Hudson Pacific Properties, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Hudson Pacific Properties first quarter 2022 conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To enter the question queue at any time, please press the star key followed by one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, Note, you will need to pick up your handset before pressing the keys. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Laura Campbell, Executive Vice President, Investor Relations and Marketing. Please go ahead.

Thanks for joining us. With me on the call today are Victor Coleman, CEO and Chairman, Mark Lamas, President, Harut Dhiramirian, CFO, and Art Suazo, EVP of Leasing. Yesterday we filed our earnings release and supplemental on an 8K with the SEC, and both are now available on our website. An audio webcast of this call will be available to replay on our website. Some of the information we'll share on the call today is forward-looking in nature. Please reference our earnings release and supplemental for statements regarding forward-looking information, as well as the reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures used on this call and in those materials. Today, Victor will touch on our strategy and capital allocation priorities Mark will discuss our first quarter business highlights and upcoming opportunities, and he will review our first quarter financial results and outlook. Thereafter, we'll be happy to take your questions. Victor?

Thank you, Laura, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We had a productive first quarter focused on our 2022 priorities that include capitalizing on leasing opportunities, progressing our development pipeline, pursuing capital recycling opportunities, maintaining our strong balance sheet, and furthering our ESG leadership. On today's call, we'll provide updates on each of them. At Hudson Pacific, our long-term strategy is to create shareholder value by selectively growing our real estate portfolio as we meet the needs of the secondary growth and increasingly convergent tech and media industries. We've had great success at the forefront of this multifaceted shift, delivering tech campuses along studio lots and finding ways to innovate physical design and to streamline leasing and operations for these synergistic types of space. As tech and media business models have expanded, so has our opportunity set. We will continue to build our portfolio around pure play office and urban West Coast tech hubs, which attracts significant talent and capital, like the Bay Area and Seattle. In major global media markets like Los Angeles and the UK, we're focused on synergistic studio and office campuses and pure play studio facilities. Our fully vertically integrated platform gives us the ability to allocate capital in several ways to generate long-term shareholder value by delivering and operating world-class, amenitized, and sustainable workplaces for tech and media tenants. Our primary focus remains executing on embedded opportunities and identifying attractive value-add projects targeting stabilized yields of 6% to 8% or more. Over the last 10 quarters alone, Through projects like Epic, Harlow, One West Side, we've demonstrated our ability to identify and invest capital in unique office and studio related opportunities that generate returns in line with or well in excess of those yields. Going forward, we expect to take advantage of even more embedded development related growth opportunities as well as identify and pursue capital attractive acquisitions in a disciplined manner. We have a significant existing value creation pipeline, most of which is studio or studio-related office development, and more than half of which we expect to have the ability to commence construction by mid-next year. There are two types of compelling opportunities we look to pursue. One is our core plus opportunities, targeting stabilizing yields of 5% to 6% or more to purchase assets that are creative and strategically aligned with our long-term growth objectives in the right markets with the key tenants. Our acquisition of an Amazon-anchored Denny Triangle located at 5th and Bell last year is an example of that. We'll also look to grow our studio production services, offering to further differentiate our facilities and deepen our relationships with key tenants. From a return perspective, these profitable businesses expand our media-derived revenue and operating margins and increase our studio portfolio stabilized yields. Continuing to return capital to shareholders remains an option as well as part of our balanced approach to shareholder value creation. And over the last four years, we've repurchased $380 million of our common stock, which will reach $580 million or approximately 15% of our market cap at the conclusion of our accelerated share repurchase in the third quarter of this year. To date during this period, we've also paid approximately $543 million of dividends. Our ESG platform, Better Blueprint, is a major differentiator for our company and over the last several years has become essential in the increased alignment with the media and tech tenants that we serve. ESG is now fully integrated into our strategy and capital allocation priorities at both the corporate and property level. In terms of the E in ESG, we're ahead of the game. Our operations are already fully carbon neutral and we have the highest percentage of LEED certified buildings amongst our direct peers. We manage climate risk in accordance with TCFT and the Paris Agreement, and we're readily able to comply with the SEC's recently proposed climate-related disclosures. Our approach to the S prioritizes real impact on issues we view as integral to our stakeholders. We're very focused on DEI, and much like our approach to sustainability, we're not satisfied with simply just checking the box. In addition to diversifying our leadership and board, Our heads of DEI and ESG are building on a variety of existing internal and external facing initiatives. And we recently launched an innovative impact investing platform, EquiBlue, to leverage our expertise to promote DEI holistically in our industry and communities. We look forward to sharing more on these initiatives in the coming quarters. And as we look ahead, we'll continue to work to execute on the multiple levers we have to maximize value for our shareholders, our niche expertise, and deep relationships with the secular, synergistic, converging media and tenant businesses will create many long-term cash flow enhancing opportunities. We also continue to weigh these growth opportunities against return of capital shareholders, again, with the ultimate long-term goal of maximizing shareholder value. Now with that, I'm going to turn the call over to Mark.