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Text: Relations page of our website, cousins.com.
In particular, there are significant risks and uncertainties related to the severity and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic and the timing and strength of the recovery there from.
As we reach the midpoint of 2021, it has been wonderful to see many of our customers bringing their teams back to the office, and we anticipate seeing more post Labor Day.
While we continue to monitor our public health guidance around COVID-19 and specifically any office delays brought on by the delta variant, I also remain optimistic about the remainder of 2021 and beyond.
Our team delivered strong financial results during the second quarter.
Here are a few highlights.
On the earnings front, the team delivered $0.69 per share in FFO.
We leased over 484,000 square feet with a 12.9% increase in second-generation cash rents.
Same property NOI on a cash basis increased 7.1%.
And our net debt-to-EBITDA at quarter end was 4.55 times.
And G&A expenses as a percentage of total assets were at just 0.36%.
Turning to the business.
Our ongoing conversations with customers provide us unique insight into their evolving long-term office strategy.
And those plans are beginning to crystallize.
First, most of our large growing customers are excited about their return to the office.
While the delta variant could create delays, we now have conviction that a meaningful return to the office, it's not an if, it's just a win.
In some instances, employees will return for part of the week, which some call hybrid.
Importantly, the nature of the hybrids model coordinated in-office days, which are designed to facilitate collaboration, necessitates real estate sites for peak load and likely does not have a significant impact on office demand.
While it's hard to remember office life before the pandemic, this was already the reality for most technology and professional firms.
Second, companies and people are migrating to the Sun Belt, where the business climate is more friendly, housing is more affordable and commute times are shorter.
Third, as companies return to the office and migrate to the Sun Belt, they are trading up to be in an environment where employees are excited to come to work and collaborate.
This flight to quality trend existed before COVID but is clearly accelerating.
With these themes taking shape, in addition to our great quarter, we're seeing positive signs of economic recovery in our leasing, which continues to grow.
Our late-stage pipeline has increased significantly, and we are highly encouraged by the opportunities in front of us, both inbound growth and expansions from our existing customers.
Importantly, we are seeing activity in our higher profile vacancies, including 1200 Peachtree and 3350 Peachtree as well as in our development projects like Domain 9, 10000 Avalon and 100 Mill.
As I have mentioned in quarters past, we had a simple and compelling strategy at Cousins.
To assemble the premier urban Sun Belt office portfolio, to be disciplined about capital allocation so we can pursue new investments, we are operating and development platform can add value and to maintain a fortress balance sheet, which provides us significant financial flexibility.
At Cousins, we are positioned at the intersection of two powerful long-term trends, the migration of the Sun Belt and the flight to quality.
As these accelerate, we are responding.
Let me highlight some exciting announcements from yesterday.
Through our relationships, we sourced an off-market transaction that includes the recapitalization of Neuhoff, an exciting development project in Nashville and the acquisition of 725 Ponce in Atlanta.
Neuhoff is a transformative mixed-use project that marks our strategic entrance into the Nashville market.
It is located directly across the Cumberland River from Oracle's recently announced Nashville campus and provides a clear path for growth in this new market.
Construction has already commenced on Phase one of the project which will consist of approximately 388,000 square feet of office space, 542 multifamily units and 60,000 square feet of experiential retail.
Cousins investment of $275 million represents a 50% ownership interest and includes a Phase II office site that can accommodate 275,000 square feet of additional space as well as rights to future adjacent land parcels.
Neuhoff has a unique location, a differentiated adaptive reuse component and plans for an exciting new food hall.
There is simply nothing like it in Nashville.
We also acquired 725 Ponce, a 372,000 square foot office asset in East Midtown Atlanta for $300.2 million.
We view this property as one of the highest quality and most interesting buildings in Atlanta, located along the belt line, one of the city's premier public spaces and directly across from Ponce City market, one of the most highly amenitized and active areas in talent.
725 Ponce is currently 100% leased to customers, including BlackRock, McKinsey & Company and Chipotle.
Cousins also acquired a 50% ownership interest in adjacent land site for an additional $4 million that can accommodate 150,000 to 200,000 square feet of additional development.
We also announced that we sold One South at the Plaza, a 891,000 square foot, 58% leased office property in Charlotte for a gross sale price of $271.5 million.
Some might ask why sell One South now?
First, we remain extremely bullish on Charlotte and have a best-in-class portfolio, a talented team and great land sites in the south end for future growth.
So the simple answer is, in our view, the purchase price fully values the upside from releasing a 1970s vintage office property with a high capex profile and provides capital to reinvest in new and more compelling opportunities.
In summary, through these creative transactions, we have entered Nashville, an exciting new market for Cousins; acquired 725 Ponce, one of the best buildings in Atlanta with an additional pad for future development; and funded these transactions, in part through the sale of an older vintage property.
Overall, this enhances the portfolio quality, gives us opportunities for growth and shifts speculative leasing from a 47-year-old asset to brand new, highly differentiated products.
Interestingly, the purchase price of One South is approximately the same as our value from the tier merger pre-pandemic.
This is a strong read-through for capital interest in leading Sun Belt markets.
As we look ahead and hopefully emerge from the pandemic, our conviction around our Sun Belt trophy office strategy is as strong as ever.
Today, we have the leading trophy portfolio in the best Sun Belt submarkets in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas, Phoenix and Tampa plus we now have room to grow in Nashville.
Large growing companies recognize the value of office, migration of the Sun Belt is on the rise and companies continue to prioritize newer, amenitized experiential office space that excites employees to come together.
We are obviously watching the delta variant and any potential impact.
Nonetheless, we are thrilled with the company's position.
As we look ahead to 2022, the declining fees from a terrific transaction with Norfolk Southern will be behind us.
We have creatively and proactively addressed a large vacant block at One South and are excited to pursue new opportunities with our rock-solid balance sheet.
In closing, the power of Sun Belt trophy office is becoming increasingly clear.
They are the foundation of our company's success.
This quarter saw an improving economic backdrop and a more stable operating environment, resulting in a strong second quarter operating performance.
While pandemic is certainly not over and the delta variant persists, the demand for office space across our markets is improving.
As Colin mentioned, the vast majority of our customers have either already returned to the office or have signaled they will return sometime this fall, some fully and others in a phased or hybrid format.
From our perspective, post Labor Day seems to be the most common return timing cited.
For now, physical customer utilization in our portfolio sits around 30%.
The variation in utilization across markets that I mentioned last quarter remains with Atlanta, Dallas and Tampa, all running at higher utilization rates.
We still anticipate utilization to be largely back to normal portfolio by the end of 2021.
Turning to second quarter operating results.
Our total office portfolio lease percentage and weighted average occupancy both came in at 89.4% this quarter.
Our leased percentage declined 80 basis points this quarter which was mainly attributable to the previously known move-out of Anthem at 3350 Peachtree in Atlanta.
Given we report occupancy on a weighted average basis and Anthem expired at the quarter -- end of the quarter, we actually saw a modest increase in occupancy versus last quarter.
For the balance of the year, we expect our weighted average occupancy to remain relatively stable.
As a reminder, Norfolk Southern will vacate 370,000 square feet at 1200 Peachtree at the end of December, representing a fantastic value-creation opportunity going forward.
And looking forward to 2022, I would note that we have only 6.5% of our annual contractual rent expiring with no expirations greater than 100,000 square feet.
As for leasing activity, we executed a solid 39 leases, totaling 484,000 square feet this quarter, surpassing our level of reported activity in the first quarter of 2020.
Leasing volume wasn't the only metric back to pre-pandemic form this quarter.
Leasing mix was much improved with new and expansion leases accounting for 74% of total activity.
Recall that new and expansion leasing combined hit a pandemic low of just 14% of activity two quarters ago.
Net effective rents were $23.77 this quarter, an improvement over the first quarter and only $0.05 lower than our reported net effective rents for the full year of 2019.
Rent growth remained remarkably strong as well, with second-generation net rents increasing 12.9% on a cash basis.
And finally, our average lease term bounced back to 6.7 years on average.
These are great leasing results.
We are also still seeing encouraging activity in our leasing pipeline, both for our existing portfolio and new development projects.
Specifically, tour volume remains on the upswing.
In our Austin portfolio, second quarter tour activity was up 53% versus the first quarter.
While not specific to our portfolio, CBRE also recently noted that in Phoenix, June 2021 tour volume was 240% greater than the average monthly volume in 2019.
As we have pointed out many times, the pandemic has served as an accelerant to the migration of people and companies to the Sun Belt.
Companies are being driven to reconsider where they are located, primarily due to intensifying competition for talent.
Companies simply need to be where the talent is or wants to be.
And increasingly, that is in the Sun Belt.
Of CBRE's 2021 development opportunity watchlist, eight out of the 10 biggest development opportunities are located in the Sun Belt region.
Among the metropolitan areas with populations larger than 750,000 people, large Sun Belt cities led the way in terms of nominal population growth last year.
In fact, the top seven metropolitan areas for population growth in 2020 were all in the Greater Sun Belt region according to CoStar.
The recently released Newmark Opportunity Index showed that every one of our markets included in its index has experienced meaningful job recovery since the depths of the economic downturn.
Nashville, Tampa and Dallas ranked highest across the economic metrics in this index with Tampa at the very top.
Tampa's employment is the closest to pre-pandemic levels of all markets in Newmark's Index.
Not surprisingly, Austin remains near the top of the list for nominal population growth and its labor market continues to be one of the strongest nationally.
Austin's population increased by more than 67,000 new residents over the past year, second to Atlanta.
For JLL, overall leasing activity in Austin has increased every quarter since the pandemic began with this quarter's activity reaching 80% of pre-pandemic levels.
Further, according to Morgan Stanley, Austin was the only market to have a consecutive quarter improvement in sublease listings posting a decrease of 18%.
JLL estimated the quarterly decline was even greater at 29%.
There are promising trends in sublease listings in our other core markets as well.
Atlanta, our largest market, continues to see an uptick in demand, particularly from the technology sector and Midtown and Buckhead are leading the recovery so far this year.
In fact, JLL's second quarter office submarket reports for Buckhead stated that overall leasing activity was up 200% year-over-year.
Cousins bucket portfolio opportunity -- excuse me, Cousins Buckhead portfolio participated in this demand, signing 65,000 square feet of expansions with high-quality, publicly traded technology companies this past quarter alone.
Our current leasing pipelines in both Buckhead and Midtown are equally encouraging.
As we look ahead, we believe we will continue to see a noticeable flight to quality.
Companies are likely to increasingly view the office is critical to fostering culture, collaboration and career development, not to mention as a tool for attracting and retaining the best talent.
Recent data clearly demonstrates this dynamic.
For example, per CBRE 74% of new leasing activity in Phoenix this year has been in Class A projects.
By comparison, over the past five years, this percentage hovered under 50%.
Further, JLL recently noted that nationally, office projects delivered after 2015 actually experienced a net occupancy gain over the past five quarters in the teeth of the pandemic.
While the pandemic is certainly not over, and we are closely monitoring the impact of the delta variant, which could bring with it some economic fits and starts, we are optimistic about the balance of the year and a longer-term recovery.
Our markets and portfolio are extremely well positioned, and we have numerous exciting opportunities ahead of us.
They have worked tirelessly to produce strong results such as those delivered this quarter and through the entire pandemic.
I'll begin my remarks by providing a brief overview of our quarterly financial results, including some detail on our same-property performance, our development pipeline and our transaction activity, followed by a quick discussion of our leverage position before closing my remarks with updated information on our outlook for the balance of 2021.
As you could tell from Colin and Richard's remarks, we've been extremely busy.
However, we don't want all of that external activity to take attention away from our very solid internal performance during the quarter.
At $0.69 per share, FFO was up almost 5% compared to last year, and the important operating metrics that we all focus on were very strong.
Leasing velocity returned to pre-COVID levels Second-generation cash leasing spreads were up double digits.
And same property NOI on a cash basis increased 7.1% over last year.
Focusing on same-property performance, second quarter results represent a significant and a constructive changing trend.
Numbers were driven by improving revenue, which increased 6.6% on a cash basis.
This is the first year-over-year increase in same-property revenue since the first quarter of 2020.
The largest variable within our same-property performance remains parking revenues, which are in large part driven by the fiscal occupancy in our buildings.
After bottoming during the fourth quarter of 2020, same-property parking revenues are up 14%, but they still remain 23% below pre-COVID levels.
Turning to our development efforts.
One asset, 120 West Trinity, a mixed-use property in the Takeda submarket of Atlanta that we developed in a 20/80 joint venture was moved off our development pipeline schedule and into our portfolio statistics, while another asset, Domain 9, an office property in the Domain submarket of Austin, commenced development during the second quarter and was added to our schedule.
The current development pipeline represents a total Cousins investment of $492 million across 1.3 million square feet in four assets.
Our remaining funding commitment for this pipeline is approximately $210 million, which is more than covered by our existing liquidity and future retained earnings.
On the transaction front, as Colin laid out at the top of the call, we've been very active.
Domain nine represent over $1.1 billion in transaction activity year-to-date.
In addition, our joint venture partner at Dimensional Place in Charlotte has exercised their option to purchase our 50% interest in the property with the closing expected at the end of the third quarter.
As this series of transactions unfold, we intend to maintain our net debt to EBITDA around 4.5 -- excuse me, 4.5 times as we have done with very few exceptions since 2014.
We believe this leverage profile provides both defensive support during challenging times as well as offensive firepower to execute compelling transactions when the opportunity presents itself.
In addition, it's a small transaction, but we do want to call your attention to the sale of the land parcel adjacent to our 100 Mill development in Tempe, subsequent to quarter end.
The site was sold for $6.4 million earlier in July and will be developed into a Hyatt branded hotel.
It's a testament to the quality of that location that this sale held through the COVID pandemic.
This new hotel will be an important amenity for our 100 Mill customers as well as the customers and the other five buildings we own within two blocks of that site.
On the capital markets front, we closed on a $350 million unsecured term loan during the second quarter, replacing a $250 million term loan that was scheduled to mature later this year.
The new loan matures in 2024 and the applicable LIBOR spread was reduced by 15 basis points.
Covenant package remains unchanged.
It was a very solid execution beginning to end.
I'll close by updating our 2021 earnings guidance.
We currently anticipate full year 2021 FFO between $2.70 and $2.78 per share.
This is up $0.01 at the midpoint from our previous guidance.
There are no other dispositions, acquisitions or development starts included in our guidance.
The most significant variable behind our guidance remains our parking revenues.
As Colin discussed earlier, our customers have begun returning to the office, and we anticipate this trend accelerating after Labor Day.
Our current parking revenue assumptions reflect this outlook.
However, the delta variant could delay timing, but it's too early to know for sure.

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cousins properties releases second quarter 2021 results.
cousins properties - qtrly ffo per share $0.69.
cousins properties inc - raised its 2021 ffo guidance to $2.70 to $2.78 per share.

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