Douglas Emmett, Inc.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. We are having technical issues, and we will be delayed five minutes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry for the delay. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Douglas Emmett's quarterly earnings call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, you will receive instructions for participating in the question and answer session. I will now turn the conference over to Stuart McKelney, Vice President of Investor Relations for Douglas Emmett.

Thank you. Joining us today on the call are Jordan Kaplan, our President and CEO, Kevin Crummey, our CIO, and Peter Seymour, our CFO. This call is being webcast live from our website and will be available for replay during the next 90 days. You can also find our earnings package at the investor relations section of our website. You can find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures discussed during today's call in the earnings package. During the course of this call, we will make forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs of, assumptions made by, and information currently available to us. Our actual results will be affected by known and unknown risks, trends, uncertainties, and factors that are beyond our control or ability to predict. Although we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, they are not guarantees of future performance, and some will prove to be incorrect. Therefore, our actual future results can be expected to differ from our expectations, and those differences may be material. For a more detailed description of some potential risks, please refer to our SEC filings, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website. When we reach the question and answer portion, in consideration of others, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up.

I will now turn the call over to Jordan. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. During the first quarter, we leased 1.2 million square feet of office space, which includes renewing a 250,000 square foot lease with WME through 2037. Even excluding that lease, we still did 950,000 square feet of leasing. New leasing was just over 200,000 square feet, still not quite enough to drive positive absorption. As we said in February, we are not assuming a significant increase in new leasing demand this year. However, our strong renewal rate tells us that our existing tenants especially the smaller tenants on which we have built our portfolio, are not reducing their space needs. Despite challenges in new large tenant demand, our office leasing economics continue to perform well and leasing concessions remain low. We are still signing leases that are more valuable than the prior lease for the same space, with straight-line roll-up this quarter over 23%. While that number benefited from the WME lease, even excluding that lease, we achieved straight line roll-up of over 11%. As we mentioned before, our average leasing costs since the pandemic have actually been lower than our prior long-term average and remain below that of other office REITs. We are well positioned to navigate this downturn and emerge stronger in the next growth cycle. I am confident in the long-term performance of our portfolio as our markets have excellent supply constraints and diversified demand from high-growth industries. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kevin.