2026 FFO by $0.05 per share at the midpoint to our new range of $6.99 to $7.05 per share. The change come from increases in our assumption for growth in our share of portfolio NOI by $0.06, lower net interest expense of $0.03 and higher fee income of $0.01, these are partially offset by a reduction of NOI from asset sales of $0.05.

Overall, we had a great quarter and all phases of our business strategy are clicking. We raised both our FFO and occupancy guidance driven by consistently strong leasing volumes and excellent progress on leasing our vacant and near-term expiring space. Our occupancy has now increased for 3 consecutive quarters. and we're executing on our planned asset sales program to both reduce leverage and redeploy capital into higher-yielding new developments.

Operator, that completes our formal remarks. Can you open the lines up for questions?

[Operator Instructions] And I show our first question comes from the line of Nicholas Yulico from Scotiabank.

So first question, clearly, you have the occupancy benefit picking up in the portfolio, which will help for 2027 earnings impact. Can you just talk a little bit more, maybe, Mike, about how the asset sales are going to work in terms of the impact on 2027 versus debt repayments since I know some of the income-producing asset sales are more back half weighted, like [ 7 ] Time Square, potentially even next year. Is there like dilution we should be thinking about for 2027? And then also, in terms of the capital, just an update on whether there might be excess sale proceeds to use for stock buybacks?

So look, on the asset sales side, as I mentioned, we're ahead of plan, and Owen mentioned that as well. So the dilution in '26 is a little bit higher than we had originally stated when -- at our Investor Day in the beginning of the year, I think we said the dilution would be $0.06 to $0.09, and now if we get everything done that we expect it will be closer to $0.11.

And a good chunk. The majority of our asset sales will be completed, we will evaluate going forward incremental sales as well. Our goal remains to bring down our leverage into the lower 7x range, which gives us capacity for future investment activities. And those future investment activities could include new developments, could include stock buybacks, and we will evaluate all of those things.

With respect to 2027, I mean, we're really not giving guidance on 2027 right now. The total asset sales that we project are still $1.9 billion by 2028. And as Owen described, we'll have $1.7 billion done potentially by the end of this year, which means that next year will be lighter.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Steve Sakwa from Evercore ISI.

Given the leasing success that you're having in the, I guess, the faster ramp that you're seeing in occupancy how are you sort of thinking about the ultimate stabilized occupancy rate of the portfolio. Has that sort of changed in your mind? And has the timing of that stabilization kind of been pulled forward given what you're seeing in the leasing market today?

So Steve, this is Doug. What I would say is, right now, we're sort of sticking to our 91% at the end of 2027. If things were to continue in the sort of same trajectory, I think we would be more aggressive than that, but we're not ready to do that. And as I look out at our sort of lease expirations and then the available space that we have in the portfolio, sort of that's left, there's a concentration of vacancy in two main areas.

The first is at Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. And that's the place where I think we have the most short-term opportunity to exceed our projections, which would probably occur in late '27, early '28. And then the second place would be our sort of what I refer to as our portfolio of available space in our tertiary markets in both the Urban Edge of Boston, aka, the suburbs, and our Colorado Center portfolio in Santa Monica. Those are sort of the other two areas.

And so I think that the value of that space is obviously less than a CBD property in Midtown, Manhattan, the back bay of Boston or San Francisco.

My guess is that we sort of max out at somewhere between 94% and 95%, right? That's as good as it's going to get. And so I think that by the end of we're at 91% or maybe a little bit better, but we're not ready to say that yet. And then in 2028, that's sort of when we get closer to other number I just described. And so that's kind of where we max out as a portfolio.

We will always have some marginal availability given the fact that we do 10-year leases, and we have some, what I refer to as larger clients. And if they choose to relocate or we can't accommodate their growth, then we'll have some downtime. So I don't think we get much above 94%, 95%.

And our next question comes from the line of Jana Galan from Bank of America Securities.

In the prepared remarks, you touched on some price discovery, but can you walk us through what your kind of seeing in the transaction market with fundamentals clearly improving, but maybe higher interest rates impacting pricing on land, residential and office?

Yes. I think the -- as I mentioned in my remarks, transaction volumes for office are certainly off the bottom, and they've grown significantly over the last year or so, but they're still well below what they were prior to COVID. So we're kind of in recovery mode.

Second, I would say most of the -- a big percentage of the buying is more, I would say, family office and opportunistic capital that is seeking discounts to replacement cost kind of transactions. That's not 100% true, but that's the majority of the transactions. And that's logical, when you have an asset class in the capital markets that's recovering, generally, the opportunistic capital starts it and they are successful and then other capital follows. So I think that's where we are.

The deals that I mentioned this quarter, I think, do kind of mirror where the deals were last quarter. They're kind of at 7-ish type cap rates with the possibility of stabilizing at a slightly higher number. And I don't think these assets -- I mean, I picked out the best ones that we're selling, and I still don't think they're "true premier workplaces".

And I share your next question comes from the line of John Kim from BMO Capital Markets.

Owen, I think you mentioned at Reservoir Place you're expecting a cash return of over 10%. And I was wondering if that was on the incremental CapEx? Or does that include your historical cost of the assets? And then going forward, what is your hurdle rates on developments, I guess, on like the build-to-suit developments similar to 725 12th Street?

Yes. So the 10% that I mentioned includes an inferred value for the building that was taken out of service. So the cash yield on the incremental capital would be materially higher.

So -- and then on what is our target yield, it depends a little bit on the market and the pre-leasing and the risk and all those things, as you would expect. But in general, we're getting 8-plus percent yields on our developments. I mentioned our activity at 343 Madison, we remain very much on track, I think, to accomplish that 7.5% to 8% and our deals in Washington [ pencil ] over 8%. So that's what we're seeking to achieve. And that is accretive to where the stock is trading vis-a-vis cap rates.

And our next question comes from the line of Anthony Paolone from JPMorgan.

You mentioned, Doug, I think the opportunity you saw at Embarcadero Center in the near term. But if you think out over the next couple of years and if the momentum in Northern California generally just persists, like what do you think BXP's biggest opportunities are there? What do you think you likely do with that portfolio?

Yes. So I'm going to let Rod answer that question because he has a couple of pretty interesting opportunities, one of which is physically ours and others that we're working on that he can talk about.

There's -- I mean, the market, as you've heard, is very strong in Northern California we're taking advantage of this increased demand with the AI sector, for sure. I mean if you're looking at the pipeline of tenants in the market right now are pushing 9 million square feet, which is just unheard of. We haven't seen that number.

So going forward, absolutely. I mean, it's a market where people are starting to talk about building new buildings. I know that seems strange with still some vacancy. But the reason is that there is just a limit on the premier workplaces. If you're looking for -- if you're tenant in the market right now and you're looking for 50,000 to 100,000 feet, top-tier space. You're not going to have many cases you might have. You can certainly count them on one hand, maybe not even all the hands. So it's prompting people to talk about building new buildings.

And what Doug just mentioned, we've actually -- we're very pleased to announce that we've been awarded through a competitive assignment development consultant role on a site in downtown that we have familiarity with from the past cycle. And so we're going to have a role in that. And I think it's a great site, and we'll have an opportunity to invest in it in the future if we feel that the market supports it and demand supports it. So it's positive, and we're obviously looking at all other opportunities.

And then Rod just mentioned Fourth and Harrison and sort of what we have going on there, too.

Yes. So at [ 4th ] and Harrison, I mean, that's a plus or minus 800,000 square foot potentially phased projects that we were ready to start right when COVID hit. And this is a great asset that sits proximate to where a lot of the AI companies in Mission Bay are located. And we're teeing up potentially getting ready if -- again, demand holds up to be able to do something there. And we wouldn't build it spec. But we're absolutely talking to users and we'll see if something comes to that.

So I think, Tony, to sort of summarize, we are involved in a couple of really interesting opportunities in the CBD of San Francisco, not the Peninsula where if market rents get to the point where your construction makes economic sense, we actually have places where we can create new premier product for our clients.

And our next question comes from the line of Michael Goldsmith from UBS.

To this point, the recovery story has been occupancy led, but the message this quarter felt a little bit more rent growth oriented. So is that correct? Or maybe can you just talk about the pricing power you're seeing? Is it increasing? And is that for all markets or just the strongest ones?

Sure. So for us, the occupancy story is more meaningful than the improvement in the overall sort of what I'd refer to as mark-to-market, largely because you get [ 100¢ = $1.00 ] on the occupancy and you only get a marginal amount on the increase when you're doing a mark-to-market. But why don't I let Hilary talk about sort of the her views on pricing power in Manhattan, and Bryan talked about our perspective on sort of where pricing is in the Back Bay submarket of Boston, which is where the majority of our rental rate increases will come from over the next few years.

The pricing power in Manhattan remains quite favorable to landlords, and it is expanding geographically. So while it's been very, very strong in the best submarkets of Midtown, it continues to expand outward to other submarkets in Midtown and to Midtown South.

As Doug and Owen mentioned, we are -- and Mike, we have now spoken for every single floor at 360 Park Avenue South. And we're seeing landlords across the Midtown South submarket post ever higher rents as they're leasing up remaining vacancy.

In Midtown proper, we are getting inbound interest at our highest quality buildings and at 343 at rents that are consistently sort of 10% to 15% above where they were last year and at our buildings and in the lower stack of our buildings where rents are slightly more affordable we're still seeing 20% increases year-over-year, and that is fundamentally because there's a lack of available space in the market. So great strength from the landlord perspective in New York City.

Yes. From Boston, it's the story that Doug and Owen have outlined, which is if you look at our rent roll snapshot, Boston, we're 97% -- 98% leased, Cambridge, 98% leased, Cambridge Lab, 100% leased. And then you combine that with call it, competitive set, the people that we really -- or the buildings that we really compete against and there's a wide difference between, let's say, general vacancy of [ Class A ] and then our competitive set, and it can be as much as 9 points, 11% versus 2% in the Back Bay as an example. And for us, price detection is going to be really in the renewal process versus we don't have any lease vacant space to go to market with per se.

So we're in the process of really doing our absolute best at educating the marketplace, the brokerage communities and our clients about what's taking place and really focus on factual comps, et cetera, but we do anticipate that there is pricing power there.

And I share our next question comes from the line of Seth Berge from Citi.

Nick Joseph here with Seth. Maybe if continue on the mark-to-market conversation. What do you estimate it for your West Coast portfolio? Obviously, we've seen a recovery in leasing there. But how do you think about where the portfolio sits today versus where market rents are?

So what I would say is that it's kind of a building specific answer, and I'll just sort of give you a perspective in our -- I'll use San Francisco as sort of the poster trial because it's the majority of our West Coast exposure.

So starting with the least good and then getting to the best. So down in Mountain View, where this quarter, we had a pretty significant markdown largely because we were getting somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 per square foot per month and now we're getting somewhere closer to $4 to $5 a square per month, which are still very high rents, but they're not the same place they were. And the reason we were getting those other rents was that we had gotten significant increases over a 4- or 5-year period and then obviously, the market sort of had a big change. So that's where the largest sort of decline is.

At Embarcadero Center, it's sort of a neutral place. So in buildings like Embarcadero Center 4 or anything that's sort of above, call it, the 15th to 20th floor of 1, 2 or 3 there's an embedded market opportunity for growth. At the lower portions of 1, 2 and 3, where we have leases rolling over, that's where I would say we have to be more competitive because of the availability and the modest amount of incremental demand there is from what I refer to as traditional office tenants. And so there's probably a slight markdown.

At 680 Folsom at 535 Mission, and then at Salesforce Tower, we are going to start to see material increases in our markups. Most of the leasing that we've done in those buildings has been at relatively lower rents. And as we go forward, those rents have gotten higher. We are now at a point, for example, at 680 Folsom, where our asking rents are higher than the rents that will expire when the macys.com lease expires in 2029.

And as I said, Salesforce Tower on average, my guess is our embedded growth is 30% to 40%, and we're going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of, call it, 200,000 to 250,000 square feet of expirations in that building in '27 and '28. And so there's a real opportunity for embedded growth.

The other two West Coast markets, which are -- for us are Seattle and West L.A., I would say we're modestly lower in Seattle, and then the West L.A. continues to struggle from a recovery perspective. It's the least of our markets from a demand growth perspective. And so there, net-net, we're seeing still an embedded loss in that market. But again, for us, that's 1% or 2% of our portfolio as is Seattle. So it's not material in terms of what happens in the next couple of years.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Blaine Heck from Wells Fargo.

With respect to 343 Madison, can you just elaborate on the appetite you've seen from potential equity partners, the timing we should expect on those sales of interest and any color you can provide on how you and those potential partners are thinking of value versus expected cost on the entirety of the 30% to 50% interest you guys plan on monetizing?

So as I mentioned in my remarks, we have a letter of intent with an investor to purchase a 10% interest in the project, and we expect that to close this quarter. And we continue to talk to additional investors about selling additional interest in the property, bringing us up to around that 30% to 50% level.

We are selling down interest in this property, which we consider to be one of the best office developments in the United States, we're seeking our terms, both in terms of pricing and the way the governance works.

So in thinking about pricing, our yield as the original developer of the property is just to use high-level simple numbers is around 8%. And when we deliver this property, we think its value will probably be in the 5.5% to 6% range. So as we monetize interest along the way, we'll be moving gradually from that 8% yield down to that 5.5% to 6% yield. And that's the way we're thinking about it and talking about it with prospective investors.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Caitlin Burrows from Goldman Sachs.

Earlier in the prepared remarks, you guys mentioned that 48% of leasing in 2Q was renewals, extensions and expansions. I was wondering if you could talk more about the renewal activity, maybe what retention has been over the past few, say, 3 years? And if it's fair to expect that it increases going forward?

So Caitlin, this is sort of, I guess, more of an artistic answer than you probably would like, but hopefully, it's directionally correct.

So there's a timing issue associated with this as well. So as we get closer to a lease expiration, our retention rate comes down largely because we've already done a lot of the larger transactions earlier. So as an example, Hilary's team right now is working on forward transactions that are 2028 expirations or later. And my guess is if all of those deals will likely get done. And so when I -- when we talk about our renewals in the next quarter or 2, there may be some very lumpy number that sort of say that our retention is higher than it typically is.

When we think about our sort of near-term expiration, so call it, the next 24 to 18 months and then because it goes down generally, the study that we've done is that, generally, we're somewhere between 45% and 50%. That's sort of what happens. And largely, that's because in many cases, we're not able to accommodate growth because we're so fully leased and so we, unfortunately, have some tenants that are leaving.

Right now, as I look forward into our 2027 expirations, we don't have much in the way of large users leaving. So I feel better about sort of that number for what we have in front of us. So as an example, as I said, we have 1.77 million of 2027 expirations. So right now, we're pretty actively involved in about 550,000 square feet. So I wouldn't be surprised if we get above that 50% level for this portfolio. But on a general basis, we're somewhere between 45% and 50% as we get closer to the actual year of exporting.

So just to add on to that, Doug. I mean, the last couple of quarters, we've had a number of these larger lease renewals that we signed a year or 2 ago coming in. So if you look at the details in our leasing activity page on the leases commenced, last 2 quarters, we've been closer to 60% to 65%. Again, because some of those leases you were just talking about that we did before that have come in, which is positive, if you would long term, it's around 50%. But this year is better, and it's reflected in the occupancy growth we're seeing.

And our next question comes from the line of Floris Van Dijkum from Ladenburg Tallman.

So kudos for putting your [ SNO ] pipeline out there, giving some more insight into the future growth. Obviously, not all office space is created equal. I don't know if you can quantify what that [ SNO ] growth would be in terms of NOI because clearly, New York signed not open is different than L.A. or D.C. If you can give us a little bit more insight into that, I think that would be helpful.

I wish I had my list in front of me. I don't. But I will tell you that the majority of it in 2026 is in Manhattan.

Largely coming from 350 Park Avenue and [ 200 5th Avenue ]. So that's where the most least but not yet occupied will commence.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Upal Rana from KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I appreciate all the color on the opportunity set in broader San Francisco over the next couple of years that you mentioned, but Doug, you talked about Embarcadero Center that could give you the most short-term uplift in occupancy. Could you give us an update on the pipeline there for those buildings? And maybe any time you could share would be helpful.

Sure. So I'll make a brief comment, and then I'll let Rod be more sort of robust about it.

Big picture, it's a granular market for financial services, professional services kinds of users, which means we're doing a lot more transactions, but they're smaller. And so obviously, it takes a longer period of time to fill available space, but right, you can sort of describe the tenor and the granularity of what we have going in [indiscernible].

Yes, absolutely. So one of the key strategies that we've done in the past and we're continuing to do a little bit more on expanded scale now is building prebuilt space. So we have 2 floors, for example, at one Embarcadero Center that are under construction now. One more take towards the tech build-out a little more open plan and other towards more of a law firm, professional services. We already have interest on both of them, and I think that's how we're going to find success.

I think the stuff -- the face that is sitting in old second-generation or in shell condition is going to be the hardest. So we're being very proactive in investing ahead of that and getting the spaces ready for occupancy because that's where we found the most success.

So these -- and as Doug said, it's going to be granular. It's probably not going to be one big deal that's going to occupy at the bottom of one of these buildings. We're certainly open for that discussion and chasing those deals when available, but I think it's going to happen more Florida time, partial floor and we're going to have to go at it that way.

I would add though that Embarcadero Center is going to get some nice continued positive interest, the Embarcadero Plaza, which is the park adjacent to -- for Embarcadero Center is fully underway now, and this is that's a private public partnership with the city of San Francisco to build this real Class Park, and that is going to absolutely enhance the environment around Embarcadero Center, which we will benefit from, for sure.

And I show our next question in the queue comes from the line of Dylan Burzinski from Green Street.

Just maybe pivoting back to sort of the disposition program. Obviously, you mentioned you guys are well ahead of schedule. I guess any possibility that the ultimate goal ends up being much higher than that $1.9 billion? And then I guess as you think about the portfolio, once you guys are done with that, in your guys' mind, does that get you guys to a point of where the portfolio is largely there in terms of most of the assets being what you guys deem as [indiscernible] class there? Or would there still be call it, 5% to 10% of the portfolio that is noncore or you guys have mined?

We'll keep going on sales. As Mike said, it will be slower. And there are several reasons for that. One is -- let's go through the three categories. On land, in many regions, we continue to get additional residential entitlements on land those take time and it takes time to monetize those assets. So as these entitlements come through, and this will be beyond 2026, we'll continue to monetize the land the way we have both selling for-sale pads to homebuilders as well as starting multifamily development. So that's one category.

Second, we still have a couple of build and close to stabilized apartment buildings that we have not yet sold. So I think those are potential future disposition candidates.

And then third, we do still have a handful of office assets that we would like to sell and some of those are not stabilized. They're in various stages of lease-up. And as those properties get leased up where we think we can maximize the value and the disposition we'll do it.

But I do think the cadence of dispositions going -- they will continue, but the cadence will slow down a little bit.

Yes. And Dylan, I'd say the one -- the first bucket that Owen described, which is this land portfolio. These are what I would refer to as many of our older suburban office buildings where we have made a decision that the recovery in those marketplaces is going to lag the opportunity associated with creating residential entitlements. And we happen to be in an unusually constructive time period relative to the jurisdictions that those buildings are operating in, where there is a need for housing.

And so there's over 1 million square feet of suburban stuff that will eventually disappear from our portfolio that we will ultimately we hope to sell somewhere between 75% and 80% interest in, which will be liquidating those assets and providing us with opportunities that we can either use for redeploying into those particular developments or using that money elsewhere. And I don't think people sort of really focus on the size of that and what the magnitude of that is. And it's hundreds of millions of dollars over time. So it's not $10 million a year, $50 million a year, it's hundreds of millions of dollars over time.

And our next question comes from the line of Richard Anderson from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Obviously, AI has come up a lot on this call, and it's a demand driver for you and many. But it does have -- it does remind me of the life-science boom of 5, 6, 7 years ago, and that didn't turn out great. I'm curious if there are any lessons learned from that experience to life-science and the exuberance that came from it. and how you're approaching AI demand today? And if there are any kind of lessons learned as you approach that opportunity TBD to see how long it stays intact?

The future of AI and its impacts are very difficult to project and flip through any newspaper or any magazine any day of the week and you'll get all kinds of different views. So it is very, very difficult.

I think the primary benefits to BXP's leasing are not actually from the AI companies directly, although that is a benefit. We're seeing markets just generally tighten, Like, for example, San Francisco has had 8-plus million square feet of net absorption from AI companies and a lot of other clients are getting displaced by that and then coming to us and other landlords and leasing space.

And then lastly, our core set of financial services, legal services and business service clients, many of them are investing in, providing services to the AI industry and they're doing well with that. And as a result, are growing and leasing more space.

So yes, if AI comes off the boil, as you suggest, that will be negative, but most of the leasing benefits we're getting are not directly with the AI companies. And then when we do lease to an AI company, we obviously focus as much as we can on the credit and get letters of credit in the leasing. And we're also paying attention to the percentage of our total portfolio that's leased directly to start-up AI companies.

And I would just add the following thing, relet to sort of the difference between leasing to a company -- that's a technology company that we happen to be calling AI and a life science company. So over, call it, the last 5 or 6 years, longer than we ever would have expected to have happened. People were building speculative laboratory buildings and those laboratory buildings were being built with the infrastructure necessary to allow for a lab installation, which was a very expensive proposition, and they were -- there was a lot of it that was done on a speculative basis. And so while we are actually very constructive about the long-term viability of life science, particularly in the greater Boston marketplace, there's just a ton of bespoke lab-ready buildings that are sitting out in the marketplace that are going to just have to wait their turn for a customer to show up that actually wants that particular location in order for them to achieve the value that's going on.

And in some cases, those tenants or those building owners are making a decision that they're no longer going to wait. So as an example, there's a lab building right now in Boston, that is bespoke, and it's doing a transaction with a major health organization that is not going to be doing lab work in there, but it's going to be doing some other kinds of clinical work in that building. So things like that will happen. And over time, the supply will, in fact, become absorbed.

With what we would refer to as the artificial intelligence companies, this is office space, pure and simple office space, et for better or worse, BXP is not a data center company. We do not have "data center infrastructures" with billions of dollars of equipment and enormous amounts of power needs that are sitting in and around our building. So we are simply leasing our space to the next version of technology, call it .com, call it mobility, call it cloud computing, whatever it is, now it's artificial intelligence, and that's just sort of the natural progression and those organizations are simply looking for great locations, great amenities, high-quality assets, premier management and great places for them to grow their organizations, which is what we are suited to do.

So I think there is a distinction between what happened with Life Science and the overbuilding that was occurring and what's going on right now because I'm not aware of anybody building a speculative office building in a CBD location that where we operate. And that was very different in 2022, '23 and '24 when there was a ton of speculative life science that was built in places like South San Francisco and in Watertown, Massachusetts, and in Lexington and Waltham, Massachusetts that were built on spec. And that's fundamentally the difference between what we're seeing now and what we saw over the last "cycle".

And I show our next question comes from the line of Peter Abramowitz from Deutsche Bank.

I think on the last quarter's call, Mike, you talked about leasing CapEx of around or above $400 million for the year. I think it was $330 million or thereabouts in the first half. So you're on pace to kind of go through that number. I understand certainly a lot of this is good news CapEx related to leasing. But could you just help us think about any updated thoughts on where you expect that number to shake out 2027? And then the overall leasing CapEx trajectory and how it impacts FAD growth in the second half and beyond.

Sure. And you're right. We continue to do additional leasing. We continue to -- we're increasing our occupancy projections for 2026, and that's going to roll into additional leasing transaction costs that are going to occur this year. And we are going to be increasing. I suspect it's going to be closer to $500 million than it is to $400 million based upon what we're seeing right now. And that will end up having an impact on our AFFO in 2026.

And as you said, it's good news because we're signing more leases and those leases will go into effect. And there's going to be some free rent, obviously, in the beginning of those leases. So that also has some impact on our AFFO but those leases will become cash rent paying in 2027 and will have a positive impact on AFFO kind of on a moving forward basis. So I look at 2026 as being a year where it's just going to be higher in terms of transaction costs. and also higher in terms of straight-line rents.

Your next question comes from the line of Alexander Goldfarb from Piper Sandler.

So Mike and Owen, just going to -- I know you're not talking about '27. But certainly, the portfolio has benefited immensely from stronger fundamentals, occupancy being better. And on the accelerated dispositions being able to use some of those proceeds to pay off debt. But as the company strategizes for '27 and sort of the priority, is the priority more towards, let's keep earnings growth accelerating as number one, and then debt payoff is number two? Or is it the other way around? Just trying to understand because the company is in obviously a really good position. stock's doing well today. And clearly, the fundamentals are providing office landlords with a wonderful tailwind.

Alex, we always understand and are trying to grow the FFO per share of our company. And that is a clear priority. I don't know what there's -- we are going to continue to sell assets when we have them that when we have an asset, we don't think is strategic to the company that we think we're getting fair value for. I do think the mix of asset sales that we have used has brought down the dilution because a lot of the sales that we're doing are land, and a lot of the sales that we're doing are apartments, which trade at accretive cap rates to us. So it's not like we're selling office buildings at high cap rates.

But we recognize the importance of growing our earnings per share. And as you suggest, and as Doug described in great detail, the leasing that we are doing, we expect continued growth.

Mike, I don't know if there's anything more you want to add?

No, I think you've covered it. That's our goal.

I show our next question comes from the line of Brendan Lynch from Barclays.

Are there any other buildings in the portfolio like Reservoir Place that could captured demand for similar full building redevelopments? And how do redevelopment yields compared to other competing uses of capital?

So the answer to your question is there certainly are. These are what I refer to as we're trying to mine for these organizations. They take a lot of time, a lot of effort and an incredible amount of diligence from our local operating teams. So our Boston team has done it twice. First, we did it with [ Anderol ] at a building that was out of service called 10 to 50 [indiscernible] Street.

And obviously, we've just done it with reservoir Place. We have some buildings in our Northern Virginia portfolio that potentially could have a similar outcome. These are highly speculative comments that I'm making. So I'm not suggesting there's anything imminent, but they physically exist.

And after that, I would say we are always looking to put a client and a building together to create an opportunity that may not necessarily be in our portfolio. And I ask Pete to sort of talk about what he and Jacob seeing down in D.C. because there is a lot of what I refer to as functionally obsolescent or capital structure broken places in we see that we have sort of from a thought perspective, said this could be another great place for a building. And just you guys should describe sort of the amount of inbound interest we are seeing for our franchise in D.C. Not in our buildings though.

Yes. Jake, jump in here, too. But on everybody. Yes, as Doug and Owen have alluded to, we're working on what we hope will be the third in the series here of opportunities in Downtown D.C. with inbound clients. And really, I think the key here has been matching client size with building size and with that -- making that opportunity, therefore, a highly leased development from the get-go.

There are lots of opportunities, both sites and all firms out there who are interested in doing similar things. and not as much capital as you might expect to be chasing those kind of opportunities. So we're fielding conversations with clients directly with the brokerage community and with site owners and in some cases, lenders on those sites about thinking about those different opportunities definitively out there. And I think the group of players like BXP that can execute on those kind of transactions is relatively small. So it is -- it has been talked about a bit of a large dichotomy between the market writ large and the economics that you see on, for instance, the vacancy rate on office generally in D.C. versus the very, very top of the market, which is extremely tight and getting tighter and that has had what you might expect, which is the impact on new building rents has gone significantly higher, but so has just the general market for trophy space.

Yes, we would add in Boston this kind of additional twist to what Pete was talking about was that when you look at our suburban activity, where we think we've captured like 70% of all the leasing in the Waltham market over the last 1.5 years. It's a combination of the premier attributes of location in the case of Reservoir place. I mean it's just a fabulous building large at an incredible intersection, cloverleaf very hard to get in our marketplace. And you combine that with our ability to help these clients with bespoke design that they're looking at now because their uses are very different than conventional office. And to be able to articulate that and then provide a client with a timing on that, that's definitive has been a really big competitive advantage for us and similar to what Pete's seeing in D.C.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Ronald Kamdem from Morgan Stanley.

I just had a question on same-store NOI, which the cash number was reiterated at sort of flat for the year. I did see that I think the impact from building taking out of service went a little bit lower, I'm not sure if that impacts that.

But the question is really just can you just remind us what some of the drags were for this year. And obviously, we can appreciate if it takes time for leases to commence and how we think about that potential ramp and same-store as you sort of flip the calendar with the occupancy tailwinds that you have?

So the cash same-store is going to lag the gap same-store as we gain occupancy. And these leases that we're starting this year that are going right into our occupancy have free rent periods in the beginning.

So that's why when we increased our occupancy guidance this quarter, we increased our GAAP same-store guidance by 30 basis points. We didn't move the cash because these leases are going to be in free rent periods. And so those free rent periods are -- they generally range between 6 and 12 months. So you should expect to see the cash come in on this leasing sometime in 2027. And that's when you're going to see the cash same-store start to catch up with the [ gas ] same-store.

And I show our last question in the queue comes from the line of Vikram Malhotra from Mizuho.

Just two clarifications. I guess just with how attractive the debt markets have been, would you consider taking in the unencumbered assets, perhaps utilizing this moment where the debt markets are so attractive?

And then similar to sort of that in capital allocation, just you formed a JV a couple of years ago to buy, I guess, value add, if I'm not wrong, or a value-add office. I'm wondering in San Francisco with the turn you're seeing and just overall, the breadth in office, is that sort of an opportunity to deploy more capital now?

Look, on the debt markets, the secured markets and the unsecured markets are both very strong and attractive as are the bank markets. And I think high-quality CMBS execution is going to be somewhere in the low 100 basis point spread range at a reasonable leverage rate and our unsecured bonds are also pricing at that same level. So if we were going to issue incremental debt I think we have both opportunities and we can weigh both opportunities. So if we think about -- and we're really not thinking about issuing new debt. We're more viewing ourselves as thinking about refinancing that as it comes to do. And looking at the best opportunity to try to do the most attractive debt financing that we could in all of the markets that we have access to.

And those markets, again, include the 5-year bank unsecured term loan market, the 5- to 10-year CMBS market the 5- to 10-year or even longer unsecured bond market and even the convertible debt market like we did last year, which is a lower coupon, but obviously, there's option value on the back end. So all of those opportunities are available to us, and we weigh them as we look at what our needs are going forward.

And then on the second part of your question, we do look at all acquisitions. The bar is high because whatever -- if we buy an older building, we have to believe that we can make it into a premier workplace, number one. And we're comparing it to the yield requirement. We're comparing it to the development capital that we're investing that we believe we're getting an 8% yield for us. But if we could find things like that, we certainly will look.

Thank you. That concludes our Q&A session. At this time, I would like to turn the conference back over to Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for closing remarks.

Well, it's been 1 hour in 22 minutes. So we have nothing else to report and thank you all for your interest in BXP.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Good day.

All right. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Tony Paolone, and I'm a research analyst at JPMorgan, and it's my pleasure to moderate a company discussion here with BXP. With us is the management team. And I'm going to start from your left on the far end here and start with who we have here this morning.

We have Hilary Spann, who runs the company's New York region, which is going to be a great point of discussion here today. We have Mike LaBelle, who's Chief Financial Officer of the company; Doug Linde, President of the company; and to my right, Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. So thanks, everybody, for coming here this morning and for doing this.

I'm going to start with Owen here and just kick it off and give us a couple of minutes on BXP, the portfolio and what's happening today?

Yes. Great. Good morning, everybody. Tony, thank you for hosting and moderating the conversation today. I thought I would kick it off by giving all of you an update on the progress that we've made on the business plan that we outlined at our Investor Day in September of last year.

As a reminder, for those of you that follow us, it basically has 3 components. One, we're going to lease space and grow the occupancy of the company. Second, we're going to sell assets. And third, we're going to advance our development pipeline. And we've made, I would say, very -- we've been very successful in all 3 fronts and made tremendous progress.

I'm just going to hit some very high-level points because I know Tony has got some good questions for us to go through all the details of this. But just to start on the leasing, all of our markets today are stronger than they were in September of last year. We leased 1.1 million square feet in the first quarter of this year. We've leased well over 800,000 square feet already this quarter.

We have a pipeline of about 2.3 million square feet of leases that we're trying to close that are under letter of intent. We've got over 1 million square feet of pipeline beyond that. We have minimal rollover in '26 and '27, so we don't have that headwind. And we outlined a plan where we were going to improve our occupancy 2% in '26 to 89% and another 2% in '27, and we're very much on track to accomplish that.

On sales, what we said we were going to do is $1.9 billion by -- over the next 3 years as of September of last year. As of today, we've closed $1.2 billion in asset sales. We have $200 million of sales in addition that are under contract where we have hard deposits. And then we have about $400 million of sales that are in various stages of marketing. So if you add all that up, it's about $1.8 billion. Some of those sales will end up being happening in '27, but we're obviously very much on track to accomplish that $1.9 billion in -- certainly sooner than 3 years.

And then on development, we continue to make great progress in our pipeline and our development pipeline continues to be an important driver of external growth. We're delivering 290 Binney, which is our AstraZeneca lab project in Boston this quarter. I'm sure we're going to talk about 343 Madison, but we continue to derisk that project. We're 56% either signed leases or under letter of intent.

Our construction buys have gone well. We're in the middle of a recapitalization. We continue to believe that project will generate a 7.5% to 8% yield on cost to shareholders. We have a significant office pipeline in D.C. that's pre-leased. 72512, the building demolished. 2100 M, which is also 75% leased, commences in '28. And we're looking at, believe it or not, additional projects driven by clients, not necessarily driven by sites.

And then lastly, on residential, that continues to be an important part of our development pipeline. We're launching a project near Reston Town Center this year, we're going to be 20% of the equity, and we're also monetizing our land. We had a similar project called 17 Hartwell that we started last year. And we have similar types of projects on land that we control in Weston Mass, Walthton Mass and Santa Monica, California. So again, we've made terrific progress on all aspects of our business plan.

Sounds great. Well, 2 things you said stand out to me, and I think it pivots to where I want to go next. One is that you said across all your markets, things are stronger today than they were a year ago. And then two, on the development side, you talked about projects being tenant-driven or customer-driven. So these are some pretty big shifts in the office business. Talk to us a little bit more about the demand side, where you're seeing it, the types of tenants that are demanding space, the kind of space they want and start to touch on your markets.

So I would say, Tony, that your statement about things are getting better everywhere is absolutely true, even in the markets that are least good. But the BXP portfolio is seeing progress everywhere. It's really not concentrated in any one market. So this is not just a New York story or this is not just a West Coast story. This is all of our market story. The demand sources are slightly different depending upon the geography.

A market like Manhattan primarily is a financial services, professional services, asset manager, private equity hedge fund kind of an environment, although we saw in the first quarter and are seeing continued growth from smaller demand AI organizations in our buildings in Midtown South.

Our portfolio in the Greater Boston market is dominated by financial services and professional services firms in the urban core, which is in the Back Bay submarket of Boston. But in the -- what we refer to as the urban edge, interestingly, we are actually getting a reasonable amount of life science demand, although it's not the kind of life science demand that we would have typically thought when we started down the road of having a life science asset base.

It's companies that are actually not using wet labs that they're buying molecules from other organizations and then they're going through the SG&A. Company called Kailera Pharmaceutical is a good example of that, did a lease with us and just recently did an IPO and raised $600 million, and they don't actually have any wet lab space in their facility.

In our Northern Virginia marketplace, which again is another area of strength for us, it's about defense contracting and cybersecurity. And so as the defense establishment has sort of changed its apparatus government contracts to help the government and other countries, quite frankly, with those kinds of technologies has been a very vibrant source of demand in Northern Virginia.

And then artificial intelligence or technology is sort of the catchword of the day on the West Coast, primarily in San Francisco. And our portfolio south of Mission Street has been very much a beneficiary of that demand. In the first quarter of 2026, 80% of all leasing in San Francisco was AI related. And so we are sort of seeing these little different kinds of pockets of activity around our various market demand sources that are unique, but all accelerating. And then you mentioned Washington, D.C., which is sort of an interesting case in point for us. So that's really a brand experience for BXP.

What do I mean by that? We have clients that are literally coming to us and saying, we love a new building. If you can find a site, we will sign a lease. And in 2 cases, they've actually come to us and signed the lease before we controlled the site and in case -- in that same case, haven't even designed the building. So they're taking great pride and belief in that we can execute and deliver them a new building at a rent in the future that they have yet to see.

And that's really a source of clients upgrading. And Owen, I'm sure we'll talk about the sort of the difference between space and premier space. But in Washington, D.C., we're seeing a tremendous bifurcation between companies that are paying significant premiums at replacement cost rents to what they can afford to pay in an existing premier Class A trophy building that exists today.

Yes. I think you're going right where I was going to go with that, which is how much of the tenant activity you're seeing is expansion versus saying we need to be in a certain type of space to do our business and you have it or this is the kind of space we want. Like how would you parse through some of those items?

Yes. Well, I think it's a little bit of all. So Mike tracks all of our renewals and leasing where we know the size of the client before they did the renewal or the lease and the size later. And on average, Mike, we're -- our clients are growing. There are definitely examples where a client maybe had shrunk a little bit, but net-net, the clients are growing.

And then second, there's no question that there are many clients out there that are in non-premier assets that are prepared to spend the money required to move into a higher quality offering. And so if you look at the premier workplace segment of the market, which I think is we would define as probably the top 20% of the space, you've got net absorption, one, because some of the clients are growing, but also importantly, they're coming out of that bottom 80% and going into the top 20%.

And I think that's a very important thing if you're going to invest in office to understand. The research that I'm sure all of you look at, it's always by market and it includes every building. So if you look at those kind of stats on D.C., you're going to see 20% vacancy, not a lot of rent growth. Yet here we are, and we have now 3 and there are going to be more clients coming to us saying, we don't want to go into that 20% vacant space. We want something new, and so we're building new buildings.

I'd like to say it this way, the New York market is definitely stronger than San Francisco, but the premier assets in San Francisco are performing better than the non-premier assets in New York. So having that quality overlay is very important to understand.

And that's interesting. What -- and going back to the initial comments, things better this year across the board than last year. Can you give us any examples around some of these markets, what that has meant for net effective rents?

So before I get to net effective rents, appreciate that for BXP, the juice is in occupancy gain. And in the first quarter, we leased 700,000 square feet of vacant space. Owen said we have 2.3 million square feet of leases as of the beginning of the second quarter that we were in negotiation and 900,000 square feet of that is on vacant space. There's another 450,000 square feet on '26 and '27 expirations. So that's where we're getting our juice, right? So when you're leasing space at $75 to $100 a square foot, it all falls to the bottom line.

Now to get to your -- to answer to your specific question, we are seeing base rental rate growth in 3 primary markets. in Midtown Manhattan, in the Back Bay of Boston and in Northern Virginia in Reston. That's where the overall market dynamics because of the lack of supply and the significant amount of incremental demand from growing companies is allowing us to push rents. Typically, the rental rate will go up, and then you will slowly start to see concessions also retreating, meaning the tenant improvement allowance that we're offering to our clients and the amount of free rent or "buildout time" that we're allowing them to have.

And I would say most amount of growth is in Hilary's market in the Park Avenue segment of Midtown, where we're probably seeing 15 plus or minus percent annual increases. We're seeing close to double-digit increases in the Back Bay of Boston and high single-digit increases in Northern Virginia. And that's sort of -- again, that's a factor that is one component of the economics of our buildings, but we're also starting to see reductions in the tenant improvement allowances and in the free rent, which means that the overall net effective rent transactions are appreciating by more than that 10% or 15%.

And you mentioned AI earlier, so I want to start to go into that a bit here. What are you hearing from your tenants in terms of their space needs and whether the real estate folks or whoever you're speaking with that are making these decisions, has it started to enter into their thinking on space?

Well, Tony, I think it's a pretty broad question, but I do think one of the -- I think what you're getting at is what's the driver of all this interest in premier workplace. And I think it started with the work from home because I think that most companies who are competing, obviously, they're all in hotly competitive industries, they think they're going to compete better and be more productive if they have their employees in the office. And most of these companies, yes, they can set rules, but the way you really get people to work together well is when they want to come to the office as opposed to they're forced to.

And what's the best way to get people to come into the office. One, have an office that's easy to get to. So having things around making the commute as easy as possible is critical. I think that's why all these Grand Central projects are so important and so successful. And then when you arrive at the office, it's got to be great. Part of that's on the client, right? They've got to make sure their people are in there and so their employees are having a productive experience. But also the amenities in the building, they vary a little bit depending on what the building is. I mean, at 343 Madison, we're dedicating the top 2 floors of the property to amenity space as opposed to leasing that to third parties because our pitch is everyone can have access to the top floor because it's going to be amenity space. So that's, I think, what the clients are looking for. It's more than just a place to go to work. It's got a hospitality component.

So it sounds like, thus far, as you talk to your existing tenants, prospective tenants, they're not saying, "Hey, I thought I was going to need a certain amount of space, I need less because we're going to just use AI now or something."

Yes. What I would say is it's actually been the opposite. So more of the growth from the technology companies that we are working with today are adding employees at pretty strong rates, and they are, in our opinion, just in time relative to their occupancy needs from a spatial perspective. And so they are expanding because they need more bodies and those bodies need to be in spaces, and they want those bodies to be in spaces at the same time, right? This is not a -- well, we're going to sort of use our space efficiently and some people will come on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and others on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. That's no longer sort of the way they're working.

And then again, you're asking a question that we sort of -- we look for anecdotal answers that would be consistent with what your postulate is, which is, well, I assume that artificial intelligence is somehow reducing the number of people that these organizations need to do their work. And time and time again, we're seeing professional services firms and the financial services firms that are our clients, and we don't necessarily have any bulge bracket investment banks with 35,000 employees as our clients, but we have lots of private equity firms and hedge funds and venture capital firms and asset managers, and they seem to be very consistent with their headcount with a modest amount of growth.

And then the professional services providers, the consultants, again, in certain cities are growing at a pretty significant rate. I mean Hilary can talk about our client, Kirkland & Ellis, who's at 601 and sort of what they are thinking and how they're thinking about AI and their law firm.

Sure. So Kirkland & Ellis is the major tenant at 601 Lexington Avenue, and they have been on a steady expansion trajectory for years now. They recently had to take space in an adjacent building because they were growing so strongly that we simply couldn't accommodate them at 601 Lex because we're 100% leased there.

They've recently announced a major investment in capital and in hiring within Kirkland & Ellis to develop their own internal AI sort of protocols and tools for their lawyers to use to be more productive with their billing and they're investing $500 million. And so that's a company that's expanding anyway, and they are looking for space to accommodate even more growth as a result of that investment and are sort of having a hard time finding it in Midtown proper.

I would add to the comments that in Midtown South, we've actually been leasing to AI-powered companies. So at 360 Park Avenue South at the beginning of 2025, that project, which we redeveloped and it was vacant during the redevelopment was about 20% leased. And over the course of 2025, it went to 90% leased. And we'll now be -- we're talking to 2 tenants about taking the last 2 floors. And with that, it would be 100% leased. And a lot of that demand is actually driven by AI.

That's very helpful. Maybe, Hilary, let's stay on you. And let's pivot over to 343 Madison. Big project. If anybody here hasn't walked by, go check it out. Tell us about where you are today with 343 Madison and what the leasing picture looks like.

Sure. So we have a signed anchor lease with Star for now 325,000 square feet because they executed a 2-floor expansion last week. And in addition to that, we are negotiating with 2 clients. We expect to sign those leases by the end of the second quarter for 200,000 incremental square feet. The combination of all of that leasing will take the project to 56% pre-leased.

We are 85% bought out on our construction trades under budget. And we have opened the first phase of the development, which is the entrance to the Madison Concourse at Grand Central Terminal. You can go see it on 45th Street. And if you commute to Long Island, it is a very, very convenient way to get into Grand Central.

Steel is going to be delivered to site in -- starting in July, and we'll begin erection of steel in early August. And all of that adds up to us delivering space to our clients in mid-'28 for them to take occupancy in mid-'29. And that puts us at least a couple of years ahead of any other building that's being constructed right now.

Can you tell us a bit about just the level of rents that these customers are willing to pay? And also just a bit about the cost.

So the base of the building would have rents just shy of $200 a square foot and the top of the building, we have 5 floors available on the top of the building. That's all we have remaining at this point. And we are receiving inbound interest on those floors. We're responding to those inbounds at $350 a square foot with relatively little flexibility on terms.

So the range is from, Tony, just under $200 a foot to well over $300 at the top of the building. which is consistent with what all the other buildings in the market have to charge. And I would point out that all of those buildings have more expensive land basis than we have and have more expensive construction costs than we have. So that number is actually -- it's going to sound a little strange for me to put it this way, but our rents for new construction are sort of a value option in the market compared to others.

In terms of construction costs, it costs about $2,000 a square foot to build a building. And so if you think about it from a return on cost perspective, that's why those rents are where they are.

And maybe this would be a good moment to pivot over to Mike. How are you paying for this?

So we're in the process -- right now, we own 100% of it, and we don't have any financing for it. We're doing it on our own balance sheet, which we can do. But we are in the process of capitalizing the project this year, and we expect that we're going to get a construction loan of about $1.2 billion, which is about 60% of the cost of the project. And we have a term sheet done with a syndicate of banks that are going to provide that financing, and we would expect to close that financing probably sometime in the third quarter.

And we're also out looking for private equity for somewhere between 20% and 50% of the equity. So somewhere between $150 million and $400 million of equity. And we're targeting international family offices who are interested in investing in a high-profile New York City development. And to date, we've got a couple of parties that are circled. We're working on term sheets to try to finalize that and bring in a portion of that equity capital later this year. So we're in good shape on that process. We kind of started it at the beginning of this year and have been working our way through it.

Yes. What has been demand from investors for office buildings right now or office projects.

Well, the marketplace has seen several transactions happen in New York City in the last, call it, 12 months, and they have traded some of them for partial interests as low as 3.9% cap rate. But the 49% interest that have traded more recently are between a 5.5% yield. So a development like 343, which would generate between 7.5% and 8% yield is really accretive compared to where you can buy in the spot market. And that's really why we haven't been aggressively pursuing acquisitions because the yields are just quite low.

Well, maybe on that point because we started again with office being better across the board. Have you seen that translate into liquidity in the market just broadly beyond just the best of the best assets? You do have assets for sale in the market, you mentioned earlier. How are those processes going?

Yes. So as I described earlier, we do have an extensive asset sale program underway. But they're not -- it's not all office. Office is a component of it. But actually, the sales that we've completed to date, there's been a fair -- a significant amount of land that we've sold to residential builders. We have sold 3 apartment complexes in the mid-4s cap rate. We sold a half interest in a lab complex in South San Francisco. So it hasn't all been office.

I do think there is maybe a more active market in office in what I'd call opportunity funds and family offices that are more value-oriented. The assets that we have put out have been attracting, I would say, fairly strong interest overall. So there is liquidity.

The other thing I would add is that in New York, the buildings that have transacted by and large, are not premier assets. They're really well located. They're Class A, but they're older. They may need some repositioning over time. The exception to that would be a small interest sale of One Vanderbilt a while back, but everything else is sort of not sort of top of the market premier dispositions.

Got it. I'm just going to -- I'm going to be a little bit provocative here. We are not in a position where the big private equity firms are trying to take public companies and privatize them because there's not enough liquidity in the single asset sale market, right? So if you sort of rewind the REIT world to when EOP, for example, got taken private by Blackstone, it's because there was a very vibrant buy wholesale, sell retail market. And my sense is that if you look at the NAVs of the -- certainly in the office company world, they're all at meaningful discounts to NAV in terms of where we're trading.

So were there the kind of bid that there was then and maybe there will be, you'll see a very different kind of environment for the private equity firms looking at the real estate office companies and saying, there's a lot of value here. We're going to privatize this thing and we're going to break it up and sell the assets on an individual basis. We're not there right now.

And so as Hilary said, the assets that are being sold are being sold to sort of what I would say is very highly levered private equity and very core plus, plus, plus kind of buyers like Vornado and SL Green, and they're sort of doing this on a one-off basis, and there's just not a very liquid market for overall core buyers of assets.

Great. We have a few minutes left here. So I want to open it up to the audience if there are any questions. And if you all think of any questions, just raise your hand. In the meantime, I want to go back to Mike because we've talked about the liquidity, financing 343. You did lay out a plan back at your Investor Day to bring leverage down. And so I was wondering if you could just refresh us on where that is and what's your target?

Sure. Thanks, Tony. So our plan, right, is to increase EBITDA by increasing occupancy of the company, increasing occupancy by 400 basis points over the next couple of years. It's going to delever us. The $1.9 billion in asset sales, which again is a mix of $400 million of land, $500 million of residential and about $1 billion of what we're calling the bottom 5% of our office portfolio, our noncore, nonstrategic office, our view is kind of a blended return on that of somewhere around 6% and using that capital to initially repay debt, which we would otherwise have to borrow in the high 5s today based upon where interest rates are today and then bring in private equity capital for some of the developments, so we reduce the funding need in our growth.

And so then we can add these developments and grow the company without bringing in public equity. And we can bring our leverage down today, which on a seasonally adjusted basis, the first quarter was about 8.1 net debt to EBITDA, down towards the low 7s in net debt to EBITDA over the next 18 to 24 months and then closer to 7. And what that will do is that will create a lot of additional balance sheet capacity for us for future investment endeavors.

Sounds good. We have a question here.

So this morning I woke up, I'm sure you probably saw the same headline from commercial observer. Manhattan office leasing on pace for best yearly performance in century. Yesterday, I met with the CEO of a small New York office landlord with an asset near Grand Central and a couple in the [indiscernible] district, he was telling me he has never seen anything like this before and the leases are being done at record levels. You guys are telling me basically the same story. And I know you don't like to comment on stock price, but as a group, you and SL Green and Vornado, it's like nothing happened. What's the market missing in your story?

I think the market is more interested in AI infrastructure. Honestly, I think that's part of the problem is it's not just office. I think it's traditional real estate right now. I mean some of the apartment companies have been selling assets and repurchasing shares. I mean I think the capital is -- I think that's -- the issue is not the story. All of what we just told you is paints a very positive picture and it's what we're experiencing as a management team, and we're delivering it in terms of the results of the company. But the market is the market, and it's driven by funds flows and other factors.

Great. I'm going to just give you one last one, if you want to chime in. You're meeting with a lot of people over the course of the conference. You probably met a bunch, you had an event last night. If you're going to leave us with 1 or 2 things that maybe we should be focusing more on as investors, analysts, folks looking at the company, what might those be just to take away?

Well, I think I just said it, but I just think that there's a disconnect between how the company is being valued and what the performance is based on the market condition. That's one. And then two, I do think that office is a less well-understood business today because it's changed. The research that's out there doesn't accurately reflect how the business works, which is you've got these top 20% assets and they compete in a different market from the rest of the office business and the statistics around that top 20% are very different from everything else.

Great. Well, with that, we're out of time, and thank you all for attending, and thank you very much to the management team.

Thank you, Tony.

Thanks, Tony.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Q1 2026 BXP Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Helen Han, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to BXP's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. The press release and supplemental package were distributed last night and furnished on Form 8-K. In the supplemental package, BXP has reconciled all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure in accordance with Reg G. If you did not receive a copy, these documents are available in the Investors section of our website at investors.bxp.com. A webcast of this call will be available for 12 months.

At this time, we would like to inform you that certain statements made during this conference call, which are not historical, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Although BXP believes the expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained.

Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements were detailed in yesterday's press release and from time to time in BXP's filings with the SEC. BXP does not undertake a duty to update any forward-looking statements.

I'd like to welcome Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Doug Linde, President; and Mike LaBelle, Chief Financial Officer. During the Q&A portion of our call, our regional management teams will be available to address any questions.

We ask that those of you participating in the Q&A portion of the call to please limit yourself to one and only one question. If you have an additional query or follow-up, please feel free to rejoin the queue.

I would now like to turn the call over to Owen Thomas for his formal remarks.

Thank you, Helen, and good morning to all of you. BXP had a successful first quarter. Our FFO per share result exceeded our own estimate by $0.02. Our FFO per share guidance for 2026 was raised by $0.01. And we made continued strong progress on our business plan articulated at last year's investor conference by completing significant leasing, closing additional asset sales and progressing our development pipeline. Last week, we also released our annual Sustainability & Impact report, outlining the positive outcomes achieved for shareholders and other important constituents from our industry-leading sustainability efforts.

Our first business plan priority is to lease space and improve portfolio occupancy. There is no question that AI has been and continues to be enormously beneficial to BXP's leasing activity despite the market anxiety regarding the impact of AI on job creation and resultant leasing demand. We are experiencing direct benefits by leasing space to AI companies in San Francisco, New York and Seattle as well as indirect benefits from both leasing space to companies displaced by growing AI firms and to our core financial, legal and business services clients serving the rapidly growing AI industry. The near- and medium-term negative impacts of AI on jobs are more likely in support functions, which are less present in premier workplaces, and in gateway markets.

We had a strong first quarter, completing over 1.1 million square feet of leasing. Our in-service portfolio occupancy rose 70 basis points to 87.4% and the spread between our leased and occupied square footage widened 80 basis points to 3.5%, a precursor to more occupancy gains ahead. The environment for leasing premier workplaces remains healthy and very active. Our current and prospective clients are generally experiencing increasing earnings due to the growing economy in the U.S. We are seeing more client growth and contraction in our leasing activity. In many cases, our clients are also upgrading their space and/or location to more readily effectuate their tightening in-person work policies.

All of these client factors, growth, more use of space and upgrading, have led to the consistent strength and outperformance of the premier workplace segment of the office market where BXP is a clear market leader. Premier workplaces represent roughly the top 14% of space and 8% of buildings in the 4 CBD markets where BXP has a major presence. Direct vacancy for premier workplaces in these 4 markets is 8.5% versus 13.8% for the broader office market, while asking rents for premier workplaces continue to command a premium of more than 60% over the non-premier buildings. Over the last 3 years, net absorption for premier workplaces has been a positive 11.9 million square feet versus only 420,000 square feet for the balance of the market. For the non-premier workplace segment, all markets had negative absorption except New York City.

Given these positive market and client trends and BXP's strong leasing over the last year, we have started to realize our forecasted occupancy gains the last 2 quarters, reinforcing our confidence that our target of 4 percentage points of total occupancy improvement over 2026 and 2027 remains achievable.

Our second business plan goal is to raise capital and optimize our portfolio through asset sales. During our investor conference, we communicated an objective to sell land, residential and nonstrategic office assets for approximately $1.9 billion in net aggregate sale proceeds by 2028. We continue to make great progress in the first quarter. We have raised $360 million in total net sale proceeds so far this year and $1.2 billion since our investor conference, including land sales for $250 million, apartment sales for $460 million and office, lab, retail sales for $500 million.

Further, we have under contract the sale of 3 assets with total net proceeds of approximately $40 million and are in various stages of marketing several additional assets. As of now, future net proceeds from dispositions projected in 2026 could aggregate up to an additional $400 million, and we are consistently exploring more asset sales.

We have been able to achieve attractively valued land sales by creatively positioning our office land for more valuable uses, particularly residential. Across multiple jurisdictions, we have received or are pursuing entitlements for over 3,500 residential units on land intended for office use, which is creating significant value for shareholders and will be the backbone of both our apartment development and land sales activity going forward. We have now sold 3 high-quality stabilized apartment buildings, which we built all at a mid-4% cap rate.

A notable office transaction we completed in the first quarter was the sale to our partner of our 50% interest in the Marriott headquarters building in Bethesda, Maryland, which we developed in 2021. The 743,000 square foot building is fully leased to Marriott and sold for a gross price of $430 million or $589 a square foot and a 6.8% initial cap rate. The Bethesda market is not strategic for BXP. We were able to achieve attractive exit pricing, and the development was very profitable for shareholders, generating a $35 million gain on a $47 million investment.

Supporting our disposition efforts, office transaction volume in the private markets remains healthy with financing available at scale, particularly in the CMBS market. In the first quarter, significant office sales were $14.1 billion, down from the seasonally elevated fourth quarter, but notably up 72% from the first quarter of 2025.

In addition to the Marriott headquarters sale, there were a couple of other transactions with relevance to BXP's portfolio. In New York City, 575 Fifth Avenue sold for $383 million or $734 a square foot and a 5.1% cap rate for the office portion of the building. The asset comprises 525,000 square feet and is 90% leased. In San Francisco, the Transamerica Pyramid sold for an allocated price of $600 million or $1,113 a square foot. The 525,000 square foot building is only 60% leased. So the in-place cap rate was 2.9%, but expected to be in the high 7% range in several years once the asset is leased and stabilized.

The third business plan goal is to grow FFO through new development, selectively with office, given market conditions and more actively for multifamily with an equity partner. For office, we have and expect to allocate more capital to developments than acquisitions because we continue to find premier workplace development opportunities with pre-leasing that we believe will generate cash yields upon delivery roughly 150 to 250 basis points higher than cap rates for lower quality asset acquisitions with ongoing CapEx requirements. The trade-off is timing as developments obviously take several years to deliver.

For multifamily, we have 3 projects with over 1,400 units under construction, are in various stages of entitlement and/or design for nearly 5,000 units and have 1 project in Herndon, Virginia, which we plan to commence in 2026. We expect to continue to capitalize new development starts with financial partners owning the majority of the equity.

BXP's largest development underway is 343 Madison Avenue, our market-leading premier workplace tower in New York City with direct access to Grand Central Terminal. As previously reported, we have a lease commitment for 29% of the building located in the mid-rise. We are also negotiating leases with tenants for another 27% of the building, which will bring us to 56% committed with available space at both the podium and high-rise of the tower.

Given strong market conditions and the lack of available competitive product, we are making multiple client presentations every week for the remaining space. We have procured 83% of the construction costs, have realized anticipated savings from our original budget, and our projections remain on track for a stabilized unleveraged cash return of 7.5% to 8% upon delivery in 2029. We are in discussions with several potential equity partners for a 30% to 50% leveraged interest in the property and also have an agreed letter of intent with a consortium of banks for construction financing at attractive terms. We intend to complete the recapitalization in 2026.

BXP's current development pipeline, comprising 6 office, life science and residential projects underway, totaling 3.4 million square feet and $3.6 billion of BXP investment, will deliver external growth over the longer term.

So in conclusion, we continue to successfully lease space and improve occupancy, creatively reposition and monetize noncore assets and derisk our development pipeline through leasing, construction and capital raising successes. New construction for office has virtually halted, leading to higher occupancy and rent growth in many submarkets where BXP operates. Debt and equity capital is available for premier workplaces.

BXP is building market share given our stability and consistent service to our clients and in many markets, less competition. BXP remains comfortably on track with our business plan, which, if successful, will lead to increasing portfolio occupancy and FFO per share, deleveraging, external growth from development and a more highly concentrated CBD and premier workplace in-service portfolio in the years ahead.

And let me turn over our report to Doug.

Thanks, Owen. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to speak towards demand this morning for the bulk of my comments. We can debate whether technology companies today are overstaffed, whether remote work strategies have had a demonstrable impact on premier property demand, whether the massive capital investment from data center infrastructure has led to a different perspective on human capital from the large tech companies and whether new AI models and AI agents will lead to changes in the makeup of the workforce. There are no answers, just conjectures.

What we do know is that the U.S. economy has gone through many technology cycles since the invention of the personal computer 45 years ago. And in this cycle, today, there is dramatic incremental office demand growth from new organizations that are developing AI. This new technology demand is focused in San Francisco and more recently in New York City. OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly the most recognizable expansions, but there are many meaningful space occupiers expanding across our markets. Databricks, Perplexity, Decagon, Harvey AI, Sierra AI, Snowflake, to name a few, with Decagon and Snowflake being new tenants in the BXP roster. It's clear that the clients that are growing are not the tech titans that expanded during the last decade, but there is meaningful office-using growth in our markets.

CBRE reports that there has been 3 million square feet of positive office absorption in San Francisco over the last 7 quarters, including an extraordinary 1.4 million square feet in the first quarter of 2026. This backdrop is important because it is increasingly translating into tangible leasing activity. In the first quarter, BXP's total leasing volume was 1.14 million square feet. As I discussed during our Investor Day, in-service vacant space leasing and covering near-term lease expirations will drive our occupancy improvements and same-store revenue growth.

During the first quarter, we executed leases on 700,000 square feet of vacant space and renewed or backfilled 235,000 square feet of '26 and '27 expirations. Post March 31, our current pipeline of leases in negotiation consists of 1.7 million square feet and covers 500,000 square feet of existing vacancies and 500,000 square feet of '26 and '27 expirations. We start the second quarter with 1.44 million square feet of executed leases on vacant space that we expect to commence in 2026 in the next 3 quarters. The remaining calendar year of '26 expirations are down to 770,000 square feet.

So if nothing else were to change, we should pick up 670,000 square feet or 150 basis points of occupancy and end the year at 89%. The majority of our remaining '26 expirations are known, so near-term upside will stem from leasing currently vacant space with immediate revenue commencement. We ended '25 with in-service occupancy of 86.7%. Our occupancy at the end of the first quarter is 87.4%, an increase of 70 basis points, with about 57% of that gain stemming from improvements in the portfolio leasing and the balance due to changes in the portfolio, including the sales described in the press release and the suburban office buildings I highlighted last quarter that we removed from service and expect to demolish and then redevelop into higher-value residential uses consistent with our portfolio optimization strategy.

Permits are progressing quickly in Santa Monica and Waltham, MA. Separately, we are finalizing documentation with an institutional partner to commence development at Worldgate in Herndon, Virginia, where we purchased 300,000 square feet of office buildings and re-entitled this as residential, townhomes and apartments. We anticipate closing the venture during the second quarter and immediately commencing construction.

We are in active conversations with new and renewing clients across all of our markets. Our total discussion pipeline, in addition to the 1.7 million square feet in negotiation, is another 1.4 million square feet, and we continue to anticipate a minimum of 4 million square feet of leasing in 2026, consistent with what we've put forth in our 2026 guidance. Post March 31, we've executed 300,000 square feet of leases, so the total for the year stands at 1.5 million square feet as of today.

We made a change to the way we are reporting our second-generation leasing statistics this quarter. Instead of providing statistics on leases based on the economic impact date of the lease commencement, which is backward looking, we are showing the change in the rents for all the leases executed in the current quarter where the comparative lease expired during the prior 24 months from the date of the new lease. Since all that data is in our supplemental, I'm not going to repeat it.

I do have a few comments on the transactions behind the aggregate numbers. In Boston, the data includes a 100,000 square foot lease in the urban edge space that was previously leased to Biogen. In New York, the bulk of the executed leases this quarter were at Times Square Tower, where we backfilled a law firm that was coming off a 20-year term with large bumps. In San Francisco, the largest portion of the leasing was at 680 Folsom. And in D.C., we extended a law firm for almost 6 years through 2038 in exchange for minimum TIs and a current rent reset.

This quarter, we executed several large leases, 17 leases over 20,000 square feet, with the largest just over 100,000 and a second with an expanding client that took 92,000 square feet. 34% of our square footage involved renewals, extensions or expansions and 66% was with new clients. Existing client expansions encompassed 150,000 square feet of activity, and we had about 50,000 square feet of contractions.

I want to make a few comments on our individual markets, which speak both to the sources of demand and the success we are having leasing vacancy across the portfolio. In the BXP portfolio, Midtown Manhattan, the Back Bay of Boston and Reston, Virginia continue to have the tightest supply and therefore, the most landlord favorable market conditions. This quarter, the most significant acceleration in activity was in the South of Mission market in San Francisco, Santa Monica and the CBD of Washington, D.C.

In the Back Bay portfolio, where we're 98.8% leased, much of our current activity is filling in small pockets of availability, but we have begun discussions with larger tenants that have expirations between 2028 and 2032, since there are no premier blocks of availability in the market.

In our Urban Edge portfolio, we completed a 100,000 square foot lease with a national restaurant operator at The Quarry in Weston and a 43,000 square foot lease with a life science company, relocating into 15,000 square feet of lab space and 28,000 square feet of office space at 180 CityPoint. Our current Urban Edge activity includes expanding hard-tech companies and additional life science companies that are looking exclusively for office space.

In New York, the most significant change in our activity has been in Midtown South. At 360 Park Avenue South, we completed another 6 floors and 138,000 square feet of leasing, which brings the building to 90% leased. Last week, we came to an agreement with an existing AI client to expand to an additional floor, which will bring the building to 95% leased. And across Madison Park, we leased an additional 32,000 square feet at 200 Fifth Avenue, leaving us with only 33,000 square feet of availability where we had 350,000 square feet vacant in 2025. At Times Square Tower, we executed over 100,000 square feet this quarter, including 85,000 square feet of currently vacant space.

In San Francisco, the most significant change in our portfolio continues to be at 680 Folsom and 50 Hawthorne. During the quarter, we executed leases for 103,000 square feet and in early April, executed another 63,000 square foot lease. Since the beginning of 2024, AI and tech leasing has steadily increased from 50% of the total leasing demand in the market to 57% to almost 80% in the first quarter of this year. And as I stated earlier, there have been over 3 million square feet of positive absorption over the last 7 quarters.

In Santa Monica, we've seen a pickup in interest from clients with near-term lease expirations and the need for new and expanding space. This is a meaningful change from the last few years.

Activity in D.C. this quarter was concentrated in 2 transactions. We did an early 153,000 square foot extension, with the anchor tenant at 1330 Connecticut, and we gave up our regional headquarters at 2200 Penn as part of a 58,000 square foot lease with the Washington Commanders. Currently, activity in the region is still concentrated at Reston Town Center, where we are 97.3% leased. This quarter, we completed 7 small leases with defense contractors and professional service firms, and we are in negotiation on over 150,000 square feet of transactions, including 100,000 square feet of '27 expiring leases, where in aggregate, the tenants will renew and expand.

Jake and Pete continue to field inbound requests from law firms that want us to identify sites and develop new projects similar to what we have achieved at 725 12th and 2100 M. We have some visibility on the third of these projects today.

That wraps up my comments. I'll turn it over to Mike.

Great. Thanks, Doug. Good morning, everybody. So today, I'm going to cover our results for our first quarter earnings and update our full year '26 earnings guidance.

So for the first quarter, we reported FFO of $1.59 per share, and that's $0.02 above the midpoint of our guidance range and $0.01 ahead of consensus estimates. The performance of our portfolio exceeded our expectations by $0.03 per share and was partially offset by $0.01 of higher net interest expense. Outperformance in our portfolio was comprised of $0.02 of better rental revenues and $0.01 of higher termination income. The rental revenue beat was from commencing leases more quickly in both 535 Mission and 680 Folsom as well as from some leases in the Urban Edge properties in Boston. And we also generated more service revenue from our clients, particularly in New York City and in San Francisco, reflecting increased utilization.

Termination income for the quarter totaled $12.8 million, and it primarily related to 2 clients. In the first case, we proactively took back 25,000 square feet from a client in Washington, D.C. that allowed us to lease 58,000 square feet to the Commanders at 2200 Penn. This is a great trade for us, creating incremental occupancy and extending lease maturity. The second case relates to a client that defaulted on its lease in the fourth quarter last year when we took a charge totaling $3.6 million to write off their accrued rent balance. This quarter, we received a termination payment totaling $6.25 million, which covers both the write-off from last quarter as well as nearly 12 months of potential downtime in rent.

Our net interest expense for the quarter came in higher by $0.01 per share from lower-than-anticipated interest income and higher commercial paper rates related to the market volatility in the fixed income markets. CP rates widened by 25 to 30 basis points during the first quarter. The rates have improved in the past few weeks, but they're still not quite back to where they were in the fourth quarter.

Now I'd like to turn to our updated guidance for full year 2026. Big picture, we've increased the midpoint of our FFO guidance by $0.01 per share at the midpoint by bringing up the bottom end to $6.90 per share and maintaining the top end at $7.04 per share. We have increased our assumption for termination income in 2026 by $8 million. It relates to several credit issues we're working through that impact about 200,000 square feet of space that we expect we will get back in 2026. More than half of this space is held in a joint venture, so the financial impact to us is less. The termination income we expect to receive is in lieu of approximately $5 million of lower rental income in 2026 from these clients. These spaces are readily leasable in the current market, and we expect we will be successful in backfilling them quickly.

Strong leasing performance across our same-property portfolio is giving us increased confidence in our growth outlook. In our same-property portfolio, we are increasing our assumption for our share of NOI growth from over 2025 by 15 basis points to between 1.4% and 2.4%. Keep in mind, we exclude termination income from our same-property NOI assumptions. So if not for the lease terminations, we would have increased our assumption for our share of same-property NOI growth by an additional 25 basis points. The increase is driven by the robust leasing activity that Doug outlined, which continues to exceed our expectations and supports a stronger occupancy recovery.

Reflecting this momentum, we've increased our occupancy outlook for 2026 by 25 basis points to an average for the year of 88.25%. On a cash basis, we have reduced our assumption for year-over-year growth in our share of same-property NOI by 25 basis points and that accounts for the lease termination activity as well as a couple of early renewals with free rent periods in 2026.

In our development portfolio, we expect to deliver 290 Binney Street more than a month early as we are just about -- complete with the tenant improvements. AstraZeneca already commenced cash rent payments as of April 1, and we expect to deliver the project by June 1 at the latest. We have 2 factors impacting our interest expense assumption for the year. First, the early delivery of 290 Binney requires that we cease capitalized interest early. Second, the likelihood for Fed rate cuts later this year has diminished, and we are now assuming that SOFR rates are flat for the remainder of 2026. Including our first quarter result, we have increased our 2026 assumption for net interest expense by approximately $10 million.

So overall, we're raising our guidance for 2026 FFO by $0.01 per share at the midpoint, and our new range is $6.90 to $7.04 per share. The changes come from increases in our assumption for growth in our share of same-property NOI of $0.02, increases in termination income of $0.04 and an increase of $0.01 from our development activity. These are partially offset by higher interest expense of $0.06.

As Owen described, we continue to execute on our plan. We have closed on asset sales generating $1.2 billion in net proceeds, including $360 million so far in 2026, in line with our guidance. We're making great progress at 343 Madison, with additional leases under negotiation and active discussions for both private equity capital and construction financing.

And importantly, our leasing activity has been consistent and above expectations. Signed leases that have yet to take occupancy for currently vacant space has grown to 1.6 million square feet. Our current pipeline of 3 million square feet of leases either under negotiation or in active discussions is higher than where it stood last quarter. And we remain highly confident in our ability to grow our occupancy meaningfully, driving higher portfolio performance and value.

That completes our formal remarks. Operator, can you open up the lines for questions?

[Operator Instructions] I show our first question comes from the line of Steve Sakwa from Evercore ISI.

It sounds like all of you have had very positive comments around the leasing environment. Things have certainly gotten better, and the tide seems to be turning in a number of markets, like New York, certainly San Francisco and parts of Boston. I guess the question is, to what extent are you able to kind of shorten the time from the time you start the discussions to getting leases signed and then the implications that might have for kind of the TI and CapEx that you might need to be spending on these deals? I guess, can you get tenants in the space faster? And might we see CapEx start to come down?

Steve, this is Doug. So what I would say is that the duration of the lease is really dependent upon the aggressiveness of the legal counsel for our tenant. And in some cases, we have counsels that are very thoughtful from our perspective, and we can get leases banged out in a couple of days. And in other cases, it can take 6 months. And so -- and I don't think that the market conditions have really impacted that. I would say our ability to say yes to requests from our tenants in terms of what their counsels are saying is clearly stiffened. And so maybe that's why it's taking longer to get leases done in some cases, I don't know.

From a capital expense perspective, there is no question that in the Back Bay of Boston and in Midtown Manhattan and in Northern Virginia and Reston, we are being more conservative relative to the kinds of concessions that we're offering, meaning they're lower. And they're lower in the form of the amount of free rent that we're giving, and they're lower in the amount of TIs that we're offering. I would say the West Coast still has a pretty significant concession package largely because there's still a significant amount of space available, even though the demand has accelerated materially. So I'd sort of say there are places where it's better and there are places where it's still, relatively speaking, consistent with what it's been over the last 3 or 4 quarters.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Anthony Paolone from JPMorgan.

I wanted to follow up on your comment about 80% of demand, I think, out in San Francisco coming from AI tenants. And so wondering how to think about that as to whether it's really incremental demand above and beyond what would be normal? Or if it kind of goes to this idea that only 20% of the demand is coming from stuff outside of AI? Just trying to think about like where that goes and what that tells us, if anything, about the rest of the tenants in the market.

So I'll start, and I'll let Rod comment. What my sort of inference on what's going on is that there is a clear acceleration of technology defined as these new AI-oriented companies that are absorbing the majority of the incremental space absorption in the market. What has changed and it's changed dramatically is if you went back to 2010 to 2019, virtually all of the absorption was coming from the tech titans, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Meta, the larger companies. And that has clearly shut down. None of those companies are expanding in any material way in the city of San Francisco. And in fact, some of them have given back space.

I would say that the amount of space that is being absorbed is accelerating or has accelerated. I can't tell you if that's going to hold for a consistent basis for the next 3 or 4 or 5 quarters, but it's -- these companies are, relatively speaking, aggressively hiring people, and they've made a decision that in-place work is critically important to their business strategies. And so those are all great indicators from our perspective.

The professional services and the business services firms have not expanded the way they are expanding in Midtown Manhattan. And we're hopeful that as these companies become public and they change their capital flows and that improves the overall wealth creation in the West Coast, that there may be some more material improvements in financial services and professional services and business and administration services.

Rod, I don't know if you have any other comments.

I think you covered most of it, Doug, but I would just add that on the topic of the non-tech companies, the traditional tenants, and we have many of them, particularly at Embarcadero Center, what we're not seeing is downsizing. I mean they've gone through that already. And so we've executed a handful of different renewals with those types of tenants and some new tenants coming in. And so I'd say they're stable. And that's kind of -- and then when you look to the flip side of that and you think about where the demand is growing and where it's coming from, it's what you would expect from the Bay Area, which is it's a tech-driven market, and these are tech companies that are driving the market right now.

There are 20 requirements that are over 100,000 square feet. That's about 3.3 million square feet. This is in San Francisco specifically. And a year ago, that number was about 12 requirements. So it's definitely increased, and it's great. And as Doug said, these are with companies that we hadn't heard of before. So it's new, emerging, growing companies. So it's very positive.

And I show our next question comes from the line of John Kim from BMO Capital Markets.

Okay. 343 Madison, you talked about lease negotiations for another 27% of space. There's been some media speculation of who that is. But I'm wondering if you could just discuss whether or not you believe that space represents consolidation of space, expansion or musical chairs.

So this is Doug. So it's tenants, like it's not a tenant, it's tenants. And I think it's yes to all of those things. It's some consolidation and it's some growth.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Nicholas Yulico from Scotiabank.

Mike, I wanted to ask about leasing CapEx. It was higher this quarter, $178 million, hitting the FAD calculation. I think, last call, you said, for the year, it could be like $220 million to $250 million. So maybe you could just talk about kind of what drove that and how to think about leasing CapEx for the rest of the year.

So what drove the leasing cost this quarter was really a very significant amount of lease commencements, basically 2x what we normally see. And it was driven by several early renewals that we did a couple of years ago that hit this quarter. That was over 1 million square feet of that. And so that -- if you looked at leasing cost per square foot, they were $10 per square foot per lease year, which is pretty reasonable. That's well within kind of the range we would expect. But it was just these early renewals that hit that caused that FAD to be higher. So I would not expect that to continue at those levels for the next few quarters.

But I do expect that for the year, our lease transaction costs will be higher given the start that we have at $175 million for the quarter. So I would anticipate that our leasing costs will be closer to -- in excess of $400 million based upon the occupancy growth that we anticipate. And the -- there's a couple of other early renewals that are going to be coming in, in the second and fourth quarter.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Blaine Heck from Wells Fargo.

I was hoping you could talk about the trends you're seeing in the life science segment of the portfolio. You've disposed of your West Coast exposure and you've had some success in leasing up the Greater Boston portfolio. Is that potentially a source of funds if the transaction market is supportive? Or do you still kind of see the overall Boston Life Science portfolio as a longer-term hold for BXP?

So the BXP Life Science portfolio is in 2 submarkets. It's in Kendall Square in Cambridge, where we are building our new building for AstraZeneca, and we have buildings with Biogen and we have buildings with the Broad. And then it's our life science buildings in Waltham, Massachusetts at 180 CityPoint and at 880 and at 200 West Street and then 103 when we get that building leased. I don't think that we are looking at exiting any of those markets or any of those buildings.

We are clearly seeing a change relative to the demand that's currently in the market towards more office and less lab intensitivity. And so quite frankly, we're taking advantage of that in our traditional office buildings with life science companies. In fact, as part of the 1.7 million square feet of leases under negotiation, we signed a letter of intent last night for a 49,000 square foot life science company that's going to take 49,000 square feet of office space at one of our buildings. So I think that's going to -- we're going to see continuation of that.

I would tell you that there is no question that the life science market has already bottomed out and things on the margin are getting better in the Greater Boston ecosystem. I think you will find if you look at the companies that are "incubator-like," there's more activity and more interest in those incubators. And hopefully, that will, over time, roll its way into larger companies. And there's clearly consolidation in terms of big pharma purchasing life science companies that are -- that were born and bred in the Boston ecosystem, again, which I think is a good thing for the ecosystem here.

So I would say on the margin, things are better. We're strategically going to continue to maintain our portfolio, and we believe in the long-term viability of the life science business in Greater Boston.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Jana Galan from Bank of America Securities.

Congrats on the great leasing. Given the focus on occupancy and speed to occupancy, can you talk about any initiatives, like spec suites, to kind of attract tech and AI tenants quicker? And do AI tenants have different power or architectural requirements than the kind of the more traditional tenant groups?

So I'm going to let our regional management team sort of answer that question. I'd let Bryan talk about sort of turnkey builds where we are doing a significant amount of, what I would refer to as, we're going to do sort of the design and the build-out for medium-sized companies. And then Jake can talk about our prebuilt suite program in Northern Virginia. And Rod, you can talk about what we did and how we were successful at leasing 680 Folsom.

So Bryan, why don't you get going first?

Yes. So Urban Edge is the area where we're seeing this type of activity because our portfolio is effectively leased in Boston and Cambridge. But on the Urban Edge, we are seeing this turnkey ability with these new emerging companies and several of them in life science. Like Doug said, we're encouraged, and we feel it's bottomed out. But the activity, I wouldn't say is like overwhelmingly significant, but it has definitely ticked up.

And the companies that we're talking to, one of the things that I think is really interesting about these companies along with doing the turnkeys -- relates to Steve's earlier question about time to effectively put a lease together. One of the things that we haven't seen in a long time is that these clients are doing their best to gather what their growth will be. And that's been a little bit of a stall in that. We'll be working on a 30,000-foot deal and all of a sudden, they'll say, "We got good news. It could be 40,000." That's new.

But the turnkeys are really working out really well. We haven't done any, call it -- we've only done very small spec builds in that area. But turnkey, fast and quick occupancy.

Jake?

Sure. In Reston Town Center, we've delivered over 50 spec suites in -- there's 2 buildings in Reston that are -- we sort of have coined our incubator buildings. These are buildings that -- these groups that are 4,000 to 5,000 to 6,000 square feet want to be adjacent to the likes of a lot of the corporate headquarters that exist in Reston Town Center. And so we've been very successful with those prebuilt suites. Oftentimes, when we've gone forward to build 5 to 6 of them, prior to having lines done on paper and drawings and permits in hand, we've already leased those suites. So there's been an insatiable demand for that space.

In terms of -- I think your question was about power requirements and anything different. Nothing really different relative to those spec suites. Oftentimes, we're doing those on a short-form lease. We're oftentimes seeing term greater than 5 years and very, very, very competitive rental rates.

Rod?

Yes. So at 680 Folsom, it was a key part of our strategy in leasing that building up, was doing the spec suites. We did a full floor. In fact, we did a 34,000-foot full floor spec suite. And we did that last year. And it was extremely well received. We were able to show prospective clients what it would look like. And so once we had that built, our activity spooled up quickly. And so the activity that we reported is largely based on that strategy. So this is nothing new for us, by the way. We've been doing this for many years, and we continue to do it across all of our properties here in the Bay Area, and it's a great strategy. I mean most tech companies, it's -- they need the space quickly. And so when it's built and ready to go, we can deliver it quickly.

And then I'll just comment quickly on the power question that you asked. It's not happening in anything in San Francisco. So the office-using AI companies that we're dealing with are not necessarily looking for more power. But we are seeing that in some of our R&D portfolio properties down in Mountain View in particular. And those might be different type of robotics companies or different technology companies, but power is definitely something that they will seek out.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Alexander Goldfarb from Piper Sandler.

So a question on the development program. I think you guys talked about a new pipeline of deals. And just curious, 2 parts: one, the split between residential where you're monetizing land or buildings to ultimately sell versus office; and then as you contemplate office, just given, again, where the stock is trading and implied 8%, how you weigh starting a potential office deal future versus where the stock is trading right now?

It's Owen, Alex. So on the pipeline, as I mentioned, it's $3.5 billion or so. It's about to shrink because we're going to deliver 290 Binney Street. We do have a portfolio of new developments coming. We've talked about a couple that we're doing in Washington, D.C. So I think that will build back up.

I think on residential, you may have a situation where we have more projects, but it will be lower capital. The 17 Hartwell deal we did, we have -- we were 20% of the equity. Skymark, we were 20% of the equity. Those are the kind of models that you're going to see going forward. So I think, in the future, the amount of capital invested will be greater in office than it will be in residential.

And then on your last question as it relates to the development yield versus the capital allocation decision of starting a new office development at an 8% yield versus repurchasing shares. We think an 8% yield is higher than the underlying yield in the stock. The look-through cap rates are probably somewhere in the 7s for the stock. And at 8%, we think it's an accretive activity for shareholders, and it's certainly more attractive than some of the acquisitions that I described in my remarks.

The only other thing I would add, Owen, on the residential is we're going to generate more fee income because we're going to only own a minority interest in those, and we're going to generate development fees and other fees like that as we do that. So as those start to ramp up, we should see it in our fee income.

The only last thing I would say on development, Alex, is the company over a long period of time has generally had somewhere between $3 billion to $4 billion -- maybe somewhere in the $4 billion of development underway. And I think in the future, that could continue, but I think there'll be less projects because simply stated, the cost of these projects is much higher. So I think it will be concentrated in fewer individual projects.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Seth Bergey from Citi.

You mentioned the $400 million of kind of dispositions. What's kind of the target mix between nonstrategic office, residential, JV interests, land? And just given some of the interest rate movements that you kind of drove the change in that guidance piece, how pricing and conversations with potential buyers changed around that pool of assets?

Yes. I think I'm not sure that pricing has really changed all that much. I do think, slowly, more and more capital is coming back into the office sector. I provided the sales data to you earlier. And in the first quarter of this year, office sales were up 72% seasonally over the first quarter of last year. So I think that's kind of a marker that more deals or more capital is coming into the market.

So on your question about mix for the rest of the year, the residential is not fully complete, but largely complete. So I think you're going to see for the rest of the year more nonstrategic office and some land.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Caitlin Burrows from Goldman Sachs.

I was just wondering maybe back to 343 Madison JV, if you could give any incremental color on the conversations you've been having recently, timing expectations for an announcement and if you're pursuing just to have one partner with you in the project?

Well, as I said in my remarks, timing is this year. So our goal is to complete this recapitalization in 2026. And in terms of how the partnership will be structured, that is to be determined. But our guess at this point or our forecast at this point is that we will probably have multiple partners instead of one.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Brendan Lynch from Barclays.

Doug, I wanted to follow up on your commentary about the U.S. economy growing through a lot of tech cycles. Certainly appreciate the commentary there, and it's important to put the current moment in context. I guess the pushback would be, historically, office hasn't necessarily grown in conjunction with tech or even in conjunction with the broader economic growth in the country. Certainly, there's been a lot of lumps over the past couple of years with GFC and then excess supply in the teens and then COVID. So I guess, high-level question, how can we get confidence that this cycle in the next 5 to 10 years are going to be better than the last 20 or so?

I can't give you confidence that the next 5 years will be better than the last 20 years. What I can tell you is that much of the discourse and pontificating about the impacts of this very rapid utilization of artificial intelligence kinds of tools is not equivalent to what is actually going on in our markets. In our markets, we are seeing additional absorption of office space, growth from our clients in premier buildings in -- particularly, in markets like San Francisco and Midtown South, we're seeing significant growth of new organizations, many of whom names and ideas didn't exist 5 years ago, that are likely to be the next vehicles of growth from technology compared to what was a tech titan explosion between 2010 and 2019. And I think it's very clear that we did, in fact, see significant office demand growth during that period of time, then we had this COVID thing happen, which dramatically changed the economics of our business because of the amount of supply that suddenly was brought back on to the market through subleases and tenant defaults.

So I think that this time is not that different than other cycles that we have been through, but the source of the demand is a very different source. And Owen started his remarks by saying there may be and there likely will be some kinds of job disruptions from these types of technologies, but certainly doesn't feel like, and we have not seen any evidence that it's occurring in premier office assets, in our markets across the United States.

If I could add a little data point to that, Doug, this is Hilary from New York. In Midtown South, the first quarter of 2026 captured as much AI demand in leasing as the first half of 2025 did. So the demand from AI users in Midtown South is actually accelerating in New York year-over-year.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Upal Rana from KeyBanc Capital Markets.

In terms of capital allocation, the stock has come down a bit this year. So I was wondering if share buybacks are potentially on the table or not or if that's something you're considering.

Well, we think our stock is a very attractive investment, given that the look-through cap rate is in the 7s and all the comp sales that I provide every quarter are in the 5s and 6s. So we think the stock is a very attractive investment. That all being said, as we've described on this call, we are allocating capital to new developments, which are generating 8-plus percent yields to the company, which are accretive. And also, one of our goals, our leverage is at about 8x net debt to EBITDA, and our goal is to lower that over time, and that's why we're not repurchasing shares.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Floris Van Dijkum from Ladenburg Thalmann.

So you talked a little bit about the CapEx requirements. I'm just curious, you guys have -- I don't think you quantify your signed, not open pipeline. You have 350 basis points of delta between your leased and occupied space, and not all spaces created equal. Obviously, your Urban Edge portfolio is much lower rents. The occupancy there is much less valuable than in your urban portfolio. Maybe if you could quantify what your -- what the $350 million of incremental rents would be and what kind of impact that would have on your NOI and FFO potentially?

So I'm just going to go back to what I said during our Investor Day and -- because I can't answer your question explicitly without having a whole bunch of computer screens open. But big picture, our average rent is about $75 a square foot on our unoccupied vacant space. So if you take $75 a square foot, it all drops to the bottom line other than maybe a little bit of cleaning expense. And so you multiply that by the 350,000 square feet and you sort of get what the overall contribution would be if that was all flowing through at one time.

And one thing I can say is there's 800,000 square feet in Midtown Manhattan. Again, our leased versus occupied is there's a significant difference in Midtown based upon all the leasing that we have done in Midtown over the last kind of 6 to 12 months. So that's a meaningful component of it at very high rents.

Yes. Those -- that rents somewhere around $100 to $105 a square foot.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Dylan Burzinski from Green Street.

Just wanted to touch on 343 Madison. Obviously, leasing continues to be very strong in New York. You guys talked about having leases in negotiation that would bring that project to high 50% pre-let. It seems like dispositions are trending very well, and you guys continue to monetize that. I guess just sort of curious why have this big desire to want to recap the equity in 2026 when it seems like maybe you can wait some time, get that project closer to stabilization and get stronger pricing? So maybe just curious the thought process there.

So we did delay raising this capital and doing this recapitalization for a year to accomplish all of the things that we have accomplished and to derisk the asset, in all the ways that you described. We've now -- or about to lease more than 50% of it. We've bought most of the materials as savings. We are close to completing a construction loan, et cetera, et cetera. And we think the terms under which we will bring in capital into this transaction will be attractive to shareholders. It will be accretive to BXP, and it will allow us to free up capital to make additional investments and also to deleverage, which is one of the goals I described earlier.

And I show our last question in the queue comes from the line from Ronald Kamdem from Morgan Stanley.

Just had a quick one on same-store NOI. Just thinking about sort of the bread crumbs as you're going through this year and into next year. Clearly, this year, I think you talked about sort of flat. There are some buildings taken out of service. But can you just sort of walk through, as you sort of roll into sort of the next year, how we should be thinking about like the occupancy ramp? Any other buildings that could potentially come out of service? Or is it sort of pretty clear acceleration into '27 and beyond?

So at the moment, the only thing that you can -- we can say definitively is that we are going to sell assets. And as we sell assets, they are going to impact on portfolio size. But they're going to be on the margin. And so we are highly confident that we will end the year at 89%, hopefully a little bit higher, and that we will end 2027 at 91%, hopefully a little bit higher. And the majority, if not all, of the occupancy that we are working on today will be in place on 12/31/2026. So you'll have a 100% run rate on all the improvement in occupancy that we're achieving right now. And my guess is that we will get some more of that as we -- early on in 2027 as we continue to do leasing in this environment on both renewals and vacant space that will likely start during that year. So we are still pretty comfortable about the ramp-up in our same-store portfolio on a going-forward basis.

That concludes our Q&A session. At this time, I'd like to turn the call back over to Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, for closing remarks.

We have no further comments. Thank you all for your attention and interest in BXP.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

The Citi's 2026 Global Property CEO Conference. I'm Nick Joseph here with Seth Berge with Citi Research. Pleased to have with us BXP and CEO, Owen Thomas. This session is for Citi clients only and disclosures have been made available at the corporate access desk. To ask a question, you can raise your hand or go to liveqa.com and enter code GPC-26 to submit questions.

Owen will turn over to you, introduce your company and team provided in the opening remarks, tell the audience the top reasons and investors should buy your stock today, and then we'll get into Q&A. And Red is actually on.

There we go. Good. Thank you for that I need little IT support here to kick things off. So anyway, Nick and Seth, thank you once again for having us. I'm joined by Doug Linde, who's our President; Mike LaBelle, our CFO; and also Helen Han, who's our Head of IR.

So just a quick overview for those that don't know about BXP, we're the largest public company in the U.S. that focuses on premier workplaces. We're in the S&P 500. We're investment-grade rated. We have about over 50 million square feet of in-service office assets. We're also -- we grow the company externally primarily through development. We have over 3 million square feet under development today. And though we're large, we're focused primarily on 4 markets, plus we have a smaller presence in 2 additional markets, and those are Boston, New York, D.C. and San Francisco which are the larger markets.

So what is our strategy? Our strategy simply put is we are -- want to be and are the preferred provider of premier workplaces to leading U.S. companies. That is our strategy. That's what we do and what we are trying to grow. So we have our ticket -- we had an Investor Day last year where we articulated a very clear and significant plan to pursue this particular strategy. So what was that plan? We said, one, we were going to lease space. Two, we were going to sell assets. And three, we were going to invest in new developments.

So that's our plan. And what is our goal from this plan? Well, one, we're going to grow our FFO per share, primarily through increasing the occupancy of the company and we said that we would grow our occupancy, we think about 2% in 2026 and another 2% in 2027.

So grow the FFO per share. Second, we want to deleverage our balance sheet and then third, we want to continue to improve our portfolio quality, focusing on the most premier assets in CBD locations. So how are we doing on that plan. We've had a press release this morning at the open, and we are very much on track with all aspects of that plan. Last year, we leased 5.5 million square feet of space. In the fourth quarter of last year, we leased 1.8 million square feet of space.

We announced this morning that this quarter, we've already leased 600,000 square feet of space. We have about 1 million square feet of space of additional leasing that's in a letter of intent stage, which we think will get signed. And then beyond that, we have a pipeline of 1.5 million square feet where we're in various stages of negotiations with clients. And by the way, of that leasing that I described for 2026, 50% of that is on vacant space. So that's the leasing. Second thing we said we were going to do is sell assets.

So we announced today the sale of a couple of additional assets. So that brings our total sales through this morning at about $1.1 billion of net proceeds. And in our plan that we announced last year, we said we would do $1.9 billion by 2028. So we're very much on track. We have $150 million of additional sales that are currently under contract that we believe will be closing in the near to medium term. And then on the new developments, we've been one of the most prolific developers of office in the country.

Last year, we launched 343 Madison, which is a major development in New York. We announced at the end of 2024, the development of 725 12th Street, which is a largely preleased office in Washington, D.C. And we also acquired a building, which is basically a development site in Washington last year, 2100 M Street, which is also pre-leased to a leading law firm.

So we've made great progress in our development pipeline as well. And then specifically on 343, we might want to get into this in Q&A, but we've made additional progress leasing the property and we've also made great progress in both securing a construction loan as well as attracting investors into the asset. And we've also made great progress in terms of our development spend and achieving our budgets.

So the last thing that I want to talk about because I think it's had a big impact on our shares over the last couple of weeks is the whole, what I call AI scar trade. And what I can tell you today is that AI has had nothing in our operations has had nothing but a positive impact on what we've been able to accomplish. What we've been articulating for a couple of years is that AI is going to create jobs, front office, client-facing, product facing, creative jobs, and it's also going to disrupt jobs that are more back office and processing. And our companies portfolio is geared towards that first group of employees, and that's what we're seeing. We've had great success leasing in San Francisco, either directly to AI companies or companies that are displaced by AI companies. There's been over 6 million square feet of net absorption in San Francisco due to AI companies. So it's been very positive. We've had no client -- by the way, the terms of the leases that we've been signing have been going longer.

So if a company was worried about AI, why are they in 2025 signing 10-year leases with us and so far in this quarter, the terms are even longer. So again, these companies, these are major financial commitments. They're signing long-term leases. So they're not -- I don't think forecasting big impacts AI on their space demand. We've seen no impact of AI on the asset sale program that we've embarked upon. Interestingly, there's been no impact on our credit spreads. Credit trades every day, credit spreads remain stable. We've had tremendous success attracting lenders to our 343 Madison project.

So the fixed income markets appear to be very, very steady. So with that, Nick, that concludes our opening remarks and delighted to answer questions.

Great. Well, thank you. And appreciate your comments on AI. It's certainly the question we get most frequently on, I feel like office broadly. Those insights are very, very timely. I guess my question is, do you think there's any merit to the concerns of office medium and longer term and maybe just less office space needed if these efficiencies do come to fruition. And look, maybe it's at different price points, right? Maybe the impact is the lower or lower quality office. But just broadly, do you think they're fully misplaced? Is it just misplaced relative to the quality of the public portfolios? How do you think about it medium and longer term?

Well, I think we've -- again, we've been saying for a couple of years that the issue that our shareholders and investors need to focus on is not work from home, actually, it's AI. And what we've articulated is a future where AI is going to create jobs, which it has, all the firms that are creating AI, creating AI infrastructure, all the financial and legal and business services that support all that and that's going to grow.

And our goal, as I mentioned at the outside, is to be the space provider to these leading companies. But what is AI going to do? It is going to automate certain job tasks. And that, we think, is going to be more in the support areas in the back office. There will certainly be exceptions to that, but I think that's where most of that is occurring. And generally, our strategy is not to be in markets that are primarily back office and to own buildings that are geared towards back office uses.

So I absolutely think it's going to have an impact. And that's why our strategy, I would describe it as a narrower path. Our company has always been our founders would articulate a strategy of owning the best buildings in the best markets, we've continued with that. And I would say today, we're pursuing an even narrower path, which is up quality, upping the quality further of the portfolio, focusing more on the CBD and getting even bigger in the gateway markets where we operate.

We've gotten some questions coming in on the audience just on that topic of AI. You focused on kind of those front office employees. For those employees who are kind of using AI tools and getting more efficient, how are you thinking about productivity and maybe those companies not needing to hire as many employees in those types of roles.

Yes. Look, there -- as I mentioned, I think there is going to be an automation benefit. I mean we've -- all of us that are using generative AI are seeing the benefits in whatever we're doing analysis, research, any of those types of things. But there's also a whole industry that's being created that's creating the AI. And so again, at least what we're seeing today in our leasing is those -- the creation of those jobs and the footprint that we have, far outstrips any the destruction of jobs or lack of hiring that might be going on as a result of their creation.

Maybe going back to some of the leasing activity that you announced this morning, can you just kind of broadly give us a market update where you're seeing strength and maybe tie it to some of those stats that you put out this morning? And kind of where does demand remain soft?

So let me go back to where we were in September when we had our investor conferences to sort of level set everyone? So what we said was we think we're going to achieve a couple of hundred basis points of occupancy gain in '26 and a couple of hundred occupancy gains in '27. So call it, 400 basis points, moving from 87% to 91%. We -- when we had our call a few weeks ago, said, look, we have 1.2 million square feet of leases that have been signed that have yet to commence. And we have, in 2026, lease expirations of just under 1.2 million square feet. So we actually -- if we do no leasing at all during calendar year 2026, we're going to be flat.

For the first quarter, sitting here today, our total activity is about 1.6 million square feet, 600,000 of that has been signed and another 1 million square feet, we are negotiating the document with our counterparty, our clients. Of that space, about 800,000 square feet is on currently vacant space and 450,000 square feet is on 2026 and 2027 lease expirations.

So we will have meaningful occupancy increases in 2026 and 2027. Our 2027 expirations today are about 1.8 million square feet. So we're going to gain occupancy this year. We're going to gain occupancy next year and we have another year of very limited rollover. Our activity, as we sit here today in 2026 is really pretty much across the portfolio. So we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 350,000 square feet of leasing in Manhattan, almost all of it is on vacant space.

So that's a 360 Park Avenue South, where we will probably be 90% leased by the end of the quarter at Times Square Tower, where we have signed a lease for 3.5 floors and are negotiating leases for another floor and a half, so that's another 100,000 square feet of space. And then we have signed leases that have yet to commence recently at 510 Madison Avenue, where we had almost 140,000 square feet of availability starting in 2025.

In our Boston portfolio, we have leases that we're negotiating on our rollover in '27 in our CBD portfolio, we are 98% leased in our CBD portfolio. So everything we are doing effectively is going forward lease expirations. And then in our Urban Edge portfolio, which is our Wealth and portfolio, we have another 200-plus thousand square feet of leases under negotiation and a pipeline of another, call it, 300,000 to 500,000 square feet behind that.

Jumping to Northern Virginia. The majority of our activity is in Northern Virginia/Reston. That's where we are seeing defense contracting and cybersecurity companies growing. Again, we are almost 95% leased there and the majority of the leasing we are doing there is on known expirations in '26 and '27. Interestingly, almost every one of the clients we are talking to is growing in that marketplace. And we're actually being asked by some of our existing clients to see if we can take back space early from their neighbors on floors so that they can grow.

And then finally, in San Francisco, the 2 largest components of our activity are south of mission. So at 680 Folsom and 50 Hawthorne, where on October 1, when we had our last call in 2025, we had no letters of intent or leases signed. And since that date, we have signed 3 leases for 120,000 square feet and a letter of intent that we expect to be executed in March for another 73,000 square feet.

So we'll have done almost 200,000 square feet of leasing in that building. And down in Mountain View, where we have an R&D park, we are leasing 2 of 3 vacant buildings for a total of about 115,000 square feet of space. So it's across the board. And we do have these other 2 sort of smaller markets, which are Seattle and West L.A. And while they are not recovering to the same degree as our other markets, there's actually incremental positive news there as well. So we are seeing more activity in those markets than we had in 2025.

So net-net, across our entire portfolio on the margin, things are better in 2026 than they are in 2025. From a rental rate perspective, we are seeing double-digit rental rate growth in our portfolio in Midtown Manhattan. We're seeing double-digit rental rate growth in our CBD Boston portfolio, which is primarily in the back day and we are seeing pretty strong growth of somewhere between, call it, 5% and 10% in our Northern Virginia portfolio, where concessions in all of those marketplaces are either static or decreasing. We still have some challenges in terms of concessions and rents in San Francisco, particularly in the high-rise product, and we're still having challenges from a rental rate perspective in West L.A. and NCL.

And then just maybe how is demand kind of -- it sounds like it's strong geographically. Is there anything to call out among the different tenant types or industries within tech. Any impact from software, professional services and then just on kind of overall leasing and tour activity, are you seeing any changes in terms of time from tour to lease execution?

Yes. So our markets are pretty different in terms of the kind of activity we're seeing. And so to try and do this very quickly. So in Boston, in our urban portfolio, it's almost exclusively asset management and legal. In our urban portfolio, it's a little smattering of everything. It's life science, some without lab and then general corporate. So for example, we have a national retailer that's relocating to Boston, where we're negotiating at least right now.

In Manhattan, it's primarily financial services and professional services. Those are the kind of companies that are looking at 343 in our portfolio in Midtown at 360 Park Avenue South, we have a little bit more tech -- some of it's AI related and some of it's Fintech. Down in Northern Virginia, the majority of our requirements are around defense contracting or cybersecurity. And in the city, almost exclusively, it's the legal profession. Although we're negotiating at least again with a corporate type in one of our availabilities on Pennsylvania Avenue. And then in San Francisco, the dominant amount of the activity that we're seeing from a volume perspective is truly artificial intelligence oriented companies or interestingly, companies that have been displaced because of that growth.

So as an example, we did a lease with a construction company at 680 Folsom Street because one of the large language model companies had rights on their space and they were kicked out of their building. And we're doing another deal with a technology company whose space was already sub led by OpenAI. So it's that kind of activity. The financial services and legal services activity in -- on the West Coast in San Francisco still is what I would say, a step behind what it has been in Boston and in New York.

Is that the type of activity you need to see accelerate in San Francisco for there to be increased demand for kind of your type of product in San Francisco? Or do you expect to see kind of increased demand from AI and tech for that type of tower product.

So we have sort of 2, I'd say, spheres of assets in San Francisco. So we have Embarcadero Center, and then we have our South of mission. And I would include Salesforce Tower in that. So Salesforce Tower is very much a place where both financial services and tech can locate or co-locate.

And 535 Mission Street, again, is also a tech building. We actually have a lot of small tech companies in there and then 680 Folsom and 50 Hawthorne or pure tech company buildings. Embarcadero Center is really the only asset that we have that is primarily financially services and/or legal services. And I think the question will be, will there be a multiplier effect associated with some of the other growth that's going on. And I think on the margin, there will be, there's a lot of wealth that's being created in California, particularly in San Francisco. There's this transfer of wealth that's going on around America that everyone is reading about.

My guess is that we will start to see more and more of those types of organizations, locating in urban locations in San Francisco, and they will primarily be in towers like Embarcadero Center. I would say that the overall level of tour activity in Embarcadero Center in the first quarter of 2026 is significantly stronger than it was in the first quarter of 2025.

And then you mentioned that L.A. and Seattle are a bit kind of slower to recover relative to San Francisco. And those are 2 markets where you have a smaller footprint. Just as you think about kind of the geographic exposure of the portfolio, how do you think about those 2 markets kind of medium to longer term?

Yes. Look, our goal is not to have 2 assets in a market. So our goal over the longer term would be to find additional assets and build those into regions like we have in the other cities. But whether it be COVID or what's going on right now with West Coast leasing, it's just been harder to accomplish.

And then conversely, as you think about the where different markets are and kind of the recovery cycle, where would you kind of like to allocate capital to?

So I think there are 2 answers to that question. What are we selling and what are we adding? So on the selling, the focus has been on land, on apartments that we built and on nonstrategic office. And so he asset sales actually have been spread around almost virtually all of our regions, not the 2 small regions, but over the 4 large regions we've been selling or in the process of selling assets and all of those. Very -- again, it's not specific so much to the market. It's specific to what the asset is. If it's a premier workplace in a CBD location in those 4 cities, we want to keep it, if it's not, it's -- at some point, I think we're going to want to -- we will want to monetize that asset.

And then in terms of new, again, it's opportunistic based on the investments that we can find. We believe in those 4 major cities that I described. And if we can find attractive investment opportunities that are accretive to shareholders, we're going to be interested. So -- and right now, and we have made some very significant investments over the last 18 months.

We started 343 Madison in New York, which is a $2 billion office building project that's located right next to Grand Central. And then we have launched a new development in Washington, D.C., which is pre-leased to 2 law firms, and that's about a $400 million project and then we have bought a building, which is basically going to be a site at 2100 M Street, and we have leased that substantially to a law firm as well. That project doesn't start until 2028.

So we believe in our markets and the capital allocation is being driven by the specifics of the opportunity.

And then just you mentioned 343 Madison. So I think it's a good time to shift to that. You kind of are in the process of seeking perhaps a new kind of equity investor, you've pre-leased 29% of the building. Kind of where do you stand today, if there's any updates you can provide on how you're thinking about bringing in a new partner for that construction financing and then just anything you can comment on with respect to kind of pre-leasing activity and discussions with anchor tenants?

Yes. We're very encouraged by the progress that we're making at 343 Madison, as everyone knows, it follows us, we signed a lease with STAR to lease 30% of the property, which is right in the and they're going to take the middle block of the building. And we're making great progress with another client that would be about another 15% of the property. And we're focused very much on the lower bank at this point. And we have dialogues going with several clients there.

So again, the leasing is going very well, and we're hitting the rents that we forecast to achieve the 7.5% to 8% yields that we've described. Second is it's a construction project. So we're on schedule with our construction. We've purchased roughly half of the job in terms of materials for construction and so forth and we are achieving savings from our budget on the construction by so far, which is also a big plus.

So we're -- as we described last year, we continue to derisk the project. So now we're getting -- guessing the capitalization, and there's really 2 pieces of that. One is the equity partner and the other is, as we bring in a partner, we're going to need a construction loan. So on the equity partner, we're out speaking with a dozen or so investors. We have materials. We're making progress -- we have not signed a letter of intent with anyone yet, but we've had multiple investors expressed strong interest in the property. My guess is it will probably not go to a single investor, but we'll probably have multiple partners in the project is how it's going to shake out. And then Mike, Mike should get into the conversation here, talk about the success that we're having with the construction loan.

Sure. Thanks, Owen. So we -- in January, we launched a process to get a construction loan, and as Owen described, it's a $2 billion project roughly and at our Investor Day, we said that we were going to be looking to raise about $1 billion in construction financing. We went out to the market and indicated that we would raise between $1 billion and $1.2 billion of construction financing, which is basically 50% to 65% of cost and we went out to a group of large domestic financial institutions, which would be capable of leading a large syndicate construction financing.

And there's a handful of those types of lenders out there. We got term sheets from all of them. We ended up creating our own kind of term sheet that was a little bit more aggressive than that and we were able to secure interest from all of the institutions that we talk to. So we effectively are going to do a club deal with a bunch of major institutions that are all interested in the project, given the high-quality nature of the project, the sponsorship that we're bringing, the pre-leasing that we have.

So we're very excited. So at this point, we're finalizing term sheets to try to get to a full commitment in loan documents, and we're in great shape to be in a position to close the construction financing later this year, which would line up with the equity financing that we need to do.

Just overall on the financing both on the equity and debt. Just in the context of AI, have any of the investors kind of expressed hesitations or anything? Or how have the conversations kind of evolve from when you first announced the project to where you sit today?

AI is not an issue in the private equity market for our product at the current time. questions and the analysis that we get is who's going to lease the space? What's the time frame for that? What are the rents, things typical questions that you would expect from an investor investing in a development project. We have not heard anything about AI risk related to this development.

I think overall, the top markets for office have continued to improve. So the availability of financing, both in the bank market where those banks have seen an inordinate amount of loan runoff in 2025 compared to what they saw in 2023 and 2024, which is leading them to want to replace and grow those assets this year.

We're seeing that. And then the CMBS market, both on the conduit side as well as the single asset securitization side for the larger loans is also improving through 2025 to the current date with every month, conduit deals going off with office of 15% to 25% of the pools and the single asset securitizations occurring every month at more attractive pricing with AAA somewhere in the low hundreds today, which is better than it was 12 months ago.

And then how much -- is there like a pre-leasing threshold you like to get the building to -- or that your debt partners would like you to get to before kind of finalizing a construction loan or how much would you like to kind of get done on that?

I think from the loan perspective, we only need to have the lease that we have signed already. Obviously, they know about the interest that we had, and we expect that we will be signing additional leases this year. As Owen described, we continue to derisk the project not only from a leasing perspective, but from a construction cost perspective to make the offering that much more attractive to investors.

Maybe just switching gears a little bit to kind of policy and the geopolitical environment in some of your markets. In New York, how are you underwriting the risk of either property tax increases or income tax increases? And how is the policy landscape in Seattle kind of impacted your appetite to be in that market?

I think we -- let me just step back for a second. We've had a progressive mayor in Boston for the last 4 years. And we have had a very constructive working relationship with the mayor, although -- and there's also shared agendas with the progressive mayors on things like affordable housing and things like that.

Obviously, there's disagreements about how that should best be funded. But in Boston, some of the things that the mayor wanted to do like switch the tax base from residential to commercial couldn't get passed in the state house. And I think you have a similar, if not more, direct environment in New York State because the governor because of the financial history of New York and the fact that the state, to some degree, rescued in New York in the '70s, there's a tremendous approval rights for major policies by the state in New York City. So -- and the governor has been very much on the record that she doesn't support additional tax burden in New York City. So that's kind of the state that we're in right now. I would also point to the fact that Mayor Mamdani has done things that I think have been well received and feel very practical and commerce-friendly like reappointing the Chief of Police, Jessica Tisch, which was not certainly assured when he was reelected and law and order is a critical factor for Citi's health as well as obviously for real estate, and that's been a positive.

We do want to touch on AI and kind of the impact to BXP directly, put aside the kind of the office questions, but how BXP is actually using AI to be more efficient or create value and different opportunities internally.

So I would say that our -- we are never first movers on stuff. We are, I'd say, a little bit more circumspect on things. And so our perspective on AI is how can we use AI to reduce cost. Not "make people jobs better and happier, but actually how to reduce cost. And so at the moment, what we are doing is we are looking at ways and we've actually -- we have an experiment that's going to go live at the end of the first quarter, where we are using an AI bot to do a series of accounting processes that are currently being done by individuals, not a BXP but under a contract with a sensor in another part of the country or another part of the world. And so we're going to be eliminating somewhere between 6 and 8 FTEs and there's a cost associated with that, but the payback is basically a year plus. Those are the kind of things we're doing. As another example, we are looking at whether or not we any longer need to do a lease abstract.

If there is a large language model that can answer a lease question for us succinctly and clearly, and it sort of works, then we don't need to go out and do a lease abstract and lease abstracts are, again, outsourced, but somebody has to check them. But if we don't need that, then that's creating another reduction in cost. Third, we're looking at how we can bring more of our legal activities in-house by giving productivity enhancing measures to our legal departments so that we don't have to use outside counsel to do as many things.

So are there tools as an example, that will reduce the amount of time it takes to review the comments on a lease that are being negotiated with a counterparty. And if we can have one of our outside counsel, do things much more quickly, therefore, they won't need to use outside counsel to do as many things. Those are the kinds of things that we are doing internally. We are not doing it to do our analysis on tenant credits yet. We're not using it to do our accounting internally yet. We're not doing -- using it to do a financial analysis of an investment. Those are, I'd say, longer-term kinds of things, and we'll see if, in fact, the language models get good enough to do those things. And what we're seeing is the cost of these things are coming down pretty dramatically.

So there's not a lot of advantage at quickly deploying one of these tools because 6 to 9 months later, you can do it for a significantly reduced cost.

Maybe just quickly touching on our rapid fire. Will there be more -- will the office sector have more or fewer or the same number of public companies in a year from now?

I always say fewer, and I'm right half the time.

And then what will net effective rent growth be for the office sector overall in 2027?

6%. Thank you.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q4 2025 BXP Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Helen Han, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to BXP's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. The press release and supplemental package were distributed last night and furnished on Form 8-K. In the supplemental package, BXP has reconciled all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure in accordance with Reg G. If you did not receive a copy, these documents are available in the Investors section of our website at investors.bxp.com.

A webcast of this call will be available for 12 months. At this time, we would like to inform you that certain statements made during this conference call, which are not historical, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Although BXP believes the expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be a change.

Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements were detailed in yesterday's press release and from time to time in BXP's filings with the SEC. BXP does not undertake a duty to update any forward-looking statements. I'd like to welcome Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Doug Linde, President; and Mike LaBelle, Chief Financial Officer.

During the Q&A portion of our call, Ray Ritchey, Senior Executive Vice President, and our regional management teams will be available to address any questions. We ask that those of you participating in the Q&A portion of the call to please limit yourself to 1 and only 1 question. If you have an additional query or follow-up, please feel free to rejoin the queue.

I would now like to turn the call over to Owen Thomas for his formal remarks.

Thank you, Helen, and good morning to all of you. BXP had a very strong year of performance in 2025 in all areas critical to our business, namely leasing, asset sales, development starts and deliveries, financing and client service, notwithstanding our below reforecast FFO per share outcome for the fourth quarter. .

We remain on track, if not ahead, in executing the detailed business plan we outlined for shareholders at our investor conference last September. This morning, I'll review our progress toward achieving the critical components of this plan, which are leasing and growing occupancy, asset sales and deleveraging and external growth primarily through new development, capital raising for 343 Madison Avenue and increasing focus on urban premier workplace concentration.

Though Doug will provide details on BXP's leasing activity, in summary, we had a strong fourth quarter and full year of leasing and our forecast occupancy gains have commenced. We completed over 1.8 million square feet of leasing for the fourth quarter and over 5.5 million square feet for the full year 2025, well above our goals for the year.

As we've explained on prior calls, leasing activity is tied to both our clients' growth and use of their space. We have every reason to be confident that the positive environment we are experiencing for leasing will continue into 2026 as earnings for companies in both the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 indices, a proxy for our client base are expected to grow at double-digit rates, an acceleration above 2025 growth levels.

Return to office mandates from corporate users continue to grow and take effect. Placer.ai's office utilization data indicates December 2025 was the busiest in office December since the pandemic and showed a 10% increase in office visits nationwide from December 2024. Concerns and speculation about the impact of AI on job growth and by extension leasing activity are not supported by the actions of our clients, many of which are growing their footprint, upgrading their space, and/or executing long-term leases.

In fact, we're experiencing accelerating demand from AI companies, particularly in the Bay Area and New York City. The near-term negative impacts of AI on jobs are more likely in support functions, which are generally not occupying premier workplaces. Providing further support for our leasing activity is the consistent strength and outperformance of the premier workplace segment of the office market where BXP is a market leader.

Premier workplaces represent roughly the top 14% of space and 7% of buildings in the 5 CBD markets where BXP competes. Direct vacancy for premier workplaces in these 5 markets is 11.6%, 560 basis points lower than the broader market, while asking rents for Premier Workplaces continue to command a premium of more than 50% over the broader market.

Over the last 3 years, net absorption for Premier Workplaces has been a positive 11.4 million square feet versus a negative 8 million square feet for the balance of the market, which is nearly a 20 million square foot difference. Given these positive supply and demand market trends and our strong leasing in 2025, we believe our target of 4% occupancy gain over the next 2 years remains achievable and more likely than when we made the forecast last September.

Our second goal is to raise capital and optimize our portfolio through asset sales. During our Investor Day, we communicated an objective to sell 27 land, residential and nonstrategic office assets for approximately $1.9 billion in net aggregate sale proceeds by 2028. We are off to a strong start. So far, we've closed the sale of 12 assets for total net proceeds of over $1 billion, $850 million in 2025 and $180 million this month.

In addition, we have under contract or agreed to terms the sale of 8 assets with estimated total net proceeds of approximately $230 million in 2026. In total, we have 21 transactions closed or well underway with estimated net proceeds of roughly $1.25 billion.

As of now, dispositions estimated for 2026 aggregate over $400 million, and we will be exploring additional sales. For the $1 billion in dispositions that have been closed, there are 7 land sales for $220 million, 2 apartment sales for $400 million and 3 office lab sales for $400 million. We have been able to achieve attractively valued land sales by creatively positioning our office land for other uses.

To date, we have sold or are in the process of selling land to a corporate user, a municipal user, a light manufacturing developer, a utility and most importantly, developers for residential use, both apartments and for-sale townhomes. Across Lexington, Waltham and Westin Massachusetts, Montgomery County, Maryland, Fairfax County, Virginia, Santa Monica, California and West Windsor Township, New Jersey, we have received or are pursuing entitlements for over 3,500 residential units which is creating significant value for shareholders and will be the backbone of both our apartment development and land sales activity going forward.

We sold 2 high-quality apartment buildings, which we built in Reston Town Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts for approximately 4.6% cap rates both were profitable developments for BXP. Lastly, on office sales, we elected not to participate in a debt restructuring at Market Square North and sold our interest to our partner for our share of the existing debt balance. We sold 140 Kendrick Street, our only asset located south of the I-90 interchange on Route 128 in suburban Boston at a relatively high cap rate of 9.5%. However, we maximized its income potential, having leased the building to 96%, and the local market is not strategic to BXP given our lack of scale.

Lastly, we sold our 50% interest in Gateway Commons to a strategic buyer that has significant scale in South San Francisco for a 6.2% cap rate and the property is 63% leased. Though we think South San Francisco is an attractive life science market longer term, given high vacancy rates and low net absorption, it will take some time to capture the upside and we received a reasonable price from a logical buyer.

With this deal, we have exited the Life Science business on the West Coast, but remain committed to the sector through our substantial life science holdings in the Boston region. Supporting our disposition efforts, office transaction volume in the private market continues to improve as more equity investors become constructive on the sector, and financing is available at scale, particularly in the CMBS market, with tightening credit spreads.

In the fourth quarter, Significant office sales were $17.3 billion, which is up 43% from the third quarter of 2025 and up 21% from the fourth quarter of the prior year. The transaction most relevant to BXP's portfolio that occurred in the fourth quarter was the sale of a 47.5% interest in 101 California Street in San Francisco, for a 5.25% cap rate and $775 a square foot. The building is a market leader in San Francisco, comprising 1.25 million square feet and is 88% leased with attractive property level financing through 2029.

The third goal is to grow FFO through new development selectively with office given market conditions and more actively for multifamily with an equity partner. For office, we continue to allocate more capital to developments than acquisitions because we're finding very high-quality development opportunities with pre-leasing that we believe will generate over 8% cash yield upon delivery, which is roughly 150 to 250 basis points higher than cap rates for debatably equivalent quality asset acquisitions.

Additional advantage as new buildings generally have longer weighted average lease term and limited near- and medium-term CapEx requirements. The trade-off is timing as developments obviously takes several years to deliver. This past quarter, we created a second preleased premier workplace development in the Washington, D.C. CBD market. Following our success at 725 12th Street, we were approached by Sidley Austin to find them a new Washington, D.C. headquarters. We identified 2100 M Street as an attractive site with frontage on New Hampshire Avenue and 21st Streets. We simultaneously negotiated a purchase of this site for $55 million or $170 a square foot and executed a 15-year lease for 75% of the to-be built not yet designed 320,000 square foot premier workplace.

The total development budget is estimated to be approximately $380 million, and the forecast unleveraged cash yield upon delivery is in excess of 8%. Though we have closed on the site, construction will not commence until 2028 and building delivery is expected in 2031. For multifamily, we have 3 projects with over 1,400 units under construction and are in various stages of entitlement and/or design for 11 projects totaling over 5,000 units, one of which will commence in 2026.

We expect to continue to capitalize new development starts with financial partners owning the majority of the equity. We continue to advance our development pipeline with 8 office, life science, residential and retail projects underway, comprising 3.5 million square feet and $3.7 billion of BXP investment. We expect these projects will deliver strong external growth both in the near term with the delivery of 290 Binney Street midway through the year and over the longer term.

Our final goal is to introduce a financial partner into 343 Madison Avenue, our leading premier workplace development in New York City, given its location with direct access to Grand Central Terminal and state-of-the-art design and amenities. We finalized a lease commitment with Starr for 29% of the space in the middle bank of the tower and are negotiating a letter of intent for another 16% of the building located just above Starr. We have committed to nearly 50% of the construction costs and our projections remain on track for a stabilized unleveraged cash return of 7.5% to 8% upon delivery in 2029.

We are in discussions with several potential equity partners for a 30% to 50% leverage interest in the property and also have had constructive discussions with several construction lenders for financing at attractive terms. Our leasing, construction and capital markets execution continues to derisk the 343 Madison investment, and we intend to complete this recapitalization in 2026.

We are making strong progress with our strategy for BXP to reallocate capital to premier workplace assets in CBD locations. We recently launched new developments at 343 Madison Avenue in New York City and 5 725 12th Street in Washington, D.C. We plan to launch construction of 2100 M Street in 2028 and the majority of the office and land assets we are selling are in suburban locations. We continue to evaluate additional premier workplace development and acquisition opportunities but remain disciplined about quality, pricing, and the result in leverage and earnings impacts.

In conclusion, our clients are, in general, growing, healthy and more intensively using their space, creating increasingly positive leasing market conditions concentrated in the premier workplace segment of the market. New construction for office has virtually halted leading to higher occupancy and rent growth in many submarkets where BXP operates. Debt and equity investors are becoming constructive on the office sector, resulting in more availability of capital at better pricing. BXP is very much on track executing our business plan as outlined last September, which we believe will deliver both FFO growth and deleveraging in the years ahead. And I'll turn it over to Doug.

Thanks, Owen. Good morning, everybody. So filling in some details on our leasing progress. When we made our presentations at our Investor Day, we had all of our regional executives on the dais and they described a very constructive and an improving environment for our portfolio across each of our markets.

Our remarks last quarter reinforced that outlook. Our leasing results this quarter continue to affirm the sentiment. As you read last night, the fourth quarter total leasing volumes were strong and exceeded our expectations, and our occupancy jumped about 70 basis points, with about 35% of that gain stemming from improvements in the portfolio leasing and [ the other parts ] from reductions to the portfolio size, aka, the asset sales. We are excited to announce our new development leasing and those investments are going to drive net operating income growth from [ 29% to 32% ], but we are in the here and the now.

It's our in-service vacant space leasing and covering near-term lease expirations that will drive our occupancy improvements and same-store revenue growth in '26 and '27. In the fourth quarter, we completed about 500,000 square feet of vacant space leasing, which included about 70,000 square feet of leases that were expiring in the fourth quarter, and we executed leases on 550,000 square feet of '26 and '27 expiring space.

In the full year '25, we executed leases totaling over 1.7 million square feet of vacant space and we start 2026, with 1.243 million square feet of executed leases on vacant space that have yet to commence. Calendar year '26 expirations have been reduced down to 1.225 million square feet. The bottom line is that if we were to do no additional leasing in '26, our occupancy would remain flat for the year. The good news is that we have lots of activity, and we are going to doing lots of leasing and we have begun to execute leases.

We expect to complete 4 million square feet of leasing in 2026, which is consistent with what we suggested during our Investor Day presentations. We have 1.1 million square feet in negotiations today, including more than 750,000 square feet of currently vacant space and 125,000 square feet associated with 2026 expirations. On top of that, our discussion pipeline currently sits at about 1.3 million square feet and includes more than 700,000 square feet of vacant space.

This is about 10% larger than the pipeline from the third quarter call. We've made significant progress on residential entitlement work, as Owen described, across a number of our assets, and some of this work is going to allow us to take out of service and demolish suburban office buildings and then redevelop those parcels into higher-value residential uses consistent with our portfolio optimization strategy.

In Waltham, our rezoning efforts have reached a point where we have removed 1000 Winter Street, a 275,000 square foot office building from the in-service portfolio this quarter. Next quarter, as leases expire, we will be removing 2800 28th Street, a 115,000 square foot office building and 2850 28th Street, a 146,000 square foot office building, both in the Santa Monica Business Park from the in-service portfolio. We've submitted our project application in mid-December for 385 units on the site of our 2800 28th Street office building, which is about 50% leased today. We will be relocating many of these existing tenants and hope to be under construction in early '27 on the first residential project in Santa Monica.

We've also reached an agreement with an institutional partner to commence development at World Gate in Herndon, Virginia, where we purchased 300,000 square feet of office space with plans to reentitle and demolish it. These buildings were never in service. The entitlements are nearing completion, and we anticipate starting during the second quarter. As Owen said, we also received our zoning approvals to build [ 100 town ] homes, which we are actively marketing and 200 apartments in Westin Nash on unentitled land and are moving forward with site plan approval.

As Owen discussed, we sold a number of assets at the end of '25 and in January, we completed 2 more transactions. On a combined basis, these sales reduced our portfolio by 2 million square feet and the assets were 78% leased. The in-service portfolio as we sit here today, is 46.6 million square feet. Owen mentioned our expected property sales for '26. Based on the transactions in documentation today and the removal of the 2 buildings at [ SMBP ], the portfolio is expected to be reduced by another 1 million square feet by the end of the first quarter.

We ended the year with in-service occupancy of 86.7%. I said we are negotiating leases on 750,000 square feet of vacant space. We expect 600,000 of that to be in occupancy in the fourth -- by the fourth quarter of '26. Again, we're also negotiating leases on 125,000 square feet of '26 expirations. This 725,000 square feet of leasing on a portfolio of 45.6 million square feet will add 160 basis points of occupancy by the end of '26.

We will sign additional leases on vacant space and/or renew '26 expirations and thereby achieve 200 basis points of occupancy improvement by the end of the year, ending the year at about 89%, just as we stated in September. The overall mark-to-market on leases signed this quarter was flat on a cash basis, though the regional variations were pretty meaningful. We had a 10% increase in Boston, New York and D.C. were essentially flat, and the West Coast was actually down 10%.

Boston was led by strong markups in the Back Bay portfolio. New York was very space sensitive. In other words, we had 1 lease at the [ General Owners ] building that was up 9%, along with another lease in the same building, same elevator bank that was a negative 13%. In our West Coast portfolio, in particular in Embarcadero Center, the structure of the leases made a big difference. For example, we had 2 leases in Embarcadero Center 4 in close proximity that had a $20 square foot difference due to 1 lease having a very small TI allowance and no free rent and the other having a full build in the year.

This quarter, we executed a number of large leases. Excluding the 2 development property assets, we signed 17 leases over 20,000 square feet, with the largest at about 115,000 square feet. 44% were involving renewals, extensions or expansions and 56% were with new clients. Existing client expansions encompassed about 162,000 square feet of the activity. We also had about 100,000 square feet of clients that renewed but contracted.

The second generation rents in the leasing [indiscernible] this quarter represent about 900,000 square feet and the gross rents were down about 3%. The DC number reflects the reality of 10 years of 2.25% to 3% annual escalation on top of operating expense increases. As I've said in prior calls, almost every DC area lease has a cash roll down of upon expiration. In San Francisco, the statistics include only 57,000 square feet and just 23,000 square feet of that was CBD office.

The change in the office portfolio rent was a decline of about 9%. Before I pass the call to Mike, I want to make a few comments on our individual markets. In the BXP portfolio, Midtown New York, the Back Bay of Boston and Western Virginia continue to have the tightest supply and therefore, the most landlord favorable market conditions. And this quarter, the most significant improvements we've seen were at -- in the Park Avenue South submarket in Midtown and the [ South of Mission ] market in San Francisco. In the Boston CBD, where we are 97.5% occupied we completed another early renewal and extension in the Back Bay portfolio.

We executed a 115,000 square foot lease, which included an 18,000 square foot of expansion that involved BXP freeing up space from other clients in the building. When you're 97.5% occupied, it's hard to lease vacant space. We completed a second large transaction in the Back Bay that was a 57,000 square foot renewal of a 95,000 square foot block. The client had sublet the remaining space in '24, and we're negotiating [indiscernible] with a current subtenant to go direct for 10 years when the prime lease expires in 2027. Again, an indication of the tightness in the market.

In our Urban Edge portfolio, we signed another life science client at 180 CityPoint, actually done yesterday, which brings that building to 92% leased. Our remaining first-generation life science availability from the Urban Edge is now limited to 27,000 square feet at 180 and 113,000 square feet at 103, totaling 140,000 square feet.

In our view, the macro issues around life science bottomed at the beginning of '25. Nonetheless, demand for wet lab space has not recovered. There are a few users actively touring but the requirements from early-stage clients continue to be limited. Construction at 290 Binney Street in Cambridge is nearing an end. Rent is going to commence in April and we expect to deliver the building into occupancy in June.

In New York, the most significant change in our activity has been in the Midtown South portfolio. On January 1, '25, we had signed leases of just over 100,000 square feet at our 450,000 square foot 360 Park Avenue South development. We executed leases on 4 floors in the fourth quarter, which brought the total leasing in the building to 262,000 square feet or 59%. We are negotiating leases on an additional 6 floors that should bring the building to 90% leased during the first quarter.

We will have 2 floors available in the building. And across Madison Square Park, we leased an additional 32,000 square feet at 200 Fifth 5 in early January, leaving us with a total of 33,000 square feet of availability where we had 350,000 square feet vacated in 2025. Starr is currently a tenant in 240,000 square feet at 399 Park. We expect their relocation to 343 Madison will occur in the third quarter of 2029. We have already received inquiries about their space.

At each of our properties, at the 53rd Street campus, the average in-place fully escalated rent is less than $110 a square foot, which is significantly below the current market. As a case in point, we signed a lease of 599 Lexington Avenue in the fourth quarter of 2024. We are documenting a lease on an adjacent floor in the building today with a starting rent that is 25% higher.

In San Francisco, the most significant change in the portfolio is at 680 Folsom and 50 Hawthorne. You will recall that in late October, about 90 days ago, I described the strong interest we were seeing at the building, where we had 208,000 square feet of vacancy and 63,000 square feet of expirations in June 2026, but no leases in negotiation.

Today, we have executed 2 leases totaling 69,000 square feet and are negotiating leases for an additional 132,000 square feet. All of these leases agreed to terms during the last 60 days of 2025. While the AI demand has not translated into commensurate growth in ancillary professional service tenants in high-rise assets in the markets, overall, non-AI client activity is also improving.

This quarter, we completed almost 200,000 square feet of leases at Embarcadero Center and 535 Mission, which is almost double what we did in the third quarter. Many of our asset sales were on the Peninsula of San Francisco. Our remaining in-service assets are in Mountain View. Client tours continue to accelerate in this market as well, and we have signed an LOI for a 52,000 square foot building at Mountain View Research. Finally, D.C. Activity in D.C. continues to be concentrated in Reston Town Center. This quarter, we were able to manufacture 43,000 square feet of expansion space for a growing defense contractor by doing an early termination with a client that was acquired not using their space and had a 2032 expiration. We also completed 195,000 square feet of additional transactions with 15 clients.

Any leasing pause associated with the government shutdown from the fall is fully recovered. That wraps up my comments, and we'll turn it over to Mike to talk about guidance for 2026.

Great. Thanks, Doug. Good morning, everybody. So this morning, I plan to cover the details of our fourth quarter and our full year 2025 performance. I'm going to spend most of my time, though on our 2026 initial earnings guidance that we included in our press release, with additional details in the supplemental financial package. For 2025, we reported total consolidated revenues of $3.5 billion and full year FFO of $1.2 billion or $6.85 per share. Our fourth quarter FFO was $1.76 per share, and it came in short of the midpoint of our guidance by $0.05 per share due primarily to higher-than-anticipated G&A expense and noncash reserves for accrued rental income.

Our G&A expense for the quarter was $3.5 million or $0.02 higher than our projection. $0.01 per share of this was from higher compensation expense and $0.01 was from higher legal expenses that were related to the elevated leasing activity that we saw in the quarter. We also recorded approximately $6 million or $0.03 per share of credit reserves for the accrued rent balances for 2 clients in the portfolio.

One is a 60,000 square foot firm that provides educational services to federal employees in Washington, D.C. and the other is a 10,000 square foot restaurant in New York City. Both clients remain in occupancy today, and we fully reserved their accrued rent balances due to our concerns of future rent collection. In aggregate, the rental obligation at our share is relatively small at $4 million annually. The balance of the portfolio performed in line with our expectations with revenues modestly above budget and higher expenses, largely driven by elevated utility costs in the Northeast due to colder-than-normal weather.

We also reported gains on sale in the quarter of $208 million on $890 million of asset sales. Gains on sale are not part of our FFO, but they are part of net income and EPS. We received net proceeds from the sales activity of $800 million that has increased our liquidity and will be used to reduce debt. We currently have $1.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents, a portion of which will be utilized in February to redeem our $1 billion bond that expires this quarter.

With that, I will turn to our 2026 guidance. We are introducing 2026 FFO guidance with a range of $6.88 to $7.04 per share, which is within consensus estimates. The midpoint of our guidance for FFO was $6.96 per share, and it represents an increase of $0.11 per share from 2025. At a high level, our 2026 guidance can be summarized as follows: internal growth in NOI from higher occupancy in our same-property portfolio, external growth in NOI generated by our development deliveries, lower interest expense from utilizing the proceeds of asset sales to reduce debt.

These are partially offset by a reduction in NOI from executing asset sales in 2025 and 2026 that is consistent with our strategic asset sales plan that we described at our Investor Day. Noncash amortization of our new stock-based outperformance plan, which is designed to align management incentives with long-term shareholder value creation and a reduction in NOI from taking buildings out of service for future residential development, positioning them for higher value creation.

To get into details, I will start with the expected growth in our same-property portfolio. Doug did a great job describing the ramp-up in occupancy from both signed leases that have not yet started and our active leasing pipeline. As we described, we expect occupancy to climb from 86.7% at year-end 2025 to approximately 89% by the end of 2026, which is a meaningful increase. We expect first quarter occupancy in the same property pool to be relatively flat, followed by improvement with average occupancy during the year of between 87.5% to 88.5%. We -- as a result, we expect our same-property NOI growth to build throughout the year.

Our assumptions for 2026 same-property NOI growth are between 1.75% and 2.25% from 2025. Based upon our same-property NOI of $1.88 billion, this equates to approximately $33 million or $0.19 per share of incremental NOI at the midpoint. On a cash basis, our results will be impacted by several terminations that we have proactively manufactured to accommodate either growing existing clients or new clients, like the one Doug described. In each of these cases, we will have new clients taking occupancy with free rent periods during 2026, so we are effectively trading cash rent for GAAP rent in the near term to accommodate growing clients, and we're getting valuable additional lease term.

One of these occurred in the fourth quarter, resulting in $8 million of cash termination income in 2025. Our 2026 guidance assumes termination income of $11 million to $15 million, A portion of this is from 3 additional terminations that we're negotiating. The incremental increase in termination income in 2026 is approximately $2 million or $0.01 per share at the midpoint of our guidance. Even though termination income is cash income, we do exclude it from our same property guidance, and the impact is muting our cash same-property growth in 2026.

Our assumption for 2026 cash same-property NOI growth is 0% to 0.5% from 2025. Our assumption for termination income at the midpoint would equate to an additional 70 basis points of same-property cash NOI growth. As Doug described, we're taking 3 buildings out of service for redevelopment into future residential sites and are in varying stages of entitlement. We are not doing any new leases in these buildings and expect to relocate existing clients to other buildings. The reduction in NOI from these buildings in 2026 is $13 million or $0.07 per share.

Turning to our development portfolio. In 2025, we delivered 3 new properties totaling 700,000 square feet and $518 million of total investment. These properties include 1050 Winter Street in Waltham and Reston Next Phase 2, which are 100% and 92% leased, respectively. We also delivered 360 Park Avenue South, where we're 59% leased today. And as Doug described, we have leases under negotiation to bring it to around 90%. We expect to have occupancy of all of this space by the year-end 2026, and we will have a full year of revenue in 2027.

The most meaningful development that will impact 2026 is our 573,000 square foot 290 Binney Street life science project in Cambridge that is 100% leased to AstraZeneca. We own 55% of this project, and it will deliver at the end of June with a total investment of our share of approximately $500 million. In aggregate, we project that the contribution from our developments will add an incremental 2026 NOI of $44 million to $52 million. And at the midpoint, the developments are projected to add $0.27 per share of incremental NOI to 2026.

As we described at our Investor Day, we have embarked on a disposition program that will fund our development activities and optimize our portfolio of premier workplaces. To date, we have closed $1.1 billion in 12 transactions and generated net proceeds of $1 billion. Our guidance assumes an additional $360 million of sales in 2026 that are either under contract or in negotiation, which we expect will generate net proceeds of approximately $230 million.

The financial impact of our sales activity is expected to result in a reduction of portfolio NOI from 2025 to 2026 of $70 million to $74 million. Investing the sales proceeds to reduce debt results in lower net interest expense in 2026. We expect the net impact of sales on our 2026 FFO will be dilution of $0.06 to $0.08 per share, which is in line with the guidance that we provided at our Investor Day in September.

Overall, we expect our net interest expense will be $38 million to $48 million lower in 2026 versus 2025. A portion of this is in our unconsolidated joint venture portfolio where we anticipate lower interest expense at our share of $11 million to $14 million that is primarily from the repayment of secured mortgages. Our guidance assumes our share of joint venture interest expense of $60 million to $63 million in 2026.

We expect a reduction in our 2026 consolidated interest expense net of interest income of $25 million to $37 million from 2025. And that results in a 2026 range for consolidated net interest expense of $581 million to $593 million. Our guidance includes refinancing our $1 billion bond issue that has a GAAP interest rate of 3.5% and expires on October 1 of this year. We currently expect to refinance it at maturity with a new 10-year unsecured bond.

Our current credit spreads for 10 years are in the 130 to 140 basis point area. So a new 10-year bond issuance today would price between 5.5% and 5.75%. We have not incorporated into our guidance the likely changing capital structure of our 343 Madison development. As Owen mentioned, we're having active discussions with prospective private equity capital partners for 30% to 50% of the project, which would reduce our funding needs. We've also started the process of construction financing for approximately 50% of the cost or about $1 billion, the response to date has been excellent, and the banks we are working with are active lending to high-quality sponsors and projects and are excited to participate.

The closing will likely occur late in the year, and I expect the financial impact on our 2026 earnings will be modest. Turning to our G&A. We project total G&A expense in 2026 of $176 million to $183 million. That is an increase from 2025 of $13 million to $20 million or $0.09 per share at the midpoint. $0.07 per share of the increase is noncash and is comprised of amortization of the imputed value of our recently announced outperformance compensation plan.

While there is an annual noncash expense related to the plan, it is completely aligned with growing shareholder value and only results in a payout through additional share issuance if our dividend adjusted stock price rose at between 35% and 80% from our current price over the next 4 years.

Lastly, we anticipate that our development and management services fee income will be $30 million to $34 million in 2026, which is a decrease of $3 million to $7 million from 2025. The decline year-over-year is from a reduction of development fee income from completing several joint venture developments, like 360 Park and 290 Binney, and lower property management fees from selling joint venture properties as part of our asset sales program.

So to sum all this up, our initial guidance range for 2026 FFO is $6.88 to $7.04 per share representing an increase of $0.11 per share from 2025. At the midpoint, the increase is comprised of higher same-property portfolio NOI of $0.19, incremental contribution from our development pipeline of $0.27, lower net interest expense of $0.24 and higher termination income of $0.01. The increases are partially offset by a reduction of NOI from asset sales of $0.41, the removal of properties from service of $0.07, increased G&A expense of $0.09 and lower fee income of $0.03.

2026 represent a return to FFO growth for BXP. We expect our quarterly FFO run rate to consistently improve through 2026, leading us to a strong base for 2027 and our portfolio is well positioned for additional occupancy growth in 2027 as we see improving trends in our leasing markets, combined with very low rollover exposure. That completes our remarks. Operator, can you open the lines up for questions?

[Operator Instructions] And I show our first question comes from the line of Steve Sakwa from Evercore ISI.

I guess maybe it's a combination for the 3 of you, but it sounds like you've had good success on the disposition front and maybe even accelerated the timing. I'm just curious, Owen, if you've kind of taken a harder or a sharper pencil to the portfolio and thought about maybe more dispositions to really tighten up the portfolio. And to the extent that you have I guess, how do you balance that in terms of Mike's comment about FFO growth? And I guess, are you willing to sell more to kind of sharpen the portfolio even if it has kind of negative FFO consequences in the short term?

Steve, our original goal that we outlined in September last year was $1.9 billion of sales for over the 3 years from September and I think at this point, I'd say we're sticking with that forecast. That all being said, we have a list of assets that we'd like to sell. And if we get a price that we find attractive, we will execute on it. We are paying attention to the dilutive impacts to earnings. One thing that we have repeated over and over, and I think it's important for everyone to understand One thing that's helping us with this is a lot of the sales that we're doing are land, and those are completely accretive because they're not generating any income.

I'm not sure they're being valued in the public market, and we're using the proceeds to reduce debt. So -- and we're going to continue to sell land assets. I described 3,500 residential units that we're currently getting entitled on land that [ former office ] development sites or buildings out of service. And when we go to sell that land, that will be accretive sales. But it will be balanced out with some additional office. I gave some an example, the 140 Kendrick was an example this quarter, which was a little bit of a higher cap rate, which is an offset. So net-net, the answer to your question is we're sticking with our forecast, we might sell more. We're paying attention to the dilutive impacts, but we're also paying attention to optimizing our portfolio and deleveraging and creating capital for our development program.

I would just add one thing. I mean, of the $1.9 billion that we discussed -- that Owen just discussed, we're off to a great start.

Yes.

And I would say the pace of the first $1.1 billion that we've got kind of closed is slightly ahead of where we anticipated. So when you look at the $0.06 to $0.08 of dilution I just described, it is within the range that we gave at the Investor Day. The range of the Investor Day was $0.04 to $0.09. It's a little bit at the higher end. And the reason for that is that a couple of the office sales occurred more quickly than we anticipated, which is great.

Yes. My only additional comment, Steve, is that -- so Owen described all this residential activity we had. I'm just sort of putting an order of magnitude on it, there's probably somewhere between $200 million and $300 million of land value there. And assuming a portion of it is just going to be sold as townhome sites that we will not have an equity interest, and we'll just [indiscernible]. I assume a majority of it is going to be residential.

We're -- I assume we're 20% of that. And then our 20% is going to be added to our development pipeline, right? So we're going to take cash off the table and make incremental investment in development as we do that on a going forward basis. So there's a little bit of dilution on a relative basis, but there's actually accretion because we're going to be making what we believe to be highly accretive investments relative to what the residential yields will be.

And I share our next question in the queue comes from the line of Michael Goldsmith from UBS.

Doug, I think you said you had 1.1 million square feet in negotiations and 1.3 million square feet in discussions. What conversion rate are you underwriting for this pool? How is that maybe compared to the last couple of years? And the historical conversion rate during prior improvement cycles.

Yes. So Michael, on the 1.1 million, it's actually now at 1.2 million as of late last night of deals that are in "lease" negotiation, I think our conversion rate is like 95%. We rarely see something drop off there. And then on our sort of pipeline of things, I'd say the conversion rate there is somewhere in the 0.5 million square feet, plus or minus, but it keeps growing, right? So the -- as I said to you before, we're going to lease 4 million square feet of space. And so we've identified as of today about 2.3 million square feet or 2.4 million square feet of space. we will probably have identified 5 million square feet of space to get to that 4 million square feet at the end of the year.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Anthony Prolong from JPMorgan.

You mentioned in your commentary that you didn't feel that AI was cannibalizing any space needs in the portfolio. So can you maybe talk in a little bit more detail about how you're tracking that, if you think that, perhaps, it's cannibalizing other types of space that's not in your portfolio? Or just any more color on that would be helpful, I think.

Tony, I'll kick it off, and Doug and Mike may also have comments on this. This is incredibly hard thing to forecast. I think all of you on this call realize that. The points that we can only make to you right now is what we're experiencing, which is accelerating leasing activity. And I just -- Doug described it, I described it, our clients are -- they're growing more than they're shrinking. They're taking better space, they're signing longer leases.

And in fact, I would say AI so far for BXP's footprint has been a net plus, not a negative because we've had very significant AI leasing not only at BXP but maybe more importantly, in the Bay Area, which is an important market. It's been a very important driver of net absorption there. So that's what we're seeing today. Our instinct on this is as we think about AI, and we use it in our own work is that it's much more likely in the near term to dislocate more repetitive tasks and support jobs. And those kinds of positions generally are not resident in premier workplaces, which is substantially our portfolio. But again, I'd just go back to -- this is hard to forecast. This is what we're seeing right now.

And I'm going to ask -- I guess I will ask Rod and Hillary sort of make some comments on their markets because I think that they're emblematic of what is going on. And Rod will, I assume, talk about just the growth in technology jobs in the form of AI companies and AI "sort" of vertical and/or horizontal business structures that are coming. And Hillary is going to describe what's going on with not only technology but with sort of the financial services and professional services sectors that are so much and so important to New York. So Rod, why don't you start?

Yes. Thanks, Doug. So I think if we're talking about the cannibalization. I don't know that I can speak to that specifically. But with respect to the demand that we're seeing in San Francisco and the Bay Area in general, from AI, it's just been tremendous. We've been talking about it on calls in the past, and that definitely now is showing up in the statistics. The overall tenant demand in San Francisco right now sits just around 8 million square feet and 36% of that is from AI or AI-related technology companies.

So that's pretty -- it's a lot. And every time we turn around, there's another deal that's being talked about or getting signed. So there's the big ones, the OpenAI, the Anthropics of the world, and then there's a lot of small wins, too, that keep [ getting informed ]. So I just -- it's definitely a wave of demand that we're taking advantage of. We spoke about 680 Folsom and the tenant demand down there. and it's happening. So that's all positive as far as we're concerned for our portfolio.

Hilary?

We are seeing real strength in the financial services sector. We continue to see companies having a difficult time securing space that they need for expansion or simply if they're trying to locate in Manhattan for the first time. I heard a statistic the other day that there is only 1 space that is direct with a landlord above 100,000 square feet in the premier buildings in Midtown.

And I think that's a pretty telling statistic. So we've continued to see demand from our existing clients wanting to expand. We have seen stronger interest from tech and media and Midtown South, which is reflected in the statistics that Doug mentioned regarding our lease-up at 360 Park Avenue South, which is approaching 90% when we complete the leasing that's underway now. Many of those tenants are either AI powered or have an AI component to their business. And then we still are leasing to more traditional financial services businesses, and those have come down -- some of them have come down from Midtown to Midtown South as they're seeking premier workplaces.

The other thing I would mention, and Rod referred to Anthropic. There was an article out last week that Anthropic is seeking between 250,000 and 450,000 square feet in New York City. So there's definitely an expansion of AI businesses in New York. And I think that, that is driving some of the demand pickup in Midtown South and the [ Flatiron ] District. But for Midtown proper in the Park Avenue submarket and the Plaza District in Premier Workplace, very heavily dominated by financial services industries who continue to expand.

So just to sort of come to a conclusion, I think that both things can be true. You can have job displaced from artificial intelligence products, but you can also have growth in certain submarkets in certain cities in the country. And as Owen said, we happen to be in those places where we're seeing the growth. So is there going to be a less overall job growth because of AI over the next decade, maybe, but we're not seeing it impacting our portfolio.

And I show our next question in the queue comes from the line of John Kim from BMO Capital Markets.

I wanted to go to Mike's comments in his prepared remarks about quarterly FFO consistently growing throughout the year as occupancy improves, which sets up for a strong '27. Should we interpret that as the fourth quarter '26 being the quarterly baseline run rate for next year?

for '27, John.

Yes.

Yes. I mean I think that's a good start. I think that we provide guidance for the first quarter of '26, which is always seasonally our lowest quarter because of the vesting for G&A. And we also expect that our kind of in-service occupancy from the same property portfolio will be flat in the first quarter. And then the occupancy will build after that.

And we'll see consistent growth. I would say there's more in the back half than the first half, and that will lead to 2027 growth as we get a full year of some of this occupancy growth in '26. And then given the low rollover we have, we anticipate that we're going to have higher occupancy in '27. Owen touched on, again, the 400 basis points. So we expect and we still anticipate seeing that. So I can't give you a 2027 guidance right now. So we feel really optimistic about where we stand.

Yes. So John, my comment would be -- I sort of gave you a lot of numbers in my remarks, which you can go back and read if you have the time. But big picture, right, what I said was our lease expirations in 2026 have been covered by the leases that we've already signed that have yet to commence, and we are going to lease more vacant space.

We are also going to lease more space that's rolling over in 2027. It would not be a surprise for me to be talking to you in January of 2027 and saying, "Oh, by the way, we've already covered the vast majority of our exposure for 2027. So any occupancy increases that we get are going to be driven -- driving to the bottom line." AKA, what we're seeing in '26 is going to happen in '27. And obviously, we're getting in '25 to '26, the improvements from our development portfolio, which Mike described. In '27, we're going to have full year from an occupancy perspective on 290 Binney Street, and we're going to have all of this occupancy that is going to be in the portfolio in 2026, driving 2027. So that's why we were pretty bullish about both the growth in our earnings from our same store and our growth in our development assets coming online as when we talk to you in September in Manhattan when we did our Investor Day. We just -- and we're just as bullish today as we were there.

And our next question comes from the line of Alexander Goldfarb from Piper Sandler.

sort of building on Steve and John's question, Owen, certainly appreciate the focus on minimizing dilution for earnings and Mike, your comment on FFO acceleration on a quarterly basis. As you guys think about leasing, is there a way to reimagine leasing? I'm not talking about development, but I'm talking when you have existing space to shorten the downtime, meaning I don't know if there's a better way to do the build-out, the demolition or how leases are structured, but one of the frustrating things that we see in [ REIT land ] is just the amount of time like 2 years or whatever between the tenant moving out and a new one moving in. And I didn't know if there's a way to shorten that. So from an earnings perspective, all the good stuff that you're doing takes effect sooner versus waiting the 2 years or so that we often have to wait for office.

So Alex, you're sort of asking, is there an accounting solution to the fact that you have turnover, and I think the answer is not really. I think, as we've said in the past, the condition of our space is what matters. And what I would say is that the one thing that I think we have done, which doesn't help in the short term, but certainly decreases the amount of downtime is that we've been doing more turnkey builds.

And when we're doing a turnkey build, we're kind of controlling the date when the space will get completed, and we're reducing the free rent component of the deal so that when the tenant comes in, instead of having free rent, they're having much less free rent. And so that's sort of truncating that. And wherever possible, we are trying to deliver space in its current condition. And if we're able to deliver space in its current condition, we can start recognizing revenue when the space is accepted by our next client if it's a move. But I would say we're -- our focus always is on trying to reduce downtime. And so we look at lots of different levers to do that, but I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate it in a material way.

Yes, I would just add, Alex, I mean we provide these tools to our leasing teams on things that they can do to structure leases so that we can recognize revenue more quickly regarding how the build-out is completed and who's doing the build-out and things like that. Ultimately, it's a negotiation with the client though because the client has an opinion as well on how they want that completed. So there's just a negotiation that has to occur. And obviously, ultimately, getting the transaction completed is the most important thing.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Johnson Zhu from Scotiabank.

This is Nick Yulico. So question on -- in terms of -- I know the focus has been a return to FFO growth. Clearly, there's leasing that's a big aspect of that. But can you just talk about a couple of the other ways to sort of help that process, whether it's on the G&A side? Are you able to find any better efficiencies through AI or other venues? And then also on the development side, how you're thinking about kind of managing the size of the pipeline and also bring in equity stakes earlier to projects kind of like what you're talking about with 343 Madison as a way to sort of manage dilution from development, which you guys can take a while. I guess I'm also wondering like 121 Broadway if you're considering any sort of partner there in relation to that?

Okay. So you asked like 6 questions there. And I'm going to speed answer a couple of them, and then I'll let Owen kind of hit the last one. So with regarding to sort of how we are going to accelerate our FFO growth the first, the second and the third thing that we can do is lease vacant space. That is, by far, the largest opportunity set.

And we're doing that, and you're going to see that quarter after quarter after quarter, we believe accelerating in terms of the value from that. Second, on the G&A side, we are spending as much time as any organization thinking about whether or not there are ways to reduce "our overhead" costs relative to using tools from artificial intelligence. I will tell you that my view right now is that we're in AI 1.0, which is, I would say, unquantifiable productivity enhancement tools as opposed to cost reduction tools for a business that's the size of BXP.

And so we are being thoughtful about how we deploy those things. So net-net, not much in the way of where you're going to see reductions in G&A. And obviously, our G&A as a percentage of our revenues is de minimis and a significant portion of our G&A, you don't see because it's embedded in our properties, and it's part of our operating expenses. So there's not much impact on FFO that would occur from that other than when leases roll over, and we have a gross lease. On the capital side relative to development, I'll let Owen answer that one.

Yes. So Nick, I would break the portfolio into 2 pieces. One is the future residential and then the office development. On future residential, we intend to bring a partner in for everything. So if you look at the last deals that we've done, Skymark [indiscernible], we have 80% partners on those, and we're working on another one right now at World Gate where we also have, we think, an 80% partner.

So I think you should expect that to continue to be the case for the residential. On the office, this is core to the company. And we think the developments that we're putting together are very profitable. I mean we think delivering these premier workplaces at over an 8 yield yields great profits for shareholders, so we're reluctant to share. But we are sharing because we're focused on our leverage. So we're starting with 343 Madison, as you heard from Mike and I, that's an important goal to recapitalize that project this year. And then in terms of bringing in partners on additional office developments, it's going to depend on what our leverage profile looks like and how many additional new developments we're able to identify and secure

And I show our next question comes from the line of Blaine Heck from Wells Fargo.

Can you talk about the cadence we should expect for FAD or AFFO over the next several quarters? And I guess how we should think about the impact of higher concessions associated with the lease-up of the office portfolio? Should we expect FAD to be down year-over-year given those increased costs driven by leasing successes?

So on FFO, I actually expect it will be up slightly. We had less rollover to deal with. We are going to increase our occupancy. So we will have additional leasing that will commence for that. But net-net, having less rollover exposure is going to help us. Our expectation on leasing costs are pretty much in line somewhere between $220 million and $240 million or $250 million a year depending on what the transaction costs are. And our CapEx is somewhere between $100 million and $125 million, I would say.

So if you look at the midpoint of our FFO, I think our AFFO will probably be somewhere in the [ 440 to 460 ] range, something like that, which is, I think, a little bit higher than it was this year. So we feel pretty good about where that is. And I think that on the cadence wise, it will follow the FFO -- although 1 thing to point out is that as we're gaining occupancy, a lot of these leases have free rent in the beginning of years. So I think that the AFFO will lag a little bit FFO because those deals will be in free rent. And if you looked at our free rent guidance for next year, it's $130 million to $150 million, which is higher than it was last year. So that's a little bit of an offset. But that will -- in 2027, that free rent will turn into cash rent. So the FFO should increase

Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Jana Galan from Bank of America Securities.

Question on 343 Madison, great to hear about the additional 16% in negotiations. Can you talk a little bit more about the demand and touring activity? And then is New York City market rents for trophy increases, how does that relationship work for potentially higher rents for an asset 3 years out?

Sure. So I'm going to let Hilary give you the specifics on this. I'll just make a couple of comments. So the first is I'm pretty sure that we're the only building that's going to be delivering new construction before 2029, which is a unique position relative to timing of the demand that Hilary is seeing. And second, we're going to be more, I would say, thoughtful about whether we want to lease the top portion of this building because it's probably some of the more valuable real estate in our -- in the BXP portfolio.

And we think that getting closer to the ability to deliver that space to smaller tenants will enure to us. But Hilary, why don't you talk about in general, the demand that we're seeing for 343, particularly from medium-sized companies.

Sure. So I would say that we have very strong demand in financial services tenancies from tenants that are about 150,000 square feet. That is very typically an asset or wealth management business or in some instances, more of a foreign bank type tenancy. And they continue to come through at a pretty decent clip, looking at space in the podium of the building as the [ midrise or upper midrise ] is now more or less spoken for. And so I think that we feel very good about where rents are trending for the building and we will meet the market for rents, whatever that is.

And we've had no trouble whatsoever meeting our pro forma on the terms that we're negotiating with existing and prospective clients. So there was some indication earlier in the call, I think Doug said it that rents are going up across Midtown, the Plaza District and Park Avenue. And my observation is that rents have gone up around 15% over the last 12 months. Now 343 Madison is at the top of the market in terms of rents. There are only a couple of other buildings in Midtown that are asking and receiving similar rent, so that market is a little bit in its own stratosphere with regards to the tenants and the demand for it. But I think demand continues to accelerate and therefore, that will continue to put pressure on pricing from the tenant side and that will enure to our benefit as we go forward.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Seth Bergey from Citi.

I guess I just wanted to ask maybe a little bit of a bigger picture question here, but you mentioned rents in New York are up around 15%. In the opening comments, you kind of mentioned the regional variation in the [indiscernible] with Boston, 10%; New York, D.C. flat, [indiscernible] is down 10%. Just kind of understand that different markets are on a different recovery trajectory, but how do you kind of balance kind of some of the rent improvements with kind of the decline of rents from premarket levels? I'm just trying to get at a little bit of kind of what's the overall mark-to-market in the portfolio? And then as you kind of maybe start to lap some of the COVID rent roll-downs or pre-COVID rent roll downs, kind of when does that kind of turn more into a headwind?

So you asked a really hard question to answer with a simple number. The way we think about things is we look at all of the space that we have that is currently occupied. So we're ignoring the space that's vacant because the mark-to-market on vacant space is 100%, right?

I mean it's from a 0. And so the mark-to-market on space that's currently occupied across our portfolio, we sort of go through on a building-by-building basis every quarter, and we make a sort of a guesstimate as to where we think the market terms would be for that space. And I would say, as of today, across the entire portfolio, it's somewhere in the, call it, high 4s to low 5% range. And that's, I'd say, a meaningful jump from a year ago and a modest jump from where we were a quarter ago. And why is it only a modest jump. I think it's only a modest jump because where we've seen the biggest improvements have been in the Back Bay of Boston where our rents have gone up. And in our Manhattan portfolio, where rents have gone up and that the top of our buildings on the West Coast, in particular, where rents have gone up.

But we're seeing still sort of, I'd say, a stability in terms of not -- no real movement in rental rates. And again, I'm ignoring concessions for a minute and sort of the basis of buildings on the West Coast, and our Washington, D.C. portfolio where, as I said, the issue on a cash basis is the structure of leases in D.C., and I blame [ Dick Stroman ] for this is that he gets these relatively significant annual increases in the rents, and he leaves us with this problem where the cash rent upon the expiration of the lease is higher than what the market rent is, right?

Because you just -- it is really, really hard to -- over 10 or 15 years, every single year have a 3 plus or minus percent increase. So that's kind of the sort of the makeup of the portfolio. And then within each of the individual markets, I think that we are in a position where we will see a modest amount of gains in our revenues from roll-ups or -- and mitigating roll downs across the portfolio but a much more meaningful impact from the occupancy gain, which is why, honestly, we focus on the occupancy gain and not really on what the mark-to-market is. And I think that's going to be the case at least in '26 and '27.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Richard Anderson from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Kind of by design at BXP, there's always sort of a lot going on, good solid real estate decisions that nevertheless can be disruptive in the short term to growth. So you're getting more than 200 basis points of occupancy gains in 2026 per your guidance, and that results in, call it, flattish same-store NOI growth for this year. Doug, you kind of alluded to occupancy falling more to the bottom line in 2027 sort of matriculating to the bottom line just because of all the work that's being done today in this year.

Do you foresee sort of a less noisy 2027 so that the next 200 basis points of occupancy gains can be something more representative at the same-store NOI line something in the mid-single-digit type of number. I'm not asking for guidance, but I'm just wondering if you're trying to get ahead of a lot of this work so that you have a cleaner story to tell next year.

Yes. I mean I think the answer is yes. I mean, I don't want to suggest that we're not going to let our regional executives find really interesting things for us to do that might put us in a -- take us slightly off that. But based upon our business in front of us today, we see -- I think, Mike, what was your same-store was 1.5% to 2.5%. .

[ 1.25% to 2.25%].

[ 1.25% to 2.25% ] and my expectation is that that will be better next year than it is this year because of the nature of the vacancy that's being pulled up and the fact that so much of it is in the back end of the year.

Yes. I think that's an important point. And we went through this at our Investor Day with the graph we showed of the buildup in occupancy where the first and the second quarter of '26 is not going to have as meaningful of increases as the back half of '26 based upon when we anticipate. When we have the signed leases starting and when we anticipate the pipeline leases starting. And then that occupancy will build on itself into '27, right? So for '26, our average increase is only up about 100 basis points. By the end of the year, a little over 200 basis points, and then you get a full year of that in '27, plus the incremental occupancy we should get in '27. So it should continue to build on itself and improve.

Our next question comes from the line of Caitlin Burrows from Goldman Sachs.

Just maybe more specific question on 290 Binney. You mentioned that rents are going to commence in April and you expect to deliver the building into occupancy in June. So I was just wondering if you could clarify when does GAAP NOI start to be recognized? And when does capitalized interest come off? Does that happen at the same time? And is it early April, late June or something in between?

It does happen at the same time. And the way this transaction was structured is we had a hard rent start date, but the tenant improvement design and costs have taken a little bit longer than the original expectation based upon some design changes that were made by the client. And so those tenant improvements are not going to be complete and get [indiscernible] a until sometime probably late in June.

And our revenue recognition rules are that we can't start revenue recognition until it's done. So we have to wait until the end of June to start revenue and then we will stop capitalizing interest also on that. And just as a reminder, we're capitalizing interest at 100% of the cost because of a consolidated joint venture, even though we only own 55%.

That was something we talked about at our Investor Day, and it's just important because it impacts our net interest expense guidance. It's embedded in the guidance that I provided. So cash rent will start in April. It will be prepaid rent on the balance sheet. And then in June 30, all that cash rent will come in and be straight lined through the full lease term starting in June.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Floris Gerbrand Van Dijkum from Ladenburg Thalmann.

My question was sort of philosophical on your outlook for tenant improvements. And you mentioned in one of your earlier prepared comments that -- some of the spreads that you reported were negative because you didn't provide TIs. What is happening in your opinion on TI packages. And maybe talk a little bit about -- because obviously, it depends a little bit on markets as well on market specifics, which markets are seeing improvements.

I was wondering your peers called out the fact that I think New York office TI packages, they expect to come down in '26. So maybe if you could talk about that a little bit, that would be useful.

Sure. So I'll just sort of go around our horn in big picture. So I would tell you that our tenant improvement concession in our downtown portfolio is getting stronger, meaning it's becoming a lower number. Our tenant concession package in our Urban Edge portfolio is pretty stable. In our Greater Washington, D.C. portfolio, our concession package and our CBD assets is stable. Our concession package in our Northern Virginia assets is getting slightly lower.

In our Midtown portfolio, we are pulling back on the concessions that we're offering by a modest amount. And on the West Coast, I would say the concession packages are still not going down. They're not going up the way they went up in 2024 to '25 -- in '25, but they are -- they're still pretty elevated, and that's largely just due to the overall availability of space.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Brendan Lynch from Barclays.

Congrats on all the leasing momentum. We have, however, seen a number of announcements from Fortune 500 companies suggesting they will be shrinking headcount. How do -- how should we think about that impacting your portfolio? And maybe I could see it from 2 perspectives: one, they might need less space, but Conversely, it could also be driving more return to office for the employees that are retained. So any thoughts on those dynamics would be helpful.

That's a hard one to answer. Look, when we see announcements for job losses, it's obviously can't be a positive per se for us. But we -- as we've described, hopefully, very clearly on this call, we're just not seeing weakness in our leasing activity from our clients. We track our clients that we renew are they growing or shrinking? And over the last several years, our indicator is that they've been growing. So it's just not our experience. We try to read into these layoffs and what exactly is going on. It feels in some of these cases, like it's business units that are being closed and things like that. So we're just not seeing the impact of it in our leasing activity.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Vikram Malhotra from Mizuho.

I guess -- just maybe a bigger picture, longer-term question for either anyone on the team or all of you, I guess. Given the momentum you're talking about [indiscernible] going into '27 building further. I guess would you venture, whether it's like 3 years or 5 years, like what do you think BXP kind of structural peak occupancies for the portfolio that you keep refining versus, say, pre-COVID or pre-GFC. And then can you link that to rent spreads or rent growth in your buildings, particularly maybe expand upon San Francisco?

Nick, what I would say is that getting above 93% on a portfolio with an average lease length of 8 to 9 years is probably attainable, but will be hard to surpass. And with regard to San Francisco, that's where we have the most opportunity for improvement. San Francisco obviously had the most difficult time of it from pre-COVID through COVID and now the recovery is obviously happening.

And so I would say there, we have the most significant amount of upward opportunity there, from a rollover perspective, I think we're going to -- on the overall portfolio of spaces that are currently in occupancy, we're probably modestly rolling down over that portfolio, and that's largely because the rents and the basis of the building have not kept up with the increases in the rents at the top of the building.

We are seeing positive mark-to-market on the top 20% to 30% of every one of our towers in San Francisco. And when [ Salesforce Tower ] ultimately starts to roll over, we'll have significant positive mark-to-market. In the short term, the rollover that we have in Embarcadero Center, which is lower down in [indiscernible], there's probably a modest roll down that will occur there.

And I think it's clear that rental rates are directly linked to occupancy. And that's why we're feeling in the Back Bay of Boston and in Midtown, New York, where the occupancy has tightened and rents are accelerating. So clearly, as we get the portfolio better leased, there's going to be less space for us for lease. We can be more choosy and charge more for those spaces.

And then we also look for opportunities to work those spaces early like we are now with some of the terminations that we talked about where we're trying to take advantage of opportunities where there's not enough space in a building and trying to accommodate growth from our clients and grow our revenue stream. .

Our next question comes from the line of Dylan Bazinsky from Green Street.

Okay. I guess just maybe sort of paralleling the question that was asked 2 questions ago about just job growth in that sort of not being as strong with layoffs going on? And maybe sort of adding the fact about return to office that I think you mentioned at the beginning of the call, Owen, I think a lot of what's going on is just pent-up demand having a significant amount of leasing activity given [indiscernible] that's been happening over the last several years. Are you able to talk about sort of how long -- how much longer you guys would expect is sort of return to office movement to continue driving leasing activity. Is this sort of a 12-month phenomenon, 18 months? Just sort of curious where you guys think we're at as it relates to this return to office normalization driving the pent-up demand?

Well, I think there's room to go. I gave you the office visits. We try to come up with indices that help us understand what's going on. I've quoted the Placer.ai data. I think that we've got some additional improvement that could happen. The questions that were -- that you all are giving us are around these layoffs and jobs, the other side of it is, historically, our leasing activity has been tied to earnings growth because when companies are making money, at least they take risks, they go into new businesses, they hire people, and they lease space.

And if you look at the forecast for broad indices of U.S. corporations, earnings are projected to be higher in 2026. The job -- the earnings growth is projected to be higher in '26 than it was in '25. These layoffs that are going on, are they office-using jobs, are they jobs that are in premier workplaces. So front office jobs, there's lots of data that you need to have in addition to a press release to understand what the impact is of these layoffs are on office usage, particularly in the premier workplace segment.

Dylan, I'll give you my perspective on sort of what we're seeing in our portfolio and juxtapose that to what you read about from a job announcement. So one of the shipping companies as announced [ 40,000 ] job losses. My assumption is none of those jobs are being lost in any office space in Manhattan, Boston, Washington, D.C. or on the West Coast of California and San Francisco, Seattle or West L.A. .

And when I look at the portfolio makeup in terms of where the growth is coming from and where the demand is coming from, what I would tell you is that our financial service clients, and I'm using that and asset management sort of in the same venue, those companies are just growing. This is not about we need more space because our people weren't showing up. They're basically hiring more people for various strategies associated with whatever their business plan is and therefore, they need more space.

It has nothing to do with return to work. Any of the expansion from our legal firms, I don't believe it's about return to work. It's about, I think our firms are hiring more attorneys because they have desires to grow their businesses and they're finding -- they're poaching from other organizations that may be losing. And because of that, they need another office for those people. I don't think they're saying, and now you have to come back to work 5 days a week and you're only coming back to work 1 day a week and therefore, we're changing our makeup.

I just don't see a lot of that going on. And then when I think about our portfolio, in Northern Virginia, which is really more corporate America, and I'll let Jake sort of talk about where that demand is coming from I don't think any of it is about while we now need more space because we have more people coming to the office every day. And Jake, you can sort of comment on where all of our expansion has been and our demand has come from in Northern Virginia and how that's all working.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Doug. Yes, Dylan, what I would just say is that, in particular, in Reston Town Center between the defense and cybersecurity industry, it's really a who's who of corporate campuses. And most of the employees of these organizations are tech-related, usually former military background, folks that are in their 30s that have a home and want to have a house and kids and a [indiscernible] fence and so they're typically live in Reston Town Center, Western Fairfax County and Logan County. And with Reston Town Center, it's really the first stop for those groups as it relates to where that talent rests every night.

Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Ronald Kamdem from Morgan Stanley.

A lot of my questions have been asked, but I just wanted a quick update, just looking at the data for -- excuse me, L.A. and Seattle and some of the occupancy moves there and the market has been going in the wrong direction. Obviously, smaller markets for you all. But just a quick update on the market and sort of the strategy there on the grounds for the few assets you have.

Sure. Rod, do you want to take that one?

Yes, sure. So just starting up in Seattle. I mean we have our 2 assets in the CBD. And we've actually had really good demand from some of our in-place tenants that have expressed some [indiscernible], so we're accommodating that. I don't think when you compare Seattle to the demand that we're seeing in San Francisco, it hasn't quite rared that yet, but it's starting to. And historically, Seattle has kind of lagged San Francisco, call it, a year to 18 months. And so I expect this year, we're going to see some continued demand -- increasing demand up there. We're optimistic that we're going to capture some of that.

Down in L.A., it's a little different story. Remember, we're just in West L.A., out in Santa Monica. We have 2 projects there. And I think that market is still kind of recovering still from many things, COVID being one of them, but then just the contraction in the entertainment business and the consolidation of that is affecting us in terms of demand down there. But that being said, we've actually started the year with some good activity. We've got a couple of proposals [ in Jason ]. So we think that things have picked up there maybe as well. But it's been slower than we're seeing in the Bay Area.

And Ron, I mean, I said it and Owen said it. I mean, we're taking 2 San Monica business park buildings out of service totaling about 260,000 square feet of space. We're going to build high-value very accretive, exciting residential multifamily projects there because we think that there's much more value in that asset class at that location than there is and hoping for a recovery in the office market in the short term. And so that's -- those are the decisions we're making. And we think that over time, we may see more and more of that going on in that particular asset. And that's a 30-acre asset, which could have an awful lot of residential use over the next decade or 2.

And I show our last question comes from the line of Michael Lewis from Truist Securities.

I feel almost guilty asking another question. My question is about leasing capital. So we saw this $128 a square foot of the TIs and LCs this quarter. It sounds like from your comments, that's probably unique to the leases in the quarter and you're not seeing more pressure on leasing capital. I was going to ask if you're able to share how much leasing capital you have committed but not spent yet because I would guess as you're leasing up and improving occupancy, maybe that pool of capital is building significantly more than you normally see. So I don't know if you have any comments around that. .

I think you're asking how much of -- how much leasing have we "provided" to our clients that they have yet to spend, right? That's the question you're asking .

Yes, that's right.

I do not have that number in front of me right now. And we do disclose that number in every Q and every K, however...

Yes. Is that an interesting trend to look at? Or do you think that's kind of off base on thinking about the pool of capital that might be building?

I don't know how much it's necessarily building. I mean it is a significant number because many of our clients do take a long time to actually [ act ] for the money, or spend the money. So there is an amount of dollars out there that is in the hundreds of millions of dollars that will be spent sometime over the next few years as those clients complete that work. I have not seen it trend significantly higher. I think if you look at our transaction costs over time, you're right that this quarter is a definite outlier. They've really ranged between $85 a square foot and a little over $100 a square foot as every quarter, which is a mix of renewal and new and it includes leasing commissions and tenant improvement costs. So when I look at our AFFO projections, right, I'm not assuming $128 a square foot. But I am assuming somewhere around $100 a square foot on a going-forward basis based upon kind of where we are in the market right now.

Yes. The other thing, Michael, but just about this stuff, it's in our supplemental is that those leasing costs are based upon leases that are having "a revenue" event this quarter. And so it's typically a backward-looking portfolio. So there are leases that may have been signed in late 2023, early 2024 that are just starting to move into that revenue recognition change. And so over time, we would expect to see that trending slowly coming down as the market improves as well.

That concludes our Q&A session. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, for closing remarks.

Thank you all for your questions. I'm not sure there's much more we could possibly say, have a good rest of the day. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Q3 2025 BXP Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Helen Han, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to the BXP Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. The press release and supplemental package were distributed last night and furnished on Form 8-K. In the supplemental package, BXP has reconciled all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure in accordance with Reg G. If you did not receive a copy, these documents are available in the Investors section of our website at investors.bxp.com. A webcast of this call will be available for 12 months.

At this time, we would like to inform you that certain statements made during this conference call, which are not historical, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Although BXP believes the expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable exceptions, it can give no assurance that expectations will be attained.

Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements were detailed in yesterday's press release and from time to time in BXP's filings with the SEC. BXP does not undertake a duty to update any forward-looking statements.

I'd like to welcome Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Doug Linde, President; and Mike LaBelle, Chief Financial Officer. During the Q&A portion of our call, Ray Ritchie, Senior Executive Vice President, and our regional management teams will be available to address any questions.

[Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Owen Thomas for his formal remarks.

Thank you, Helen, and good morning to all of you. Our financial results for the third quarter demonstrate a continuation of BXP's positive momentum. FFO per share was $0.04 above our forecast and $0.02 above market consensus, and we raised the midpoint of our earnings guidance for the full year 2025 by $0.03. This past quarter, BXP also completed a very well attended and successful Investor Day, during which we provided a detailed execution plan on how we intend to increase FFO per share fund development costs and deleverage over the next 2.5 years.

This morning, I will provide a reminder of the action steps in our plan as well as an early update on our progress. Our first goal is to lease space and grow occupancy given the modest rollover exposure BXP faces over the next 9 quarters. In the third quarter, we completed over 1.5 million square feet of leasing, 39% greater than the third quarter of 2024, and 130% of our last 5-year average leasing for the third quarter. Year-to-date, we've leased 3.8 million square feet, which is 14% greater than the first 3 quarters of 2024.

As we have explained on prior calls, leasing activity is tied to both our clients' growth and the use of their space. As a proxy for BXP's client base, over 87% of the S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings this quarter as of last Friday are beating estimates. S&P 500 earnings have been growing for 9 straight quarters and for 2025 are projected to grow around 11% to 12%, up from single-digit estimates last quarter.

Return to office mandates continue to grow and take effect, though the West Coast lags the East Coast on this measure. Placer AI just released their office utilization data showing a material uptick in office utilization from a year ago. In September 2024, office utilization was 34.8% below 2019 levels, and last month's utilization was 26.3% lower indicating a 13% increase in office utilization over the last year. This data captures a large set of office assets across the U.S. and though premier workplace utilization in gateway cities is higher, the overall trend is relevant.

Our second goal is to raise capital and optimize our portfolio through asset sales. During our Investor Day, we communicated an objective to sell 27 land, residential and nonstrategic office assets for approximately $1.9 billion in net aggregate sale proceeds by year-end 2027. We are off to a strong start. So far, we've closed the sale of 4 land assets for total net proceeds of $57 million, have under contract 9 assets for total net proceeds of approximately $400 million and are in the market with 10 additional properties for estimated total net proceeds of $750 million to $800 million.

In total, we have 23 transactions closed or underway with estimated net proceeds of roughly $1.25 billion. Dispositions completed for 2025 could aggregate approximately $500 million to $700 million in net proceeds. Office transaction volume in the private market continues to improve as more equity investors get constructive on the sector, and financing becomes more available at scale, particularly in the CMBS market with tightening credit spreads. In the third quarter, significant office sales were $12.9 billion, up 6% from the second quarter of '25 and up 55% from the third quarter last year.

Relevant transaction activity that took place in the third quarter is as follows: In New York City, Park Avenue Tower, a nearly fully leased 620,000 foot office building located at 55th Street, is under agreement to sell for $730 million or approximately a 6% cap rate and nearly $1,200 a square foot. Another 5% interest in One Vanderbilt located adjacent to Grand Central Station in New York City sold for over $2,800 a square foot and presumably a very low cap rate. In Boston, 399 Burlton Street, a 245,000 square foot office asset that is 90% leased with relatively short weighted average lease term is under agreement to sell for $124 million or just over $500 a foot and an 8.3% cap rate; in Beverly Hills, Maple Plaza, a 290,000 square-foot office asset that is 75% leased sold for $205 million or $713 a foot and a 6.5% cap rate; and lastly, in Redmond, Washington, [indiscernible], a 250,000 square foot office building fully leased to Microsoft on a long-term basis sold for $225 million or a 6.5% cap rate and over $900 a square foot.

Our third goal is to increase our portfolio concentration of premier workplace assets in CBD locations in our core gateway markets. As a backdrop, the premier workplace segment, defined as roughly the top 14% of space and 7% of buildings in the 5 CBD markets where BXP competes continues to materially outperform the broader office market. Direct vacancy for Premier workplaces in these 5 markets is 11.7%, 5.7 percentage points or 22% lower than the broader market and asking rents for Premier workplaces climbed to a 55% premium over the broader market.

Over the last 3 years, net absorption for Premier workplaces has been a positive 10.3 million square feet versus a negative 9.2 million square feet for the balance of the market, nearly a 20 million square foot difference. For BXP, we continue to reallocate capital to Premier Workplace assets in CBD locations. We recently launched new developments at 343 Madison Avenue in New York City and 725 12th Street in Washington, D.C., and most of the office and land assets we are selling are in suburban locations. There are an increasing number of higher quality office assets in our core markets available for acquisition, some on an off-market basis. We evaluate everything, pursue deals selectively, but are being disciplined about quality, pricing and the resultant leverage and earnings dilution impact.

The fourth goal is to grow FFO through new development more selectively with office given market conditions and more actively for multifamily, which we'll do with a financial partner. For office, we are allocating capital more to developments and acquisitions because we are finding very high-quality development opportunities with pre-leasing that we believe will generate over 8% cash yield upon delivery, which are roughly 150 to 200 basis points higher than cap rates for debatably equivalent quality asset acquisitions.

An additional advantage as new buildings generally have longer weighted average lease term and limited near- and medium-term CapEx requirements. The trade-off is timing as developments obviously take several years to deliver. For multifamily, we are selling 4 properties totaling over 1,300 units, have 3 projects with over 1,400 units under construction and our various stages of entitlement and/or design for 11 projects totaling over 5,000 units, 2 of which could commence in 2026. We expect to capitalize new development starts with financial partners owning the majority of the equity.

We continue to advance our development pipeline. This quarter, we delivered 3 office projects: 1050 Winter Street, Reston Town Office Phase 2. The office component of both these assets are fully leased and 360 Park Avenue South, currently 38% leased and experiencing accelerating leasing activity. We have 8 office life science, residential and retail projects underway, comprising 3.5 million square feet and $3.7 billion of BXP investment. We expect these projects will deliver strong external growth, both in the near term with the delivery of 290 Binney Street midway through next year and over the longer term. Our Washington, D.C. team is also working on another Premier Workplace build-to-suit opportunity.

A final goal is to introduce a financial partner into our 343 Madison development project, which is under construction. As we have described, 343 Madison is a leading premier workplace new development project in New York City given its location with direct access to Grand Central Terminal and state-of-the-art amenities and design. We are finalizing a lease commitment with a financial services client for 30% of the space in the middle bank of the building. We are also in discussions with several other large users for the balance of the space in the project.

Our financial goal is to introduce an equity partner for a 30% to 50% interest in the property. While we are in very preliminary discussions with a small number of investors who have expressed interest, we believe the value of the asset will appreciate given our leasing progress and the accelerating market rent growth in the Midtown office market and do not expect to finalize an investment until sometime in 2026.

In conclusion, our clients, in general, are growing, healthy and more intensive [indiscernible] space, creating increasingly positive leasing market conditions concentrated in the premier workplace segment of the market. New construction for office has virtually halted leading to higher occupancy and rent growth in many submarkets where BXP operates. Debt and equity investors are becoming constructive on the office sector, resulting in more availability of capital at better pricing.

BXP is very much on track executing our business plan as outlined last month, which we believe will deliver both FFO growth and deleveraging in the years ahead. Let me turn it over to Doug.

Thanks, Owen. Good morning, everybody. So it's been 6.5 weeks since we made our presentation at our Investor Day, and I'm going to begin my comments this morning by affirming our expectations relative to our same-store leasing, occupancy growth and bottom line contribution to future earnings. As you probably noticed, our beat this quarter came directly from better operating portfolio performance.

We have entered a 30-month period of very light lease expirations 60% of historical annual average over the last 10 years, and we've now reduced our '26 and '27 expirations by another 8% from [ 630 25. ] So the total expiring square footage on our 49 million square foot portfolio is 3.8 million square feet.

During 29 of the last 39 quarters, -- we executed leases in excess of 1 million square feet with this quarter's 1.5 million square foot performance added. We will surpass our goal of 4 million square feet for 2025. [indiscernible] says to say confidently. As I described in my remarks in September, leasing vacant space improves occupancy and delivers the highest contribution to revenue growth.

During the first half of '25, we leased 810,000 square feet of vacant space. And this quarter, we leased an additional 490,000 square feet of vacancies, making this the seventh consecutive quarter of between 400,000 and 500,000 square feet of vacancy leasing. Post [ 10 25, ] so at the beginning of the fourth quarter, we had 1.8 million square feet of leases in negotiation, which is where we began the beginning of the second quarter. So we have continued to replenish the pipeline.

The space under lease negotiations includes 650,000 square feet of currently vacant space, 71,000 square feet of known 25 explorations and 450,000 square feet of [ 26 27 ] expirations. In addition, we have active dialogue on other space that's not yet in lease negotiation totaling about 1.1 million square feet, and that includes more than 125,000 square feet on buildings that we delivered into the portfolio this quarter, aka 360 Park Avenue South.

Last quarter, on our call, we called out the delivery of the 3 development properties in our portfolio that would occur this quarter and result in an estimated 70 basis point reduction in our occupancy from the portfolio additions. I'm happy to report that the in-service occupancy as of [ 9 30 25 ] decreased by only 40 basis points to 86%. BXP's totaled sequential same-store portfolio occupancy, excluding the portfolio additions. So looking back to where we were at the end of the second quarter, actually increased by 20 basis points in end of the year [indiscernible] the quarter at 86.6%.

The largest lease starts and expirations this quarter all came in the urban edge portfolio of Boston. We had 160,000 square feet exploration at 1000 Winter Street, which, by the way, is a building that we are considering for a potential conversion to residential. We executed and delivered 104,000 square feet at 153 Second Avenue in the full building lease at [ 1050 ] Winter Street for 162,000 square feet commenced this quarter.

We placed 350 Park Avenue South Reston Town Phase 2 into service and we added 130,000 square feet of occupied space and 405,000 square feet of vacant space, of which 120,000 is leased but not yet occupied. BXP's total portfolio percentage leased for the quarter was 88.8%, a decline of 30 basis points. Excluding the impact of placing the 3 development properties in service. So again, going back to 630, the lease percentage increased by 10 basis points to 89.2%. The difference between the leased and occupied square footage has grown again this quarter and now sits at 1.4 million square feet. 300,000 square feet is expected to become occupied in '25, about 1 million square feet that's going to commence in the back half of '26 and another 100,000 square feet in '27.

Owen described the magnitude of the operating assets being actively marketed for sale. As we dispose of assets, we will disclose the incremental impact of occupancy from the changes in the portfolio. Looking forward, we project that the current in-service portfolio, which includes the recent development deliveries to end '25 at approximately 86.2% occupied and '26 at 88.3% occupied, a 210 basis point increase with most of the improvement in the second half of '26.

We are reaffirming our guidance from the Investor Day, adjusted for the 70 basis points of impact from the Q3 new deliveries, which we also disclosed at that time. The overall mark-to-market on leases signed this quarter on a cash basis was up almost 7% with a 12% increase in Boston a 7% increase in New York, flat results in D.C. and a 4% decrease on the West Coast. This quarter, we executed a number of larger leases, including 5 that were each over 75,000 square feet. 60% of the square footage involved renewables or extensions and 40% was either new clients or expansions from existing clients.

Existing client expansions encompass 84,000 square feet of the activity. The second-generation rents in the leasing statistics this quarter represent about 523,000 square feet and are down on a gross basis about 4%. The LA statistic had a whopping 1,300 square foot lease and San Francisco included 117,000 square feet with 74,000 square feet to about 2/3 coming from our Mountain View properties.

I want to pivot my remarks now to the market conditions and the activity we're capturing. Our leasing this quarter came from 79 transactions, 398,000 square feet in Boston; 795,000 square feet in New York; 191,000 square feet on the West Coast; and 140,000 square feet in D.C. In the BXP portfolio, Midtown New York City, the Back Bay of Boston and Reston Virginia continue to have the tightest supply and, therefore, the most landlord favorable conditions. What this means is that net effective rents are increasing due to either higher rental rates or flat or decrease in concessions or both.

The bigger [indiscernible] in Boston this quarter took place in our Urban Edge portfolio, where we completed over 200,000 square feet of leasing to life science clients. This included 104,000 square foot lease with a drug development and medical device research services company and 5 -- counted 5 additional pure office leases with life science organizations. Our remaining first-generation life science availability in the Urban Edge is now limited to 70,000 square feet at 180 CityPoint and 112,000 square feet at 103 CityPoint. So that's a total of 180,000 square feet. That's our life science first-generation exposure.

Demand for wet lab space continues to be tepid. There are a [indiscernible] lab users actively touring but the requirements from very early stage clients continues to be limited. In the Boston CBD, we continue to complete renewals in the Back Bay portfolio. This quarter, we completed about 140,000 square feet. And as you can see from our property occupancy tables, availability is very limited, net effective rents are improving.

In New York, our executed leasing activity was focused on the Midtown East portfolio. The underpinning of this demand is the growth of clients in a variety of asset management strategies. I described a series of client-initiated early extensions under negotiation last quarter, while 500,000 square feet were executed this quarter, with the largest being at 399 Park Avenue. There have been many unconfirmed press reports about our lead 10 for 343 Madison. If that client were to come from one of our Midtown assets, there would be strong demand for the space at either 601 Lexington Avenue, 599 Lexington or 399 Park Avenue. The average in-place fully escalated rent is under $110 a square foot, which is significantly below market.

This quarter, while our executed leases were primarily in Midtown, the new client inquiry story was focused on 360 Park Avenue South, where we have our largest availability in Manhattan. Activity at the building has grown substantially, and we executed 2 leases during the quarter. There are a few AI companies in the mix, but much of the activity is being driven by financial service and asset management organizations, the heart of New York City.

We have 56,000 square feet of leases in negotiation and letters of intent discussions on more than 125,000 square feet. All of these leases would commence in '26. With the tightening of availability in the Park Avenue and now the 6th Avenue submarket, we're also seeing stronger activity at Times Square Tower where we are in lease negotiations with over 100,000 square feet of new client demand. And down in Princeton, we completed over 160,000 square feet of leasing with 8 clients totaling -- including [ 834,000 ] square feet renewal with a life science client, again with no lab infrastructure.

In San Francisco, the demand from organizations that describe themselves as AI business continues to accelerate. The bulk of this demand is concentrated south of Mission Street. The majority of these requirements are looking for inexpensive, fully built and furnished space with short-term commitments. To date, these criteria have been available in either sublease situations or with landlords that have direct space that was vacated by tech companies over the past 3 years. These opportunities in medium-sized [ block ], 25,000 to 100,000 square feet are quickly shrinking. The result has been a dramatic pickup of activity at our 680 Folsom, 50 Hawthorne assets, which are south of mission between Foundry Square and Mission Bay.

We have had multiple tours every week and are exchanging proposals with tenants ranging from a single floor to over 200,000 square feet. During the first 6 months of the year, we had 11 unique tours at the property. In the month of July, we had 7, in August 9, in September 10 and so far in October 14. That AI demand has not translated into a commensurate pickup in ancillary professional services growth in the high-rise assets in San Francisco.

While San Francisco is unequivocally the financial capital of the West. The organizations that are growing assets under management in San Francisco are not expanding at the same levels we are experiencing in our New York and Boston portfolios. There's clearly been a pickup in activity, and the premier buildings are gaining market share, but it's just nothing like the client growth from the AI companies south of Mission where CBR reports that there are 36 AI active tenants with aggregate growth of 1.5 million square feet in the market right now.

In our towers, we completed about 100,000 square feet of transactions this quarter. The rest of the West Coast activity came from Mountain View, where we signed 30,000 square feet in Seattle where we completed the 54,000 square feet of vacant space leasing. Activity in D.C. continues to be concentrated in Reston Town Center. This quarter, we executed a 51,000 square foot lease on space that was vacated by Meta in June of this year as well as a handful of smaller office and retail leases. The government shutdown has had minimal impact on government contract or leasing activities. The private sector clients that have space needs are all still active in the market.

Before I conclude my remarks, I want to update our construction activities, particularly because we are in the process of establishing our GMP for 343 Madison. Subcontractors are actively bidding the job after taking into consideration the tariffs associated with nondomestic suppliers and the most recent country agreements. We expect to purchase our steel from U.S. manufacturers, and we are within our expected budgets with all include anticipated savings relative to our last GC estimate. Given the overall slowdown in construction activity in our markets, there is enough subcontractor interest to provide savings in spite of all the tariff increases. Remember, construction is a composition of labor cost, material cost and profit.

And let me hand the call over to Mike.

Great. Thanks, Doug. Good morning. Today, I'm going to cover some of our activity in the capital markets as well as our third quarter earnings results, an update to our full year guidance and some updates on our expectations for 2026 since our Investor Day in early September.

The debt markets have been steadily improving throughout 2025, and this quarter, we opportunistically and successfully accessed both the secured and unsecured markets. In late September, we closed on $1 billion of 5-year unsecured exchangeable notes at a 2% coupon. If you include closing costs, the interest costs we will record for GAAP is 2.5%. This will refinance a $1 billion bond issue that expires in February of next year and carries a GAAP yield of 3.77%. The notes include a conversion premium at a stock price of $92.44 per share. So if our stock trades above the conversion premium during the term, our diluted share count will increase. We also acquired a capped call to increase the conversion premium to 40% or $105.64 per share, to reduce the dilution from the increase in our share price. The [indiscernible] has no impact on our P&L or our diluted share count during the term. It settled at maturity.

The market demand for our deal was exceptionally strong, and we were 5x oversubscribed. That allowed us to price the security in the low end of our expected pricing range and upsized the deal from the $600 million initially offered to $1 billion. We also closed a $465 million mortgage refinancing on our Hub on Causeway office and retail complex that we own in a joint venture where our share is 50%. This loan was executed as a single asset securitization in the CMBS market, and it priced at a 5.73% fixed rate for a 5.5-year term. This is approximately 50 basis points lower than the floating rate on the prior loan.

The pricing equated to about a 200 basis point credit spread for a premier quality secured mortgage with a 55% loan-to-value ratio. There have been about a dozen single asset securitizations completed on office buildings in the past 6 months, and that demonstrates the CMBS market is supportive of financing high-quality, large office assets on competitive terms and credit spreads have been consistently improving. We expect this will help lead to a healthier sales market, as Owen described.

Overall, we continue to have very strong access to all the capital markets to finance our business. This includes the debt markets as well as the asset sales environment where we expect to be increasingly active.

Now I would like to turn to our earnings for the quarter. Last night, we reported funds from operations for the third quarter of $1.74 per share, which is $0.04 per share above the midpoint of the FFO guidance range we provided in July. All of the outperformance came from better-than-projected same-property portfolio NOI due to a combination of the straight-line rent impact of completing early renewals at higher rents and lower net operating expenses in the portfolio.

Our occupancy came right in line with our expectations. As Doug described, occupancy in the same property pool increased by 20 basis points from last quarter. We grew occupancy sequentially in Boston, New York City, Reston and Princeton. The improvement showed up in our top line lease revenues that increased $4 million this quarter. In our leasing activity this quarter, we executed 4 early renewals totaling 500,000 square feet at 399 Park and 200 Clarendon Street with future starting rents nearly 15% higher than our in-place rents. We are locking in future rental rate increases and a portion is straight line into the current period and improving 2025 revenues.

Our portfolio revenues exceeded our guidance for the quarter by approximately $0.02 per share. On the expense side, we experienced lower-than-anticipated repair and maintenance expenses this quarter, and that contributed $0.02 per share to our outperformance. I anticipate that we will give some of this performance back in the fourth quarter as our teams complete R&M projects that were budgeted for Q3, but not completed in the quarter.

We also recorded $212 million of impairments this quarter related to assets that are part of our strategic sales program we announced on our Investor Day. The accounting guidance requires that we recognize impairments to fair value when we shorten our whole period and prior to an asset sale actually closing. On the flip side, gains on sale are not recorded until the sale closes. So if you look at our sales program as a whole, we anticipate that the aggregate gains less impairments will total nearly $300 million. We expect gains will be recorded in future quarters as we execute our sales strategy.

Looking at the rest of 2025, we've increased our guidance range by $0.03 per share at the midpoint, and we expect full year 2025 FFO of $6.89 to $6.92 per share. Our increased guidance includes a $0.07 increase in the low end of our range, reflecting outperformance from the third quarter, some of which was incorporated into our guidance range we provided last quarter.

Sequentially, we expect Q4 funds from operations to be higher than our Q3 actual FFO from higher portfolio NOI and lower net interest expense. With respect to changes in our guidance, the outperformance in our same-property portfolio is expected to add an incremental $4 million to our full year NOI assumption. That equates to about $0.02 per share of improvement. We've reduced our net interest expense projections for the full year 2025 by approximately $6 million or $0.03 per share. The improvement is from our new $1 billion exchangeable notes offering, where we're recording interest expense at 2.5% and we're actually earning over 4% on the proceeds until we repay our expiring bonds on February 1 next year.

And we also improved the interest rate with our Hub on Causeway refinancing and we're projecting several asset sales to occur in the fourth quarter that will reduce our debt. These increases to our FFO are anticipated to be partially offset from the reduction of about $0.02 per share of NOI from asset sales that we expect will close in the fourth quarter. If you include the associated changes in interest expense, our fourth quarter asset sales are projected to be dilutive by $0.01 per share.

So to summarize, we've increased our guidance range for 2025 FFO by $0.03 per share at the midpoint, $0.02 of higher same-property NOI, $0.03 of lower net interest expense offset by $0.02 of lower NOI from asset sales. At our investor conference last month, we provided some insights into our expectations for FFO growth in 2026. Doug described our active leasing pipeline that we expect will lead to higher occupancy primarily in the back half of next year.

We are off to a strong start on our refinancing plan with our exchangeable notes deal pricing with a GAAP yield that is 75 basis points better than we anticipated. The impact is about $0.04 per share of lower interest expense in 2026 than we described at our Investor Day. We still have $1 billion bond issue expiring October 1 next year that has a 3.5% yield. We currently project that we will refinance it with a 10-year unsecured bond where we could issue today at approximately 5.5%.

The other factor that is fluid and will have an impact on our 2026 results is the timing of our asset sales. As we stated at our Investor Day, we expect the program to be slightly dilutive in 2026. We are seeing good response to date, which could accelerate some of our sales. We will continue to update you every quarter on the success of the program as it evolves. That completes our formal remarks. Operator, can you open the lines for questions?

[Operator Instructions] And I share our first question comes from the line of Steve Sakwa from Evercore ISI.

I guess I wanted to go back to maybe some of the comments you made about reallocating capital into the premier locations. And as you're looking at deals, how are you thinking about some of your smaller markets like a Seattle and L.A. where you haven't had the success in scaling those markets? And A, are you seeing the opportunities to buy high-quality assets in the submarkets that you want to be in? Are you finding development opportunities? And like, I guess, how do you think about those markets long term if you aren't able to scale?

So you're asking about L.A. and Seattle where they are smaller markets for us now. We have a toe hold a couple of assets in each. They're on the West Coast. So they -- those markets from a leasing standpoint are weaker in general than our East Coast markets. I don't think there are development opportunities in L.A. or Seattle at the moment. I don't think there are any in San Francisco either because those markets are weaker. The leasing is not as strong. The vacancy is higher. So I certainly don't see any near-term development opportunities. And if an acquisition opportunity presents itself in those markets, we would certainly look at it. But acknowledge that those markets are smaller at this juncture.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Anthony Paolone from JPMorgan.

On a call yesterday, one of the other office names talked about just having done enough leasing in '26 at this point that what's remaining just may have a lower retention rate. And so just wondering how you're thinking about what's left for you all in '26 given you've done so much this year and just any risk around or confidence level around a couple of hundred basis points of pickup in occupancy you've outlined?

Tony, this is Doug. We are working as quickly and as [ possibly ] as we can to renew as many of our clients that as we would have in the portfolio if we can accommodate their growth and if they're able to continue to want to be in business. I would tell you that our available set of tenants with expirations has dramatically decreased. So there's not a lot there in sort of the aggregate, right? I said 3.8 million square feet of space over 2 years and we're a 48 million to 49 million square foot portfolio. So that's about 7%. Do I expect we're going to renew 50% of that? Yes. Do I expect that we're going to renew 60% of that? No.

We are leasing about 1 million square feet per quarter if we're able to maintain that velocity, which I don't see any reason why we shouldn't. We will be able to meet or exceed the expectations that we outlined when I sat in front of you all in September, which is about a 200-plus basis point increase in occupancy by the end of 2026 and another 200 basis points of increase in occupancy at the end of 2027. Those are our projections. We're confident in them today, and that's what we're sort of sticking with.

And I show our next question comes from the line of John Kim from BMO Capital Markets.

I wanted to ask about the recovery in San Francisco. It sounds like, Doug, from your commentary that your high-rise product is not where AI demand is currently, and I'm wondering if that's something you plan to address? And also I wanted to see if you had any early thoughts on Salesforce [indiscernible] $15 billion commitment into the City and what that could mean for job growth and office demand?

Sure. So let me start, and then I'll ask [indiscernible] to make some comments. The AI demand is not a tower business right now. Although companies like Salesforce, I guess, are calling themselves to a company now, so maybe that's slightly different. But the AI growth relative to infrastructure companies or VC-backed companies is really a low-rise south of Mission Street demand pool, obviously, with AI and anthropic sort of headquartered in either Mission Bay or in Foundry Square, right? That's kind of the world where I'd say the nucleus of that is. And it's unlikely to -- what you're going to see an AI company taking a 25,000 square foot piece of space at one of the buildings in Embarcadero Center or at 535 Mission Street or at Salesforce Tower if there was availability, as opposed to going into, as I described, what they would like to go into today, which is shorter-term, cheaper, less expensive furnished space, right, which is really in what I refer to some of the buildings that were occupied by technology companies from [ 20, call it, 15 to 2019 ] during that sort of booming period of time. I don't think there's much we can do to position our properties differently the demand for Embarcadero Center in particular, is really professional services and administrative services. That's not to say that there aren't a couple of small start-ups that have a couple of thousand square feet and a sweet here or there, but it's hard for us to imagine a large growth component there, very different at 680 Folsom Street. 680 Folsom Street is a mid-rise building with 35,000 square foot floors, with 16-foot clear glass, with availability today and more availability coming in as the macys.com lease expires, it's a perfect setup for an AI company from a growth perspective. And Rod, maybe you can comment on the sales force initiative relative to their contributions into the city.

Yes. Thanks, Doug. On Salesforce, I mean it was great to hear that news. And that was a fantastic bit right in front of their Dreamforce event, which happened last week, and it was very well attended, which is great for the city. So we haven't heard more specific about what exactly that investment is going to look like. But I think being the largest private employer in San Francisco, making [indiscernible] like that is pretty meaningful. And -- so we're eager to see where it leads. And as Doug said, I mean, the other activity in the buildings that's kind of driven by this AI push, we're seeing it as a 680 Folsom. We're very encouraged by that activity. And just the overall just optimism that a lot of that brings to our city. So it's positive.

Yes, I just want to make one other comment on that, which is there have been a lot of articles and news reports about the reduction in jobs, white collar jobs over the past, call it, 3 or 4 days in particular. And San Francisco is sort of the opposite of that, right? We are seeing growth from these companies in terms of the amount of space they are looking to lease and obviously, the number of people they are hiring, and you sort of see these tongue-and-cheek articles as well about the intensity of which people are working and the fact that they are working in premises all of the time, mean that is sort of what we are experiencing from the technology companies in San Francisco as we sit here today in 2025.

And I show our next question in the queue comes from the line of Richard Anderson from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Can you talk about the percentage of the portfolio of -- let me say it this way, that leases that were signed pre-pandemic that have yet to have been addressed at this point? And just how, with the passage of time, your experience has been with tenants in terms of their willingness to take more or less space, space per worker, square feet per worker, how are those dynamics changed? And sort of what's left pre-pandemic that is still sort of -- has to be addressed by you guys?

So Rich, it's a really, really hard question to answer in a specific way. So let me try and answer it in a more general fashion. BXP traditionally has been leasing space on a long-term basis with an average lease length today of about 8 years, but all of our new leases that we generally do are between 15 and 20 years. So there's a lot of "prepandemic leasing" in our portfolio, right? It's just matter of how we compose the portfolio. The fundamental important fact, however, is that if you look at who our clients are and we go through all kinds of disclosure in terms of who our top clients are, all of the growth that we are seeing is coming from clients who were prepandemic occupants taking additional space as the world has changed post-pandemic and quite frankly, because so much of our clients are in the financial services, professional services, administrative services business what is going on relative to those industries is much more important relative to the sort of composition of our portfolio and the growth than what is going on with companies that may or may not have taken additional space during the dot-com growth in 2000 or in the post-GFC or in the years leading up to the pandemic because that's just not what our portfolio is comprised of because we're -- again, we are -- that's not who we are. And as Owen has said, and you'll see it as we move forward over the next couple of years, we're reducing our exposure to what I would refer to as less of those types of buildings and those types of customers and clients in terms of the kinds of things that we are going to be disposing of. So I don't think it's an issue of any significance relative to how much "growth" there was during the pandemic relative to the Amazons of the world that was described in a couple of those articles in the last few days relative to sort of their pickup in the number of people that they had hired because we didn't experience that within our portfolio.

Doug, the other thing I would add is just -- and we've mentioned it, we just don't have a lot of rollover and the rollover we have is very granular, right? There's no really large tenants. I mean there's no tenant over 150,000 square feet that expires in the next 2.5 years. So we just aren't exposed to some big vacancy coming. And the other thing I would note that Doug described in his comments is -- and this has been the case for the last few quarters, more of our tenants are expanding than contracting when they renew. So this quarter, Doug mentioned, we had 85,000 square feet of net expansion by clients that we did deals with where they stayed in our portfolio.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Nicholas Yulico from Scotiabank.

So I know, Doug, you gave a lot of detail on leases in the third quarter and even some leasing in the works to address vacancy. But as we think about that occupancy build that you had at the Investor Day and the component there that is leases that address vacancy given that the build-out could take some time, is it right to think that like by next quarter, you guys should be in a position to sort of maybe declare victory on the vacant space piece of that equation that gets the occupancy benefit by year-end next year?

I guess I don't think about this on a quarter-by-quarter basis. Our projections were done on an annual basis. We -- again, we have 1 million square feet of current leases that are signed that are going to be starting in 2026. And so clearly, that will -- that's the driver of a lot of our confidence relative to 2026. I also said that the activity that our team and I'll let Hillary describe it at 350 Park Avenue is above our expectations. Again, I think that -- all that activity will lead to leasing in '26 and occupancy in 2026. So 200 basis points is a pretty meaningful increase, right? And another 200 basis points is another meaningful increase. So we're comfortable and confident that we will be able to achieve those numbers based upon the conditions that we're seeing now in the economy and in our marketplaces. And Hillary, maybe you can sort of describe what's going on at 360?

Sure. So at the moment, we have 6 floors leased and in discussions with proposals out, we have covered every other floor except one. So to the extent that we were able to secure all of the tenants that we're currently in negotiations with, we would have 1 floor available at 360 Park Avenue South. So the tour activity has increased really dramatically. And as Doug noted earlier, the clients that are coming to see the building and asking us for these lease proposals are not just tech and media, but also more traditional asset managers and financial services firms that are just looking for great space and due to the tightness in the market. are seeking out Midtown South, perhaps from Midtown or seeking to upgrade their space from existing locations in Midtown South.

One quick note for Boston in terms of the speed of delivery of recent leases, there is a portion, and Doug and Mike could probably respond to this afterwards, but a portion of the activity that Doug mentioned in the Urban Edge is in existing products, and they are spaces that don't need as much build-out. So we would anticipate at least 150,000, 200,000 square feet that could be delivered in that zone next year.

And I show our next question in the queue comes from the line of [indiscernible] from Citi.

I think kind of at the Investor Day, you had outlined $0.09 to $0.04 of kind of dilution from asset sales. It sounds like pricing and the [indiscernible] market is coming a little bit and ahead of your expectations. How should we think about kind of that impact? And I think you also mentioned potentially bringing some more assets to market? So just kind of what are the puts and takes there?

I think, as I mentioned in my notes, I think this one is harder to judge because it's based upon the timing. So we estimated timing for the transactions that we have under our asset plan at our Investor Day. And now we have started to execute on that timing, right? So we now have more assets under contract than we had at that time. And we have more assets in the market than we had at that time. And we do feel like we're getting pretty good demand from people, pretty good response from people on this. So I think we're going to be successful in that. And so the timing of when these things sell will impact the range that we provided. And if it was significantly earlier than that, could it be slightly more diluted? Yes, it could be slightly more dilutive. But it's hard to provide a better answer than that at this moment in time. I think as we go through the next quarter or 2, we will have more and more information, and we'll provide it to you.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Alexander Goldfarb from Piper Sandler.

Just a question on, as you guys have tightened up the strategy since the Investor Day. I just want to understand better on the investment side, how much of that -- when you guys think about the investment pool or more likely when the regional people come to you to submit proposals, how much the criteria have tightened up? Meaning have yields been raised that, hey, all deals now need to be 100 basis points higher or some degree higher. Just trying to understand how it's gotten -- how you guys have tightened up again, just thinking about some of the legacy deals like a [ platform 16, ] et cetera, obviously, I don't want to repeat, but you have the 343. So just trying to understand how the investment criteria has tightened up. And how many deals got kicked out of discussion because of the new higher thresholds?

We've talked about this on prior calls. Our threshold deal that we're looking at for developments as we've repeated over and over again, has been about 8% or higher. And really before interest rates went up and of course, some of the diminution in demand that we saw from COVID we were developing, depending on the market and the asset between 6% and 7%. So the yield requirement for office development has gone up 100 to 200 basis points. You combine that with the elevation in construction costs, it takes significantly higher rents to support development. And as we said on Investor Day, what does that mean? That means we're going to be a more selective office developer. But we are developing. We've launched 2.5, a little bit under that, $1 billion of new development projects in office just in the last 6 months. So that's the increase that you saw. And then as I just said in my remarks, we are looking at acquisitions. There hasn't really been much to look at up until the last 3 to 6 months. There's a little bit more today. And the issue has been, we feel like we can get higher yields developing, albeit and we'll have a new building, and it will have lower CapEx and longer wall and all those things, but it takes several years to deliver the development, that's the trade-off. So again, we're going to continue to look at acquisitions. And as I said in my remarks, we're going to continue to be disciplined and I think cap rates are probably 150 to 200 basis points right now in the market below our development yield threshold.

And I just add one thing just to sort of give you a reference point. The development at 343 is, call it, $2 billion development. The development at 725, 12th Street there's a $300 million development. Knock on wood, [indiscernible], are working really hard at lining up a client who desperately needs a new building with a potential purchase of a piece of ground or an existing building to build another building let's assume that's another, call it, $300-plus million. So we're talking about having $2.6 billion of developments that the company is going to be executing on. That's a pretty significant amount of external growth. And so I would say that the appetite for buying a building at a 6% NOI yield where the cash flow yield is probably 150 basis points lower than that, and there is rollover in 3 to 4 years. It's just not as enticing as those other opportunities are today. And so that's, I'd say, the frame of reference that we're sort of looking at as we think about "acquiring" new assets. Now if a fabulous building at an 8% cash return came up "off-market" and we thought it had great upside, of course, we would be really thinking about doing something like that. But but these broker-initiated investments for "core asset" and CBD locations are -- they're interesting, and we're going to study them, but it's going to be hard for us to rationalize utilizing our dry powder for that.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Michael Goldsmith from UBS.

In the press release, you called out 89% of BXP's rents come from the CBD portfolio. given the outlined dispositions are focused in the suburban markets, what percentage does that take CBD in the near term? And in long term, is the goal to just to be 100% or completely CBD?

I can't give you an exact percentage. I would agree that we want it to grow. There are certain suburban markets that I think we will maintain exposure to where we feel like we have a good sense of place where we can build an amenity-filled environment and where we think that it's a mature and dense demand profile. So there are suburban markets that I believe we will stay in. I do believe though it's not going to go to 100%, but it's definitely going to grow because our -- both our Asset sales focus, which is suburban, but also our new investment focus is more urban. So we're going to be adding assets that are CBD and detracting assets that are suburban.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Jana Galan from Bank of America Securities.

Congrats on the progress you've already made on the priorities laid out at the Investor Day. On the dispositions, can you talk to the pricing you're seeing on land, residential and office relative to kind of initial expectations?

I'd say that we're achieving pricing that is in line, if not a little bit better than our expectations. I mean it's very hard to say pricing for land because it depends on what the new user is doing. I think the real opportunity that we've had with land is that we have -- our regional teams have done a great job very successfully re-entitling many of these land parcels that were previously set up for office into residential. And as we all know, there's a housing shortage in this nation and many communities that were against housing in the past are for it today and that has allowed us to create a lot of value. The 17 Hartwell investment that I described last quarter is a great example of that. So it's a little bit hard to talk about pricing for land. I think on the residential assets, we are seeing cap rates below 5%, which we think is very attractive. And on the office, it all depends on the location and the quality.

I show our next question comes from the line of Floris Van Dijkum from Ladenburg Thalmann.

Clearly, it looks like your office markets -- your core office markets are inflecting office underlying growth was positive. It was down though in the hotel and residential. I think -- maybe remind us there was a big occupancy decline apparently in DC and the residential side. Could you maybe talk about that?

I'm going to -- Mike is going to quickly look through the supplemental. The only thing I can imagine is that we brought 100% of signature is in service, and then we brought Skymark into service, and Skymark is probably not 98% leased yet, although my guess is that we're going to be stabilized, which I think is, call it, in the 93% to 94% this quarter, which is extraordinary given the amount of units that we had delivered there. So I'm guessing that's sort of what happened. But I wouldn't I would not take that as anything other than a change in portfolio composition not activity in our actual assets.

Yes, that's what it is because this is a year-over-year concept. It's not a sequential concept. So in September of '24, the Skymark building was under development, right? And now it's leasing up, and it's actually leasing up quite well. It's, I think, around 90% and it's leased up better than we expected. The occupancy in the stabilized portfolio that has been in service for a while has been very strong and stable and rents have continued to go up. Again, our residential portfolio is located in pretty tight markets. And so places like the urban Boston market and Reston, we've seen good fundamentals with our residential.

And it's going to get smaller in 2026 before it gets bigger again.

And [indiscernible] next question comes from the line of Ronald Kamdem from Morgan Stanley.

Just on same-store NOI. I think you talked about sort of the occupancy inflection point, obviously improving '26, '27. Just can you tie that back to what the expectations are as you think about same-store NOI? Should we expect sort of similar 100, 200 basis point sort of acceleration? And what are the puts and takes there?

So we're not going to provide guidance for 2026 or 2027 today. I think that most of our growth is going to come from occupancy, and we've talked about that. I think the mark-to-market in the portfolio is improving because we're seeing rents go up in many of our marketplaces. So I think that situation will -- is improving and will continue to improve. And I think we will see positive same-store NOI growth as the occupancy climb. So yes, we will -- it will follow. It makes sense to follow and should.

And I show our next question comes from the line of [indiscernible] from KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Could you provide some color on the current state of what you're seeing in terms of demand for life science leasing and supply across your markets, given some softer commentary from another one of your peers. You mentioned a few things related to Boston and Urban Edge, but maybe you can broaden that out a little bit and maybe what your outlook is for that industry?

So our life science exposure at BXP is comprised of 2 places. It's the Urban Edge of Boston, which I described. And again, we have 180,000 square feet of first-generation space available. And then it's our joint venture with another publicly ARE in South San Francisco, where we have a large building that was developed a few years ago that is available for lease where, again, I think I described the demand for [indiscernible] space is being pretty tepid, not much has changed on a relative basis there. We are seeing some "inquir" but we're not -- what I would describe as close to any major transactions at that building at this time.

I show our next question comes from the line of Dylan Burzinski from Green Street.

Owen, I think you mentioned seeking or going out to market and seeking a capital partner for 343 Madison sometime in 2026. But I guess just given the tight availability that you're seeing in New York, especially in the submarket, the 343 Madison is in and likely continued net effective rent growth. Why not sort of put the brakes on reaching out and getting the capital partner given that sort of backdrop?

Yes, it's a good question. I think as I tried to describe in my remarks, we're just being patient. We've had some inbound inquiry. We know of some investors that are interested in the project. We're having preliminary conversations. As I mentioned in my remarks, we're not in hurry. This asset is appreciating. We're having leasing success. Markets are improving, as you suggested. And I think this will happen sometime in 2026. We do want to match to some degree, commitment of capital to raising the capital. And so far, the development draws and spend on the project have been reasonably modest, but they do start to accelerate next year. So I do think 2026 will be an appropriate time.

And Dylan, just remember, as Owen said at the outset, we have 3 objectives, right? Our objectives that we outlined at our Investor Day where we want to grow our earnings, and that's mostly through occupancy and deliveries of developments that are currently underway. We want to fund 343 Madison and we want to reduce our leverage. And so I think that our objectives in finding a partner sort of meet all of those requirements.

And I show our last question in the queue comes from the line of Blaine Heck from Wells Fargo.

I wondered, Doug, I was hoping to get your latest thoughts on the New York mayoral race and any sort of impact you've seen? Any commentary you've heard from tenants and just your general thoughts on whether it could or will have a notable impact on the New York office market.

I would suggest that the significant negative rhetoric that's in the press and the media about the impact of the administration of Zohran Mamdani, I think it's just overblown. I'm not suggesting that there are impacts that we need to be conscious of and aware of. as we've described before, there are controls and guardrails that exist for the mayor in New York. The state has a lot of approval powers over things like public transit and increasing taxes. And the state has indicated so far, there's not a lot of appetite for increasing taxes in New York. So that's something that we are concerned about. And again, our success as a company in any city is capped at the city's success. And so we want to do what we can to work cooperatively with the city and ensure that there are -- that it's constructive environment for business, there is the safety and security for the citizens. And those are the kinds of things that we're very focused on. the potential Mayor Mamdani has indicated that he wants to hire [ Jessica Tisch ], who's the current head of the New York City Police Department. I don't know that she's agreed to do that yet, but we all think that's a great step because I think she received high accolades for her performance and success to date. So again, something that we're monitoring. But we are, I think, a little bit more constructive than what the media has been outlaying on this change.

And additional, we have 1 question in the queue from Brendan Lynch from Barclays.

I'm just interested in your view on the new office tower above South Station in Boston and how that might impact leasing dynamics in the market?

So I'll give you a couple of comments, and I'll let Brian give you his perspective. So the building that is currently open and has been available for the last number of months. is a gleaming tower, and it's, I'm sure, going to be successful from an occupancy perspective at some point. There is a conversation, as I understand it going on with a large financial institution to relocate there, not necessarily grow, but relocate there. The building hit the market at the absolute wrong time and there's a bunch of availability in the financial district that it had to compete with. And so the economics of the investment are different than what I would tell you, the success will be from an occupancy perspective because of just the nature of what's going on. I think it's unlikely that another building in the financial district will be started for quite some time. So if the market is able to continue to sort of absorb space, I think the Peninsula market downtown will continue to recover. We have an opportunity to build a building at 171 [indiscernible] Street, which is in the Back Bay and there are obviously significant opportunities from a tenancy perspective because we have very, very, very tight supply in the back base. So I think there's a higher -- much higher probability of something going on there. we would obviously not start that building unless we had a major commitment from a lead anchor tenant, as Owen sort of described earlier in terms of [indiscernible] what our development yields were. So I think that's sort of, I would say, my general views are on that development, Bryan?

Yes. So I'd comment on what's the impact to portfolio. And as Doug mentioned, as you look at the Back Bay as the submarket, there's very little transfer of tenants that lead this market, and it's highly desirable. We look at our competitive set of the billings we compete against daily and it's a 3% vacancy. So it's extremely tight, as Doug mentioned. And in fact, we're actively asking tenants if they'd like to get back space because we've got growth in those sectors that Doug mentioned earlier. And then when you look at the downtown market, our buildings are leased up and tucked away for quite a few years now with limited limited space at 100 Federal and the same is true at Atlantic Wharf and also Hub on Causeway.

That concludes the Q&A session. At this time, I would like to turn the call back to Owen Thomas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for closing remarks.

No further remarks from us. Thank you all for your interest and your time and your interest in BXP.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.