NEW YORK CITY-Brookfield Office Properties, which has taken giant steps toward its goal of a pure office play, said Friday that quarterly results for income and leasing were up year over year. Leasing volume for the third quarter was up 9% across its 70-million-square-foot North American office portfolio, while net income attributable to common shareholders for the three months ended Sept. 30 was $156 million, compared to a quarterly loss of $288 million in Q3 2009.
Funds from operations was $169 million or $0.32 per diluted share for the quarter, compared with compared with $123 million or $0.28 per diluted share during the same period in ’09. BOP leased 1.1 million square feet in Q3 and ended the quarter with a 95.1% occupancy rate, up 30 basis points from Q2.
The strong quarterly showing doesn’t include the $1.2-billion divestiture of Brookfield’s residential land division. The transaction, which involves a merger of BOP’s Carma Developers division with Brookfield Homes Corp., is expected to close in January 2011.
Also during the quarter, BOP added a 16-property Australian office portfolio comprised of eight million square feet in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, a deal first announced in late July. With a total equity value of $1.4 billion, the transaction was funded from the company’s available liquidity and a subordinate bridge acquisition facility.
“Having completed the first step in our strategic repositioning with the expansion into Australia, we look forward to successfully concluding the next step, divesting our residential land business,” says Ric Clark, BOP’s president and CEO, in a statement. “Our transformation into a pure-play global office company should result in more transparent performance and growth creating meaningful value for our shareholders.”
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