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Text: If you did not receive a copy these documents are available through the quarterly disclosures and supplemental SEC information links on the Investor 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 therefrom.
Over a year ago, COVID-19 emerged swiftly and our entire world changed nearly overnight.
As we mark a year later, I'm sure I share with many of you a feeling of hope that while the pandemic is not yet over, there is optimism on the horizon with the accessibility of vaccinations.
I'm hopeful that 2021 will be a healthier, happier, more productive year for everyone.
Cousins was well prepared to weather the challenging year with our simple compelling strategy that enabled us to operate effectively.
The core principles of our strategy include first to build the premier urban Sunbelt office portfolio we have focused on building concentrations in existing and potential new Sunbelt markets with the best long-term growth characteristics.
Second, to be disciplined about capital allocation and pursue new investments where our operating and/or development platforms can add value; third and importantly to have a best-in-class balance sheet; and finally to leverage our strong local operating platforms with focus on an entrepreneurial approach, local market relationships, and community involvement in our high-growth markets.
Today, we have the leading trophy portfolio in the best Sunbelt submarkets of Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas, Phoenix, and Tampa.
Second, we have a terrific development pipeline of $363 million that is 79% pre-leased and attractive land sites where we can build an additional 5.2 million square feet.
Our balance sheet is strong with net debt to EBITDA of 4.87 times and G&A as a percentage of total assets at 0.32%.
This strategy positioned us to perform well during challenging circumstances.
The first quarter of 2021 was no different.
Here are a few highlights of our solid Q1 results.
On the operations front, the team delivered $0.69 per share in FFO.
We leased 271,000 square feet with a 10.5% increase in second-generation cash rents.
We placed our 10,000 Avalon development project into service.
In addition we acquired a land parcel adjacent to our 3350 Peachtree property in Atlanta for $8 million through a 95% consolidated joint venture.
While these results are very solid, they reflect a time when vaccines were not widely available.
Now, that they are, we see a market that is on a strong path to recovery.
Broadly speaking, our customers are shifting their plans to begin a phased reopening of their offices during the summer, with a significant ramp-up likely after Labor Day.
This is translating into significant increase in tour activity and in our leasing pipeline.
Richard will touch on this more specifically in a minute, but we are optimistic that our leasing volume is likely to improve during the second half of the year.
As Cousins evaluates the role of the office, we look directly to our customers for feedback.
First, let's look at what they're saying, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley I could go on.
They've all publicly communicated, that their office remains core to their culture and their business.
Next, let's look at, what they're doing.
Microsoft and Google both committed to large new hubs in Atlanta.
And Oracle has announced a corporate relocation to Austin and a major expansion into Nashville.
Most recently, Apple announced plans to create, at least 3,000 jobs in the Raleigh-Durham area.
So what does this mean for Cousins?
Large growing companies, recognize the value of the office to promote culture, collaboration and mentorship.
They are migrating to the Sunbelt at an accelerated pace.
And they continue to prioritize newer, highly amenitized properties.
Their goal is to create a dynamic environment that excites employees to come together, in person.
As we near the end of COVID-19, our conviction around our Sunbelt, trophy office strategy continues to grow.
Looking ahead to the balance of 2021, our priorities have not changed.
We are focused on creating value in our existing portfolio, including making leasing progress in our larger blocks of space.
We will also look for opportunities to upgrade, our already high-quality portfolio, through trophy acquisitions, in conjunction with compelling new development projects.
We will likely fund new investments with the sale of ultra-vintage, less-relevant buildings.
And we are making great progress on this front.
And our recent investment activity is illustrative of our strategy going forward.
In December, Cousins acquired The RailYard, a creative office asset in the South End submarket of Charlotte for $201 million.
We also purchased an adjacent land site, for a gross purchase price of $28 million.
On April 7, we sold Burnett Plaza, a one million square-foot office property in Fort Worth for a gross sales price of $137.5 million and with that, exited a non-core market.
Last night, we announced plans to commence construction on Domain 9 in Austin, where we have a growing pipeline of demand from small, medium and large customers some already in Austin and some potentially new to the market.
As I mentioned earlier, we have a simple and compelling strategy at Cousins.
And these transactions showcase our creativity as we execute that plan, leveraging our balance sheet and our development platform to assemble the premier Sunbelt office portfolio which is positioned to capture outsized customer demand, while maintaining a lower capex profile.
At the same time, we are generating attractive value-add returns for our shareholders, by blending acquisitions and development with discipline.
As our customers' preference for trophy office accelerates, we are responding.
As our Domain 9 project illustrates, we are not opportunity-constrained at Cousins.
However, we continue to look at potential new markets in the Sunbelt that benefit from continued migration of people and companies.
Nashville is one example, expanding in Dallas is, another.
2021, is a transitional year for Cousins from an earnings and occupancy perspective.
Our financial results will reflect several known move-outs from past value-add acquisitions such as 1200 Peachtree and 3350 Peachtree in Atlanta and One South at The Plaza in Charlotte.
With lockdowns easing, we have begun executing our business plans, to reposition these exciting projects.
And we are seeing leasing opportunities grow.
As we look to the future, Cousins is uniquely positioned to deliver long-term growth for our shareholders.
Importantly, we have the right balance sheet with low leverage and ample liquidity to capitalize.
They are the reason for our success.
Like all of you the Cousins team was excited to leave 2020 behind and focus on executing in a new and hopefully more positive year.
Our strong first quarter operating results reflect that excitement and focus, and we are very pleased with how this New Year has kicked off.
As I've done since the pandemic started I will begin with general business conditions.
First, physical customer utilization continues to track at an average of about 20% across the company.
With that said, utilization is not consistent across markets or even among buildings within each market.
For instance, our Atlanta, Dallas and Tampa portfolios are all running at about a 30% or higher average utilization rate.
I also want to point out that activity and energy at many of our buildings even in the markets that still have lower overall utilization are building momentum with each passing month.
Whether within our portfolio or generally speaking, we are hearing of more and more companies planning to return to the office at some capacity during 2021.
We continue to believe the back half of the year should usher in more broad-based increases in utilization, however, with the full effects potentially not being felt until 2022.
With regard to rent collections, they remain strong.
Similar to last quarter, we collected 98.8% of rent from all customers and 99.1% of rent from office customers in the first quarter.
Now let's turn to first quarter operating results.
Recall that in February, we said, 2021 would be transitional for Cousins including occupancy.
As expected, our total office portfolio leased percentage and weighted average occupancy declined to 90.2% and 89.3% this quarter, respectively.
The biggest driver of occupancy by a wide margin was Bank of America's final phase of exploration at One South in Charlotte, which took occupancy at this 891,000 square-foot project to 57.3%.
A second driver, albeit, much smaller was the addition of our 10,000 Avalon new development in Atlanta to the operating portfolio, adding about 50,000 square feet of highly desirable first-generation office vacancy.
I would note that leasing interest at 10000 Avalon is very encouraging.
Looking to the balance of 2021, our occupancy will continue to trend down into the second half of the year, largely due to the long-anticipated 200,000 square-foot move-out of Anthem at 3350 Peachtree at the end of June.
With that said, and as we have said previously on other calls, our occupancy will benefit late in the year from the positive impact of some known commencements for new deliveries, most notably at The Domain in Austin.
As for leasing activity, we executed 271,000 square feet of leases this quarter.
We view this as solid volume given we are still operating in a pandemic.
I would like to share some observations about our leasing activity this quarter that we see is encouraging.
First, we executed leases in every one of our core markets, which has not always been the case during the pandemic.
Not only that, we executed at least one new lease in all but one core market.
Second, we executed the highest overall number of leases since the first quarter of 2020, increasing 43% over the last quarter.
And finally, new and expansion leasing as a proportion of total leasing activity increased versus last quarter coming in at 30% of our total leasing activity.
But we do see these characteristics as reflective of a clearly improving leasing environment.
I'm also pleased to report that rent growth remained remarkably strong in the first quarter with second-generation net rents increasing 10.5% on a cash basis.
With this continued rent growth and concessions only modestly higher than our eight-quarter run rate, net effective rents this quarter came in at a solid $23.53 per square foot.
I have one more fact about our recent lease economics that I think is important to point out.
During the 12 months ended this quarter, essentially the time horizon of the pandemic to-date, our completed leasing activity yielded weighted average net effective rents 1.1% higher than our completed activity during the 12 months leading up to the pandemic.
This is an outstanding achievement in a difficult operating environment and is a testament to the quality of our team and portfolio.
Across the Sunbelt economic activity is recovering and expected to be even more robust later this year and beyond.
As we have said many times, migration to the Sunbelt is only accelerating through the pandemic.
In fact inward migration to Florida is back to over 1,000 people a day.
Not surprisingly, Austin has become the top destination in the country for potential commercial real estate investment according to CBRE, due to the resilience of its labor market and an outlook for steady and attractive growth.
Further per JLL, Austin has seen twice as many new jobs announced in the first two months of 2021 than in all of 2020.
The same JLL study found that Dallas, Phoenix and Atlanta were also among the top-performing cities in 2020 with regard to overall job retention.
As I mentioned earlier in my remarks, more and more companies are announcing plans to return to the office.
Importantly, they are also vocalizing the view that time together as a team in an office is critical for healthy culture, collaboration and career development.
As a result, many major global companies no longer plan to reduce their use of their offices after the pandemic.
I'm sure many of you have already seen the recent KPMG survey that found just 17% of senior executives plan to reduce their usage of office space down from 69% in the last survey in August.
This is a staggering change in sentiment to the good.
With companies now willing to make longer-term decisions and data points like the one from KPMG, you will not be surprised to hear that our leasing pipeline has improved considerably over the past couple of months.
The most noticeable increase in activity has been in our early stage leasing pipeline, which we define as tour and proposal activity.
Specifically, this quarter the number of active proposals outstanding increased 68% and the number of space tours increased 89% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020.
This is an exciting trend.
But please remember, this is early stage activity that typically takes a number of quarters to translate into signed leases, occupancy and net operating income if at all.
While the pandemic is certainly not over, we are cautiously optimistic about the balance of the year ahead of us.
Absent a negative catalyst not seen today our markets are well positioned for a sustained recovery and our teams in the markets are excited about the opportunities we have in front of us.
They continue to focus on our goals, work hard everyday and drive impressive results.
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 balance sheet and dividend before closing my remarks with updated information on our outlook for 2021.
Overall, first quarter numbers were solid and held up well since the onset of the pandemic.
FFO was $0.69 per share.
Same-property cash NOI declined 2.7% year-over-year.
And as Richard said earlier, cash rents on expiring leases rose by a very healthy 10.5%.
Before moving on, I did want to highlight that we have increased cash rents on expiring leases every single quarter since the onset of COVID last spring with a weighted average increase of 12.4% over that period.
Focusing on same-property performance, first quarter results represent a positive change in trend and are an improvement over the previous two quarters, which averaged year-over-year cash NOI declines of 3.1%.
This improvement took place despite Bank of America's departure from our One South property that was discussed earlier.
If we pull One South out of our same-property pool to get a better sense of performance for the balance of the portfolio, same-property cash NOI adjusting for COVID-related parking losses increased 2.7% compared to the first quarter of 2020.
Turning to our development efforts.
One asset 10000 Avalon was moved off of our development pipeline schedule and into our portfolio statistics schedule during the first quarter.
The remaining development pipeline represents a total Cousins investment of $363 million across 1.3 million square feet for assets.
Our remaining funding commitment for this pipeline is approximately $94 million which is more than covered by our existing liquidity and future retained earnings.
On the transaction front, we closed one land acquisition during the first quarter and one property disposition subsequent to quarter end.
We also refinanced the maturing construction loan during the first quarter.
I'll start with the land purchase.
In mid-March a land parcel was acquired in Buckhead, next to our 3350 Peachtree operating asset for $8 million.
This transaction was completed through an existing 95/5 joint venture partnership with Cousins investing $7.6 million.
The partnership already owned an adjacent parcel and with this acquisition it now controls the entirety of what is the last surface parking lot located in the core of the Buckhead submarket often referred to as the Buckhead Loop.
Subsequent to quarter end, we sold Burnett Plaza in Fort Worth for a gross sales price of $137.5 million.
Built in 1983, Burnett Plaza was 80% leased at the time of sale.
We acquired it through the TIER merger in 2019 and it was identified as a noncore asset from the very beginning.
Proceeds from the sale were used to help fund the prior acquisition of The RailYard in the South End submarket of Charlotte.
Finally, we refinanced the outstanding construction loan on our Carolina Square mixed-use property in Chapel Hill during the first quarter.
A new $135.7 million nonrecourse loan was obtained replacing the original $77 million construction loan.
The proceeds from this refi exceeded the partnership's original equity contribution and are clear third-party validation of the value that we created there.
As a quick reminder Carolina Square is held in a 50-50 joint venture partnership.
Looking at the balance sheet.
We entered this period of volatility with outstanding financial strength among the very best among our office peers.
Our debt maturity schedule is balanced.
Our liquidity position is strong.
And our leverage is low.
At the end of the first quarter our net debt-to-EBITDA was 4.87x.
Proceeds from the Burnett Plaza sale are not reflected in this number since it happened after quarter end.
Incorporating the Burnett Plaza sale as well as the potential Dimensional Place sale which I'll discuss in a moment will reduce this ratio to approximately 4.5x.
We also increased the dividend during the first quarter by 3.3%.
This follows a similar increase last year.
Our underlying cash flow growth has allowed us to deliver consistent dividend increases even through the COVID pandemic.
Our dividend policy is set by our Board and is based on an FAD payout ratio between 70% and 75%.
Last year our FAD dividend payout ratio was 68%.
Needless to say our dividend is well covered by cash flow.
I'll close by updating our 2021 earnings guidance.
We currently anticipate full year 2021 FFO between $2.68 and $2.78 per share.
This is down $0.08 at the midpoint from our previous guidance of $2.76 to $2.86 per share.
The change is entirely driven by the completed sale of Burnett Plaza and the assumed sale of our Dimensional Place investment this summer.
As we've stated before our joint venture partner Dimensional Place has a onetime purchase option.
And while they have not provided formal notice, we have received strong indications that they will exercise their option in the near future, hence our inclusion of the sale in our guidance.
The start of Domain 9 during the second quarter has no material impact on our guidance and there are no other dispositions, acquisitions or development starts included in our guidance.

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cousins properties inc - funds from operations was $0.69 per share for the quarter.
cousins properties inc - updated its full year 2021 ffo guidance to $2.68 to $2.78 per share from $2.76 to $2.86 per share.

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