Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for coming. I'm Jerry Sweeney with Brandywine Realty Trust, and we're happy to welcome you to our 2017 Investor Day. We have a great day lined up, including property tours later this afternoon. Really our hope today, our last full formal investor day was back in 2012, a different time in the cycle and certainly a different time for Brandywine. Our hope today is to show you the progress we've made over the last few years, how we've created a solid growth platform for going forward, and how we plan to use that platform to grow earnings, cash flow, and maintain a very strong and safe balance sheet. In front of you have a couple of handouts, really four pieces of material.
The first book is called "Our People." A lot of you see just Tom Wirth and myself and maybe a few other senior executives at conferences. We really have an amazing team of people at Brandywine. That's really one of our core strengths. We have a number of folks who are here with us today, and we've really identified in that book everyone from Brandywine who's participating in some element of the investor day and tours today. We also are going to be joined around 10:30, quarter to 11 by Paul Levy, who's the CEO of the Center City District, to talk about Philadelphia's transition to a 24/7 city. There's a booklet that contains his slides. He promises he'll move through those very quickly. There's a lot of slides there. We'll move it through.
Of course, we have our investor day book, and then a summary of our Schuylkill Yards tour that'll occur later this afternoon. With that, I'd like to again formally welcome everyone. We have a good agenda lined up for today. One of our objectives, we have a lot of speakers, a lot of ground to cover, is to go through a lot of these slides fairly quickly. There'll be plenty of time at the end of the session for Q&A. If you certainly have a question, feel free to raise it. We're going to try and have a lot of the Q&A towards the end of the session. The first thing we want to talk about is our business plan, and I'll kick off on that, and then we'll turn it through the rest of the management team.
Where we were and where we are today. I think what's kind of interesting, if you look back in 2012, we had 217 properties. We're down to 97 wholly owned properties. We're down 120 properties, or 55% of our properties, and around 40% in square footage. We simplified the management structure of the company, we have three operating regions versus seven back then. Philadelphia has continued to increase its NOI contribution up to now about 40%, and we did a wonderful job, I think, as you'll hear from some of the team later, on eliminating exposure to commodity buildings in some slower growth markets. That really was one of the driving predicates behind our repositioning plan. We really wanted to create a growth platform that could accelerate future growth by insulating the company from functional obsolescence and shifts that we were seeing in sub-market demand drivers.
Some of our key goals we reviewed a number of years ago, we've accomplished. We've eliminated or minimized our exposure to commodity buildings in low-growth sub-markets. Mass transit, as most of you know, has been a key focal point of Brandywine over the last few years to really get as many of our properties as possible with mass transit optionality. Truly to try and create a compression of the net operating income and cash flow lines of our business by having a better-positioned inventory with higher quality product and implementing some very specific tactical leasing strategies. This slide here shows a little bit of what we've been able to do just in the last several years from mass transit. Back in 2012, we had about 11% of our properties and about 35% of our square footage that were transit-served.
Today, we've got about 64% of our square footage transit-served, and when we take a look at planned expansions of existing transit zones near our properties, we believe that in the next several years, we will have a contribution of NOI coming from our properties around 83%, and the total number of square footage, about 84% coming from properties that are located with access to mass transportation. One of our key focal points was that we wanted to heavily concentrate on what we viewed to be higher gross sub-markets. We clearly were our number one here in Philadelphia. We're still number one in the Crescent markets. Those of you who are going out on the suburban tour will see that.
We've made some good progress in repositioning our portfolio in the Toll Road, and then we've had a big expansion of our asset base in the last few years in Austin, Texas. As you'll hear from Bill Redd, we are the market leader there as well. Our business plan has a couple of key predicates. We want to grow earnings, grow cash flow, and continue improving our balance sheet. We'll go through all of these in detail in different parts of the presentation this morning. Really, balance sheet management, key takeaways is our de-leveraging plans are paramount. They are a predicate to all of our business decisions. We want to maximize our liquidity, and as Tom Wirth will walk you through, we've done a wonderful job of layering out a very good laddered debt maturity schedule. Operationally, simply put, we want to be a top quartile performer going forward.
We know that we have the ability to grow that within our own portfolio. Having a stable operating platform, and George Johnstone will touch on some of those key elements, gives us the ability to really expand our growth programs going forward and always be in those steady and improving markets that can deliver growth to us. From a growth standpoint, key items are our capital recycling, which George S. Hasenecz, our Senior VP of Investments, will walk through what we've done the last few years. Also look at going forward, how we're going to focus continually on sub-market refinement, as well as having a very disciplined development and acquisition pipeline going forward. Driving operational excellence is the first point. If you step back and think about it, we really are kind of in the sweet spot of our business. We have strong occupancy and leasing levels.
We've really done a wonderful job minimizing forward rollover exposure to sub 10% for the next 4 years. We're back to higher levels of tenant retention. We're generating strong same-store cash flow growth, positive mark-to-market. As George will show, we've had a very good success in maintaining our capital costs within our targeted 10%-15% of lease revenues. We've actually been pretty successful in lengthening our lease terms as well. From a balance sheet perspective, as I touched on, balance sheet de-leveraging really does drive our business plan execution. There is no chance this company's going to re-lever, as we look forward in upcoming cycles. We also wanted to try and minimize floating rate risk. Our first balance sheet objectives of getting down to 40% leverage target and 6.5 times debt to EBITDA, we achieved that.
In fact, we're about 37% debt to GAV at this point in time and 6.3x EBITDA. Our plan is, as it has been, to run our company sub 6 times EBITDA. When we take a look at our growth strategy, there's really three elements that we think are important to focus on. One is the improvement that we've made in our land inventory. Second is our development pipeline going forward. The third element is our joint venture simplification. The first piece of that is our current land inventory right now is about $153 million. Our focus is to keep our land holdings between 3%-4% of total assets. Right now, we're about 3.7%. We have executed a multi-year transition plan to move out of a number of the land holdings. To give you an example here, we put a chart that shows the $153 million.
We have about $52 million under contract or on the market for sale, which we think will get us down to about $100 million of carrying value. What's interesting is if you take a look at the land holdings we have, this does include the land that we've optioned for Schuylkill Yards, that we'll see later, and it does also include the redevelopment plan we have underway at our Broadmoor complex in Austin. We can do about 14 million sq ft of development, and our average carrying price per FAR is sub $20. We think we have a very attractively priced land bank that gives us complete flexibility on when to deploy that and on how to deploy it.
You'll certainly see within some of those Austin and Schuylkill Yards projects, we'll be deploying that land through monetizing it through sale to other development companies, just as we did with our Garza complex down in Austin. From a development standpoint, our development and redevelopment will range between 5%-10% of our asset base. We have a little graphic here about somebody falling over their skis. I know it's very easy in this business to get over your skis in terms of development pipeline. I think from our perspective, given where we are in the cycle, the hard work we've done to maintain and build a very strong balance sheet, we're not going to get over our skis at all in terms of development.
Our goal is to have a great land bank, which we have, go through the planning and development process for a number of those projects, then time it to how we can meet market conditions. No spec development, 50% pre-lease threshold requirement. Our financial plan is to do forward-funding certainty through matched dollar approach. Recycle assets as we move through the development pipeline, and certainly recognize where we are in terms of late cycle and assess that risk in terms of our development pipeline going forward. The focus will be on our production assets, some of which you'll see later today, our 933 project in King of Prussia, Metroplex, Four Points, we'll hear about. Then we have a number of mixed-use, multi-phase master plans that we think deliver tremendous value and growth opportunity to this company going forward, primarily at Schuylkill Yards, Broadmoor, and Garza.
One other point that we wanted to amplify is, one of the things we think that provides Brandywine with a great differentiator is our tremendous institutional client relationships. Even when you look around here in University City, a lot of our relationships on the land that we build have come from University of Pennsylvania, Children's Hospital, Drexel University, Amtrak, SEPTA. We actually anticipate that's a good avenue for us to continue to cultivate as we look at our business plan over the next several years. Joint ventures. We've done a number of joint ventures over the years, all which was really an effective way for us to manage our cost to capital, improve our return on invested equity. We currently have today 11 different joint ventures. Total investment on Brandywine's part of $265 million.
About $470 million or 19% of our total debt is coming through those joint ventures in terms of debt attribution. When we look at 2017, the balance of this year through 2018 and 2019, our plan is very simple. It's harvest profit, reduce our investment base down to about $130 million, and reduce debt attribution down to at least $250, which would improve our leverage metrics by two turns. Continue the successful product recycling, just like we did earlier this year with The Park at Plymouth Meeting, which we sold out of a joint venture with Toll Brothers. We certainly anticipate doing that on a couple of the other projects we have that are now reaching maturation. But certainly, looking forward, reducing the scope of our Allstate DRA and MAP ventures via asset sales.
As you'll hear later from Mike Cooper on our D.C. ventures, finalize the development and approval process, then market for tenants. Quick market snapshot. You'll hear a lot more detail from our operating executives on this. When we take a look at the Philadelphia region, look, we're in a market-leading position. We have excellent sub-market positioning, and we really have become the challenger brand. I think what that means to us is that every day we need to do better and better in terms of taking advantage of the platform we've created, in terms of delivering service to our customers, our prospective customers. That's something Jeff will touch on later in terms of the power of our overall platform. We've also, though, have made some significant reductions in our suburban exposure.
We sold a lot of what we call the Turnpike markets here, Horsham, Blue Bell, down through Great Valley, Exton. We've actually reduced our King of Prussia inventory by 34% in the last several years. We do have the best in-market infrastructure. We think our leasing teams, our property management teams are the best in the market. They're talented, they're enthusiastic, they're well experienced, and they know their market and their product very, very well. We've executed some accretive developments for the organization. 1919 Market that you'll see later, FMC Tower, 933 First. We've renovated 1900 Market, again, on the tour later. Our focus really within the CBD has been on portfolio management and marketing new developments. As we've done that, we've also harvested significant profit. We sold the main post office, where we've generated over $100 million gain.
Sold our pier operation on the Delaware River a few weeks ago. That generated a nice gain for us. We've optioned Schuylkill Yards, which I think is probably a great structure for this company in terms of being able to tie up that forward development capacity on an option basis. We also acquired almost a full block last year at 2100 Market Street. Our average cash return on cost, gross cost in Philadelphia is north of 9% and a little bit north of that 9.3% by having a 9.6% return in Radnor. Takeaway for Philadelphia, good market position, really tremendously talented operating and leasing team, and we think that the future, as Jeff will touch on, holds great things for us here. In the Austin region, again, Bill Redd will touch on that, but a strong market position.
One of our goals was to become the market leader in that market. We've been able to do that the last couple of years. I think one of the real major growth drivers for this organization going forward is the wonderful job our team has done in assembling an amazingly priced land inventory that can develop close to 7 million sq ft. Again, market conditions permitting, but look at that investment base per FAR foot. Pretty significant. Our goals there are continue to build on our infrastructure, continue to increase the Brandywine brand awareness. We have increased our asset base since 2012 by over 50%. We've completed a very successful development project. As I alluded to a few moments ago, and you'll hear from Bill, our DRA joint venture, which holds a number of our existing Austin assets, it's really harvest time.
There's been tremendous compression of cap rates in that market. We've moved up rents dramatically. I think we've got an awful lot of embedded value in that portfolio. I think between Brandywine and DRA, you'll see us put some of those properties on the market over the next year or so. In D.C., we've really focused on a portfolio shift. We've exited all of our off-toll road properties. Our toll road focus remains upon the Metro-served markets of Tysons and Herndon. We will shift out of the I-270 markets over the next several years, and Mike Cooper will touch on that. As we look at our future growth capacity, we think we have some very successful internal redevelopment opportunities in our existing portfolio. We have a couple of ground-up development opportunities out on the toll road as well, and we have a very well-positioned Metro-served land bank.
We have a tremendously talented team down there that's done a wonderful job of moving that portfolio towards stable occupancy and really staying very much in front of the marketplace, we have a continual mining of new opportunities. What will be interesting, you'll see from both George S. Hasenecz and Mike Cooper the amount of opportunities we've looked at in D.C., we were not able to make any of those numbers work for us. It's been a very disciplined approach as we've assessed growing our asset base in that market. To wrap things up, looking ahead. This slide here kind of shows our targeted concentrations. I'd like to highlight a couple of points. One, when we met with this group back in 2012, 53% of our NOI was coming out of suburban markets.
That today is 16%, our target is to have that down to about 5% of our NOI over the next several years. Really that primary market we're focusing on is King of Prussia, which as you saw on the slide earlier, that will be Metro-served in the next five years, or transit-served in the next five years. We think that we're down to the inventory we want there. We may do some additional culling, but we view that a 5% target NOI number out of suburban markets is kind of where Brandywine will be. We have Metro high-growth markets, which our target there is 45% of NOI. Right now, we're about 43%. Then in the CBD, our goal is to move Again, we were 24% a few years ago.
Right now, with all the work we've done, we moved up to 41%, we have a target of 50%. Looking at the company going forward. I think you'll see it, 50% of our NOI coming in from the CBD markets of Philadelphia, Metro D.C., and Austin. You'll see the town center metro high-growth markets comprising about 45%, then prime suburban markets in the interim being a feeder for capital recycling, ultimately migrating down to about 5% of NOI. At this point, I'd like to turn it over to George S. Hasenecz to talk about the investment market.
Good morning, everyone. From a standpoint where we were the last time we got together, in 2012, we had done a lot of test marketing of properties. In 2010 and 2011, well over $1 billion worth of real estate that we didn't do a lot of trades from that standpoint. The great thing was that it kind of gave us an idea on how investors were looking at the market. From a standpoint, in 2012, obviously we can kind of see the last five-plus years, we've sold about $2 billion worth of real estate. From a standpoint of our weighted average cap rate, very good compared to the national average on suburban office. We exited California and Richmond, as well as reduced our square footages in New Jersey and Delaware very significantly.
From a standpoint, I mentioned 2010, 2011, we did a lot of test marketing of properties that didn't actually end up happening. From a standpoint, as you can kind of see, these are the national suburban office sales, the volume are the green bars, and the blue bar is the cap rate. You can kind of see where everything kind of started to take off from a volume perspective, as well as from a cap rate compression perspective. From our standpoint, a majority of our sales have really been focused on, over the last several years, during that time frame, where we were able to sell into a great market and be able to do it at a very great cap rate. This is a breakdown of the different portfolios of what we actually sold on a square footage and percentage of price.
You can kind of see how everything kind of broke out from a total dollars and total square footage standpoint. What did we trade out of? We talked about commodity suburban office product. It's your traditional suburban office park. You're not served by any sort of public transportation. You need a car to get there. You need a car to go to lunch and run errands. You just don't have any on-site amenities to be able to work with. Also from a standpoint, a lot of these buildings, since they were built in the '70s and '80s, require a significant amount of capital to make them viable moving forward. There are opportunities.
We're going to walk through a couple of them that you could see from a suburban standpoint that can work if you're able to kind of get it at the right price and invest. We kind of look at a lot of these properties that we sold as functionally obsolescent. What have we invested? We reinvested in transit-oriented property, town center, and CBD property. Amenities in the building on-site, nearby, walkable. You actually have a great workspace that you can look at from a standpoint of attracting tenants. The tenants, the big push, and you'll probably hear from a lot of our other operations people, the big push is your marketing space is really a selling point to recruit talent.
We kind of look at a lot of our acquisitions and development opportunities as stuff that we really want to look at to give us the best opportunity to attract the best and the brightest tenants. All the while we were actually selling properties, we continued to look at assets. We underwrote $31 billion worth of office properties in our three core markets since 2012. We didn't do a lot of transactions during that time frame, but we were very strategic in what we did. In Austin, we established our DRA joint venture as well as added to it, and then really did some great land plays there, which Bill will walk through. In Metro D.C., existing assets really were very pricey from a standpoint. We were never able to kind of find something that made sense.
We really pivoted our strategy to invest in some great land parcels that give us great growth opportunities going forward, which Mike Cooper will talk about later. Here locally, we were able to consolidate our investment in Commerce Square through the Thomas Parkway deal, as well as really focus on a couple of opportunistic investments, both in the city and in key suburban markets. From a standpoint, this is the Metro D.C. market, from 2004-2016. You can see from a volume standpoint, the D.C. market still is not as high as it was in 2005, 2006 from a volume standpoint. From a cap rate standpoint, obviously, some of the current cap rates today and the spread between the district, Northern Virginia and Suburban Maryland.
Just recently in 2015 and into 2016, we actually started to see the volumes from a historical perspective that was commensurate with an average volume standpoint. In Austin, it was a little bit of a different story. Obviously, in the last peak cycle, we saw some investment activity. Really from a standpoint of the last five years, look at the volume from a long-term perspective of investment in Austin, as well as from a cap rate compression. The CBD became a lot more viable of a market and the suburban markets became a lot more attractive. Really from a volume and cap rate standpoint, the investments that we've made in Austin have really panned out, and Bill will talk a little bit more about them later on.
Here locally, we did not see a lot of volume from a long-term historical perspective until recently in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs. When you look at it from a standpoint of where the average cap rates are today and the spread to the CBD, we saw a lot more CBD assets trade over the last couple of years, as well as a lot of key suburban deals in the PA suburbs trade at very good cap rates. You can see from a standpoint, we're always going to look at how do we compare, because we're right between two gateway markets. You can see the spread over the last few years of where buildings are trading in Philadelphia CBD compared to Manhattan and the District. Value creation. Jerry talked a little bit about Park.
This is a land parcel that we bought in 2005, originally planned for office. When the downturn happened, there wasn't any opportunity to be able to develop it for office. We pivoted, got it rezoned for residential, and struck a great joint venture with Toll Brothers, and were able to achieve a great IRR. It was really a creative way to take an office investment that we had made and turn into something different and monetize it. The Och-Ziff transaction, we talked about it a little bit. From a standpoint, we looked at it and said, "Can we do a bulk sale and trade out of non-core markets and product that is high capital users and low growth?" We were able to do that with our Och-Ziff transaction, trading out of nearly 4 million sq ft of product. Cira Square, which is the IRS building.
This was a project that we got involved with in 2007. We did a long-term lease with the IRS there, and we were able to sell that first quarter of last year to a Korean investment fund for over $350 million. The cap rate is 5.5%, and that's a flat lease. We were able to kind of generate a lot of cash out of this deal, book a great gain, a tremendous IRR of 25%, as well as something that really didn't kind of drive any growth for us going forward. 1900 Market. We're going to spend some time there a little bit later on in the tour. This was an asset that came to the market in 2012.
We knew everything that we were doing in that area and what we had planned to do in that area, we knew that there was some value creation that we could add here. We were actually selected as the winner by the special servicer, even though we were only the third highest bid, because of our ability to move quickly and close. Certainty to close is very important. You'll be able to see, obviously, our projected IRR and stabilized cash yield is very strong. We were able to just freshen up a product that was built in the '80s that was tired and needed some capital. 660 West Germantown Pike. I talked about commodity suburban assets and how you can actually reinvest into suburban office that was built in the '80s and be able to make it new again.
Some of you that are going on our tour out in the suburbs will see this. This is a user-occupied facility that was owned by the user. They moved out, it was brought to the market. We were able to buy it for 56 bucks a foot. We did a full renovation of the five-story lobby, as well as added on-site amenities and really created a real dynamic project in a suburban location. From a standpoint, the IRR and the yield, the stabilized yield, bear that out.
Thank you, George. At this point, I'd like to introduce you to Paul Levy. I know one of the questions that a lot of folks have when they come into Philadelphia is kind of where is Philadelphia? Is its trajectory different going forward than its past? What's been happening in Philadelphia for the last five, 10 years? There's probably no one in the city who's a non-elected official who can probably explain better where Philadelphia's been, but more importantly, where Philadelphia is going. Paul Levy is the CEO of the Center City District, which is probably one of the preeminent business districts in the country. He does a lot of speaking around the country, and actually internationally, talking about how to redo urban cores to make sure that they're vibrant, productive, integrated, and mixed use going forward.
I'd like to turn it over to Paul Levy, who will spend a few minutes giving you a sense of where Philadelphia is.
Well, good morning. I'm really glad to be here, and sorry we didn't warm it up for you a little bit more. Usually, it's much warmer this time of year. As Jerry indicated, I want to give you a kind of overview of the transformation of the city, largely over the last quarter century. One or two slides got screwed up when they were transferred over by email, so excuse me for that. Just by quick way of background, there's kind of an old Philadelphia story that many of you may have, and as you went to school here, may be thinking about us as one of the original American colonies, as the birthplace of American democracy. You may know us as what we used to be in the 19th century, a major industrial center.
We were a place that made Stetson hats, Baldwin Locomotives, Atwater Kent Radio, and therefore, a place with a lot of old industrial ruins. More sadly, a place with endless "Rocky" sequels that keep going. That is part of our history, but I really want to tell you the new Philadelphia story, and the story that has really been the last quarter century of what has happened here. This is really a city that has transformed itself, and not last week and not last year, but really starting as early as the mid-1950s. We were one of the first American cities, along with Boston, to place a premium on historic preservation. We took about 500 historic properties in what we call Society Hill today and began a tradition of downtown living and renovation in the mid-'50s.
For more than 60 years, we've been adding to downtown living and building a very strong downtown residential area that I'll talk about in a moment. Also in the '50s, through urban renewal, that's the same view from our City Hall. We took down a lot of defunct rail lines. Those are the former Pennsylvania rail lines, opened up and created in the 1960s, the Penn Center Office District. Long before people used the phrase transit-oriented development, we connected virtually every one of our office buildings to public transit. In the '80s, we took the two suburban train lines, connected them together underground. Today, any employer in the downtown or here in University City has access to a 360-degree labor market. 70% of our office workers arrive by public transport each day.
We have, in the downtown, 41 million sq ft of office space, about 110,000 office jobs. There's been a very similar process here in University City. This is the view across the bridge right out your window in 1920, when this used to be an industrial area. Here is the same view today, as this entire area, which is behind you in University City, has been thoroughly transformed in that last quarter century to 30 years. This is a global center for education, a center for healthcare and research. Just about $850 million of NIH research coming in, most of it right here at the University of Pennsylvania, but huge investment in innovation and new economy industries coming out of our universities.
If you take Center City to behind me in University City, we have 18 colleges and universities, 107,000 students here, many of whom live in the downtown, most of whom shop in the downtown, or all of whom get drunk in the downtown. More seriously, a highly educated group of people graduating, about 35,000 graduates each year. We have 75,000 eds and meds jobs right here in University City. Sorry, this is one that's screwed up a little bit. 58,000 eds and meds jobs in Center City. If you take University City and Center City, that is 53% of all jobs in the city are in this very dense cluster, and I'll come back and talk about that in a moment. We've been through the sustained process of growth.
Our own organization was created back in 1991, when we had major problems with cleanliness and safety in the downtown. We're a business improvement district that started with a $6.5 million budget and has grown to a $23 million organization. Starting, obviously, with just clean and safe, which we continue to do, deploying people out in the street, a unique partnership with the police that has resulted in serious crime being cut in half and quality-of-life crimes cut by more than 80%. Those basics of clean and safe, a strong public-private partnership. In the mid-1990s, as hospitality and other investments that I'll talk about began, we financed a whole series of streetscape improvements. Directional signs, lighting, landscaping, all of which has been extended out here by our counterpart University City District, is also in place.
A very visitor-friendly, well-lit downtown, and we maintain a significant number of those assets in the downtown. We began to focus on place-making along with other organizations in the city, we've renovated four parks in the downtown. Our biggest one, the completion on the whole west side of City Hall with Dilworth Park, which is a flexible multi-use space that we program continuously. As an organization, private sector, about $46 million of ours has leveraged another $100 million. We've done about $146 million of streetscape capital improvement, public area improvements. Our counterpart University City District done a great deal of similar efforts out here. Now, the transformation beyond clean and safe that also began in the 1990s was first a commitment to arts and entertainment.
We took an early 20th century office district that was largely vacant on South Broad Street and converted that into our Avenue of the Arts, which is not just an arts district. It's an office district, a student district, a hotel district, a residential district, vibrant throughout the day and evening. We have cultural amenities across all of the downtown, 419 cultural institutions within the downtown, second only to Manhattan in terms of arts and cultural institutions within our downtown. The other big investment in the 1990s was the closing of what was a really obsolete civic center here in West Philadelphia, and we took what was then the vacant Reading Train Shed, converted that into the gateway to our convention center. We have a 1.1 million square foot state-of-the-art center that is hugely successful in attracting game shows, trade shows, and major conventions into the downtown.
That investment prompted huge numbers of new hotels within the downtown, all within about a 15-minute walk of the center. Beginning in the last decade, we had a comparable investment in tourism and hospitality infrastructure. We built a new visitor center, a new home for the Liberty Bell, a new Constitution Center, National Museum of American Jewish History, the President's House that commemorates the presence of slavery even as we created the democracy, and we just opened the American Revolution Center here in Old City last week. We've seen our number of hotel rooms in the downtown more than double, with occupancy rates up close to 80% at this point, with a significant number of new hotels under construction right now. The best part of all of this is that has driven this huge growth in fine dining restaurants.
I always tell people you cannot lose weight living or working in Center City. We started with 65 restaurants in 1992. We're up to 464 just in the core. That's not counting all the residential areas surrounding the city as a whole. We've seen a huge flourishing of sidewalk cafes. Absolutely none in 1995. We counted 431 last summer, growing every single summer we count. This area, what we call Greater Center City, the traditional CBD and the surrounding residential neighborhoods, is now the fastest growing residential area in the city. Our population of downtown is up 19% since 2000. 25% of all people who moved into the city since 2000 moved into the downtown. It is this vibrant, dense, mixed-use place that is attracting huge numbers of people, and that has driven even more housing within the downtown of very diverse types.
Traditional row houses, converted loft buildings, new apartments, new condominiums, a real diversity of housing type. We've added just under 21,000 units in the downtown, with rents and residential values steadily rising during that period of time. Just last year, 2,500 units of housing were completed. When you look at the downtown today, 40% of the downtown population is aged 20 to 34. I take solace as being an empty nester. There's at least enough of us here, so we don't feel so old all the time walking around the downtown. It's an incredibly young downtown, both in terms of college students and in the number of people who've moved in. We are having a significant number of those people stay within the city. 33,000 children born to Center City parents since 2000.
You will be run over by strollers on most blocks within the downtown, which is one of the really positive signs of vitality. We build children's parks, and they're overrun by children. We're looking at how to expand and add more capacity in our children's parks. That birth rate is continuing to rise. While there have been challenges with funding schools within the city, of all those parents with kids in the downtown, 70% of those kids are going to public, or 78% are going to public schools. You've got strong parental commitment, raising additional funds for 19 K to 8 schools. Just a remarkable sense of vitality in and around the downtown. University of Pennsylvania and Drexel are committed to public schools out here, you have strong numbers of families with children as well.
When you look at Center City in this area from Girard to Tasker River to River, 42% of the people who live here work within the downtown. Another 12% commute over here to University City. 62% of residents in the downtown get to work without a car. 39% walk. You've got this very dense live/work environment that we've created, and we're living essentially at 10 times the density of the surrounding suburban areas. What that has done is helped drive that restaurant boom, along with arts, entertainment, office workers, and tourists coming into the downtown. While Walnut Street was our traditional high-end retail street, West Chestnut Street has now gone through a revival, its rents are higher than West Walnut Street.
Significant recovery underway on East Chestnut Street and our former department store district, East Market Street, has major development that will be coming to completion this year, both residential, retail, and office on the 1,200 block. Across the street, Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust is working on the conversion of four blocks, the former Gallery site, into the Fashion District Philadelphia, which will be opening in 2018. A long-lagging retail area going through significant revitalization. Everywhere you look in Center City, we have national brands now coming into the city. We saw this morning's paper, too. We have even the pet people coming into town. When young people come here before they have kids, they have dogs, clearly, we've got a huge growth in the number of pet stores within the downtown.
More seriously, at this point, we have one of the highest concentrations of educated workers in the region. 59% of Center City residents have at least a college degree. Another 30% have an advanced degree. That has been really driving and attracting suburban firms. We have a continual number of suburban firms who are either taking traditional office space or coming into the huge array of new co-working spaces that are in the downtown. People are trying out the downtown, coming in to be near that huge, successful workforce. In the downtown, sorry about the little screw-up there, 40% of the downtown workforce is in office, 20% in eds and meds, 13% in public sector, 16% in leisure, hospitality, and retail. Out here, the concentration is very much eds and meds. What's happening out here is equally remarkable.
You have Drexel University with very ambitious plans to come east around 30th Street Station in partnership, as you know, with Brandywine Realty Trust around an innovation district that will create a gateway to University City right by 30th Street Station. Obviously, this building, an equal gateway to the University of Pennsylvania campus. Penn and FMC have obviously come here to the edge of University City. Center City growing west, not only with Comcast but with residential. Aramark is converting the 2401 Walnut Street building into their corporate headquarters. If you think about these two nodes, we are very close to tying them completely together into one continuous transit-oriented regional hub. Our counterpart, the University City District, has dramatically improved the public spaces already around 30th Street Station. We've partnered with them to link at a pedestrian level across the bridges that we have a continuous fabric.
Again, to come back to this graphic, 42% of all jobs in the city in Center City, 11% here, and just in the last five years, 37% of all people moved into the downtown, either into Center City or University City. Fast-growing from a residential point of view. We've added jobs for 11 of the 12 last years on an accelerating rate of job growth. Just to summarize, we're at a point with this highly successful, very walkable downtown with a strong diversity of uses. We are thriving with day and nighttime activities. As somebody who's been here for a long time, I still have that Tuesday night or Sunday night experience of walking out in the street and saying, "Who are all these people?" That is the vitality of the streets.
The activity with people is a dramatic transformation. We're incredibly well linked to the region with both highway and rail, 15 minutes from an international airport from the downtown, and extraordinarily well-positioned for growth. Right now in the downtown, we count 42 major projects, $5.4 billion worth of investment. Huge investment happening out here in University City as well. All of that you can find a lot of this data, we annually publish our State of Center City report that's on our website. That's a quick overview of, let's say, the last 25 or 30 years. I don't know if you want me to take questions or get off the stage and keep moving. Okay, let me open it to questions.
Hearing none.
Hearing none. All right.
Great.
Oh, here's one right here.
I don't know if it's a question for you or for Jerry.
Okay.
What is all this meaning in suburbs then? I think one of the real things that we're seeing is kind of a net regional growth trend. There's a nice balance between what's happening in some of the suburban counties, what's happening here in Downtown University City. I don't know, Paul, you have any more observations on that?
I think what we're seeing is a growth that is spinning. The universities, for example, are spinning off startups. We want to keep a lot of them here in the city, but they're equally going out to the burbs. We've got very strong pharmaceutical growth still happening out in the suburbs. We certainly don't see it as an either/or. Clearly from a residential point of view, this is huge preference for the city center, but lots of people in that 35-50 demographic with kids and cars and needing to get to soccer games. I think we're seeing a diversity of choice now with a lot of young people and empty nesters being in the center, but the suburbs still being really first-class places to live and work.
What are some of the challenges or growing pains involved in this great growth?
How long it took me to get out here because there's too much goddamn construction going on blocking the streets. That's the biggest complaint, is construction. One of our great strengths in Center City is our typical street is 60 feet building line to building line. We literally have 1-2 moving lanes, and you take one of those out for construction. That's a kind of piece of growing pain. I think people sometimes get upset about the pace of change. As you say, go off to New York if you want to see lots of construction. I think in general, there's tremendous amounts of enthusiasm about this. I don't think the simple issue is do our city permit departments have enough speed to keep up with what we're doing. I think people are delighted to see this growth that's going on.
Sure. Do the tax incentives stand in terms of either to tenants or to developers, and whether that's leading to above average supply?
Sure. I'll start. Jerry, I'll turn it to you. We have an across-the-board 10-year tax abatement, which is an as of right incentive available everywhere in the city for every type of development. That has really helped drive office, that's helped drive retail, that's driven residential development. We have special zones. Jerry, do you want to talk KOZs or how do you want to go?
Why don't you wrap up and I'll touch on that.
Okay. We have special zones, of which this is one where there are exemptions from both city and state taxes at a higher level. I think across the board, the 10-year abatement has really been critical to jump-starting. When we got it first passed in 1997, there was limited activity in the city. We count now for about a 52% share of the region's apartment construction within the city. There's been a real dramatic shift in new supply back within the city.
Other questions? Sure, in the back. One of the things that a lot of cities take benefit from is a waterway that kind of snakes its way through Chicago River-
Sure
Paris, whatever. You have the Schuylkill River here that really doesn't provide any sort of essence to the city. At least that's my opinion, not being from here. Is there a plan to integrate that more if you're trying to connect this area to Center City?
Sure. One thing you should do is look out the window across the river. We have been building, and Jerry is actually chair of the Schuylkill River Development Corporation board. We have been steadily building a trail on the Center City side, which is a bike trail, walking trail, dog walking trail, and you can go from here in Center City out to Valley Forge, 26 miles across just one traffic light. On one side of the river, we've got really good amenities emerging, and that will go all the way down to Bartram's Garden. We have inherited, as a lot of cities did, highways that were built. We've got the Schuylkill. Jerry can talk about some of the work he's doing right now to kind of build amenities along the edge.
We're certainly not the Seine at this point. There are the initial work we did on the bridges with Market Street. We are planning, there's renovation for Chestnut Street coming up. We're looking at the linkage between Center City and University City being improved. That's one of the lagging areas on the Delaware. We've probably come less far than we've come on the Schuylkill at this point.
Do you want to add anything? Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Anything else for Paul? Great.
Thanks very much for that, Paul. I appreciate it. Yeah, I guess it's the two Paul questions. One is on the Schuylkill. I think one of the things that Paul's map showed is an amazing evolution, just in the last 10 years, has been the push of Center City West and the push of University City East. One of the ribbons there is the Schuylkill River. Within the last 10 years, a nonprofit Schuylkill River Development Corporation was formed consisting of both institutional and holders, public officials, and citizen groups. We raised just shy of $40 million to create the trail that now has over 30,000 people a week using that trail, and it's become a real centerpiece for things ranging from the Penn Relays that were here just last week. The trail was full of people exercising and preparing for their events.
The NFL draft, it was packed. We're actually really happy. When we take a look at where that river can be 10 years from now, just with what we've done on the east side of the river. Even in Portland, when you look out the window, one of the city's highest-end residential projects, condo projects, was just completed and opened, and it's selling for over $1,200 a square foot. One of the primary advantages is they're on the river and are able to look right at the trail, which will ultimately go down to the Delaware River and connect down there. A lot of those pieces are in place. Michael, to your question on the tax benefit side, look, these Keystone Opportunity Zones were really designed to attract businesses that qualify, either through an investment or a job creation test, to come into the city.
As Jeff DeVuono will show you, we've had a lot of absorption in the city coming from companies who are outside the city. In the city, you have the 10-year tax abatement, which frankly helps as much residential development in the neighborhoods as it does in the downtown University City area. That's where you're seeing a tremendous amount of growth, these small residential developments taking place in the neighborhoods. Then these tax zones have been an attractive entry point. They don't address all of the issues that I think Philadelphia faces on that front, but they're a good entry. They remove a gating issue in terms of taxes that bring companies downtown. With that, to keep things moving along, we can certainly probe that a little bit more later. Let me turn it over to George Johnstone, who will talk about our operations.
Okay, great. Good morning, everybody. Jerry and George have painted a little bit of the picture on the transformation of the portfolio. Today, we sit here with a much simpler, higher-quality portfolio. When you look specifically, our CBD portfolio has grown to now 40% of revenues, but it's really the bottom of the screen that I think shows that we've exited these slow growth regions. Now down to 2.3% of our revenues coming out of New Jersey and Delaware. Once upon a time, in Brandywine, New Jersey was 31% of our revenues. We've completely exited both Richmond and California. Again, this kind of sets the stage for a lot of the operating trends that I'll now walk through. In terms of our operating performance, year-end occupancy has increased 620 basis points since 2012.
As you correlate that to our spec revenue, which we report each year, you can see the downtrend in the amount of spec revenue coming out of new leasing as we've increased occupancy. Back in 2012, 2013, $22, $23 million of spec revenue from new leasing, now down to $5.5 million in 2017. Our renewals, we're constantly in front of both near-term and mid-term renewals, and we've averaged close to about $20 million of spec revenue out of the renewal program. Our operating performance in terms of leasing spreads has also increased. We're at -6% back in 2012 on a cash basis. We're now looking at positive 6%. You see the trends along with GAAP rents as well, hitting a high water mark of almost 12% last year.
Our average lease term, again, one of the things that we're constantly working with our leasing teams on, averaged about seven years across all of the years presented. Of note, we've done some major transactions in the last two years with two companies: IBM down in Austin, Texas, and Comcast here in Philadelphia. Those companies have both, for their own reasons and some of ours, have opted to do five-year transactions. IBM did an as-is five-year deal. Absent those two companies, 2016 and 2017's metrics both increased one year to the average. We go from six to seven in 2016, and from seven to eight in 2017. Our capital performance, again, has averaged about $2.42 across the presented period. You can see that this year we're at $2.25. This is for revenue-maintaining transactions as reported.
Our capital as a percentage of rents has averaged about 10% across those presented years, with 9% both last year and this year. When you factor in all of our revenue-creating deals, the capital would go to about $3 per square foot on average across these presented years, a $0.60 increase, and our capital ratio to 12.6%. Again, both inside of the targeted 15%, 10%-15% range on capital spend for leasing capital. We've got a much higher quality and diverse tenant base. The left-hand side shows our largest tenants, IBM being the top and Comcast being number two. The portfolio highlights are really of note. This simpler platform, we've gone from almost 1,400 tenants back at the end of 2012, down to 869 tenants today. That average tenant size has increased.
We've gone from an average tenant size of 14,000 sq ft up to 17,000 sq ft. Our average remaining lease term back at the end of 2012 was approximately five years. The average remaining lease term of the portfolio today is almost six years. The average escalator built into the lease has improved 75 basis points. We've now got an average rent bump in the leases in place today of almost 3%. The stable operating platform, again, in terms of our rollover and early renewals, we're below 10% for the next five years in terms of reducing that forward rollover. The upcoming near-term roll, largest rollover is with Northrop Grumman down in D.C. Michael will add some additional color to that. They expire September 30th, 2018, and they represent 17% of that 2018 rollover.
Our tenant outreach really starts with our leasing teams, and it begins 12 to 24 months in advance. They're out in front of these larger tenants, knowing that their space plans could be changing, just to understand their needs, working with our property management teams to understand how they're utilizing the space. We go through security card counts to kind of monitor if tenants are increasing or decreasing. Those relationships have really led to us doing a large percentage of our deals on a direct basis. Over the past five years, 24% of our deals have been done on a direct basis, eliminating the external broker. That was at a high-water mark of 32% last year. Our in-place rents today are approximately 2% below market rents across the portfolio. We're looking at a lift in mark-to-market upon rollover.
Regionally, that breaks down here in Philadelphia CBD, about 3%-5% below market. Out in the Pennsylvania suburbs, which Jeff manages, 0%-2% below. 17%-19% below market in Austin, as we see just continued high volume of rent growth. In Metro D.C., we're about 6%-8% above market today, as we've got some long-term leases still burning off above today's market rent. It really starts with our best-in-class operating teams. A lot of those people are actually here with us today, and you may have met them earlier on some of the tours upstairs. Our internal leasing teams are just a great team from top to bottom, and it's really the well-seasoned leadership, averaging 24 years of service on our day-to-day leasing. Those relationships and their experience are really what are leading to a lot of those direct deals I just mentioned.
Our property management, tenant service, facilities management, engineering teams, they're really the face of the franchise. They're out in front of that customer base every day, making sure that everybody's got comfortable space meeting their needs. Their efforts have led us to a broad range of awards. TOBY Awards, which are the best buildings in the markets presented by BOMA. A number of NAIOP awards. The Energy Reduction Race was a building competition conducted here in Philadelphia, and our property at 2 Logan Square was the winner of that award. Our sustainability initiative's another key driver to what we do on a daily basis. Sustainability plays an important part here at Brandywine. We've reduced our electricity use by almost 60,000 megawatts portfolio-wide. That's the equivalent of taking 9,000 cars off the road for a year. We've procured 263,000 megawatts of electricity from wind.
About 40% of the electric that we've purchased has come from a green source. That's enough to power about 20,000 homes for a year. On the recycling front, we've diverted 274 tons of waste from the landfills through our recycling efforts. Water is another one where we've reduced consumption 15,000 gallons portfolio-wide, enough to fill about 23 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Those sustainability initiatives are also being recognized. GRESB awarded us with their Green Star award last year. Our ENERGY STAR program, we've got about 70% of our properties ENERGY STAR-labeled. BOMA 360 is another award that's given out to buildings based on operating performance. Our legal team, through their efforts, have gotten us the Green Lease Leader for our sustainability languages in the leases. How do we create value? One of that is our daily processes. We're constantly monitoring activity and deal flow in our markets.
We recently rolled out a View The Space, VTS, software, which was an upgrade to a formerly internal-built lease tracking pipeline. The leasing agents are in that on a daily basis. The pipeline today is about 1.8 million square feet. Tour activity during the first quarter was 750 prospects. That reporting on kind of a live basis allows the senior management team, the managing directors, to understand how deal flow is coming in and out of the portfolio. Our conversion of tours is averaging about 58%, leading to a proposal. From the proposal to the lease executed stage, we're converting about 35%. One of the other things is minimizing tenant and prospect decision time, and we feel that our internal management structure leads to that. The leasing teams, in-house construction and design teams, as well as our legal teams, allows for faster turnaround on plans and leases.
Property managers in managing operating expenses, we have an ongoing contract biddings process where we're bringing in new vendors to make sure that our operating expenses are as low as possible, a very active real estate appeal program, and the energy conservation that I talked about. The other point I want to make is on this controlling of capital. It really is an everyday thing. The leasing agents know it, the asset managers know it, the managing directors all hear about it. We're monitoring all of this process. The leasing agents basically have to come back for a second set of eyes on any deal that exceeds that 15% of total lease revenues for a new deal and 7% on a renewal.
Doesn't mean that we don't do the deal, it just means that another set of eyes and a conversation is had to say, "Should we be doing this deal? Should we put off that capital, or do we really need to make that deal because we may have lost one in another region earlier?" Creating a value, better assets, and better returns. If you go back and look at 2012, 217 properties, about 24 million square feet, we were generating 6% yield on those assets. Today, 97 properties, 15 million square feet, and we're generating 7.7% return. You can see the improvement in CBD Philadelphia at 31%. Out in the suburbs, again, largely driven by Radnor, but also Conshohocken and Plymouth Meeting, a 15.7% improvement. Even in Metro D.C., where we still are fighting that mark-to-market on rents, we've grown our yield on cost by 13.3%.
Over 100% growth in Austin, again, coming out of the Broadmoor campus with IBM. That's a 28.3% improvement since the last time we were in this room. I will turn it over to Mike Cooper.
Thank you, George. Hi, I'm Mike Cooper, managing director of the D.C. region. I've seen many of you as you've come through the D.C. market, and I thank you for stopping in. 31 years in the D.C. market and 21 years with Brandywine. I'm joined in D.C. by a terrific talent mix in management, leasing, construction, and investment. A mix of very seasoned personnel and a lot of youthful new energy. With all the media focus on D.C., our business climate gets lost in the shuffle. We have the number 1 most educated workforce in the country, measured by percentage of bachelor's degrees, and I believe advanced degrees as well. We've had very significant job growth with low unemployment in the last several years. We're building apartment units, about 10,000 a year, and they're being absorbed.
We have a lot of millennials moving into both the downtown and the inner suburbs, D.C. is on the rise again. Our markets are also on the rise. We had a little bit of a self-inflicted downturn with the Base Realignment and Closure Act, BRAC, and also sequestration. In the last three years, we've had positive absorption return to all three of our markets, Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. Our new administration, although a bit of a wild card, we believe will be good for defense, which is good for Virginia, definitely good for the lawyers, and good for government outsourcing as certain agencies turn more to privatization. Our economy is diversifying. We're not just a government town. In fact, the federal government share of gross regional product is moving from 39.8% in 2010 all the way down to 27% projected for 2020.
That is a huge shift to privatization in our market. D.C. historically does well in recessions, and whether you believe one is coming or not nationally, if it does, I think we will fare well. Our new construction is moderated. You do see a lot of cranes in D.C. Most of those are in things other than office. The new construction in office does require very high rental rates, which is good for our portfolio, gives us a lot of room to run up our rates. You see the employment trends on the left. As I mentioned, we've had a recovering from the downturn of 2009. We've been well above our run rate of 40,000 annually the last couple of years in terms of job growth, and we're expected to continue to be above that run rate through 2020.
You can see we've returned to the top 10 in job-producing markets, along with our friends here in Philadelphia. Our current unemployment is at 3.4%, one of the lowest in the nation. We are more than a government town, as shown by some of the new growth on this slide. I love this slide because it shows some of the different businesses that are coming on in D.C. You see Amazon Web Services, technology, Capital One, and Apple Federal Credit Union taking big expansions. Then Inova Healthcare, 1.2 million sq ft in their new Virginia campus for genetic medicine. Just want to talk a little bit about Brandywine's outperformance in Northern Virginia, historical occupancy rates over the past five years compared to the Tysons market, the Tollroad market, and Northern Virginia as a whole. Why have we done this, you ask?
The answer is we've invested in our properties. We have hustle and great execution by our regional teams. A quick look at our portfolio strategy. Since 2016, we've sold 1 million sq ft, nine buildings. This allows us to get our occupancy back where it should be into the low 90s, 90.8% forecast for the end of the year. We've been able to reinvest in our properties, our well-located properties. Our portfolio has a lot of embedded growth where we have transit-located properties. As these rail stations open, it's not just about the transit, it's about all the mixed use that comes along with transit. In terms of future growth, we focused on picking up some really good sub-market land positions. We targeted the fact that tenants want new space.
We had Jones Lang LaSalle and Cushman & Wakefield evaluate what percentage of tenants 100,000 sq ft and up have relocated over the last 5-7 years to new space. It's well over 50%, between 50% and 56%, depending on which brokerage house you believe. In the District of Columbia, that number is even higher at 72%. The other thing we're focusing on besides our development is opportunistic sales. Jerry mentioned culling our Maryland portfolio a bit. Of course, we're always on, always trolling for value-add acquisitions. Let me take you to a couple of case studies now to talk about our execution. At Dulles Corner out on the toll road near Dulles Airport, Northrop Grumman vacated a major position about 150,000 sq ft a couple of years ago. We took that as a great opportunity to reenergize this suburban portfolio.
It's five buildings, 875,000 sq ft. We went in and created some extraordinary outdoor collaboration spaces with shade sails, barbecue grills, outdoor Wi-Fi. We renovated lobbies, restrooms, added a fitness center, added a conference center. We went very big with these amenities because they service the entire park. Net result, 231,000 sq ft leased in the last two years to 18 different tenants. We sold out our pre-built spec suites in 30 days. We increased rental rates from mid-$20s to $30-plus, earning a return on our incremental capital of 21.8%. We did a similar thing in Maryland in our Bethesda sub-market. This is a 1970s building with a very dated facade. We had some tenant move-outs and rollovers. We went in and completely redid the ground plane and created a new focal point at the entry.
We redid the lobbies, the restrooms, brought in fitness, redid the elevators. Same result, 116,000 square feet leased to five tenants. Increased the rents from $34 to well to over $40 in our latest transactions, we're projecting a return on incremental capital there of 18.7%. We're getting ready to do it again on the toll road at Woodland Park in our Cooperative Way portfolio. We have two buildings, actually four buildings there. The two buildings, called Cooperative Way, will have outdoor collaboration areas. They already have a lot of the amenities we discussed before, but we will be updating those lobbies. Again, raising rental rates $3 a foot, projected return on an incremental capital of 21%. We do have a development site here.
We've kind of had it set aside for a number of years as the market recovered, we're seeing a tremendous amount of activity now in the toll road, tenant activity. We believe the time is right to pull this building out of the drawer, freshen it up. We're taking it through a redesign. It's 120,000 square feet. A really nice mid-size building, which will appeal to mid-size tenants who want toll road signage. In addition, we're taking a piece of the ground here and taking it through a rezoning in order to create a retail amenity for the park, which will be a big driver. This park sits directly between two of the transit stations that'll be opening up in 2020, two new Metrorail stations.
Moving on to our development projects, I'll try to hit 875,000 square feet of new development in about two minutes. This is 4040 Wilson in the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor. This arguably is the best site in the sub-market. It's a very unique situation where we originally had an office building design in its entirety for the site, we've now created a redesign of the building which allows for a mixed-use project similar to the one that we're in today, where we have apartments on the top and office in the bottom half. We've been a little slow out of the gate on this project just because the market has been definitely hurt by the BRAC and sequestration that I mentioned earlier. The recovery's underway in this corridor.
We've seen a tremendous pickup in our pre-lease prospects, we're working hard to see if we can get this building pre-leased. We did invest in the underground parking garage, that has been constructed, completed, and allows us to deliver this building in 18 months instead of the 24 that it would take otherwise. Moving into downtown, again, try to get the best site in the sub-market, we believe we have. This is in the NoMa sub-market, north of Massachusetts Avenue, up near Union Station. This is a market that's been traditionally government tenants, we're seeing a lot of movement now of young people into the new apartments that are being constructed, new hotels, new restaurants. A lot of exciting energy here. This is an 11-story building with an awesome penthouse, activated penthouse.
Really what I call the perfect floor plate, rectangular 23,000 square feet. Our plans are virtually complete, and we're starting the pre-lease marketing process. This is a joint venture with the JBG company. We did acquire this land for $75 per gross square foot, which is a very good, very low land basis for D.C. Last, but definitely not least, in the Capital Riverfront, another emerging sub-market of D.C. In this one and the one prior, I didn't mention earlier that we're able to deliver these buildings with a huge gap in rental rate compared to CBD properties, about a $20 per square foot gap. That's one of the appeals of these emerging markets, is the tenants can get brand-new product at a much lower price point, right around $55 gross. This building is in a really exciting position.
Again, best site in the sub-market, right on a busy corner, it's a business corner, but yet a block from the ballpark. We acquired this ground for $83 per gross square foot. Again, a very low land basis for D.C. With that said, I'll turn it over to my colleague, Bill Redd, to talk about Austin.
Good morning. I'm Bill Redd. I'm speaking about Austin with you today. I'm very fortunate to have two of our key people from Austin, Don Weekley in the back, and Blair Hunter, who I hope if you have questions about Austin, please grab me or one of those two. Probably them. I would start with them. Probably know a lot more about it than I do. Delighted to be here. I'm going to go through these really quickly. I know you've already been sitting through a number of these slides. When you start out in the 60s on your slides, you know you got to move quickly. In Austin, first thing, why are we in Austin? Why are we in Texas?
You probably know because you're paying attention to these sort of things anyway, but you can see that Texas has really been leading the way last five years or so in terms of population growth. Population growth drives job growth. Texas has done an unbelievable job at that. These are some of the accolades you can see. Texas is the second-largest economy in the United States, to California being number one, and you see Texas has led the way in terms of corporate relocations and expansions last five years. What does that mean for Austin? Austin has been driven by incredible population growth. From the 1880s to the day, in rough terms, and Don Weekley's laughing at me back there because we repeat this all the time, but essentially, every 20 years in Austin, the population doubles. Now that seems just unbelievable, but that's what essentially happened.
You can see that here. Today, we're sitting at, in 2017, about 2 million ft. The predictions by a number of analysts who are paying attention to this sort of thing is that by 2030, we're at 3 million, and 2040, 4 million. Obviously, population growth results in job growth. The top right-hand corner of this slide, you'll see for the last number of years, job growth has ranged between 3%-4% in Austin. That's 30,000 to 40,000 jobs a year. About 55,000 people moving there every year, or about 150 to 160 people moving there on average every day. Last year in Austin, which has been noted since the early 2000s, for the amount of new in-migration of new companies, last year set a record at the number of expansions and relocations to Austin, 131 companies. Think about that. That's one city, one year.
Across the bottom is something that I think you ought to take note of, too, because one of the criticisms sometimes about Texas is that, hey, Texas will never pass on any opportunity to build new space, thus they'll overshoot the market, and there'll be a lot of vacancy. In Austin, from 2014 to 2016, about 7 million feet has been delivered, taking us from the competitive set of about 39 million up to 46 million. During that same period of time, occupancy's gone from 91%-94%, and rental rates are up 23%. That's market-wide. That's a remarkable outcome. All this space, brand new space getting delivered, it's getting leased up, and the rest of the market continues to do very well.
I'm not going to dwell on this slide too much, but I urge you to look back at it when you have a moment if you're interested in Austin and what drives it. These are a number of drivers. Suffice it to say, extraordinary economy, extraordinary place to live and raise a family, and just an incredible environment in terms of health, fitness, and business environment. All these accolades, you could go on forever in Austin, and as I'm sure you've done. I would point out two of them. One on the far left-hand side says number seven. Doesn't seem like a very high number, but that's ranking the city of Austin globally.
JLL did an analysis of the top 30 cities in the world, Austin came in number seven, and in fact, was in the top 30 of those categories in the three major categories they looked at, which were momentum, future momentum, the ability to embrace change, and the ability to compete globally. The other one I would note is JLL in their most recent Not JLL, ULI in their most recent analysis, has determined that the best market to watch from a real estate perspective is also Austin. Okay. This is, I'm just going to try to, very high level, hit some snapshots of what we've done in terms of outperforming in Austin. First, from a leasing standpoint, which is really an unbelievable credit to our team. You can see outperformance on the left-hand side in leasing. Our average occupancy in the last five years has been 96%.
That is outperforming our market competitors by almost 700 basis. You look at what we have done in terms of rental rates, and you compare that to an earlier slide where I talked about how much rental rates have gone up. Our rental rates are up 41% over the last five years, since the last time we met here. In terms of development, two projects that I wanted to identify was The Park at Barton Creek and Encino Trace. You can see at the bottom in blue kind of how much value creation we think we have created in each of those two new developments. I want to spend just a second on our DRA partnership. You can see in 2013 column, we started out with six properties and a value of $336 million. At that time, we gained net proceeds to Brandywine of $271 million.
We acquired and developed during the interim period between 2013 and 2017. The total portfolio, at least in terms of what we have got in it, stands at about $640 million. Down below, you can see what that market value is today. We think it is somewhere between $763 million and $843 million. A projected value creation of $165 million or a 20-plus IRR. Incredible results. The future for Austin looks pretty bright for us as well. We have four projects I am going to cover very quickly, which are the land bank that Jerry spoke of earlier. This is the Garza tract that we have, and you will see down below, it is 35 acres, mixed use, retail, hospitality, multi-family, and office. You can see where we expect to be. We have got a $26 FAR number in there for our land.
We think it is at least worth $50 a foot. Four Points, again, you can see where our FAR is. This we can do, we think, up to 330,000 square feet of office and two buildings on 10 acres. You can see we have got $8.70 FAR on it. We think the value is about $45 an FAR foot. We are entertaining built-to-suit prospects for that now. Broadmoor Domain is worth a lot of time, and we can talk about it later if you guys would like to at lunch. Suffice it to say, we have 66 acres here. Currently, it has 1.1 million square feet on it, and IBM is the big tenant there. We can do up to 20 million feet there, but the plan is to do about 6 million.
If we do 6 million square feet, you can see with the numbers what happens to your FAR down at the bottom. We go from $1.22 an FAR foot up to $50 an FAR foot. $50, honestly, for that land is on the conservative side in terms of its value. We just have a huge amount of value locked in that project, which we are very bullish on. Finally, our 405 project downtown, which is our first entrée into the CBD. We are very bullish on this, have a wonderful opportunity. It will allow us to do 200,000 feet of space. Entertaining, obviously, don't want to start without a pre-lease, although I will say the 700,000 feet of new space that has just been delivered in downtown Austin, most of it is already spec, is delivering virtually leased. Another project has started coming out of the ground today.
The rumor is that that's fully leased, that's 320,000 feet. The downtown market's in great shape, doing very well. We have a film, which I think we can start. It'll give you a little bit of an idea of what we have planned for 405. I'll turn it over to Jeff DeVuono to cover Philadelphia.
Thank you, Bill. You don't have a pool as cool as we do up on 2018.
Sure.
Jeff DeVano. I oversee our leasing and property management operations here in Pennsylvania. We've got two topics we're going to talk about today, the opportunity of Philadelphia. Certainly, you heard from Paul Levy, similar to Austin, there's a lot of exciting things going on in the region. I'm going to touch on how that opportunity ties in with what we're seeing from our tenants' interest level, the power of the platform. Certainly, those of you familiar with Brandywine in this region, there's never been a portfolio of its kind in this market. As a result, we've been able to achieve an outperformance from our peer groups and the market in general. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about how we've been able to change the market a little bit and why we think we continue to have a bright future.
First, we'll step back and take a look at where we are in the cycle. JLL lists us in the rising phase. They think we have plenty of runway in the future, as do we, both in the city, the suburbs, more so in University City. Tying it into what we're seeing from our tenants. The issue and the noise that we hear from our tenants is always about talent. That's the way they can propel their company. As you saw from Paul Levy, we have that opportunity here. We have the third-largest increase in millennial population of the 10 largest cities. More importantly, as you saw earlier with Paul, it's an educated workforce.
About 30% carry bachelor's degrees. When you define that even further into Center City proper, Paul's figures vary slightly from us, about 59% versus 67%, which JLL reports, but still a very significant number. What we bring to that as well is the fact that we also have the third-largest GNP of any city. What we have is growth, about 7% over the last five years. Certainly, that's falling behind the national average of 9.9%, but given the size, it's still a very healthy number at 7%, and given the scale of the operation here, it's very significant. Bill, I saw your slides. You had 3 million people in 2030. We're already there. That's why more people are running in there to the city.
As Jerry mentioned earlier, we've had north of 1 million square feet of companies moving in from outside the area to the region in the last two years. It's about 25% of the overall activity in the city. We're very excited about this. To Michael's point earlier about the KOZ savings, very few of these companies actually migrated into taxes-free zones. They moved into Center City proper, University City, and throughout. Brandywine was able to participate in several of those transactions. FreedomPay, a customer of ours from the suburbs, Marcus & Millichap, WeWork, Lutron, but the largest transaction was Independence Blue Cross. As exciting as Center City is, the real excitement for us is University City. This slide has a lot of information. I'm just going to highlight a couple of features. One is 95% occupancy in its office market.
It's the highest occupancy in the city and has historically done so for the last several years. On the far right, you'll see that there's 76,000 jobs in University City today. Just as a point of reference, in 2005, when the doors opened up for Cira Centre, there were 50,000 jobs. The NIH grants that Paul mentioned in his slide, somewhere around $850 million in Philadelphia. It's the third-ranking city for receiving NIH grants. University City, in fact, gets almost $700 million of that and literally would be fourth or fifth ranking in the country as receiving NIH grants. That's going to provide a lot of opportunities for growth as companies create new products, create new vision, and take office space, hopefully. The population of University City is currently around 50,000 people.
When I moved here to Center City in Philadelphia in 1985, that was the population of the city today. As you look forward, it really does have a lot of potential. Somebody asked a question about the suburbs, how does that match out? As Paul indicated, we've had 35,000 people move into Center City since 2000. We've had 350,000 people move into the suburban markets. That really talks into the power of the platform. We think we're in a tremendous position to leverage that opportunity. We've got a great track record for outperformance. We think we'll continue to do that in the future. In the Radnor market, which is arguably the premier suburban market in the Philadelphia region, we're the dominant player.
Most of the office space, 1.7 million square feet out of 2 million square feet, we're currently 99% leased. We've had less than 3% vacancy over the last five years. Tremendous growth and a total investment basis of just north of $200 a foot, which as George has touched on, there's tremendous value there created since then. The power of the platform. In Conshohocken, the neighboring market to Radnor, we are not a significant player. We have less than 12% of that market, but we've always been able to outperform our peer group. We're 96% leased at this point. We basically have beat the market by 400 basis points on average, historically, and similar to Radnor, have a limited investment. Plymouth Meeting, similar to Radnor, we're the dominant player there, 850,000 square feet out of 1.2 million.
We're currently 93% leased. Our team has done a fantastic job there in outperforming the market historically, about 700 basis points versus our peer group. Again, a similar limited investment. The power of the platform in the city of Philadelphia is absolutely staggering. Everyone in this room today works for a company that if they had an office in the city of Philadelphia, it would be a trophy building. You hire your broker, they bring you around the market, what happens? Brandywine has seven of the 12 trophy buildings, and of the five we do not own, two are owned and occupied by Comcast. Literally, your brokerage representative could only show you three different buildings. That doesn't guarantee an outcome for us, but it certainly does influence our destiny, and we think our results over the last few years reflect that.
We're currently 97% leased. Our historical vacancy rate has only been about 4%. What's been fun about it is we've only had a $200 investment. We've actually created a lot of value there. Rare is it that a real estate company has the opportunity to influence a market. For years, this market had what was $0.50 rental increases per lease year. Brandywine went through a very strong effort to change everything from fixed rate to percentage bumps. The market has followed, and in the trophy buildings downtown, with the exception of two, 10 of them all prepare leases now on a triple net basis, not just plus electric. We've been able to influence the market and clearly create a lot of value. We'll always be a winner. We have this dominant portfolio. We're in the premier submarkets throughout the region.
We have the highest quality assets available. More importantly, we have tremendous relationships with the brokerage community. Our reputation is very clear. It's quality, integrity, creativity, dependability, but more importantly, speed. The best tool in our tool belt, there's a lot of things about being a public company that are a bit of a challenge, I think we would all say, but the unsecured debt model is an incredible platform for us. Over the years in Pennsylvania, we've done over 100 transactions exceeding 1 million square feet with companies who needed to change their business before their natural lease expiration. What I'm going to walk you through are a couple examples, and we're very proud of these stories. The team has done a phenomenal job. VWR is a company that occupied space in the suburbs.
They were in three different buildings, one of which was Brandywine's. They had actually signed a lease with a competing landlord for a project to be built out in the suburbs. They got nervous at one point about that landlord's ability to deliver. They went back out to the market. They had 19 days from the day they called us to exercise a lease termination right. Tell me true, the platform of Brandywine, the scale of it, the unsecured debt model, put us in an incredible position. I don't think any other company in this region would've been able to do that. In 17 days, we got a phone call from the broker, toured the space, did a space plan, priced it out, negotiated the terms, negotiated a lease, and executed it for 145,000 sq ft. EisnerAmper, an accounting firm, again, looking for talent.
They wanted to change their office space and use it as a recruitment tool. They were a subtenant in one of our buildings down at The Logan in 10,000 sq ft. They liked their experience with Brandywine, even through a subtenant relationship. We ended up negotiating a deal and signing a lease with them on a Friday for 30,000 sq ft in the suburbs and 10,000 sq ft in the city. Literally, over the weekend, the partners had a meeting. They decided they wanted to switch that and put their headquarters location in Center City, ultimately, The Logan. Just the unsecured debt model is incredible opportunity. Literally in one day, we just turned it into a 30,000-sq-ft lease in the suburbs to a 40,000-sq-ft lease in the city, complete reverse, and just a great outcome for Eisner and for Brandywine. Brand loyalty.
This is what you get for being a long-standing fixture in this market. Wilmington Finance, our team took a flyer on a small company at the time with 5,000 sq ft. They eventually grew into 71,000 sq ft. The CEO of that company sold that business. What did he do? Three years later, his non-compete expired. He opened up another business. Where'd he choose to locate that business but in the Brandywine portfolio. He opened up New Penn Financial, started off with 13,000 sq ft, grew it up to 42,000 sq ft, and now he's just started his third business, Spring EQ, which he's decided to locate in Center City in our Cira Centre. Who knows what this gentleman's gonna do, but he's been a tremendous customer of ours for a number of years. Brand loyalty, once again.
EHR was a tremendous story for us out in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. They went from 27,000 sq ft to almost 200,000 sq ft. That principal group sold that business for a tremendous amount of money. Once again, the theme is their non-compete expired. What did they do? They opened up another business this past year, small office in a Brandywine building, 8,000 sq ft today. Who knows what they're gonna be tomorrow. FreedomPay was literally a company that we had to relocate to accommodate the growth of EHR over time. We moved them from a location in Newtown Square to our Radnor portfolio. Their business was growing. They just decided to relocate in FMC Tower. Accolade is a tremendous story there as well. You underwrite management.
In the business plan, Accolade went from 2,000 sq ft to what is today 120,000 sq ft, and we've been told by their group that they want to open up a satellite office in Center City, Philadelphia, and they're going to look to Brandywine to accomplish that objective. The power of the platform. We've historically outperformed our peer groups by anywhere between 400 and 700 basis points. We mentioned earlier, we've been a market maker. We converted the terms that are done in this marketplace from fixed rent bumps to percentage increases, as well as a triple net structure, both of which create tremendous value over time for this region and our portfolio. This is an effort we went through, the landlord of choice for real estate companies in this region.
We made a conscious effort as an organization to get as many companies who were involved in the real estate business in our portfolio. We have CBRE from the real estate brokerage perspective. We have other owners, we have other investors, we have finance groups, construction companies, property management companies, engineering firms. That's just a small listing right there, and there's quite a few more. When their client base, their customer base, their employees, whoever they're interfacing with in this related industry, ask them what kind of car they drive, they can respond and say they drive a Brandywine. If the people who know the most about what's going on in this real estate community select us as a landlord, we can leverage that position. It's a very different story than it's been for 20 years.
A lot's changed both in the city and in the portfolio, and we really do think we're not finished yet and have tremendous opportunities. Thank you, and I believe we're going to talk to Tom Wirth now.
Thanks, Jeff. Good morning. Financial review. We want to talk on the strong balance sheet, continued improvement on leverage metrics, limited interest rate exposure, and then focus on earnings and cash flow. From 2012 to 2017, you can see net debt to EBITDA has gone from seven now it is three. Net debt to GAV down from 45 to 37. That's a combination of both growth in the EBITDA and income, but also showing that what we've used our proceeds for. As we sold properties, we've been paying down debt and trying to lower those leverage. Also, by the benefit of the interest rates, you can see, look at fixed charge ratios improved by 38%, debt service by 41%, and interest coverage by 32%. Again, that's a combination of interest rate improvement as well as the portfolio improvement. Looking at our debt, again, the theme is we're going to try to lower debt.
We've reduced debt by almost 18%, just under 20, by $443 million. Our borrowing costs have gone down to 4.48% today, an 11.4% reduction. Our balance sheet flexibility. As Jeff mentioned, we want to stay unsecured. We think it's the best way to move tenants around in our properties. We only have three properties right now that have mortgages. Those will be paid off when those mortgages come due, I think through 2021. We will be completely on an unencumbered balance sheet platform at that point. 100% of our wholly owned debt is fixed rate. We are using our line of credit right now, and we've paid off the preferreds and the bonds, but that will be switched to fixed rate when we go to I'll talk about that in a minute in terms of what we're doing with our financings.
Weighted average maturity of 5.7 years. I mentioned just under 4.5% is our weighted average interest rate. To date, since the end of the quarter, we have paid off the preferreds at 6.9%, and we paid off our $300 million of bonds at 5.7%. We used cash on hand and our line of credit to do both of those. If we look at the near-term opportunities for financing and interest rates. We paid off the bonds, preferred shares have been paid off. We're evaluating what to do with the 2018 bonds, which come due in the second quarter of next year. We're looking at a bank term loan, potentially a 3.25% range, to help finance what we've already paid off.
Whether we do a new bond issuance right now, I think we're between 4.25% and 4.5%, so use 4.375% in this scenario if we want to do a new issuance. Potential if we do the bank term loan as well as do the 10-year financing, we would drop our weighted average interest rate to just over 4%. We'd raise our weighted average maturity to 7.9 years, and we will be 100% fixed and have cash on the balance sheet again. Pro forma debt profile, if we do those transactions as we're looking at, is no maturities for 2017, 2018, and 2019. No refinance risk. The 2020s are the balloon payments on our mortgages, and we have those term loans that we'll have executed, as well as our seven-year term loan will also be coming due.
Next few years, there'll be very little to do in terms of refinance risk. As I mentioned earlier, look at the chart, we'll be 83% on a fixed rate, and we'll be fully fixed out on our no floating rate debt. Going to the balance sheet also looks at our capital projects. As you can see from this schedule how much we've been spending on our capital. As you know, with FMC, as well as most of our projects, they are done on-balance sheet. We tend not to use construction loans. We have not had to do our JVs with development. You can see that we started at $130 million, hit a high water mark of $350 million in 2015.
As you look going out, we basically will get down to some recurring CapEx and the finishing of some of the projects that are in place now that we've talked about, getting down to $90 million by 2019. Cash flow growth. One of the things that we've talked about is that we've sold a lot of properties. Right? $1.2 billion, I'm sorry, of property since 2012. Yet our cash EBITDA has only decreased from 2012 to 2017 by 3.7%. What we see going forward is a 12% growth in that cash EBITDA as we go into 2018. When we took a look at how we're going to do that and where that's coming from, a lot of it's already in place or being worked on.
You look at FMC, cash NOI will grow to $30.6 million in 2018. You'll see the other projects that we have ongoing, whether it be 1919 or some of our other projects, 933 First Avenue, which are in process to be finished. You can see the growth in the cash NOI in 2017 from $8.6 million going up to $52.5 million, and the GAAP NOI going from $30.5 million up to $57.5 million. A lot of built-in growth from all the work we've done on the projects to date. Another important fact when you look at sort of where our NAV is and how you look at our cap rate and our portfolios, FMC, by the fourth quarter of 2018, will be generating over 10% of our cash EBITDA. All right. With that, I'll turn it over to Paul.
Tom, thank you. Good morning, everybody. I'm Paul Commito. I'm going to talk about Brandywine growth drivers and specifically discuss examples of creating value through accretive development. First one is 1919 Market. This was an example of recycling a land position purchased back in 2011 at auction and converting it into a strong income-producing asset. This was a 50/50 JV with the LCOR/CalSTRS platform. Total project cost of $142 million. Brandywine equity was $28 million, 50% of which was a land contribution. Status is we finished the building, substantially completed it in the last quarter of 2016. It's operational. Well ahead of pro forma on lease-up, so we're at 94% leased. 8% over pro forma rent at $324 versus pro forma $301. Projected cash yield is 7%. Terminal value at a 5 cap is $195 million. That's $53 million over total project cost.
Frankly, 5 cap, there are several core properties that have traded sub 5 recently. Game plan here is the next 12-24 months, as Jerry talked about in terms of harvesting value, we'll either sell or recapitalize, lower our ownership interest, and pull cash out. FMC, this building. Philadelphia's first vertical neighborhood. Over 1 million gross sq ft, about 860,000 rentable sq ft. Total project cost, $400 million. Office has been operational, it's 96% leased. Hotel is, for the most part, about 80% of the keys operational. We're in the process of finishing up delivery on the flexible stay and apartments. Projected cash yield is 8.1%. Projected terminal value, $540 million. That's actually a 6 cap. At a 5.5 cap, it would be an additional $50 million in value, potentially close to $590 million. 933 First Avenue.
This is a great example of the power of the platform. We capitalized on the resurgent King of Prussia market. We had an existing tenant who was growing substantially, and we were able to accommodate that need. This is a single-tenant user, 12-year term, 100% leased. Total project cost of $26.8 million, which is below pro forma, and substantial completion end of this quarter, in June, next month. Projected cash yield is 10.5%, and terminal value projected $43 million at a 6.5 cap, approximately a $17 million in value created here. Metroplex. Jeff talked about this, the Plymouth sub-market. This is a very strong land position that we've had for a while. We're developing this into an innovative office campus. We've got a phenomenal design team, NBBJ, out of New York, and several other local people who are contributing greatly on this design.
Estimated project costs are $120 million. This is about a 300,000 sq ft building. We're in design development now, and we would go forward based upon pre-leasing of minimally 50%. Projected cash yield is 8%. Habitable Garage. We're going to be on top of Cira Green shortly, having lunch. This building is literally the building that we're going to be in shortly. There's really two parts to this. It's creating a really augmenting the tremendous environment that we've created in Philadelphia's first elevated park. It's 100 feet off grade. It's really augmenting this garage to create food uses and really activating Cira Green. The two parts are, we're going to be adding a fabulous cinema screen, food uses, beverage uses, as well as other rooftop activators on the green.
Along 30th Street, doing an 8,000 sq ft food hall with multiple vendors, very eclectic and diverse, eight to nine food vendors. Really what that'll do is it'll complete the neighborhood and really create additional value for Cira Centre South, both FMC Tower and Evo. The first phase, which will be Cira Green, will be completed at the end of this year. Next phase will be summer of 2018 for the food hall. This is the Piers at Penn's Landing, this is an example of monetizing an operating land position originally purchased for mixed-use development. Several piers along the Delaware River, a marina, restaurants, Dave & Buster's. We sold this to Durst for $21.4 million, closed in March of 2017. It's a bifurcated selling price.
$12 million will be paid at closing, and $9.4 million will be paid once the Dave & Buster's leases expire. 1.6% cash on cap rate, $15.9 million projected final gain on sale. Harrison West Lots at Oakland. This really was all about monetizing an operating land position and completing a sale of a non-core land parcel and finalizing the exit out of the Oakland sub-market. Two surface lots, just under an acre, sold for $13.75 million, which is an $8.9 million gain on sale. Thank you. Jerry?
Thanks, Paul. We hanging in there? We're just about done. As Paul mentioned, I'll do a quick wrap up. There should be plenty of time for Q&A once the mayor speaks and leaves everyone on Cira Green. What I wanted to do is just spend a couple of moments kind of summarizing all of these presentations. If you take a look at kind of our growth drivers, our balancing, our operating platform, I think we really do believe that a lot of the work we've done over the last five years really does position Brandywine to really start to accelerate our growth. Obviously, assuming market conditions, assuming all the right pieces are in place. Clear as we look at growth, it's really going to come primarily through our land holdings. To deliver our current pipeline on time, on budget, make sure that we meet our required returns.
We will be very disciplined going forward. Look, we've been in this business a long time. Brandywine's had a good footprint in all these markets. You can't be in this business without frankly making some missteps and misreading markets. One of the things we want to focus on going forward is learning from any mistakes that were made in the past in terms of moving our land inventory into a development pipeline. Clearly, as we look at that, major predicates are going to be maintaining our balance sheet on an improving leverage timeline. I'll touch on that in a few moments.
Making sure that when we have developments that we plan on starting, that not only do we have a large level of pre-leasing, but we also have a very healthy pipeline behind that to make sure that as we move through the development cycle for these projects, we know that by the time we open the doors, we'll either be pretty close to or on a direct path to being fully absorbed. As we look at our pipeline, looking forward over the next several years, we think we have an opportunity to move about three projects from land holdings into our development pipeline based upon the build-to-suits and some of the other activities we're looking at. As I mentioned, one of the things, and it really illustrates in some of Tom's numbers, we've done a pretty good job match funding our development pipeline with asset sales.
Certainly, that's what we look forward to doing over the next several years. We think that will put us on a path to both create arbitrage between assets being sold and our development yields, compress that line between NOI and cash flow. Take a look at an FMC. We have 10-15 year leases in place here. There's really very little capital we need to spend over that period of time. That is a great sweet spot for Brandywine to be in. Certainly, the match funding, and as I showed you on the land slide, we already have about $50 million of our current land bank either under contract or on the market for sale. Certainly, as we have in the past, we would really expect going forward to have a very aggressive plan in place to manage our land inventory.
Operational excellence, I think you heard from Bill, from Mike, from Jeff, from George. That's a key part of what drives our business. That's where most of our employees are focused. It's always wonderful to talk about the new development projects or the investment activity, but we know that what drives our business is the day in, day out leasing, property management, engineering, maintenance, brand building that our employees undertake every single day. We're fortunate enough now to be at the 95, 96 leasing range. Clearly, we want to stay at those levels and have upward pressure to move that forward. You can see in markets where we're in, like Austin or Philadelphia, we have a long track record of running 2%-3% frictional vacancies. Clearly, we want to try and move that 96 number up, but that's a great sweet spot for the company to be in.
Maintain a stable operating platform. Folks like George D. Johnstone working with Bill, Mike, Jeff, and their entire teams, they're always looking ahead. Always looking ahead to see where our exposure is from tenants, either from a credit exposure or from a rollover standpoint. Because we know what gives us the opportunity to grow our development platform is knowing there's a very stable operating base to support that timeline we're going through the development cycle. Maintaining that stable operating platform is a key growth driver for our organization. We're in a great spot. We have good same-store growth. We're forecasting over the next five years to average between 2%-5%. Obviously, a broad range. At midpoint, that's about 3.5%. Clearly, we're coming off some very good same-store growth numbers now. We expect that to continue.
Looking out, we think that's a very good range as you analyze Brandywine, both in and of ourselves, but also compared to our peer set. George D. Johnstone touched on an important point. Even if you take a look at our entire capital spend, revenue creating and maintaining, we're in that 10%-15% bandwidth. Big driver there is our ability to get our lease transactions done in-house. Almost a third of our deals are done with our in-house leasing teams. That's a huge value driver for us. Certainly, we would expect to exit completely New Jersey, which is now below 3% of rents, Delaware, and suburban Maryland in two years, to get back to that 5% target for prime suburban markets. Balance sheet, very straightforward, very much on the path. We're on the rails. As we're growing our EBITDA, we are de-leveraging.
As we're looking at doing development, we're looking at those transitional strategies through asset recycling to maintain our leverage levels. We will run this company below six times EBITDA in the next couple of years. That's our path. That's what we talk about with our board. That's a review with all of our management team. That is a governing predicate of where we are. We want to have the capital capacity to take advantage of opportunities no matter where the market is. Certainly, that'll be done by our operating activities, but also by taking a look at our joint venture investments. I think as George and Paul touched on, we've got tremendous embedded value in some of these JVs, and our goal is to harvest that over the next couple of years.
It all comes down to this last circle here, which is we're looking to grow our cash flow. That's what drives this business. That's what drives value. That's what people look at long term in terms of underwriting investor value. We have done a very good job and hope to continue to do an excellent job going forward of growing our cash flow because of both our investment and our operating strategies. Thank you very much. I know we threw a lot at you. There'll be plenty of room for Q&A. We do have the mayor of Philadelphia coming in sometime between 12:30 and 1:00. We'll work the Q&A around his availability and when he comes and he goes. We're going to leave now, head downstairs to the lobby, and then take the elevators up to the green roof, and that's where we'll have lunch.
Mayor will speak. We have stands set up there that identify some of our other development pipeline projects. They're staffed by some of our top leasing and development people. Please take a moment to chat with them, and we'll see you over on the green roof. Thank you very much.