BXP, Inc. ($BXP)

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 on 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 1.2 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% on in '27, and we're very much on track to accomplish that. On sales, what we said we were going to do is $1.7 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 $1.5 billion. Some of those sales will be -- 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 Benny, 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. 751, the buildings demolished 2100, which is also a 75% lease 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 Heart well that we started last year and we have similar types of projects on land that we control in Weston mass, Waltham Mass and Santa Monica, California. So again, we've made terrific progress on all aspects of our business plan.

That's great. Well, 2 things you said stand out to me and I think it pivots to where we want to go next. One is that you said across all your markets, things were 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 at least good. But the BXP portfolio is seeing progress everywhere. It's really not concentrated in any 1 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 as 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 and 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. A company called Calera Pharmaceuticals 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 a catch word 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 to activity you're seeing is expansion 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 are -- our clients are growing. There are definitely examples where a client maybe has 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 nonpremier 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 DC, 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 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 nonpremier assets in New York. So having that quality overlay is very important to understand.

I mean 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 that effect or ends, I appreciate that for BXP, the juice is in occupancy game. 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're in negotiation and 900,000 square feet of that 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 that's $75 to $100 a square foot, it all falls to the bottom line. Now to get to your -- to the answer to your specific question, we are seeing face rental rate growth in 3 primary markets. In Mittal 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 Hillary'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 a -- that's sort of -- again, that's a factor that is 1 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%.

Got it. 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 their force to and what -- 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 it 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 while we're going to sort of use our space efficiently and some people coming on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and others on Tuesday, Thurday, 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 posture 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 bold 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 head count 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 and 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 likes 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 any way, 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. And 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 we'll take the project to 56% pre-leased. We are 85% bought out on our construction trades under budget and 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 and 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- 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 the 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 so we're in the process of -- right now, we own 100% of it. 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 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.

Got it. 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 -- we 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 a 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 1 vendor built 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 we're 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, a very highly levered private equity and very core 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 question, just raise your hand. In the meantime, I want to go back to Mike because we've talked about the liquidity, financing $343 million. 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 is going to delever us the $1.9 billion in asset sales, which again is a mix of inland, $500 million of residential and about $1 billion of what we're calling the bottom 5% of our office portfolio or 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 and 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 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.

All right. Sounds good. We have a question here.

Good morning. So this point I will open up. I'm sure you as the same netlike from commercial observer Manhattan office leasing base for best yearly performance of the century. Yesterday, I met the CEO of a small New York office landlord with an asset near Grand Central and a couple of positive East Colin, he's never seen anything like this before and the leases are being at record levels. You guys are telling me basically the same store I know you don't like to comment on stock price, but as a group, and SL draining and Borneo is 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 the 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 that the capital is -- I think that's -- the issue is not the story. -- all of what we just told you is a paint is a very positive picture. 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. Thank you. 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've probably met a bond, 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 and 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 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.

Thank you, Tony.