You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: These statements are based on management's expectations, plans and estimates of our prospects.
Today's statements may be time-sensitive and accurate only as of today's date, Thursday, April 23, 2020.
We assume no obligation to update our statements or the other information we provide.
Also on the call today are Jojo Yap, our Chief Investment Officer; Peter Schultz, Executive Vice President; Chris Schneider, Senior Vice President of Operations; and Bob Walter, Senior Vice President of Capital Markets and Asset Management.
So we apologize in advance for any slight gaps or delays we may experience, particularly when we get to the Q&A segment of our call.
I'd like to begin my remarks today by saying that the entire First Industrial team hope that you, your families and loved ones have maintained your health, while we all do what's necessary to get through COVID-19 together, hopefully sooner rather than later.
With respect to measuring the eventual economic impact of COVID-19 and related stay-at-home orders in the US, it's still early.
Over the coming months, as stay-at-home orders are reduced and eventually lifted, we will gain a wealth of knowledge about how our actions impacted outcomes.
While it is still early, we are extremely pleased about not only our strong Q1 results, but especially about how our team has performed during the past six weeks.
Due to the shelter-in-place orders in most of the country, the virus has significantly impacted commerce.
Unemployment has increased at an alarming rate in a short period of time, and the second quarter is likely to show a significant reduction in GDP.
Prior to the shelter-in-place orders, the vast majority of our tenants' businesses were doing well.
So we're hopeful that the overall economy and their businesses will bounce back as the social distancing restrictions are reduced or removed, whenever that may be.
Moving now to our recent rent collection experience, I'll start by saying we value our tenants and our relationships with them.
In an effort to get ahead of these conversations, in late March, we contacted a number of our tenants to make sure they were knowledgeable about the available financial relief programs from the government.
In cases where our customers may not have had firmly established financial relationships, we referred them to one of our bank resources willing to assist them in the process.
We also made an internal resource available to walk them through the loan application process.
Through the end of March, we collected about 97% of our March billings, which was in line with what we experienced before COVID-19.
For April billings, as of April 22, we have collected about 93%, which includes Pier 1.
For April billings for which we have yet to receive payment, approximately two-thirds are in jurisdictions which currently have moratoriums on evictions or evictions aren't being enforced, which is negatively impacting collection.
Because we're in the early phases of experiencing the economic impact of COVID-19, it's prudent to include in our updated guidance an additional $1 million of reserves for bad debt, which Scott will walk through shortly.
Moving now to rent relief requests from our tenants, including those requests from clearly well capitalized tenants, total requests for rent relief in the form of rent deferral or abatement represented approximately 19% of our April billings.
Excluding the well capitalized tenants and only including tenants that ask for specific terms, this represents 8% of our April billings, of which approximately 85% have paid April rent.
This subset occupies an average of 48,000 square feet and represent a broad range of industries.
At this time, we've not granted rent relief, and it's not clear how many tenants will legitimately require rent relief.
We hope the range of information we provided gives you an idea of what we are experiencing today.
Needless to say, this is a point in time picture.
We won't try to predict when infection rates will begin to decline and when or how the phase-out of the shelter-in-place restrictions will flow through to our tenants' businesses and financial health.
Moving now to general activity in the leasing markets, prior to COVID-19, there were a substantial number of new requirements across our markets, led by e-commerce and food related businesses, but representing a broad range of uses.
In our portfolio, as of April 22, we have signed 72% of our 2020 lease expirations, which is consistent with our experience in the past several years.
These signings have a cash rental rate increase of 8.4%.
Over the past few weeks, we have seen leasing activity on most of our vacancies, but the pace around some of those conversations has slowed or paused.
As a result, as part of our revised guidance, we have pushed out the leasing assumptions for two of our developments to the end of the year, which Scott will walk through shortly.
We feel very good about the long-term prospects for our business.
The COVID-19 virus has accelerated the adoption of e-commerce for many consumers for necessities as well as routine needs, which should boost future demand.
We also expect an increase in inventories to provide cushion against product shortages due to supply chain shocks such as we are experiencing now.
All in all, in the long run, these factors should drive incremental demand for industrial space.
Moving to dispositions, we closed on $13 million of sales in addition to the Tampa portfolio we closed in early February.
Through today, we've closed on $40 million of sales this year, on our way to meeting our 2020 sales guidance range of $125 million to $175 million.
As we noted on our last call, we expect sales to be back-end loaded in the year.
Note that our sales guidance excludes the expected $55 million Phoenix sale in the third quarter, in which the tenant exercised its purchase option in 2019.
As always, our sales process is focused on maximizing value for shareholders, while improving our cash flow growth profile.
As we think about new investment opportunities, at this point in time, we will continue to be judicious with our capital with a near-term emphasis on maintaining liquidity.
We are proceeding with all of our developments in process, which totaled 1.5 million square feet and a total investment of $154 million at March 31.
At this time, we are not targeting any new speculative development starts.
This includes the postponement of our planned summer start at First Park Miami, where we will continue to monitor the market.
Due to the impact of COVID-19, we are seeing some delays in certain of our projects as contractors and suppliers deal with shutdown orders, social distancing requirements, slower approval and permitting, and other restrictions.
Of this group, only our 100,000 square foot Philadelphia development has been halted entirely due to statewide restrictions on construction deemed non-essential, although those restrictions will be lifted as of May 8, subject to forthcoming guidelines.
As a result of these delays, you will see in our supplemental Page 22 that we've adjusted some of our estimated completion dates accordingly.
Let me recap some recent investment activity.
In February, we were pleased to acquire Nottingham Ridge Logistics Center, a two-building development forward totaling 751,000 square feet in the Greater Baltimore industrial market, where the submarket vacancy is under 4%.
The park has I-95 frontage and is located just 12 miles north of the Port of Baltimore at the intersection of Route 43.
Today, it is 15% pre-leased, and we are seeing good interest on the remainder of the space.
Our total investment is estimated to be $82 million with an expected cash yield of 5.7%.
In the first quarter and second quarter to date, we also completed the acquisition of two buildings in the East Bay market of Northern California for a total purchase price of $14 [Phonetic] million at a weighted average yield of 5.2%.
The first property is a 39,000 square footer in Fremont, and the other is a 23,000 square foot building in Hayward.
Both are in the I-880 corridor.
The buildings are 58% occupied.
We also acquired a 24,000 square foot building in Los Angeles in the South Bay that we plan to redevelop.
The purchase price was $14.4 million.
In the first quarter, in addition to the First Park Miami land, we also acquired a 9-acre site in Southern California in the Inland Empire East for $2 million that is developable to 189,000 square feet.
On the development front, we placed in service our Ferrero build-to-suit development at PV303 totaling 644,000 square feet with a total investment of $53 million and a stabilized yield of 7.9%.
Let's start with our earnings per share and FFO for the first quarter.
Diluted earnings per share was $0.32 versus $0.19 one year ago.
NAREIT funds from operations were $0.45 per fully diluted share compared to $0.41 per share in 1Q 2019.
First quarter 2020 FFO includes our previously disclosed restructuring charge related to the closure of our Indianapolis office and costs related to the vesting of equity awards for retirement eligible employees we talked about on our last call.
This was offset by income related to the final settlement of one of our two outstanding insurance claims for damaged properties that we previously disclosed.
Excluding these items, FFO remains unchanged at $0.45 per share.
First quarter FFO also includes an approximately $800,000 non-cash write-off of a deferred rent receivable related to our lease with Pier 1 in Baltimore.
We have received April's rents, but due to the economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 virus, we feel this write-off is prudent.
We now -- we are now assuming Pier 1 will pay rent through June and vacate the building, the impact of which I will walk through shortly when I discuss our revised 2020 FFO and portfolio guidance.
Our occupancy was strong at 97.1%, down 50 basis points from the prior quarter and down 20 basis points from a year ago.
As for leasing volume during the quarter, we commenced approximately 2.6 million square feet of leases.
459,000 square feet were new, 1.3 million were renewals, and 925,000 square feet were for developments and acquisitions with lease-up.
Tenant retention by square footage was 68.9%.
Same-store NOI growth on a cash basis, excluding termination fees, was 8.4%.
Lower free rent on developments accounted for about half of that growth.
The remainder is attributable to rental rate bumps and increases in rental rates on new and renewal leasing, which was partially offset by a slight decrease in average occupancy.
Cash rental rates were up 10.8% overall with renewals up 8.9% and new leasing 16.1%.
And on a straight-line basis, overall rental rates were up 26.5%, with renewals increasing 27.
1% and new leasing up 24.8%.
Now, moving on to the balance sheet, at March 31, our net debt plus preferred stock to EBITDA was 5.2 times.
Today, we have approximately $70 million of cash and $400 million of availability on our line of credit, for total liquidity of $470 million.
From a debt maturity standpoint, we have very little coming due in thousand 2020 and 2021.
In 2020, we recently paid off a $15 million mortgage loan and have no other debt maturities in the remainder of the year.
In 2021, we have a couple of debt maturities.
First, we have a $200 million term loan that matures in January at an interest rate of 3.39% with a handful of banks with which we have relationships spanning many years.
We contemplate renewing this term loan inside of the expiring interest rate.
After that, we have our line of credit coming due in October, but note that the maturity date for the line is extendable for one year at our option, which enables us to push this maturity to October 2022.
Lastly, in 2021, we have $63 million of mortgage debt coming due in October that we can pay off using the availability in our line of credit if the debt capital markets are cooperative.
On uses of capital, we anticipate development spend of approximately $100 million for the remainder of 2020 and $35 million for 2021 for a total of $135 million.
These capital needs will be funded with property sales and excess cash flow after payment of our dividend, given our AFFO payout ratio, as calculated in our supplemental, of 66%, which is one of the lowest in the REIT world.
Our NAREIT FFO and FFO before one-times item guidance are both $1.73 to $1.83 per share with a midpoint of $1.78.
This is a $0.05 per share decrease compared to the midpoint of our FFO before one-times items guidance we discussed on our fourth quarter earnings call, primarily due to a decrease in forecasted NOI due to the following.
We are now assuming that Pier 1 pays rent through June 30 and vacates.
At this time, we expect no income from this building after June for the remainder of the year.
This, plus the impact of the write-off of the non-cash deferred rent receivable, is about $0.02 per share.
We have also reduced our assumption for average quarter-end occupancy by 100 basis points to a midpoint of 96.5%.
This reflects the pushback of our leasing including Pier 1, as I just discussed, and the lease-up of our remaining vacancies to the fourth quarter at First Joliet in Chicago and Building B of First Logistics Center at 78/81 in Pennsylvania.
Excluding the FFO impact of Pier 1, this change in leasing assumption represents an additional $0.02 per share.
Lastly, we are increasing our bad debt expense assumption from $500,000 per quarter to $900,000 per quarter for the remainder of the year, which is $0.01 a share.
Including the $300,000 of bad debt expense we recognized in the first quarter, our bad debt expense assumption for 2020 is now $3 million, an increase of $1 million from our prior guidance.
Please note, that guidance does not reflect any potential non-cash write-offs of deferred rent receivables related to tenants that are having financial difficulties.
Other key assumptions for guidance are as follows: same-store NOI growth on a cash basis before termination fees of 2.75% to 4.25%, a decrease of 125 basis points at the midpoint due to our updated occupancy and bad debt assumptions.
Our G&A guidance remains at $31 million to $32 million.
And guidance also includes the anticipated 2020 costs related to our completed and under construction developments at March 31.
In total, for the full year of 2020, we expect to capitalize about $0.04 per share of interest related to our developments.
We, like all of you, look forward to getting back to normal soon.
As a company, we've built our business to perform through the cycle and particularly for unexpected times like these.
Through disciplined risk management in our investments and operations, top-rated customer service, a high-quality infill portfolio and a strong balance sheet, we are well positioned to succeed in this turbulent environment.
Lastly, we are focused on serving and working closely with our customers for as long as it takes and to find the optimal outcome for all involved.
With that, we will now move to the question-and-answer portion of our call.

user
q1 ffo per share $0.45.
issued revised guidance related to business impact of covid-19 pandemic.
sees 2020 nareit ffo of $ 1.73 to $1.83 per share.

assistant