Earnings call transcript: SL Green Realty Corp. beats Q3 2025 expectations

SL Green Realty Corp. (SLG) reported its third-quarter 2025 earnings, showcasing a robust performance that exceeded Wall Street expectations. The company posted an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.34, significantly outperforming the anticipated -$0.34. Revenue also surpassed projections, reaching $244.82 million against a forecast of $156.92 million, marking a surprise of 56.02%. According to InvestingPro data, the company’s financial health score remains weak, with an EBITDA of $144.35 million in the last twelve months. Despite these strong quarterly results, SL Green’s stock saw a decline of 5.53% in post-market trading, closing at $57.14, reflecting the stock’s notable volatility highlighted by its beta of 1.75.

Key Takeaways

• SL Green reported an EPS surprise of -200%, significantly beating expectations.
• Revenue reached $244.82 million, a 56.02% surprise over forecasts.
• Stock declined by 5.53% post-earnings, suggesting mixed market sentiment.
• Leasing activity remains strong, with occupancy rates climbing above 92%.
• The company completed a $1.4 billion refinancing at a 5.6% rate.

Company Performance

SL Green Realty Corp. demonstrated strong performance in Q3 2025, driven by robust leasing activity and strategic acquisitions. The company signed 1.9 million square feet of leases year-to-date and is on track to exceed 2 million by year-end. Portfolio occupancy has climbed above 92%, with a target of 93.2% by the end of the year. The refinancing of 11 Madison Avenue for $1.4 billion at a 5.6% rate highlights the company’s financial acumen.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $244.82 million, exceeding forecasts by 56.02%.
• Earnings per share: $0.34, beating the forecast of -$0.34.
• Portfolio occupancy: Above 92%, targeting 93.2% by year-end.
• Leasing: 1.9 million square feet signed year-to-date.

Earnings vs. Forecast

SL Green’s EPS of $0.34 far exceeded the forecast of -$0.34, indicating a significant earnings surprise. Revenue also surpassed expectations, with a 56.02% surprise over projections. This performance is a testament to the company’s effective leasing and refinancing strategies.

Market Reaction

Despite the positive earnings surprise, SL Green’s stock fell by 5.53% in post-market trading. This decline suggests that broader market trends or sector-specific concerns may have tempered investor enthusiasm. The stock’s movement contrasts with its strong earnings performance, highlighting potential external factors influencing investor sentiment.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, SL Green remains optimistic about its earnings momentum and strategic opportunities in Midtown Manhattan. The company plans to provide a detailed 2026 outlook at an investor conference in December. However, future guidance indicates potential EPS losses, with forecasts showing negative earnings in upcoming quarters.

Executive Commentary

CEO Marc Holliday emphasized the strong demand for Midtown assets, stating, "Demand for amenitized core Midtown assets is literally off the charts." Executive Steve highlighted the potential for significant rent increases due to limited supply, noting, "We’re in the early days of significant rent increases because of the lack of supply and strong tenant demand."

Risks and Challenges

• Broader economic conditions impacting REITs.
• Potential challenges in maintaining high occupancy rates.
• Sector-specific issues such as limited new office supply.
• Future guidance indicating potential EPS losses.
• Market volatility and its impact on investor sentiment.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts focused on strong tech and AI leasing demand, market rent dynamics, and the Park Avenue Tower acquisition strategy. The company’s disappointment in a casino license bid was also addressed, reflecting on strategic decisions moving forward.

Full transcript - SL Green Realty Corp (SLG) Q3 2025:

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you, everybody, for joining us, and welcome to SL Green Realty Corp.’s third quarter 2025 earnings results conference call. This conference call is being recorded. At this time, the company would like to remind listeners that during the call, management may make forward-looking statements. You should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events, as actual results and events may differ from any forward-looking statements that management may make today. All forward-looking statements made by management on this call are based on their assumptions and beliefs as of today. Additional information regarding the risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause such differences to appear are set forth in the risk factors and MD&A section of the company’s latest Form 10-K and other subsequent reports filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Also, during today’s conference call, the company may discuss non-GAAP financial measures as defined by Regulation G under the Securities Act. The GAAP financial measures most directly comparable to each non-GAAP financial measure discussed and the reconciliation of differences between each non-GAAP financial measure and the comparable GAAP financial measures can be found on both the company’s website at www.slgreen.com by selecting the press release regarding the company’s third quarter 2025 earnings and in our supplemental information included in our current report on Form 8-K relating to our third quarter 2025 earnings. Before turning the call over to Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of SL Green Realty Corp., I ask that those of you participating in the Q&A portion of the call please limit your questions to two per person. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Marc Holliday. Please go ahead, Marc.

Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SL Green Realty Corp.: Thank you for joining us this afternoon to recap what was undoubtedly a very busy and a very productive quarter. As The Wall Street Journal reported just this week, the New York office market is roaring back, and you can see it across every aspect of our business. We have now signed more than 1.9 million square feet of leases to date just this year, and we are trading paper on leases that will take us well over 2 million square feet with two and a half months of the year still to go. These are extraordinary numbers coming on the heels of such a big leasing year. In 2026, it was over 3 million square feet of leasing and one of our highest leasing years ever. Back-to-back years, extraordinary result.

As a result, we’ve increased our occupancy significantly quarter over quarter, climbing above 92% as of the end of September, and we’re on track to hit our goal of 93.2% by the end of this year. I’m especially proud of the incredible momentum at One Madison, where three huge leases this quarter have brought occupancy over 91% on that development project, and we’re on track to reach 93% leased by end of year, at which point we expect to have just a single available floor left to lease, putting us in a position to execute a significant upsize refinancing in 2026. The market outlook for the remainder of the year is good with the strong pace of leasing we saw in Midtown Manhattan during Q3, expected to continue on into Q4 and beyond.

Accelerating office-to-residential conversions, combined with limited new construction, is creating a scarcity dynamic in the high-end space market, which is expected to drive market vacancy rates lower and net effective rents higher. With tenant demand and rents continuing to rise, particularly in the Park Avenue corridor, last night we announced the acquisition of Park Avenue Tower for $730 million. This is a very targeted market play, acquiring a well-leased asset with rents considerably under market and where we see significant near-term upside from rapidly increasing rents. We add Park Avenue Tower to our growing collection of premier Park Avenue assets: One Vanderbilt, 500 Park, 450 Park, 280 Park, 245 Park, 125 Park, 100 Park, not to mention all those just off of Park.

No one can come close to this concentration of premier properties along our Park Avenue spine, nor our track record of profitable acquisitions over the past five years. We saw the heightened demand for well-located Park Avenue and Grand Central assets long before the competition, and now it’s truly paying off. Earlier in the quarter, we delivered on our goal of identifying a major new development site, acquiring 346 Madison Avenue and 11 East 44th Street. Across the street from One Vanderbilt, this is the perfect place to build the next great building on the heels of what we accomplished at OVA and OMA. At a time, there is very little new quality office inventory being delivered in Midtown over the next five years, this is the exact right time we want to be launching on this office development project.

We think we can get this done by 2030, delivering right behind two projects we expect will be completed and fully leased well before our delivery date: Excel’s 575 Fifth Avenue and BXP’s 343 Madison Avenue, both of which are in advanced negotiations with tenants covering much of the space they have available in those buildings, and that basically leaves little to no competition for what we’ll be delivering on our new project in 2030. We’re looking at a smaller floor plate building than One Vanderbilt, geared to boutique financial tenants paying on average over $200 per square foot. We’ll have more on this project in December when hopefully we see many of you at our annual investor conference.

I should note that we were very busy in the third quarter also on our debt business, and particularly with our SLG opportunistic debt fund, where closings now stand at $1 billion with additional closings expected in November before we finally close the fund to new investment. I’m also pleased to report that we’ve commenced deployments out of the fund, which amount to about $220 million as we speak, which is anticipated to rise to over $400 million by the end of this year. We are also beginning to plan for additional fundraising strategies for 2026 that we’ll discuss in more detail at our December investor conference.

Finally, we successfully completed a $1.4 billion refinancing at 11 Madison Avenue with our joint venture partner PGIM at a rate of approximately 5.6%, which we were very happy with that outcome, and it’s reflective of a deep pool of buyers for sizable quality Manhattan office SASB financings. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the disappointment we felt in not advancing in the state process for a gaming license. You know we put our heart and soul into Caesars Palace Times Square, and it was an enormous loss for New York City and for the large coalition of community stakeholders that stood to gain so much from this project. Despite the outcome, we cannot be prouder of the enormous effort that the entire company put behind this proposal. From the start of the project, it reflected SL Green at our best: bold, community-minded, and rooted in New York.

It would have improved Times Square, created thousands of good jobs, and served as an economic engine for every business in the area for generations to come. We truly did leave it all on the field, and I have no regrets whatsoever about our proposal, but many regrets about the outcome of a process that put so much power in the hands of so few. There should be at least one casino in Manhattan. I think that’s obvious, and Times Square was the exact right location, but the process was designed to make that impossible, at least for the time being. The positive outcome is that we know we have an extremely valuable asset of 1515 Broadway, whether its future is as office or as an entertainment and hospitality use.

We have plenty of time to sort that out since the building is fully leased through mid-2031, and you’ll be hearing more about that in the near future. Before I open the line for questions, I just want to say that this is an incredibly exciting time in the city at the doorstep of the AI industrial revolution, and especially an exciting time in our company housing the companies that are the new frontier of demand, both in tech and financial services. You can see that we are executing our business plan for the year with ruthless efficiency, taking advantage of dislocations in the market, and reaping the rewards of an ideally located portfolio of properties expertly assembled over the years. I know you’ve heard this from us before, but it’s increasingly undeniable.

Demand for amenitized core Midtown assets is literally off the charts, and the lack of supply is driving up rents for the foreseeable future. With that, I’d like to open it up for questions.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. To ask a question, please press star one-one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one-one again. In fairness to all, we please ask that you limit yourself to two questions. One moment as we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question is going to come from the line of Steve Sakwa with Evercore ISI. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes, thanks. Good afternoon. Maybe just starting on the leasing front, Marc or Steve, can you comment on the activity from big tech? I guess there’s been some discussions about them maybe picking up their activity levels, and you guys definitely signed some tech firms down at One Vanderbilt in the quarter. What are you seeing from the large tech firms in the city today? Thank you.

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: I think, and you’ve heard me say this for the past couple of earnings calls, I think tech is back in a big way, driven largely by AI. We’ve seen some big AI requirements. As a matter of fact, one of the 92,000 square foot leases we signed was with an AI firm. We’re feeling that demand is here to stay, driving absorption and driving rents, particularly in the Midtown South market.

Okay, maybe follow up just on the transaction, Marc. Obviously, you guys announced Park Avenue Tower, but I think it was pretty well known that a number of public companies and private took a look at another public office company, which wasn’t successful by any reason. I’m just curious, when you sort of look at the two deals and the underwriting, I guess how did you sort of think about the large public M&A deal versus kind of the one-off deal where you were successful?

Everything we’re looking at is always a relative analysis of where we’re going to deploy our capital. Clearly, we had in our sights at the time looking at 623 Fifth, Paramount Reeds, the 346 development site, and just the beginnings of Park Avenue Tower. That was kind of like on the late stages of our decision matrix there, and 590 Madison. There was a lot on the market in a very short period of time. I think what’s interesting to note is it all cleared. Whether your perception, Steve, is that something went cheap or something went full or whatever, we looked at every one of those deals hard, and we made our decision of where to plant our flag, and that was 346, and that was Park Avenue Tower. I’m extremely happy with the outcome, both of what we got and what we passed on.

Any deal you can always reach and try and win it if you have the resources to, but I like to think after 28 years of this group being at the leadership of this company, we exert a lot of discipline, and we target the deals we like and where we think there’s relative value, and we constrain ourselves in deals where we don’t. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s how I look at those deals.

Yeah, I mean, I can follow up offline on some other questions.

What was the question, Steve? I didn’t hit it. What was the question?

I’m just trying to maybe dig a little deeper on just maybe the opportunity set, and like I guess I would have maybe thought that a public company could do better merging with another public company and squeeze more synergies than a private equity firm might get from buying that same platform.

Steve, when you say a public company, the public company was a compilation of six assets. You have to evaluate the six assets and put a value on them, and then figure out what all the frictional costs of transfer are versus a standalone single asset. We did all that, and I think the issue is not so much whether you think one went cheap and one went expensive. I think the issue is, like I said, billions and billions of dollars cleared. That’s probably close to $10 billion of product there that all cleared the pipe in at probably relatively good market terms. I think that’s the big story, Steve, not why did, I don’t know, why did a public company trade to one and a private company trade to an individual asset trade to a REIT? From our perspective, it’s where we saw the most value, period.

I don’t care if we’re buying, I don’t care if I’m buying debt or assets or a public company or whatever it is. We want to buy relatively good risk-adjusted returns. Our going in cap rate on Park Avenue is about 6%. Our levered returns are well into the mid-teens, and it’s a rock-solid rent roll. It’s under market. We’re going to lease the hell out of the portfolio and perform some upgrades, and I think people will make the building as part of the SL Green family of Park Avenue buildings and make it very desirable and enviable. Blackstone did a very good job investing in the project over the years, but time flies and some of those improvements are already a bit dated, and you have to revisit and do it again, which we will do.

Fortunately, the building’s in pretty good shape, and I think we made a really good buy on that project. That’s it.

Okay, thanks. Appreciate the color.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of John Kim with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I had a question on, or two-part question, on cash lease spreads. Basically, just what drove it to be slightly negative this quarter? Also, we noticed this quarter that less than half the leases signed are part of your mark-to-market calculation. Can you just remind us on the methodology and why you include in replacement leases a timeframe rather than just the prior rents on that space?

Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SL Green Realty Corp.: Hey, John. It’s Matt. I’ll kind of go in reverse order, and then Steve can talk about the quarter itself. Yeah, mark-to-market for the way we do it, let’s talk about how we do it, is benchmarked based on, first, it’s space that was occupied within the last 12 months. If a tenant expired in August of last year and we re-tenanted the space this year, it’s not in mark-to-market, even though August of last year feels like yesterday. The comparison is fully escalated rents, meaning if it’s a lease done 10 years ago, it’s the base rent plus the expense escalations that happened over that term as against the day-one cash rent of the new lease. I’ve heard that maybe that’s too conservative, too punishing a way to do the math, but that is the way we do it.

It’s only on, you know, for every quarter, a fraction of the space. You made the point that it’s only 300,000 feet, which is about 1% of our entire portfolio in any quarter. Clearly, that can be then swayed by any one lease in any one building in that given quarter. With that, I’ll turn it over to Steve just to talk about the third quarter itself.

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: Yeah, it’s a nutty calculation because it’s not indicative of the market. Just to drill a point into it, we signed 54 leases in the third quarter, and our mark-to-market was driven by the anomaly of two single leases. If not for those two leases, we would have shown a positive mark-to-market. It shows you how little relevance the mark-to-market calculation is as an indicator of the overall health of the marketplace.

My second question is for Marc on 1515 Broadway. Just based on your commentary, is the vision of obtaining a casino at this property completely dead? One of the remaining proposals has come to life. When do you think you’ll make a decision as far as potentially converting this into a different use?

Yeah, no, I don’t think by any means it’s, you know, to use your terms, completely dead. I think the whole process and the outcome is still unknown. How many bidders will there be? You know, how many licenses will be awarded? You know, and whether, if any are held back, there’ll be another shot, you know, for casinos in Manhattan or otherwise to come into play.

I think this is still a process playing out, but you know, we are evaluating all options from our current situation with our existing tenant, which has just gotten financially much stronger through its buyout from Skydance and the subsequent strength in both business announcements and stock price movement, as well as what we uncovered through this multi-year process of repositioning, unearthing pockets of opportunity we think are very interesting as it relates to immersive and destination entertainment uses combined with hotel and hospitality offerings in the tower. The building converts perfectly, and obviously, you know, keeping alive a hope for the future of a possible casino if a license remains available. We’re going to evaluate all options. The beautiful thing is right now, we’ve got so much flexibility because our debt per square foot is, I think, like $375 a foot or thereabouts. We have complete financial flexibility.

The building’s net leased through, I think, the middle of 2031, and the cash flow is significant from the property. That’s a good scenario for us to sort of look at all options, commence multiple negotiations, and try and end up in the best place. I think the debt yield on the debt currently is like 13%. It’s probably the highest in our portfolio.

Thank you.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Anthony Paoloni with JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great, thank you. My first question is, when you think about 346 Madison Avenue and even like the north of $200 rents you’re getting at One Vanderbilt, can you just talk about like depth of market at that rental price point versus, you know, kind of where the rest of like a lot of Park Avenue is and Park Avenue Tower down in the low $100s?

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: I don’t, you know, Steve can chime in with rents, but I don’t want to go through rent by rent by rent. I would not say Park Avenue is low 100s. Park Avenue is decidedly, I would say, mid-100s or, you know, even higher on average. Steve can sort of address, you know, Park Avenue rents generally. New building rents in or around Park Avenue is kind of rare inventory. I do think today, one, those deals are going to have to underwrite to $200, $225 a foot or higher on average relative to new costs. I think we bought 346 Madison, you know, well enough that we have some room and cushion there, you know, to go forward with the site that we’ve acquired and the, you know, ability to max out the zoning pursuant to Midtown East rezoning and also through landmark zoning.

I feel very good about our basis on 346. It’s not a big building. When you talk about depth of demand, there’s like 25 million plus or minus tenants in the market looking for a space kind of like this. The building at 346 will be about 800,000 square feet. I think things are decidedly tilted in the supply and demand metric in favor of, you know, having the space, being able to deliver the space, and meeting the market at those rents. If you want to compare, it’s a little apples and oranges, but we want to compare those rents with, let’s call it, you know, Park Avenue rents and buildings built in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Steve, you can answer that. There’s a couple of points.

If you look at the buildings within our own portfolio, whether they’re 40, 50-year-old buildings like a 245 Park, a 280 Park Avenue, we’re seeing massive rent appreciation in those buildings. We’re doing deals today, 20% higher rents than we were doing at the beginning of this year. That’s 10 months of rent appreciation. The other point, I guess what you’re trying to inquire is like, you know, what’s the level of tenant demand? As Marc said, there’s actually 27 million square feet of tenant activity in the marketplace. Most notable about that, there’s 72 tenants that are being tracked right now that have requirements of more than 100,000 square feet. There’s not nearly enough supply to support the tenant demand that’s out there as we sit here at this moment in time.

Okay, got it. Thank you for that.

The tenants in the market, Steve, you said are over 50,000. There are 72 with requirements of over 100,000 square feet. Right. How many square feet is that, do you know offhand? Don’t know the total aggregate. The point is we need like five of those tenants, not 72.

Got it. Thanks. Just a second one from me on Park Avenue Tower. Can you talk about how you plan to finance it? You talked about the debt fund a little bit, but what’s the appetite for equity to partner up with you all at this point? Just working through the capital stack on the credit side, I’ll tell you that in the past 12 hours, I’ve been inundated with lenders reaching out, both bond buyers, balance sheet lenders, banks, all trying to get their hands on financing this. Pricing is getting very tight, just again in the past 12 hours based on inbounds we’ve received. I would expect to see us finance this through either bank execution or through CMBS. We’ll make that decision in the next couple of weeks.

On the order of magnitude, in terms of size of debt, roughly around $475 million against the purchase price, which is roughly around 65% of the purchase price. On the equity side, the plan is to close this through the balance sheet. We’ve already gotten inbounds, just like on the debt side, from equity investors looking to discuss this project. I’ll also note we’ve gotten similar inbounds from equity investors on 346 Madison as well. We’ll evaluate those options and make sure that we’re not leaving any money on the table by bringing in partners too soon into these projects.

Okay, thank you.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Nicholas Ulikow with Scotiabank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Just going back to Park Avenue Tower, can you just talk a little bit more about where the occupancy of the asset is? What’s, you know, and then also, you know, in-place rents versus market, just a feel for sort of how big that gap is?

Yeah, sure. In-place occupancy today is 95%. There was a lease that actually signed the day of contract signing that brought it to 95%. There’s a pending lease out there right now with a hedge fund tenant that will bring it to just over 96%. In terms of in-place rents, the in-place rents today are about $125 a foot blended. I’ll let Steve speak to market and the amount of appreciation we see in those rents. I think a critical component of this is this is a cash-flowing asset. The building needs very limited capital. Marc talked about some refreshing that we’ll do to really brand it through the SL Green platform. Blackstone did a great job with this asset. This is really an investment focused on appreciation that we’re going to see in the Park Avenue corridor over the coming years. I’ll let Steve speak to that.

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: Yeah, there’s a lot of the building in certainly the bottom third of the property is put to bed for the next five or six years at least. Where there’s opportunity, which is the mid-rise to the tower of the building, those rents are easily in the mid-$150 to well over $200 a square foot, depending on the floor that you’re on. That’s as we sit today. If we continue to see the kind of appreciation in rents the way we’ve experienced throughout this year, then it’s easy to see where those rents are headed in the not-too-distant future.

Okay, thanks. That’s helpful. Second question, I guess, is for Matt, just in terms of, you know, FFO, which I know it’s now, you know, the quarterly issue where there’s maybe some noise in the numbers. You talked about last quarter, I think, that you could have a larger than expected debt extinguishment gain. It happened in the quarter, yet, you know, the guidance, I don’t think you changed. Just maybe you could sort of walk through some of the pieces of that and thinking about, you know, versus, you know, original guidance, kind of where you’re standing on FFO and any items we should be thinking about for the fourth quarter. Thanks.

Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SL Green Realty Corp.: Sure. Yeah, I mean, you start off with the right theme. You know, every quarter has its puts and takes. I’m a champion of eliminating quarterly reporting as a result. As to FFO, we did have an incremental gain above and beyond our $20 million DPO gain over at 1552. That, of course, was offset by the transaction costs of about $0.17, that charge that we took in the third quarter. The other side of that, in the third quarter and into the fourth, you know, we do have a feature up at Summit called Ascent that is down for maintenance. It was down for the entirety of the third quarter that hit the FFO numbers, that hit same store results as a result of, you know, percentage rent that it pays.

We expect that to come on in the fourth quarter, but it is still going to be down for a period of the fourth quarter. As a result of, you know, some sales that we have delayed or deferred, we are carrying more line balance for longer in the year than we originally anticipated. Interest expense is up and fee income is a little behind where we expected. Interest expense, you know, probably $0.20 over the course of the third and fourth quarters as against what we expected, the vast majority of that being as a result of carrying a higher line balance.

Okay, thanks.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Blaine Heck with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great, thanks. Just following up on the leasing market, given the tightness that’s emerged in some of your key submarkets, are you seeing any moderation on the concession side, whether that’s lower TIs or free rent?

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: Yeah, we’re starting to see that, you know, some early tightening in concessions, certainly on the top end of the market, where you’re seeing sort of that disproportionate base rent increase. You’re also seeing some tightening of the concessions. I would say we’re seeing examples where the TI is down $5 to $10 a square foot, where the free rent’s been brought in. If you said the high water mark was 18 months of free rent, now it’s down to the 14 to 15, 16 months of free rent. That’s kind of new news over the past, I would say, three months or so, where it’s more common than it is an anomaly. It’s probably the top third of the market where it’s most pronounced.

Great, that’s helpful. Second question, can you comment on the King and Spalding lease that’s expiring this month at 1185 Sixth? Are there any subtenants there that you’re working with to go direct, or any commentary on potential tenant interest in backfilling that lease? Maybe also where you think the market rents are relative to what King and Spalding is paying?

They subleased a little bit of their space, and we’re in discussions with some of those subtenants. We’re also in with leases out on a couple of the floors with replacement tenants, just new tenants to the portfolio. Rents have been rising in that part of the building. It’s a better part of the building. I would say rents are, you know, we’ve seen probably a 10% to 15% rise in our taking rents in that building over the past six months. Having said that, the market on it will be down. King and Spalding rolled off of a, you know, a heavy rent, but that’s reflective of the fact that it has escalated over a lot of years, and does not indicate, you know, the good news of how we’ve seen the rents over the past 12 months rise in that building.

Okay, great. Thanks, Steve.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will be from the line of Alexander Goldfarb with Piper Sandler. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Marc. Two questions here. First, Marc, just going back to your comments on the casino, you guys have done a lot of public-private, you know, One Vanderbilt, of course, you were with the MTA in the city. Would you say the casino experience is a one-off, or is your view that the way the city is doing public-private partnerships has changed and therefore may make you a little bit more cautious next time there’s something similar that comes along?

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: I still have a lot of faith in our ability to work with certainly this current administration and city council to get things done. It’s usually a win-win situation. I think this is more of an anomaly where it needed a leader. You needed someone to stand up for what’s right, to sort of do the right thing and not give in to the pressure of the vocal minority, which I think many in our elected government do, both at the city and state level. I think in general, we have very good leaders, very good legislators at the state level, very good council people who are thoughtful in Manhattan, which is the universe we deal with in particular.

I would not call this extrapolatable or say it diminishes our desire to want to do the things we do in terms of breathing new life into older buildings, rehabilitating landmarks, developing new properties, providing market-rate and affordable housing, supporting all the charities and philanthropies we do, most notably Food First for the food needy. We are in New York, and New York’s been good to us, and we want to return the favor. I think this was more of a one-off example of some misguided view on that CAC community that just didn’t get it.

As a result, it’ll remain in a sort of a time bubble for the time being until we take another run at the goal line, maybe with others, at trying to come up with something transformational for Times Square, which should be something that is an iconic asset for the city, not just for tourists that want to go through and take pictures, but for people who, including locals and people from the city and around the boroughs who want to shop there, dine there, stay there, go to Broadway and go to other forms of entertainment there. I think there’s more work to be done.

Okay. Second question is, Steve, obviously, we talked, you gave a good discussion of lease spreads as it’s presented. Just curious, as you’re mapping out your rents, given that there’s, you know, dwindling availability, no supply for the next five years or so, are you seeing faster escalations, meaning in prior cycles where you had a starting rent and the finishing rent, are you seeing that that pace accelerate now where there’s much more growth over the course of the lease, or has there been no change, you know, despite the market tightening in the pace of growth between the starting rent and the final rent of the term?

Remember how the rent grows over the term of the lease is really a function of a pass-through and escalations of operating and tax increases. That’s not really a base rent increase. That just gives parity for the landlord to stay neutral to his numbers on day one. We do get a base rent increase mid-term typically, and that can be anywhere from $5 to $20 a foot, depending on what the base rent is. I don’t think those increases are necessarily driven by an improving market. Where we’re seeing, I think, consistent with where we’ve seen other market recoveries over the years past, these things tend to move very quickly. When the market recovers and starts to go up, it doesn’t go up in small, little, 2, 3% a year. It goes up in big moves of 7, 8, 10% a year.

That’s what we’re seeing in the market right now. Started off on Park Avenue, started to spread over to 6th Avenue, Rock Center, and now you’re seeing the overflow come onto 5th and Madison, and even if you can believe it, 3rd Avenue is now seeing rent appreciation. I think we’re in the early days of significant rent increases because of the lack of supply and strong tenant demand, and we see no reason why that’s going to abate over the foreseeable future.

Thank you.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ronald Camden with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, great. My first one was just going back. I think you mentioned the Ascent as sort of a headwind to SameStore, but now I see SameStore down 1.6% year-to-date. I think at the investor day, you were looking for 1 to 2%. Just wondering, was that all the Ascent to delta or what else is going into that number? How do we think about, as you’re rolling into 2026, how factors to consider?

Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SL Green Realty Corp.: Yeah, just our guidance for SameStore cash NOI was 0.5% up to 1.5% down. We’re only 0.1% below the bottom end of our range. Remember, guidance and goals are different, right? We stretch our goals to try and get above the guidance range. We actually would be squarely within the guidance range if it wasn’t for Ascent being offline, and again, they pay percentage rent. Uniquely, we had a tenant of, you know, fairly significant size convert TI to free rent, which is an option in their lease, rarely taken advantage of. They did, and that impacts, it’s not no incremental dollars out of our pocket, but it’s a change in the treatment of those dollars, and it hits cash NOI. Otherwise, we’d be squarely within our guidance range.

What was baked into the goals that maybe is not materializing?

Nothing baked into the goals. The goals are, hey, let’s outperform our guidance.

Got it.

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: Ascent, we’re online. We’ll just put it into the, what else?

Okay. My second question, if I may, just on the sort of the development, you know, obviously you bought the land and so forth. Any sort of incremental color on just the amount of capital needs and again, funding, because I know you also are managing sort of the balance sheet leverage as well. Thanks.

Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SL Green Realty Corp.: Ron, can you get that question one more time, please?

Sorry about that. On the asset that you bought that you’re planning to do a development on, just thoughts on cost and funding and potential impact on the balance sheet. Thanks.

You’re talking about 346 Madison. We’ll do a deeper dive on 346 once we get out to the investor conference, talking about plans and costs of returns and the like. As a general matter, as you’ve seen us do on One Vanderbilt and One Madison, likely capitalization would involve construction financing and a JV partner. As we said today, that’s our funding strategy. We’ll give you more detail when we get out to December.

Great. Thanks so much.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Seth Berge with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. Just given the leasing activity to date, kind of at the 1.9 million square foot, and you’ve done or announced an incremental 390,000 square foot since your last leasing update, do you have a sense of kind of where you could get to by the end of the year?

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: We’re not, we don’t give quarterly guidance on leasing. We have a million square foot pipeline, so I would sort of be guided by that. You know exactly what that translates into. I don’t want to get caught in what’s going to close by December 31, what’s going to close June 5. We’re going to vastly exceed 2 million feet, that’s clear. Will we exceed 2.25, 2.5 million feet? That’s to be seen. We generally run at a clip, let’s call it average, 500,000 feet a quarter. If you miss by a week or two, it could be a little less. If you accelerate by a week or two, it could be in the sixes plus. If we’re at 1.9 million now, then I would think for the quarter, we should be on something close to a half million run rate.

I’d be sort of guided, but we can’t give any detailed guidance for the next 2.5 months. We’re going to be 20% plus or minus ahead of our original projections.

Okay, thanks. That’s helpful. You mentioned rents were 20% higher in some spaces than they were at the beginning of the year. Do you have a sense of how much of the portfolio is kind of at below market rents or an overall portfolio marked to market?

No, I mean, not at our fingertips. We’d have to go through and do a real granular calculation, building by building and space by space. That’s not something that we do. Generally speaking, I can tell you where we have a lot of leasing activity or where we’ve done a lot of leasing activity, whether it be Park Avenue, 6th Avenue, or even some of the 3rd Avenue and Graybar Building examples, that’s just where we happen to have a lot of activity. We’ve seen rents generally up somewhere between 10% to 20%, depending on the building that we’re talking about, over the last 10 months.

Great, thanks.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of Michael Lewis with BofA Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great, thank you. On 1515 Broadway, has Paramount already determined it’ll move out in 2031, or is it possible that just becomes a renewal? I don’t know if that makes sense for them or for you.

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: Oh, I don’t think there’s any determination that I’m aware of that’s been made. We had dialogue and negotiations in connection with the casino, but that’s completely different and apart from the steady state situation now. I have no reason to believe one way or the other they’re going to stay or go at the end of 2031. They’re happy with the building. I mean, like 2031, I think in the realm of planning for these guys is eons away. They just bought the company, so I think they’re going to have to go through and figure out what are they doing maybe with Warner, maybe not with Warner, rumored to be in dialogue with them. How big a New York City footprint will they maintain and how big will it be on the West Coast?

On the one hand, I don’t think anything’s set in stone there, certainly that I’m aware of at this moment. I think having just acquired the company less than two months ago, I can’t imagine there’s anything definitive on their end yet. With that said, this is a big valuable block of space. Whether we keep it long-term as office use or we now know it converts, I mean, seamlessly into solid hotel use, we’ve got the plans to revamp those signs into state-of-the-art signage where we can increase substantially the revenues we’re getting from those older signs that serve their purpose but are past useful life. Viacom doesn’t pay a big rent. Viacom, I call them from the old days. Skydance Paramount doesn’t pay a big rent. I don’t have it in front of me.

I don’t know if, but the escalated rent in place, I think, is in the 70s, at most, like, low 70s. You’ve got a big block of space. They’re not paying a big rent. Like I said, they like the building. It’s well located, but it also has flexibility of use. We have low debt on the property. I think it’s a perfect storm for us to keep forging forward with our plans and try and do something really transformational with the building, which could include doing an early renewal deal with Skydance if they choose to.

Okay, great. My last question, you obviously have continued to have very strong leasing volume. There’s been a lot of talk on this call about very high rents and optimism for where rents are going. I wanted to ask about OpEx, overhead, CapEx, because I look at the three key results. Your NOI margin, I see 54%. Your G&A, 10% of total revenue, give or take, and then obviously CapEx. If we backed out the debt extinguishment gain, it looks like your FAD would be well below your dividend. I understand quarter to quarter and count this and don’t count that. I guess the question is, is there any concern not with leasing volume and rents, but with office real estate profitability? Does that make sense?

I mean, what you’re saying, I understand the question. You know, the way we position ourselves is how we, you know, combat that issue by focusing in on the buildings that have the highest net effective rents. I’ve said this before, I’ll say again, the TIs, the physical cost of construction, are relatively fixed. If you’re doing business at the high end of the market with $150 rents, or $125 to upwards to $250 or higher, that’s where there is a lot of margin in the business, first generation, and even more so on second generation. We just need to let all of that bleed through into the numbers. I think what you’re focusing in on is due in part to the way we do the business, which is as soon as something gets to stabilization, we tend to sell our JV.

As a result, you put all the work in on the front end, and we realize and monetize what you would be looking at as, you know, call it FAD. We monetize it in profit, and we have significant profits that we bring in when we JV an asset. I mean, look at what we just did with our sale of 5% to MORI at a $4.7 billion valuation on a project where our basis was under $3 billion. We lose that coverage, but we get that, in that case, $80 something million dollars. We have that for reinvestment into new projects and capital. It’s a little bit of a different game plan, but I think the business we’re doing is very profitable.

We do cover our dividend, but we cover it in a holistic way through FAD and through our harvesting, which we’ve been, we do year in, year out for 28 years.

Okay, got it. Thank you.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Vikram Malhotra with Mizuho. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Just, I guess, two clarifications. One on the recent transaction, the Park Avenue Tower. You mentioned sort of the cap rate. I just want to clarify, does that include the lease you mentioned that took the occupancy up? Could you just sort of clarify the value creation you kind of highlighted? You know, what’s the capital you’d need to put in and the timeline to sort of get a decent chunk of this building to that $200 rent level?

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: I think with both leases, the cap rate’s actually like 6.2%. I rounded to 6%. I think if you’re looking for a precise number, the number I saw with both the lease just done and the lease pending was 6.2%. I don’t know if that, is that answer the question or is that, what was the second part of that question?

Yeah, just the, you know, you mentioned the value creation, the $125 rents, you know, you hope to get it up to $200.

I got you.

If you want to put this, I’m just trying to get a sense of the value creation from where you bought it today, I guess, for a foot or cap rate-wise.

What I said in the first part of this call was this is really a market play more than this is not a redevelopment project like a 245 Park or like a 753rd. We have capital allocated for what I’ll call refreshing or updating the amenities, probably expanding the amenities as well, bringing in some newer, and I would say better, higher elevated food and beverage, which I think we’ve gotten quite good at. Also, doing something with the entry experience at the plaza, which right now I think is okay, but I think we can improve it. These are not big capital in the context of a $730 million loan investment. I think the capital devoted to those uses in total, including infrastructures, is less than $50 million. It might even be less than like in the high 20s or something.

I don’t have it in front of me, but in that range of, let’s call it, $25 to $40 million. That’s over time. That plan would be a five, six-year plan. It’s not a big capital intensive. All the capital will be leasing-oriented capital, TIs, and commissions. We’ll try and minimize that because there’s not a lot of lease-up. We’re going to try to, you make your money, always say, on second-generation deals, retaining tenants, renewals, etc. Play the Park Avenue scarcity market where I think rents could be up 20% to 25% over the next four to five years. I think that’s completely within reach, given the dynamics between sort of ever-expanding space needs right now by New York’s larger growing tenants and just no real space delivery in and around Park Avenue, at least not for the foreseeable future. It’s really a market positioning and rental play.

It’s a cash-flowing deal right out of the blocks. It’s different than a lot of what we do. We’re going to get good financial leverage because there’s going to be good competition for this debt, and we’ll hit our underwriting on our spreads. Maybe down the road, we’ll consider a JV, and then you throw in an extra 300 basis points of yield for fee and promote income. I think we have some work to do on the front end over the next 12, 18 months, and then revisit that situation down the road, which is how we typically do it.

Okay. I mean, just maybe building upon that, you mentioned Park Avenue rents could be up 20% over the next few years.

I’d say 20% to 25% over four to five years. I just want to be clear because I know 20% to 25% over the next four to five years. I think that’s for this slice of the market, I think that’s completely within reason.

Okay. I guess just like in the past, like you mentioned, you’ve done a lot of other deals, more those more specific basis play, or you bought the debt and you’ve eventually converted. It’s been much more value or, I guess, basis-oriented. This one is different. I get it. The option we said going forward, given what you just said about rent growth, is your acquisition pipeline, is it more this tower type deal, do you think, or is it more kind of your historical, you buy it at a much, much lower basis and it’s more of an NEV play than just a rental play or a market play?

I would say our pipeline is opportunistic and doesn’t have any one. It could be a deal like this, which is rental rate driven. It could be 346 Madison Avenue, which is development driven. It could be opportunistic debt, like 522 Fifth. It could be a complete wholesale redevelopment play like 245 Park. The only thing symmetrical about the business we do is that it’s all in Midtown Manhattan. That’s a good bet. Beyond that, if you’re trying to characterize the nature of the opportunity set, I think it’s all over the place. We’re looking for risk-adjusted returns, generally on a debt-neutral leverage basis in the mid-teens for Midtown Manhattan high-quality assets. That’s a very good return, historically and today.

Okay. Sorry, just last clarification. You mentioned, again, the rent growth, the strengthening of the broader market spilling over into a lot of submarkets. I’m just wondering, as you look into 2026, like you said you don’t have a mark-to-market, but I guess, you know, historically you have had some sense whether it’s 5%, 10%. Given the strength you’re seeing into next year spilling across markets, would you venture a high-level guess, like where do you see rents going, market rents going next year, and where’s your portfolio today?

Here’s what I would suggest. I’m going to save you a front row seat at the December investor conference. We will have front row. We will have all the information. What you’re asking for is completely reasonable, but it requires a substantial amount of work, which we do in preparation for our three-hour full portfolio granular asset-by-asset review. It’s just not like an earnings call thing for us. I’m very optimistic about what those numbers will show because the rents are generally for most of the buildings in the portfolio on a rapidly rising trend, and we’re starting to see the concessions come in. There’s a story to tell there. We will tell the story. I think what Steve said earlier, and I’ll have to reiterate, is we just can’t do that right now. I don’t want to ballpark it or back of the envelope it.

You’ve been to these before, you know the drill. We’re going to have complete illumination in December of what we think 2026 looks like, where the opportunities are, how we’re going to drive our earnings, etc. At this exact moment in time, we just don’t have that number in front of us.

Fair enough. Thank you.

Okay.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question.

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: I’ll take one or two more. It’s given it’s, we’re on 3:00 P.M. now, so I think we’ll take time for one or two more.

Conference Call Moderator: All right. Our next question is going to come from the line of Caitlin Burrows with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, just two follow-ups on recent questions. I hear you on the investor day. One, I was wondering if you could confirm it’s going to be on December 1, because I have gotten some questions. When you look at the 2026 lease expirations, it does look like those rents are relatively low versus the rest of the portfolio. I was just wondering if at this point you guys have a sense of what those spaces are, and does that create an easier comp, or does it reflect the quality of those 2026 expirations?

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: Do you have those recordings, Steve?

No.

Boy, it’s tough. You know, again, on the heels of, we don’t have all of those 26, you know, expirations in front of us.

Just do a space lease by lease and evaluate them.

I mean, the one thing I’ll say, as you look into next year, it’s not a particularly large lease rollover year next year. Our largest lease that’s a known vacant next year is only 120,000 square feet. After that, there’s a handful of leases that are kind of in the 50,000 square foot range. We have leasing to do and renewals to take care of, but our mark-to-market, I don’t think, will be as driven by one particular lease expiring next year of size. Another way to look at it, we’ve only got one large block of space I think that exists in the portfolio. We’ve got like 30 million square feet. I think the largest block of continuous vacant is 250,000 at BMW, right? That’s it. That’s really forward-looking. That’s forward. It’s not even existing vacant. We really, just putting, we’re approaching 93% leased on 30 million square feet.

What you have are little pockets of vacancy across many different buildings. That’s the dynamic our shareholders want because that’s where we can really start in the coming years with nearly fully leased buildings and no big blocks in the near term to worry about, to try and right-size the concessions and push the rents to the natural level of where they should be to meet the demand. Hopefully that will result in good mark-to-market and everything that comes from that next year. I think we’re going through our 2026 budgets right now as we speak. We do it lease by lease, asset by asset. We roll it up. We generally have that done a couple of weeks ahead of the conference. Then we’ll come with full transparency on everything.

We’re optimistic that there’ll be earnings momentum and, as characterized by, leasing momentum going into the year, just because as we get closer to fully leased, that’s where we want to be.

Okay. The other one, just on the back of the question related to kind of like costs of the business, it looked like the operating expenses line was relatively high this quarter. I was just wondering if you could confirm, is that the line where the expense related to the gaming bid was included?

Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SL Green Realty Corp.: No, that’s not the line where the expense related to the gaming bid was. That’s its own line called transaction costs. Operating expenses affected by two things. One, moving a DPE position over from the DPE book into real estate as we executed a control shift, which changes the accounting for that. That’s about $1 million of the expense. The rest is actually utilities. The third quarter tends to be the highest utility costs of the year. Utility costs, we fixed price on the supply portion, but the variable portion of our utility costs are higher. That’s what drove the operating expense increase in the quarter.

Got it. Thanks.

Conference Call Moderator: Thank you. One moment for our next question.

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: This is going to be unfortunately the last question because we’re over time right now.

Conference Call Moderator: All right. Our last question is going to come from the lines of Brendan Lynch with Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for squeezing me in. I’ll keep it quick. Just a couple of quick ones on One Vanderbilt. Did MORI have an option to purchase the additional 5% stake? What drove the transaction down, and why was the valuation the same as late 2024?

Yeah, they did not have an option. This is a deal Marc and I made with MORI in January of this year. We always tell you guys that transactions with some of our partners take some time. We cut this deal early January, probably 45 days after we closed the first transaction. We always intended to sell down an additional 5% stake. I think we were public about that in our investor conference. Right after that, we went out to Japan, made this deal, and closed last quarter.

Are you looking to maintain the current 55% stake?

Yes, that’s it. That’s the final piece of our dispositions is in our One Vanderbilt stake.

Great. Thank you.

Steve, Executive (likely CFO or COO), SL Green Realty Corp.: All right, thank you. In wrapping up, Matt’s got some info that he’ll conclude with.

Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SL Green Realty Corp.: Yeah, I just want to remind everybody who’s still on the call, apologies for running a little long. Our investor conference this year will change in schedule. It would have typically been on Monday, December 8, but due to the changing of the date of the NAIRI conference, starting that same day, we’re moving our investor conference to the Friday before, Friday, December 5, 10:00 A.M. here at One Vanderbilt. That is invite only.

Conference Call Moderator: It is webcast. For those being invited, keep an eye on your inbox, and there will be an announcement, a webcast link for those who want to listen in. With that, thanks everybody for joining the call today, and we will see you December 5th.

Marc Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SL Green Realty Corp.: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.