Douglas Emmett, Inc. (DEI)
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Earnings Call: Q1 2021

May 5, 2021

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Douglas Emmett's quarterly earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, you will receive instructions for participating in the question and answer session. I will now turn the conference over to Stuart McElhinney, Vice President of Investor Relations for Douglas Emmett.

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

Thank you. Joining us today on the call are Jordan Kaplan, our President and CEO, Kevin Crummy, our CIO, and Peter Seymour, our CFO. This call is being webcast live from our website and will be available for replay during the next 90 days. You can also find our earnings package at the investor relations section of our website. You can find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures discussed during today's call in the earnings package. During the course of this call, we will make forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs of, assumptions made by, and information currently available to us. Our actual results will be affected by known and unknown risks, trends, uncertainties, and factors that are beyond our control or ability to predict. Although we believe that our assumptions are reasonable, they are not guarantees of future performance, and some will prove to be incorrect.

Therefore, our actual future results can be expected to differ from our expectations, and those differences may be material. For a more detailed description of some potential risks, please refer to our SEC filings, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website. When we reach the question and answer portion, in consideration of others, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. I will now turn the call over to Jordan.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. In Los Angeles, we have seen a remarkable shift in the prevalence of COVID over the last six weeks. During the first quarter, L.A. county was reporting three times the infection rate of any other U.S. county. By early April, L.A. county was reporting the lowest infection rate among the nation's 10 largest counties. On April 5th, L.A. county permitted non-essential workers to return to their offices, and on April 6th, Governor Newsom announced plans to fully reopen California by June 15th. Our first quarter results still reflect the impact of the pandemic. Our collections during the quarter continued to improve, so that during the four quarters affected by the pandemic, our aggregate rent collections totaled 93.1%, including 96% of our residential rent, 96% of our office rent, and 44% of our retail rent.

We executed more workout agreements with minimal rent forgiveness. Less than $100,000 in the first quarter, mostly for retail tenants. The big catalyst for collections will come once the eviction moratoriums expire, which we believe will accompany the full reopening in June. Some medium and larger tenants are starting to make leasing decisions. In the first quarter, we signed leases totaling 750,000 sq ft. Given our seasonally larger expirations, this leasing was not enough to create positive absorption. As we have said, we expect to lose occupancy during the first half of the year. I feel confident and optimistic as the pandemic subsides. Our operations and our markets are uniquely positioned considering our supply constraints, industries driving demand, and tenant build-outs that already accommodate a COVID-sensitive return to work.

Our operating platform, which is designed for the small tenants that are leading office reoccupancy, is the largest and most effective in our markets. Our development and repositioning activities are progressing nicely, and our balance sheet is strong. We are pursuing refinancing opportunities that may even further lower our cost of debt and working on new acquisitions as they emerge. Last quarter, we discussed our now completely digitized leasing experience. This quarter, Kevin will describe the progress we have made on sustainability. With that, I will turn the call over to Kevin.

Kevin Crummy
CIO, Douglas Emmett

Thanks, Jordan. Good morning, everyone. We remain very pleased with the progress of our two multifamily development projects. At 1132 Bishop, our downtown Honolulu office to residential conversion, we have now leased 100% of the 174 total units we've delivered, validating the demand for high-quality rental housing in the heart of Honolulu. Our Brentwood high-rise apartment construction has topped off at 34 storeys. Once finished, our 376 units will offer stunning ocean views in the first new high-rise residential tower west of the 405 freeway in more than 40 years. We plan to begin pre-leasing the units after the summer and remain on schedule for occupancy in early 2022. Property transactions in our markets remain slow, with potential sellers still in a watch and wait mode. We're hopeful that the signs of recovery and planned reopening will bring some deferred sales to the market.

Our investment in sustainable systems and technology at our properties continues to produce outstanding results. At year-end, more than 88% of our eligible office space had qualified for ENERGY STAR certification. During 2020, we took advantage of lower tenant attendance at our properties to aggressively accelerate our LED lighting retrofit program. These efforts will generate annual energy savings of 3.3 million kW h per year.

You can find more information about our environmental performance, as well as our social and governance efforts in our recently published 2020 ESG report on our website. I will now turn the call over to Stuart.

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. In Q1, we signed 199 office leases covering 751,000 sq ft , including 204,000 sq ft of new leases and 547,000 sq ft of renewal leases. Our leasing in recent quarters has been led by our small tenants. We saw some activity during the first quarter from a few medium and larger tenants. This increased the average size of the leases we signed last quarter to 3,800 sq ft from 3,100 sq ft in the fourth quarter. It is still below our 5,600 sq ft portfolio average. As a result of the seasonally high lease expirations during the first half of this year and lower recent leasing activity, our office lease percentage declined 86 basis points to 87.7%. Our leasing spreads during the first quarter were - 9.1% for cash and - 0.3% for straight line.

However, we have mitigated the impact to our net effective rents by lowering our leasing costs 10% from Q4, as tenants remain willing to trade tenant improvements for competitive office rents. The lease rate for our multifamily communities has fully recovered at 99.6%. With that, I'll turn the call over to Peter to discuss our results.

Peter Seymour
CFO, Douglas Emmett

Thanks, Stuart. Good morning, everyone. Our first quarter results reflected the continuing impacts from the pandemic. Compared to the first quarter of 2020, which was largely unaffected by the pandemic, FFO was down 19.6% to $0.44 per share. AFFO declined 21% to $78.3 million, and same property cash NOI declined by 16.8%. When we reported our results last quarter, we noted that our FFO per share included a net $0.04 gain from insurance offset by advocacy spending. Excluding this $0.04, our first quarter FFO per share improved by $0.02 per share, primarily from better collections and lower expenses. At only 4.4% of revenues, our G&A for the first quarter remains well below that of our benchmark group. Turning to guidance, we expect second quarter FFO per share to be between $0.43 and $0.45. This reflects our belief that occupancy will continue to decline.

We expect significant improvements in collections and parking revenue once the economy opens up and local moratoriums expire. As usual, this guidance does not assume the impact of future acquisitions, dispositions, or financings. I will now turn the call over to the operator so we can take your questions.

Operator

Our first question comes from Steve Sakwa with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Steve Sakwa
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Thanks. Good morning. Jordan, or maybe whoever wants to take it on leasing. Can you maybe just talk a little bit about the pipeline? I realize given the smaller nature of your tenants, your pipeline may not be as visible as some of your peers that are dealing with larger tenants. Just sort of curious, what's kind of in the hopper today, and as you look out one to two quarters, what's giving you the confidence to think that occupancy may bottom after Q2?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

What's giving us the confidence is the amount of leasing that's getting done now in the-- I was really happy about the 750,000 ft. I know we had a little bit of negative absorption, but the work that was done, the hard work that was done to kind of dig what we shortened the name of to digitized our leasing experience and all of the work that was done around that, and the amount of flow we're now able to push and generate and speed up. I know I keep reiterating it on every call, as things open, I don't think you're going to see the full power of how this system has shifted itself until things really start rolling open.

Because what we're seeing already against these horrific pandemic shut things down, waiting for the economy to open headwinds is just so impressive in numbers of deals and total square footage of deals and all the rest of it. As we look forward, you still face pandemic style move-outs or people that are calling it quits or whatever the case may be. At the same time, you're seeing this very strong trend of returning leasing deal flow. Stuart gave you some good info when we tracked square footage of deals compared to our typical square footage. Then you know we were much smaller if you go back a quarter, but now even the average size is getting larger. The number of deals still in that 200 range, which is very strong. Then now up to 750,000 ft in terms of volume.

You go, okay, all that's going in a very good direction. I will say. I'd like to say as expected, as hoped, as expected, all of those words together, but that's what's giving me the confidence.

Steve Sakwa
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Okay. Then you sort of mentioned the executive orders in L.A. opening, I guess, June 15th. Can you just remind us kind of what the dollar size is of the bucket of tenants that are not currently paying or whether they're retail tenants or some office tenants that are not paying but are maybe in current occupancy. How large is that bucket in dollar terms, I guess what would be your expectations of when that may start to flow back into the P&L?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Well, we've told you that we're making deals, right? We said it's in the range of 15%. Each quarter, the same guys don't pay, but also we make deals. The number is running in the $60 million-$70 million range of what's out there that we still want to get that we've written off, right? You go, that should be growing much faster if everyone was just not paying, but we weren't making deals with people that had not been paying in the past. We are making deals. Depending on when you catch us in the quarter, depending on the time during the month and wherever you are, it seems to be running in that range, but we've stopped growing that number. Actually, we stopped growing that number last quarter. That's also a good kind of directional trend sign on all of that.

Steve Sakwa
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Great. Thanks, Jordan.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

All right.

Operator

The next question comes from Manny Korchman with Citi. Please go ahead.

Manny Korchman
Analyst, Citi

Hey.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Hi, Manny.

Manny Korchman
Analyst, Citi

[inaudible], can you remind us or help us think about how long it would take once sort of the small tenants, maybe the moratoriums burn off, small tenants decide they do want space? What's sort of the timing from them going onto your digital platform or calling you to sort of getting into that space and becoming cash flowing?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Yeah, Manny. What we've seen on average is that.

Manny Korchman
Analyst, Citi

Michael.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Oh, is that Michael?

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

No, that's Manny.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

On average, from the time we sign an LOI with a tenant until they're moved into our space is on average for us about four months. It's very quick relative to probably the larger folks that our peers are talking to.

Manny Korchman
Analyst, Citi

Right. Then, just has there been any activity that you can share on the space that's up for sublease within your portfolio?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

I mean, we haven't seen a material uptick in sublease space in our own portfolio that we're tracking. I know the sublease space is up generally in the market pretty materially. What we've seen in those reports is that it's generally concentrated in the larger tenant space, kind of the tech and media type style space, larger footprint. We haven't seen a material impact.

Manny Korchman
Analyst, Citi

I could be wrong, but I thought there was a couple news reports about some specific spaces in that sort of medium-sized space that your tenants had put up for sublease.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Yeah. I certainly think we've got tenants listing their space for sublease. I don't think it's materially overall.

Peter Seymour
CFO, Douglas Emmett

Yeah. I am actually always surprised to see a broker listing a space that's in our building that's a sublease deal because obviously I get all of them. I don't think there's a ton of it compared to how much we have, but what's most important is I don't think there's any meaningful competition being created by that sublease space against the direct leasing that we're doing.

Manny Korchman
Analyst, Citi

Right. Thanks, everyone.

Operator

The next question comes from Frank Lee with BMO. Please go ahead.

Frank Lee
Analyst, BMO

Hi. Morning, everyone. Can you talk a bit about what you're seeing in Century City and Beverly Hills? It appears those two sub-markets experienced the largest sequential decline in terms of the lease percentage during the quarter. Thanks.

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

Yeah, Frank. When you look across all our sub-markets, we had some that went up a little bit this quarter, most went down. I think that's kind of been the case. We've seen kind of a downward trajectory in occupancy throughout the pandemic. We haven't seen a read-through specifically to any sub-markets where they're acting a trend that we noticed or something different that would be worthy to point out to you guys between the sub-markets. There's going to be noise from quarter to quarter. Like we said, we're still expecting some declines overall in Q2. Nothing I would point you to in those specific sub-markets that we're seeing.

Frank Lee
Analyst, BMO

Okay. Just a follow-up on the average lease size being modestly higher in the quarter. Are you starting to see any tenants taking more space now that rents have come down a bit, or even tenants making floor plan changes where there's a higher square footage allocation per employee?

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

I think on the tenants taking more space, every quarter we look at tenants expanding, tenants contracting, and obviously for a long time, we had our expansions kind of outpacing our contractions. Tenants are always kind of moving around, and their space changes are shifting. But I haven't seen a material uptick in expansions that I would point you to in Q1 in the numbers. It seemed pretty consistent with what we've seen historically. Your second question about space needs changing, I think the great thing about our portfolio and the way our space is already built out, and we've talked a lot about this over the recent quarters, but we think on average, our tenants are already built out to 200+ ft per person. If you think about a typical space that's 2,600 sq ft

It's a couple of window line offices, it's a couple of workstations, kitchen, conference room. Everybody's pretty well-distanced. We haven't had to make a material shift in how we plan our spec suites, for example, and those have been leasing at really a tremendous pace throughout. That's really been a strong point for us throughout the pandemic, those ready-to-move-in spec suites that we build. We haven't had to shift that. I don't think we've seen tenants really changing that. They're pretty well set up, the way they've been doing it.

Frank Lee
Analyst, BMO

Okay, thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from Jamie Feldman with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

Great. Thank you. As your leasing pipeline starts to pick up, any kind of read-throughs for types of sectors or types of tenants that are either more aggressive than you thought coming back or maybe less aggressive, and maybe shifting more towards a longer-term work from home strategy? Just wondering what the data's telling you.

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

We have that great diverse pie chart in the supplemental of our tenants and all the industries driving demand here, and it continues to be pretty broad-based demand. We haven't seen any trends from industries or sectors that have shifted dramatically.

Kevin Crummy
CIO, Douglas Emmett

We pointed out the only trend we've seen is in size, right?

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

Yeah.

Kevin Crummy
CIO, Douglas Emmett

It's been the smaller guys coming in earlier than the larger guys. It's not in industry, it's not in market.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

Okay. They're more eager to get out of the house, I guess.

Kevin Crummy
CIO, Douglas Emmett

I suppose so, yeah.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

I guess just shifting gears to the investment sales market. A, can you talk about anything new you guys are looking at or interested in? B, just what's the market overall feel like? Are you seeing a pickup or any changes in how people are underwriting or willing to take risk?

Kevin Crummy
CIO, Douglas Emmett

The market is still fairly slow. Now that things have opened up, I'm hopeful that people are going to start bringing things back to market as people get a little bit more certainty and optimistic on the overall market. It's been abysmally slow in our markets, and there just hasn't been a lot. We're underwriting everything that's out there, but there hasn't been a lot that is super appealing.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

Is there any change in tone from either the brokers or competitors in terms of what people are willing to look at and how comfortable they are underwriting rents or occupancies?

Kevin Crummy
CIO, Douglas Emmett

Look, I think that people are bullish on L.A. long term and the industries that we've got here and the supply constraints in our markets. I think that when something does get offered, it's going to be a very competitive offering. I just think that we're easier to underwrite a recovery than some of the other major markets out there that are more bigger buildings, more vertical, different transportation, et cetera. When it comes, I'm anticipating that pricing is going to be fairly aggressive.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

Okay. Then do you have an appetite to try new sub-markets that you're not in right now as we head into a recovery?

Kevin Crummy
CIO, Douglas Emmett

We're always looking at everything in our markets, and in markets that we're not in, we're tracking it. I think that between the development platform and the repositionings that we've got going, that we're deploying a fair amount of capital. When things come out in our market, I think that the opportunities there are going to be more compelling and easier to fold into the portfolio than necessarily branching out to other sub-markets. We continue to underwrite them, and if something really interesting comes up, we'll definitely underwrite it.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from Alexander Goldfarb with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Alexander Goldfarb
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Hey, good morning out there. Want to go back to Steve's initial question, I'm going to ask the standard sell-side two-parter. Jordan, the rents that you guys are still not being paid and you're not accruing from a GAAP perspective. Last quarter, you said it was $6 million a month. One, just want to confirm that $6 million is still the number. Two, given the propensity for these moratoriums to get just sort of extended almost indefinitely, what is the local scuttle out in California on whether or not Newsom will stick to the June 30 extension, or given his recall campaign, is apt to punt it and extend it like they did here in New York?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

I know New York extended to, I think, August, Of course, they were expiring this May, right? They had to face it. I'm not sure. By June, I think it'll be quite ingenuine to extend it, That doesn't mean I have any particular insight into what they're actually going to do. In terms of the rent, as we were getting into the pandemic, you may or may not remember, it was actually over $7 million a month.

We started putting pressure on people. It calmed down to $6 million a month, and it was really jumping around between $6 million, $6.2 million, $6.5 million. I remember watching that. As we started making deals and the months stretched out, now the numbers come.

Alexander Goldfarb
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Come down.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

come down pretty substantially. If you count the pandemic, when people stopped paying in April, and you go, here we are 12 months later, and I gave you a number, I think it's $60-something million. You go, well, obviously that's well below $6 million a month. That number you would think is just going to keep shrinking as we make deals, as people start paying again and coming back, as people start settling up. We ought to be able to keep shrinking that number, and it has been shrinking. Right? It's now down in the $5 million range.

Alexander Goldfarb
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Okay. Just confirming, you're still not, from a GAAP FFO perspective, you're not booking the accrued rents. You're only booking basically what you receive on a cash basis, correct?

Peter Seymour
CFO, Douglas Emmett

It's Peter. Everybody that we moved to a cash basis, the cash comes in, we book it. We don't book it other than that.

Alexander Goldfarb
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Great. Okay, this is upside to the numbers. That's the point. The second question is, on the CapEx, normally what we see in other markets is, in sort of soft leasing or soft market, concessions rise. Here you had your leasing CapEx decline. Is it basically a one for one because a lot of what you do are pre-built suites, therefore it's effectively a percentage of, or do you see that there's going to be pressure from tenants and therefore you're going to have to increase your leasing CapEx?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

I would say our leasing CapEx has meaningfully gone down. The math of the question would be rents down and leasing CapEx causing net effective to be better than just what the rents are down by. It's improving the situation, not that bad for it. Right now, just like you'd think, the market and everybody starts losing occupancy, that starts impacting rents. As that impacts rents, our rent base rate impacted, our base rate plus the leasing CapEx. The leasing CapEx has shrunk in the face of the declining rents. Our net effectives are actually better than the reductions in just rents. When you look at some of the stats we give you of roll-down and whatnot, when you start looking at net effectives, you go, well, it looks like things are actually not that bad.

Now, I'm not saying not down, but I'm saying better than they look of just looking at roll-downs.

Alexander Goldfarb
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Basically, Jordan, you don't expect concessions to suddenly rise absent rents rising. You view the two as moving in sort of lockstep. You don't think there's going to be pressure, competition for tenants where you're going to have to increase CapEx before the rents rise.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Okay. Just to be narrowly accurate, you have commissions and TIs. You've been tracking what's been happening. We digitized our platform. We have some certain percent, and that's maybe not as much market-driven. When you go over to the TI side of all of that, what I'm saying to you is our TIs per foot are coming down. Now, why are they coming down? One reason is we just rolled through, and we have a ton of space that generally works, and it's built out to the right size, and tenants want it. Even when the guy does want something, it's paint, carpet, moving walls, and that takes time to happen.

If you think all the way back to the Blackstone portfolio, buying millions of sq ft, it takes a long time for us to roll through and get that space more standardized so that the CapEx that we're spending is not as high. That's one thing. Another thing is renewals are very much saying, we just want to renew and keep going. I told you guys about that a couple of quarters ago. The last thing is, we're doing deals with smaller tenants, and we all know there's less CapEx associated with small tenants. When you do big multi-floor tenants, they come in with big demands, and just the reality is the net effective on large tenants is not as good as the net effective on small tenants.

That's mostly because of the very demanding CapEx of tearing everything out and redoing it when you're a full-floor tenant. So for all those reasons, probably, and the fact that during the pandemic, we happen to be built out in ways that are already extremely user-friendly to someone that just wants to return to work. We're just seeing our TIs go down.

Alexander Goldfarb
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Okay. Thank you.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

All right.

Operator

Our next question comes from Rich Anderson with SMBC. Please go ahead.

Rich Anderson
Analyst, SMBC

Thanks. Good morning out there.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Hi, Rich.

Rich Anderson
Analyst, SMBC

Jordan, can you talk a little bit about, or maybe bookend what making deals means? What I mean by that is, are you just kind of deferring rent for a short period of time, or is anyone coming back to you and saying, "Look, we'll sign something early. We don't renew until next year, but we'll do it early at a depressed rent, and you could keep us for four or five years at that level." Is any of that happening anywhere, or is that not the right way to color it?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Most of what I'm hearing is extensions, spreading what's due out, combination deals. That's most of what I'm hearing. Believe me, just like 31 flavors, but most of what I'm hearing is extending leases and stretching out what's owed now, as opposed to being bonked on the head with it when the moratorium ends.

Rich Anderson
Analyst, SMBC

Okay. Prior to all this, you had a nice little redevelopment business, as mentioned about outlaying capital in this market. You're doing something like 30% returns on incremental dollars. I think last quarter you said you're talking about ramping that business back up. What's the pipeline there, and have you started to ramp that incremental business up?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Yes. We actually returned Well, I guess we returned on paper more than two quarters ago. We returned physically doing more last quarter. We have four projects now back in the pipeline.

Rich Anderson
Analyst, SMBC

Is it similar in terms of incremental return?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Yeah. There's a reskinning of the building like we did at 1801. There's all kinds of stuff going on. Yeah. Unfortunately, fortunately, whatever. If you look at the last projects we did, the numbers were spectacular, and by the way, in retrospect, panned out spectacular, right? We looked at how rents changed, how leasing changed, all of that. It's going to be harder to do during pandemic market with all the external noise against rents, harder to compare and whatnot. It was such a successful program, and we're optimistic to where things are coming to turning, and we don't want to be putting our shoes on when the gun fires, everyone starts racing. We want to be ready and fire off the line.

We said this was just too successful, and we believe the market's going to recover in a strong way, and so we're back at it. We put four projects in, and we're doing them.

Rich Anderson
Analyst, SMBC

Okay, awesome. Thanks.

Operator

The next question comes from Craig Mailman with KeyBanc. Please go ahead.

Craig Mailman
Analyst, KeyBanc

Hey, everyone. Could you guys maybe touch on the refinancing opportunities? It looks like you have some expirations here, about $600+ million that probably makes sense to get to. Is there any cost associated with the swaps and getting rid of those? Where do you think you guys would price, and or what's the most interesting term at this point from a pricing perspective?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

First of all, of course, you're correct. Great time to look at refinancing. We are looking and fully working on it. We have a goal, and I think I had it in. It was in one of ours. It might've been Kevin's. I thought I said it, that we have a goal. We are looking at refinancing. Our average cost of debt right now is just a hair under three, like 2.99%, 2.98%, something like that. I'd like to see that number come down, and I think we have an opportunity to do that. You're naming some. There's maybe even be more than that. We have very flexible debt. A typical loan for us is a seven-year loan. We swap five years. I don't know why we would go off that program.

Super aggressively Michelle Aronson, team world, and all the people over there are working on that.

Craig Mailman
Analyst, KeyBanc

What do you think would be anticipated timing if you guys kind of pull the trigger?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

What I'd like to do is wait and be able to announce, and then you'll have the stats of an actual deal. I'm just going to wait for that because I don't want to sour what we have going on out there with that announcement aware of what it needs to be. Let's let it play out. Obviously, you know I wouldn't be squawking about refinancing if I thought it was going to stay at 30%. You know we're headed down. Let's see how much improvement her and her team can get out of the program as, of course, rates have Certainly, you can look at five-year swaps, see where that is, and then what can we do with spreads, and then combine those and see how much can we improve our cost of debt and how fast can we move to take advantage of that.

Craig Mailman
Analyst, KeyBanc

All right. That's helpful. Just one other one. Brentwood resi development's coming on in 2022. What's happened to rents for that type of product in L.A., and do you still feel like you're in a good spot from an underwriting perspective?

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Matter of fact, I know I say this all the time with the office leasing portfolio where people go, "Where do you think rents are?" I go, "Don't worry about rents. It's all about occupancy. Rents follow occupancy, and we got to get occupancy up, and then we can push rents." As you watched us lease up the apartment portfolio, which we're now certainly at or above what you would call fully occupied, now we're seeing rents move. We're seeing rents start moving back up again. That's great. If you're more narrowly asking the question, in the higher-end market of the product that we're putting in Brentwood right now, we don't have any reason to believe that that's not going to be equivalently or more successful than we expected going into the pandemic.

Of course, we've been giving you some good feedback on what's happening in Honolulu with the project we did, and that's in leasing right now. We've leased 174 units. We have really hard stats on that, and we know that would have been called very successful, not with the pandemic. Almost stunning with the fact that the thing's still under construction and the pandemic.

Craig Mailman
Analyst, KeyBanc

Great. That's helpful. Thank you.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

All right.

Operator

The next question comes from Dave Rodgers with Baird. Please go ahead.

Dave Rodgers
Analyst, Baird

Yeah, good morning out there. Jordan, maybe you addressed it a little bit with your redevelopment comment, I guess I was curious in terms of flight to quality. We hear it pretty much across the country as tenants come back looking for better quality space. Curious if outside of the leasing CapEx bucket, tenants are asking for better air handling, better air movement, those types of things, just within the portfolio and any movement you're seeing within existing sub-markets within the Valley versus the Westside in terms of flight to quality.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Well, okay. We look at acquisitions, and we look at our existing portfolio. When we see something in the bottom quartile, we go, "How do we move it to the top quartile?" I want to buy into the top quartile of quality. When we look at our buildings, we go, "That's in the bottom quartile. What can we do to it to put it to the top quartile?" Okay. That type of aggressive recycling, which you've been seeing us doing now, we think you get paid for it. We were for sure being paid for it before the pandemic. Now the pandemic has completely shaken up the table, it's hard to go look at stats and just prove that in the direct way we were able to do before the pandemic.

We still think, as you're obviously indicating, that that exists at or more today. That's why you hear us committing to capital and restarting four new projects. To whatever ability someone can run on a treadmill, I want 100% of what we own to be in the top quartile in quality of what we own. Whether it's through buying or repositioning, that's our goal. That goal puts you in the top, and we're definitely in the top, and we're probably above the top quartile of our markets in terms of what we own.

Dave Rodgers
Analyst, Baird

Okay, thanks for that. Maybe just a question for Peter following up. You guys mentioned a lot in terms of bad debt, workouts, and the like during the quarter. Do you have the straight-line rent write-off and the cash bad debt for the quarter that you specifically recorded? Maybe just a quick follow-up for Kevin. Rents in Honolulu for the conversion relative to pro forma?

Peter Seymour
CFO, Douglas Emmett

It's Peter. For the most part, the tenants who haven't been paying are still the tenants not paying. Every quarter, we have had a few new tenants come on the list and getting written off. Not meaningful this quarter.

Kevin Crummy
CIO, Douglas Emmett

Regarding the Honolulu rents, we're nailing pro forma, which, in the middle of the pandemic, who would've thunk? It's really unique product. It's very, very high quality. We're 100% leased now, it's in high demand. We're very pleased with how that project's progressing.

Dave Rodgers
Analyst, Baird

Great. Thank you all.

Operator

The next question comes from Jamie Feldman with Bank of America.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

Thanks. I just had a quick follow-up. You have, I think, four UCLA leases expiring this year. Do you guys have visibility on renewal yet?

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

Yeah, you're right. There's 65,000 ft. I think you're right, there's four leases. They're different departments, different decision makers on the leases, Jamie. We're not in the business of commenting on individual tenants and how they're going to work out. It's not all just one big lease, and it's not one decision. We'll see how those play out.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

Okay. Nothing's been renewed at this point?

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

If it was renewed, it wouldn't be expiring this year. No, it would've changed in the stats.

Jamie Feldman
Analyst, Bank of America

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Stuart McElhinney
VP of Investor Relations, Douglas Emmett

Thanks.

Operator

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jordan Kaplan for any closing remarks.

Jordan Kaplan
President and CEO, Douglas Emmett

Thank you all for joining us, and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter.

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.