Corporate Office Properties Trust (NYSE:OFC) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call April 28, 2023 12:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Venkat Kommineni - Vice President, Investor Relations
Steve Budorick - President & Chief Executive Officer
Anthony Mifsud - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Anthony Paolone - JPMorgan
Blaine Heck - Wells Fargo
Michael Griffin - Citi
Camille Bonnel - Bank of America
Tom Catherwood - BTIG
Steve Sakwa - Evercore ISI
Operator
Welcome to the Corporate Office Properties Trust First Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. As a reminder today's conference is being recorded.
At this time, I will turn the call over to Venkat Kommineni, COPT's Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Kommineni please go ahead.
Venkat Kommineni
Thank you, Michelle. Good afternoon and welcome to COPT's conference call to discuss first quarter results. With me today are Steve Budorick, President and CEO; and Anthony Mifsud, Executive Vice President and CFO. Reconciliations of GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures that management discusses are available on our website in the results press release and presentation and in our supplemental information package. As a reminder forward-looking statements made during today's call are subject to risks and uncertainties, which are discussed in our SEC filings. Actual events and results can differ materially from these forward-looking statements and the company does not undertake a duty to update them. Steve?
Steve Budorick
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Before turning to results for the quarter I'd like to start by highlighting a few important themes. The fundamentals of our business remained very strong, as does the outlook for defense spending. We continue to see demand for new leasing and renewals at our Defense/IT locations, as evidenced by our 95% portfolio lease rate. Defense tenants working on secured programs can't work from home and that's resulting in our tenants retaining space in our portfolio. And as a result, we expect to achieve a tenant retention rate in 2023 that is at or above our 10-year record high of 81% in 2017.
We have good visibility into demand for our current and future development projects. We continue to project FFO per share growth of roughly 4% on a compound basis between 2023 and 2026. And we completed the JV equity raise earlier in the year and we now have capacity to self-fund the equity component of our anticipated development investment going forward. And lastly, based on the strength of our business, our Board approved a 3.6% increase in our dividend in February.