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whitestonereit.com in the Investor Relations section.
With that, let me pass the call to Jim Mastandrea.
We continue to hope and pray that all of you, your families and your businesses remain healthy, and are doing well as we navigate these most unusual times.
I am pleased to share with you our strong operating and financial results that have sustained the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our business has recovered quickly, and in doing so produced shopping center sector-leading results.
Dave Holeman, our Chief Financial Officer, will provide a more detailed look at the drivers of our operating and financial performance.
We attribute these results to owning properties located in areas with high household income neighborhoods and the fastest-growing MSAs in business-friendly states.
Operating a consumer business-driven model based on consumer demographics and psychographics to design a tenant makes that drives customer visits and experiences.
Our strategic customer focus differentiates Whitestone from other real estate owners that leads to traditional hard and soft good retailers.
To enhancing our intrinsic value through redeveloping and developing, which adds value to -- value as we physically expand our real estate footprint and grow rents and to balancing a capital management structure to drive revenues, net operating income and funds from operation.
With this background, I would like to provide some color as to where we are today, where we plan to go in the coming months and quarters to drive long-term shareholder values, key building blocks to Whitestone's success and our progress toward the long-term goals we announced in February of 2018.
First, where we are today.
Since the onset of COVID-19, which injected considerable economic uncertainty, relative to the real estate industry in particular, we've had shopping center sector leading rental collections throughout the pandemic and most recently announcing 90% cash collections for the third quarter of 2020.
These results are in line with our expectations and are trending upward from the first-half of the year.
Rental collections, solid leasing spreads and execution of our business model is deeply rooted in Whitestone's team culture.
Since the end of the first quarter, we focused on improving our dividend payout ratio, increasing our cash on hand, paying down our debt and strengthening our balance sheet.
These actions have prepared us for the next level of growth and provided greater financial flexibility.
Our judicious and disciplined allocation of capital has produced positive third quarter operating results, including occupancy of 88.9% at the end in the quarter, revenue that approached $30 million for the quarter, up 8% from the second quarter.
Property net operating income of $21.3 million, up 6% from the second quarter.
Leasing spreads that were strong and resulted in a positive 11% increase for the quarter.
Cash collections, which I mentioned earlier that achieved 90% for the quarter were up from 81% in the second quarter and funds from operation core that were solid at $0.23 per share, up $0.01 or 5% from the second quarter.
Dave in his remarks will follow mine, will go into greater detail on these results and comparisons to the prior year.
Overall, I am very pleased with the way our management team is navigating the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus, stabilizing our business quickly and enabling us to refocus on extracting the embedded intrinsic value in our properties, while targeting acquisitions that are accretive and further scaling our platform.
Second, where we plan on doing in the coming months.
We intend to maintain our disciplined capital allocation philosophy going forward, as we have over the past.
Our track record of our growth from 2010 to 2019 speaks to our plan.
Our long-term plan is to grow our strategically chosen markets of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Phoenix through redevelopment and development opportunities within our portfolio and externally grow by making targeted acquisitions in our existing markets and beyond.
Third, the key building blocks for Whitestone's success is building a portfolio of choice properties in great markets that we lease and manage with a team of well-trained professionals who continue to do what has worked for us in the past.
We view Whitestone as a highly differentiated and somewhat a special really -- specializing in e-commerce-resistant entrepreneurial tenants and crafting the right mix of those tenants who ultimately meet the neighborhood consumers' needs.
Our diversified mix of tenants provide essential services for lease that cannot usually be acquired online, if at all.
As a result, our open-air centers provide community experiences that cater to adjacent neighborhood as an extension of their lifestyle.
While we recognize that we are in the retail real estate business, our differentiated approach and contrarian business model has allowed us to profitably grow an asset base over the years despite significant overall industry challenges.
Our growth since our IPO in 2010 has been steady and disciplined and we intend to continue this disciplined approach.
Finally, we continue to make progress toward our long-term goals of improving debt leverage and scaling our G&A cost that we set in 2018.
During the third quarter, we paid off $9.5 million of real estate debt from cash, lowering our net real estate debt by $11 million from a year ago and improving our ratio of debt to gross book value real estate assets to 55% from 58% a year ago.
We also are making progress on scaling our G&A.
These costs since the beginning of the year have been reduced through reduction of headcount from 105 to 85 or 21% through further automation, improvements in processes and all of our team working smarter and harder.
Our total G&A costs for 2020 are approximately $900,000 or 6% lower in the same time last year.
We have a highly dedicated team that works every day to create local connections in communities that drive and we feel strongly that we are positioned to withstand the current headwinds and thrive into the future.
Given the severe economic pressures caused by the coronavirus during the quarter, our portfolio has performed quite well.
Despite having a significant amount of our tenant businesses impacted, we only had a handful of tenants close for good such that the portfolio occupancy rate held up well ending the quarter at 88.9%, down just 0.3% or 13,000 leased square feet from the second quarter.
Also our annualized base rent per square foot at the end of the quarter was $19.43 and $19.38 by cash and straight-line basis.
This represents a 0.5% increase on a cash basis and a 1.3% decrease on a straight-line basis from a year ago.
The decrease on a straight-line basis is largely related to the conversion of 84 tenants to cash basis accounting and the associated write-off of accrued straight-line rents.
Our square foot leasing activity was up 43% from the second quarter of 2020 and 46% from the third quarter of 2019.
And we are pleased with positive blended leasing spreads on new and renewal leases of 3.3% and 11% on a cash and GAAP basis for the quarter.
As Jim mentioned, for the quarter, we collected 90% of our rents, this include base rent and triple net charges billed monthly.
We have also entered into rent deferral agreement on 3% of our third quarter rents.
As part of the deferral agreements, we have negotiated beneficial items, such as, entry into our online payment portal, further reporting of tenant sales, suspension of co-tenancy requirements, loosening of exclusive or restrictions that allow further development and stronger guarantees.
While we are encouraged by how things are progressing, the pandemic has continued to impact our business in term -- in the terms of our financial results.
Funds from operations core for the third quarter was $10.1 million or $0.23 per share compared to $10.9 million or $0.26 per share for the same quarter of the prior year and our same-store net operating income for the quarter decreased by 4.5%.
These decreases are primarily due to the impact of the pandemic, which resulted in a charge of $1.3 million to bad debt expense and $100,000 in write-off of straight-line receivables in the third quarter.
This charge was incremental to the bad debt expense and straight-line revenue recorded in the prior year by $900,000 or $0.02 per share.
Let me add some color on our collectability analysis related to the pandemic and the related receivable balances.
At the end of the quarter, we had $23.6 million in accrued rents and accounts receivable.
This consists of $21.1 million of billed receivables, $1.9 million of deferred receivables, $16.1 million of accrued rents and other receivables and a bad debt reserve of $15.5 million.
Since the beginning of the year, our billed receivable balance has increased $4.4 million and our deferred receivables have increased $1.9 million for a total build and deferred receivable balance increase of $6.3 million.
Against this increase of $6.3 million, we have recorded an uncollectible reserve in 2020 of $4.5 million or 71%.
Our accrued rents and other receivables had decreased by $1.1 million, largely the result of the write-off of accrued straight-line rent receivables on tenants converted to cash basis accounting and our bad debt reserve has increased by $4.3 million.
In accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, if the company determines that the collection of a tenant's future lease payments is not probable, the company must change the revenue recognition for that tenant to cash basis from accrual basis.
In light of the financial pressures that COVID-19 has been placing on many of our tenants, we reevaluated all of those tenants in the second and third quarters, as a result have switched 84 tenants in our portfolio to cash basis accounting.
These 84 tenants represent 3.6% of our annualized base rent and 3.4% of our leasable square footage.
As a result of this conversion to cash basis accounting we have written off $1.1 million of accrued straight-line rents for the year, but the company intend to collect all unpaid rents from its tenants to the extent possible.
Our tenants on cash basis accounting paid 63% of contractual rents in the third quarter, up from 41% in the second quarter.
We have provided some additional details of our collections, it can be found on Page 27 of the supplemental.
Turning to our balance sheet.
Since March, we have implemented various measures to conserve cash, including further reductions in headcount.
To-date, we have approximately $39 million in cash, representing a 6% increase since March 31st.
Additionally, we paid off $9.5 million of real estate debt in the third quarter and have no debt maturities in 2021.
We have reduced our total net real estate debt by $11 million since the third quarter of 2019.
Currently, we have $111 million of undrawn capacity and $13 million of borrowing availability under our credit facility.
We are in full compliance with our debt covenants and expect to remain so in the future.
Looking ahead, one particular trend we are seeing as COVID-19 persists is that Whitestone's best-in-class geography is benefiting from net migration of businesses coming out of the regulation-heavy gateway market.
Our markets continue to attract both large and small businesses, as evidenced by Charles Schwab's recent announcement of its move of its headquarters to Dallas from San Francisco.
Whitestone's properties are seeing this migration also.
Recently, we added a successful restaurant who needed to escape the high-tax high-regulation environment of California to our Mercado property in Arizona.
Examples like these prove the resilience of our markets and give us further assurance that our business model is thriving.
We have seen pent-up demand in our markets, as consumers are leaving their homes and returning quickly and in force.
Parking lots are filling and stores and restaurants are becoming more active.
Whitestone is well positioned to capture this pent-up demand and intends to do so.
Our team has worked together through this ongoing crisis and our shareholders will reap significant future benefits through greater collaboration, a more robust exchange of ideas, better and more effective communication and improved systems and processes that provide new actionable data and allow us to more efficiently scale our infrastructure.
Whitestone is continuing to perform and deliver on our strategic plan.
We operate in many of the most highly desirable growth markets in high-population growth states and expect these markets to lead the country in economic recovery from the pandemic.
We look forward to providing further updates as we progress.
And with that, we will now take questions.
Operator, please open the lines.

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qtrly net income attributable to common shareholders of $0.02 per diluted share.
qtrly core ffo per share $0.23.

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