Douglas Emmett Inc Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call

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

Please go ahead. Thank you. Joining us today on the call are Jordan Kaplan, our Chairman and CEO, Kevin Crummey, our CIO, and Peter Seymour, our CFO. This call is being webcast live from our website and will be available for replay during the next 90 days. You can also find our earnings package at the Investor Relations section of our website. You can find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures discussed during today's call in the earnings package. During 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. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Jordan.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. During the fourth quarter, we had good new office demand and very high retention. As a result, we achieved 100,000 square feet of net positive office absorption while maintaining modest concessions and stable market rents. On the multifamily side, our strong demand and increasing rents again led to full occupancy and an increase in same property cash NOI of almost 5% compared to the prior year. You may recall that our Los Angeles residential assets are concentrated in the very high-end west side. I am also proud of the fact that by aggressively focusing on revenue growth and expense control, we achieved positive same-property cash NOI for the year. For the full year of 2025, we also made substantial progress on several key capital market objectives. We acquired 10900 Wilshire and our close-to-beginning construction to convert it into a high-end, mixed-use residential and office building. We strengthened our relationships with our joint venture partners, and, as a result, we were substantially oversubscribed for our 10900 Wilshire acquisition. We started construction at the Landmark Residences, our 712-unit redevelopment in Brentwood. In the Burbank Media District, we converted Studio Plaza into a multi-tenant office building, and leasing is progressing nicely. And we successfully executed almost $2 billion in debt transactions at competitive rates, both extending our maturity profile and further fortifying our balance sheet. Looking ahead, we have a straightforward strategic plan for 2026. Our primary focus remains office leasing, including re-tenanting Studio Plaza. Our first quarter always has somewhat higher seasonal move-outs, but our overall lease expirations during 2026 are relatively low. We will continue to refinance and extend maturities at advantageous rates. Construction of our new high-end residential units at the Landmark Residences and 10900 Wilshire will, of course, be a key focus. We have begun planning additional residential development sites on our land in the west side. And we believe we can make more very high-quality office acquisitions in our markets, where current valuations offer significant discount to long-term values. 2026 will surely present new challenges and opportunities we feel well positioned for both i remain confident in the long-term fundamentals of our markets the high quality of our portfolio and balance sheet and our incredibly strong operating team which has carried us through many other challenging periods with that i will turn the call over to kevin thanks jordan and

good morning. We're making progress with our development portfolio. At 10900 Wilshire and Westwood, we expect to commence construction in 2026 to convert the existing office tower into 200 apartments and to develop an additional 123 units and a new building at the site. Our very successful phased Honolulu conversion project demonstrated that full-floor office tenants and apartments coexist quite well. At Studio Plaza and Burbank, we have completed extensive common area upgrades to transition this asset into a premier multi-tenant property. We are well into lease-up, with construction fully underway on the new tenant suites. In Brentwood, we have started construction on the transformative redevelopment of our 712-unit landmark residences. After refinancing over $1.6 billion of loans during the first three quarters of 2025, we had another productive quarter. In November, one of our consolidated JVs reduced its outstanding debt by $60 million and effectively fixed the interest on the remaining $565 million at 4.79% through November 2027. That loan matures in August 2028. In December, we closed a non-recourse first trustee construction loan, which will provide up to $375 million for the redevelopment of our landmark residences project in Brentwood. As of December 31st, we had drawn $49.5 million against this facility. The loan mature in December 2030 with interest at SOFR plus 245 basis points. We entered into accreting swaps that mature in January 2030 to effectively fix the interest rate at 5.8% per annum on 75% of the increasing estimated balance outstanding under this loan. Looking ahead, we are well positioned to address our remaining 2026 loan maturities and capitalize on attractive acquisitions during this stage of the cycle. With that, I will turn the call over to Stuart.

Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. For all of 2025, we signed 896 office leases, totaling 3.4 million square feet. During the fourth quarter, we signed 224 office leases, covering 906,000 square feet, including 274,000 square feet of new leases and 632,000 square feet of renewal leases. Office tenant demand continues to be spread across the multiple diversified tenant industries in our markets. During the fourth quarter, financial services, legal, health services, education, and real estate led the way, but no one segment provided more than 20% of tenant demand. As Jordan said, with the combination of good new demand and high retention, we achieved 104,000 square feet of positive net absorption for the quarter. We continue to sign higher value new leases, increasing the straight line value over the life of leases executed in a quarter by 2%, as our 3% to 5% annual fixed rent bumps more than offset the impact of beginning cash rent that was 10% lower than the prior leases ending cash rent. At an average of only $5.76 per square foot per year, our office leasing costs during the fourth quarter remained well below the average of other office REITs in our benchmark group. Our residential portfolio, with cash same property NOI up 5% compared to last year's fourth quarter, continues to enjoy strong demand and remains essentially fully leased. With that, I'll turn the call over to Peter to discuss our results. Thanks, Stuart. Good morning, everyone.

Compared to the fourth quarter of 2024, revenue increased 1.8% to $249 million, reflecting increases in both office and multifamily revenues. FFO decreased to $0.35 per share, and AFFO decreased to $53 million, reflecting increased interest expense and lower interest income, partly offset by strong multifamily performance. The same property cash NOI decreased 1.4% for the quarter, largely as a result of higher office operating expenses, offset by multifamily NOI growth. At approximately 4.9% of revenue, our G&A remains low. Turning to guidance, we expect our 2026 net income per common share diluted to be between negative 20 cents and negative 14 cents, and our FFO per fully diluted share to be between $1.39 and $1.45. Our guidance primarily reflects the impact of increased interest expense. We have not assumed occupancy growth despite our fourth quarter results, though we will be watching it closely. For information on assumptions underlying our guidance, please refer to the schedule in the earnings package. As usual, our guidance does not assume the impact of future property acquisitions or dispositions, common stock sales or repurchases, financings, property damage insurance recoveries, impairment charges, or other possible capital markets activities. I will now turn the call over to the operator so we can take your questions. Thank you. We will now begin the

question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star than one on your telephone keypad. If you're using the speakerphone, we ask that you please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star than two. Our first question today comes from Alexander Goldfarb with

piper sandler please go ahead hey uh good morning morning out there uh jordan uh hey how are you uh i guess maybe we'll just go to the stock first uh you spoke i think kevin spoke about doing acquisitions but you know obviously the stock has languished on our numbers you know trading around a nine cap how do you you know as you i know that you want to assemble more assets but at the same time, the stock just seems to be, you know, incredibly attractive versus buying office directly. So given the persistent, you know, depressed value that the stock is trading, are you more inclined to dial back from acquisitions and focus more on stock buybacks? Or is your view that you still want to grow assets still there? Okay. So when you talk about stock buyback at a

time like this that one of the one of the problems for it which i like i mean i understand what you're saying because it does seem like quite an opportunity is that for the company to buy back stock mathematically and every other way it means i'm increasing our leverage and i'm just going to i could i'll say right now for everybody i'm not working to increase our leverage much other than and where I know it would really need to be judiciously used to protect the company. We have, you know, we know we have leasing. We have debt that we have to be, you know, very careful and monitor. It's in a good place. We have a lot of room on it, but I don't want to let it get away. Times like this is when it can get away from you, right? We have our development projects that have to get finished, right? and then we have our kind of growth platform that we want to build, right? So we're trying to watch all of them and moderate all of them. But for new stuff, the growth platform and buying is very forgiving because we're able to make deals with our joint venture partners. We've done a lot of work to make sure that we have them there and we're able to get control of great properties at great prices without stretching the balance sheet very hard because we just take a piece of those deals. And so for us now, that's the best way to go. And I'm just not comfortable doing this kind of double whammy regardless of how great the price is of buying stock, which effectively I'm doing with leverage and in like two different ways I'm increasing our loan to value.

Okay. And then the second question is the positive absorption, clearly a good thing. you've had fits and starts before, are you seeing a fundamental shift in market demand or was it just some year-end activity that drove the absorption? Just trying to understand, you know, if LA is finally healing or if there's still a long, long way to go. Obviously, your guidance

suggests, you know, some caution for the upcoming year. Well, I mean, one point doesn't create a line. But I mean, I'm obviously hopeful that that's the case. Our pipeline today is equally as strong as it was last quarter. Now, we need to, you know, perform well for many quarters in a row for us to say that we're like solidly on the path to recovery. But I mean, I feel very good about what's going on. And I feel great about the way the last quarter rolled out. And my hopes for

this quarter. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. And our next question comes from

Sackwell at Evercore. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning out there. Jordan, maybe just a follow-up on Alex's question on kind of leasing. You know, we're obviously going through a bunch of, you know, kind of larger mergers within kind of the media business, and I realize the large tenants per se are not your kind of focal point for leasing, but there's obviously derivatives that kind of come off of those larger companies and probably would be in your portfolio. So I guess what concerns, if any, do you have about kind of industry consolidation within kind of the media space right now?

Well, I'm not concerned that the consolidation will impact us if you're saying concerns with respect to Douglas Emmett. I do think the consolidation will help to kind of rejuvenate the making of movies and all of that, because I think the guys that are buying those other platforms aren't buying them to shrink them. But whether it be Netflix or Ellsense, I don't see. And the tenants we have probably at this time are growing and making money because of consolidation because they're all the service providers of those guys and the lawyers and all the rest of it. And I don't see them going down. Now, of course, at the same time, we feel pretty good with how things are going at Studio Plaza. So maybe it's having a positive impact for us out there. I don't know, but we're certainly still leasing there.

Okay, and the second question, you know, I guess last quarter or this quarter, you've disclosed you have about 9,000 apartment units that you could develop, I think primarily on either vacant land or parking garages. It really doesn't disrupt much of the income-producing assets that you have. You know, I'm just curious, how quickly are you able to kind of put those in the service Are most of those kind of entitled and ready to go, and it's just a question of, you know, designing, you know, buildings or, you know, what do you think the rollout of that pipeline looks like, and what are the yields that you can get on those assets if you were to start them today?

So, I actually mentioned in the prepared remarks, there was like one little short sentence, that we have already started on planning, architectural planning on two more projects. and we got kind of first rounds on that and that's now moving through the system that that'll represent a pretty that's another pretty good amount of units similar to what we've got going on right now so that's been started with the architects that's on both on west side sites I'm excited about both of those because funded this part's fun every other part is not fun after this But those have gotten going. So to answer your question directly, we're actually already moving to another, I don't know, 500 or 1,000 units. And what was the second part of your question? What kind of yields would we get? Yeah, what kind of yields on cost? Yeah, so I don't, like, obviously we own the land, and you stated correctly that it's not very disruptive. Most of these sites are not very disruptive to the income-producing properties that are already on that land, and I just can't imagine we're going to do anything that's being less than, like, you know, when finished an eight-cap rate, and I hope better, and historically it has been better, but nothing's going to be below an eight. Of course, it's not including the cost of the land, and, you know, so I'm not saying something that's so spectacular.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ed. Our next question today comes from Nick Ulico with Scotiabank. Please go ahead.

Hi, Nick. Thanks. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Hi, Jordan. Can, I guess, first of all, I just had a question on the guidance. Can you explain, in terms of the straight-line rent, this year is higher than it's been in prior years, kind of what's driving that? I wasn't sure if it was all related to Studio Plaza, and if you could also just tell us, you know, sort of what's assumed in terms of NOI benefit for Studio Plaza this year, if any.

Yeah, hi, Nick. So, yeah, our guidance for Straight Line is higher this year. It's an estimate of what we think it's going to be. Obviously, a lot goes into that. Studio Plaza is a piece of it. You'll see that last year's Straight Line was higher than the year before. So, you know, it reflects the existing leases that we have. It reflects the new leasing that we do and the occupancy that takes place. And we're not ready at this point to give a breakout on NOI on Studio Plaza.

Okay. And then the second question is in terms of, you know, leasing and just thinking about, you know, kind of the bogey you guys have to hit each quarter. I mean, it does feel like it's sort of in that 250,000 square feet of new leasing, you know, which you did got done above that this quarter to kind of drive absorption versus your expiration. Is that kind of the right way to think about it in terms of the math of, you know, how you can keep up, you know, positive net absorption is hitting that type of new leasing number each quarter?

Hey, Nick. I think better than a number like 250 or 300, look at the percentage of leasing we're doing new versus renewal. We know pretty reliably that our retention rate is around 70%. So if we're doing 30% or more of our leasing as new leasing, when we look at those quarters, those are generally positive quarters. That was true this quarter. It was about 30% new leasing overall versus new versus renewal. So, sometimes we've had quarters that are positive less than $250,000, and sometimes you do more than $250,000, and it's still a negative quarter. But I think that kind of 30% is more reliable.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you. And our next question today comes from Blaine Heck at Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Great, thanks. Hoping you could talk about UCLA. They obviously are still your largest expiration this year and have additional space expiring through 2033. Jordan, last quarter you talked about some issues with government funding impacting them, but it looks like their total lease with you increased this quarter. So maybe talk about what happened there and whether you have any updated color to provide on your ability to retain them as their leases expire.

So when you look at UCLA, I know you're looking at like that, you know, largest tenant thing and all the leases together. They really do operate as completely separate groups, leasing or not leasing based on their departmental or whether it be the medical center or whatever's needs, and there are just many independent divisions that could be or not be leasing. I think that in general, I don't see them substantially trying to shrink anymore. But like I said, to make a global statement about the university and their desire for outside office space is a huge mistake. I mean, you've got to look at whether individually the medical center or individually what's happening in the other departments, the ex-MBA program or whatever, that have space scattered around or admin divisions. But, you know, do you have something you want to say?

Yeah, Blade, I was just going to mention that, you know, the expirations this year, that's five leases. So they're not large leases. I mean, they're around 12,000 feet on average. They're not very big.

So some might go out. Some might stay. Some might expand.

No, that's fair. That's helpful color. Second, I was hoping you could just provide a little color on any political initiatives you guys are pursuing in 26. I guess what specific regulations are you kind of targeting in that process and how is that impacting G&A in 26?

For the last six years, on the even years, which is when elections are, we've seen politics having a meaningful impact on the operation of the company, and we have realized we have to get engaged in that. And so when there are things going on that can impact Douglas Emmett, we have to get engaged in it, and we are. And therefore, we're running into these additional costs that run through G&A in each of these periods. I hope that will wane over time, but certainly politics are a hot topic right now, and it impacts real estate in California and in our city.

Yeah, it's Peter. I'd also just point out we've historically had lower G&A than our office peers, and we do expect that to continue even with a little bit of room for advocacy spending.

Got it. That's helpful.

Thank you. And our next question today comes from Seth Berge with Citi. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask a little bit more on the additional residential development sites that you mentioned in your prepared remarks. You know, what is kind of the size and scope of those projects, and, you know, how do you think about funding needs for those?

They range from 500 units for each of them, maybe as low as 250, but really more of 300 to 500. that, you know, you might even be able to build more, but it's probably kind of the type of sizing we would build. We typically fund all the early stages, and then we look at the cost to do the construction. And then at the time we're doing that, we've got to look at, you know, our equity, our cash positions, and the rest of the things regarding the company. And, you know, we can bring in. And it's very – those are the type of deals that very easy understates how easy it is to bring in partners on those deals. But also, they're pretty high-yielding deals because, remember, I was asked before, and I said I think it's like an ACAP and put a plus sign on that. So – and because it doesn't take a huge amount of capital out of the gate, right, because when you're doing construction, You're leaking equity in over a couple of years as you're doing the work. Most many times we can fund it ourselves, but then, of course, there could be a time when we have to bring in a partner.

Thanks. That's helpful. And then I guess just on the lease, and I think you kind of said the pipeline size is kind of similar to last quarter. Are you seeing any of that change between the mix of new versus kind of renewal leases? And then, you know, just broadly, any kind of changes that you're seeing with tenant behavior, whether, you know, continuing to look for additional space or anything to call out with different industry groups there.

Yeah, I said, when we're talking about the pipeline, that's kind of only talking about new. Our renewal, our renewals, like I said, very reliably going to be in that 70% range. Last quarter was a little higher, which was good. but typically it's right around 70. So the pipeline that Jordan referred to is on the new side. You asked about industries, or you asked about expansions and contractions. Last quarter, our expansions outpaced our contractions. We look at that every quarter. It's generally been more expansions than contractions the last few quarters, which is also good to see.

Great. Thanks. Thank you. And our next question today comes from Rich Anderson at Cancer Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning out there. So I know you don't want to divulge too much on the process at Studio Plaza, only to say that it's progressing nicely. But, you know, 450,000 square feet, obviously going multi-tenant. Do you think that the average tenant size at the end of the day will be still larger than your typical for the company, or do you think it can get, you know, into that sort of 5,000 square foot average range? I'm just wondering what the end tenant might look like at the facility.

It's larger. My guess is we end up with, like, an average size of a full floor, and maybe even bigger.

What does that equate to?

It's a floor that's like 25,000 feet. I think those floors are really bigger than that. But, yeah, it'll start out larger and then over time probably shrink, but it's going to start out much larger than our typical building.

I only have a couple floors that can't broken up to the smaller tenant.

i don't think we have a lot of that yeah okay and then uh second question uh sort of absent from the conversation a little bit lately has been honolulu um and you know just because of everything that's going on in in la i'm curious you know how you're feeling about the market today you know you've got bishop dunn obviously is there is there anything on the um priority list in Honolulu that are kind of running an autopilot right now. I'm just curious if you have any comment at all on the market as it stands today.

First of all, I've never met over a million feet that ran on autopilot with the amount of tenants we have in Honolulu. Not to mention, what do we have, 2,000 or 3,000 apartment units on 70, 80 acres. So it's definitely not on autopilot. If you're talking about, like, next capital step, next steps in the capital side, I mean, in a sense, you've got to love autopilot because it means you're leased to the 90s, which is a bright star in the portfolio. But the next big move there, very likely, is, you know, we had started, and even during COVID, Kevin on Zoom spoke to the city council and got some special entitlements for us on, with respect to residential towers. You know, we have 12 acres right next to downtown. We have 30 acres that we've already built 500 units on in that red hill area next to Tripler Hospital. and then we also have 30 acres out in the Royal Canina area and so they we have significant development sites there and so the next step as like costs and everything lines up there and and frankly capacity and attention and all the rest we need to move and start you know building out those additional units that work extremely well they're putting the light rail in it's very close to our projects so there really will be a good way to get back not not that downtown needs to help downtown's doing extremely well but but uh you uh these projects are well suited to get like get back and forth to the where the density of jobs are so i mean it's just great because we we spent so many years explaining to you guys we thought why i was going to come back and so i don't seem like feel like i got my due to ask the question the same amount of times now that hawaii's doing so well but those are the next steps on capital okay great and if i could just

Sneak in one quick one. Last quarter I asked about Olympics and whether, you know, there's any sort of, you know, forces at work positively. And you pointed out the Olympic Village at UCLA and some other stuff going on in Santa Monica. Is there any update to – is it just too short of a time, three months previous? Or is there any update to anything going on that's sort of tethered to the Olympics that you're getting yourselves involved in?

well we are seeing i have been in some meetings recently there's a lot of tension now that's being focused on uh preparing the village for the olympics i've been in some meetings for it and uh people are definitely now taking seriously the time we have left and the stuff that needs to be done, and I see them working on it. And it is coming out of the council. It's coming out of UCLA. It's coming out of private ownership in the village. Everybody's having meetings and focused on it.

Okay, great. Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you. And our next question today comes from Jenna Galen with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and congrats on a nice fourth quarter. When thinking about your 2026 cash same-store NOI guidance, What are the assumptions for kind of cash-releasing spreads? Is there a range there, or do you think we remain in this kind of low to mid $40 per square foot? And then if you could maybe give a little color around which submarkets you think that may start to inflect positive.

Yeah, I think you should assume the leasing spreads stay, you know, we've been at a pretty consistent range over the last couple of years. Our contractual rent bumps built into all our leases, you know, we get between 3% and 5% increase every year on basically all our office leases. So our straight-line spreads have stayed positive. The overall value of the leases has been increasing. That's been nice. That increase in cash every year is really nice to get. It makes that cash-releasing spread metric really hard to go positive unless your market rents are really, you know, moving up at a good clip. But I would expect those metrics to stay pretty stable. As far as sub-markets, you know, I don't want to make any predictions about sub-markets and which ones inflect. I think we've got a lot of leasing to do, with the exception of Hawaii, kind of across the board. And, you know, all our markets had good positive momentum in Q4. So we'll hope that continues.

Thank you. And then just following up on the residential development, when will the kind of first units at Landmark start delivering? And then maybe when is 10,900 Wilshire expected to start delivering units?

We got a couple years on Landmark LA. It's years out. Construction has started. But it's, you know, we're looking out, you know, two, three-plus years. at 10 900 it's a different type of conversion so it's both building a building in the back and then converting floors which of course we at the same time we're also willing to have office tenants here so the first move that's going to probably happen there is the amenities we try and get them in and then we just start moving through full vacant floors building out and building out the apartments it historically once we get them built out which that construction we expect to have start this year once we do it the single floors tend to lease very fast um so my guess is my hope is that you know we'll get those floors we're going to start that later this year and those floors will be ready and start leasing i'm not sure you'll see much of an impact of revenue actually as compared to our whole company in 2026, but, you know, pretty hopeful for 2027.

Thank you. Thank you. And our next question comes from Upal Reina with KeyBank Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Jordan, going back to the first question on acquisitions versus buybacks, it sounds like you prefer acquisitions at the moment. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the transaction market in L.A. and what kind of opportunities you're seeing out there and what kind of opportunities maybe would get you to

transact today? Well, I thought the way that Stuart drafted the first round of our script, the way he said it, that was such a good way to say it that we probably repeated it three or four times. But the long and short of it is, you know, you can never argue that value today, oh yeah, value we're getting today is less than the value today. Value today is the value itself for it, that's the value of the day. But what he said was, which is how we feel, is I think that the transactions we're doing today and that we can buy today will be, you know, the pricing's very good compared to where we think the long-term value is for these properties. And that's a reason, and it's always hard in markets like this to do this. That's a reason, and I mentioned it with respect to our equity partners and the time we're spending with them, that's a reason to work double hard and make sure that even though you have a huge focus on whether it be refinancing your debt, huge focus, obviously, on leasing, you can't take your eye off the ball of an opportunity like this. So we're working very hard to make those happen. I am extremely confident that we will deliver more on the acquisition front to you in 2026 of deals done that we really feel are good deals. I'm not telling you they're off market to today, but I'm telling you I think they're very good deals for companies like ours to run over a period of time, and you'll get an opportunity to see those. We are going to make those deals. I don't know how many, but we'll make some.

Okay, great. That was helpful. And then could you spend some time talking about where L.A. stands in terms of the anti-rent gouging ordinance that was passed last year after the fires and what that could mean for future multifamily rent growth for the company this year?

That was very odd. I mean, I don't know. Where we stand, it expires again in like three months or something.

Yeah, I don't think it's been super impactful. I don't think it's material, you know, for what we're doing. For our existing tenants, you know, the increases, we weren't generally trying to go up huge amounts. Yeah, we weren't trying to go up that amount. And, you know, you saw our multifamily growth. It's been fantastic in 2025, but the anti-gouging thing really hasn't had a material impact. I mean, we're calling fantastic fives and sevens and stuff.

That thing kicks in at like 10. And I mean, to me, it's the worst form of just, like, political grandstanding. But I'm not sure what it's doing to actually, whether it's having any impact on anyone. And, by the way, the people, I don't want to spend time on it.

Great. Thank you.

And our next question today comes from Dylan Brzezinski at Green Street. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking the question. And maybe just touching on sort of – or I guess could you touch on any differences in depth of demand across the west side versus the valley? Are you guys seeing any sort of outside strength on the west side? And maybe if you can kind of just talk about expectations for whether or not you see the same timeline of recovery for those areas within the portfolio?

Yeah, well, I'll say that we did have positive – the positive absorption we saw was across the board. The only market that we actually had a dip a little bit in Q4 was Hawaii, which is our strongest market, and our pipeline there is very good. But every other market we're in in L.A. moved up in the fourth quarter, so great to see that demand kind of across the board. You know, in past cycles, we've had markets that historically were, you know, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills for a long time were our strongest markets. I suspect they've got unique aspects that drove certain tenants there to those markets. I suspect that those markets over the long term will continue to be some of the best. But our markets, we're in our core markets for all the reasons we like, the supply constraints, the proximity to expensive housing, the amenities in these areas. So I expect them all to perform well over the long term.

That's it for me.

Thank you. And our next question today comes from John Kim of BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

I wanted to ask about how you see the occupancy trajectory during the year. Looking at your lease expirations, it is heavy weighted towards the fourth quarter, so I'm wondering if you envision occupancy kind of picking up during the year until you hit that headwind.

John, we mentioned a little bit on the call the seasonality of move-outs. For whatever reason, more than their fair share of leases expire 1231. And those move-outs tend to impact the first quarter, but those expirations are listed in Q4, you know, at the 1231 expiration. So that's typical seasonality for us. The overall move-outs for the year are below kind of average, the roll-outs. I should say expirations, not move-outs. So the expirations relative to kind of historical averages are low. which has us optimistic, and we do expect a little bit of seasonality always to happen

for those 1231 expirations. And just wanted to ask on your views, Jordan, on the Hollywood Union negotiations, which have started up again, beginning with SAG-AFTRA. Has this impacted leasing demand at all in your portfolio or for NASA like Stadium Plaza? When I look at your 2023 three leasing that was sort of a light year, and that's the year of the big Hollywood strikes. So I'm just wondering if you view that to be a potential issue this year.

I'm sure for some people it will be an issue. For us, I don't view it as having any issue for us at all. I think we barely have any even exposure, and other than knowing it's happening, I haven't been following it. And believe me, I follow a lot of other things that I am worried about, but that's not on the list.

But people you talk to, business leaders, are they more concerned of a Hollywood strike?

I don't know. I actually am surrounded by entertainment people, and none of them have come to me and said, this is the disaster in the making. So I don't know if it's just that unions have gotten used to doing it. I really don't have an opinion on it. It hasn't been a subject, even with the people in the entertainment business that I'm talking to.

Thank you. And that concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to the company for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you all for joining us, and I'm sure we'll be seeing many of you during the quarter. Goodbye. Thank you.

That concludes today's conference call. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may not disconnect your minds and have a wonderful day.