Started. Thank you all for joining us for the final roundtable of the Bank of America's 2025 Global Real Estate Conference. I'm Yana Gallen, and I cover the office REITs at B of A. We're very pleased to have with us COPT Defense Properties CEO and President, Steve Budorick, here today. Steve will introduce his team and provide some opening remarks, and then we'll open it up for questions. Let's wake you. With me is our Chief Operating Officer, Britt Snider, and our Chief Financial Officer, Anthony Mifsud, and we're pleased to be here. Thank you. COPT Defense Properties is a specialized REIT, deeply concentrated in mission-critical assets that support the national defense activity of the U.S. government. The vast majority of our 204 properties are located adjacent to, or sometimes occupied by, priority defense missions, generally involving knowledge-based defense activities. Missions that we support include intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, cybersecurity and network activity, naval, sea, and air technology development, missile attack and defense systems, drone aviation technology development, cloud computing, and others. Our property locations are not typical for an office company because they are proximate to important U.S. defense installations in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Alabama, and Texas. Our properties are unique in that they are approved for top-secret mission work. 80% of our defense portfolio contains high-security operations, and that 80% includes eight U.S. government-secured campuses representing over 4 million square feet that are built to anti-terrorism, force protection, and SCIF standards. SCIF is an acronym for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. We have another 1 million square feet of U.S. government leases that are SCIF and access-controlled outside campuses. We have over 6 million square feet of defense contractor leases that contain SCIF in them, and we have 15 cloud computing campuses representing over 6 million square feet that's fenced in and has limited access. An additional nuance of our business is our defense tenants have to work from their office, and they did so throughout the pandemic environment because if they take their work home, it's espionage and they go to jail. It's a big differentiator. Today, over 90% of our annualized rental revenue is derived from our defense IT properties. Our pre-lease developments that are available in our supplement will increase that figure in coming years. Our defense IT segment was 96.8% leased at quarter-end, well above our peer average. The U.S. government is our largest tenant by revenue. We have over 100 separate leases in 70 different properties. That totals 5.6 million square feet and produces 36% of our annualized rental revenue. Defense contractor tenants lease 15 million square feet from us. This includes 3 million square feet of cyber defense contractor tenants, and defense contractors contribute 51% of our annualized rental revenue. 15 of our 20 top tenants are defense tenants. Our non-defense locations provide just 10% of annualized rental revenue, and they consist of five properties, three in downtown Baltimore on the waterfront, one in downtown D.C., and one in Tyson's Corner. Our tenants in these assets also have excellent credit, but we do plan to recycle these assets as market opportunities support reasonable sale values. Our strategy is straightforward and pretty simple. We allocate capital to durable demand locations adjacent to priority defense missions, and we do that primarily through low-risk, highly pre-leased development. Occasionally, we get an opportunity to redevelop an asset or reposition, but development is our major strategy. Of course, we maintain a strong investment grade-rated balance sheet. Our competitive advantage really falls into four pillars. We have an operating platform of experienced and credentialed workforce. We've been serving the U.S. government as a landlord for over 30 years, and over that 30-year period, we've reached the point where over 40% of our employees are cleared to design, build, and operate the highest security level assets in the U.S. DoD. Over those years, we've also accumulated immense development experience that includes SCIFs, anti-terrorism force protection, data center, and other specialized mission critical facilities for the U.S. government. As I mentioned, we have a 30-year track record of not only designing, building, but the important distinction is we actually operate the properties. Our teams are embedded with their secure customers as part of the delivery vehicle for the mission. This is all built upon advantage land positions that we identified years ago, made investments in land, and we continue to develop on land we primarily own. To wrap it up, we are a specialized REIT. We're not correlated with the broader economy because we're deeply correlated with the defense industry. Our assets have strategic features and locations. There's little risk of work-from-home across our portfolio, and we've enjoyed strong demand for new development and vacancy leasing for years. There's four main points I'd like you to leave with today. First, we have strong underlying tailwinds from the growth in the defense budget, the funding for the Golden Dome, Defense Shield for the United States, and the recently announced relocation of U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville. I might add, it will go on the land that we control, and we will develop the properties. The second point is growth. In 2025, we're forecasting nearly 4% FFO per share growth at the midpoint of our guidance, and that would mark our seventh consecutive year of FFO growth. We've increased the dividend nearly 11% over the last three years, and we are the only office REIT to raise the dividend in both 2023 and 2024, and we did it again in 2025. The third key point is leasing. We're very confident we'll meet or exceed our leasing targets. We set an initial goal of 400,000 square feet of vacancy leasing. We achieved over 350,000 in the first half. We elevated our guidance modestly, and we're very confident we'll deliver that. Fourth, we set a guidance of committing $225 million to new developments over the year. At mid-year, we're at $50 million. We are in advanced negotiations with six different tenants for build-suit solutions, three of which we think we'll secure during the remaining part of the year, and that will achieve our objective. Finally, I'd like to point out we're still at a great value at $30.44, trading at a mere 11.4 times FFO and only two turns above our 10-year low. We have a 4% dividend yield, and we trade at a 9% discount to our NAV. It's a good time to buy our share. Mithal, back to you, Yana. Thank you, Steve. Following up on the correlation with the defense industry, if you could help us with your defense budget outlook and what are the key takeaways from the One Big Beautiful Bill and then the president's budget request for fiscal 2026? The One Big Beautiful Bill was really unusual in that the Congress pre-appropriated $150 billion for the next five years. Within that pre-appropriated amount, $113 billion will occur in fiscal year 2026, which starts on October 1. That adds $150 billion to the current base defense budget of, call it, $833 billion. It represents a 13% increase, the largest nominal increase in defense spending in a single year over the last 25 years, and the second biggest percentage increase. It sets a strong backdrop for our ability to generate business out of that funding. We guide investors to expect incremental leasing and development opportunities from defense budget increases trailing 12 to 18 months as that money has to get matriculated its way through the government program of procuring new contracts, issuing those contracts to contractors, finalizing awards, and then we lease space. It's a pretty exciting time. The president's budget? The president's initial budget is right on top of last year's budget, so it's $831 billion. That's what's been submitted to Congress. It's not unusual, it's almost common that by the time it makes its way through the House and Senate, it actually grows. Base case is flat base budget from last year. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it increases by a couple of%. This morning we had a policy panel, and they kind of talked to the potential risks of a government shutdown. Does that in any way potentially impact or delay rent payments? No, but it usually represents a good time to time our stock because people think it's going to hurt us, and it doesn't. If we lose a little bit on our price, you should time your buy to that. Our leases are covered. I forget the act, but the U.S. government is required to pay our leases. The missions we support are all essential missions, and they will work through any shutdown that does occur. The last time we had a shutdown at one of our locations, the only impact that occurred is the line of cars waiting to get on base got longer because they deemed the security access point as non-essential and reduced it by half. Government shutdowns are not a factor for our company. Thank you. There was some big, exciting news last week with the relocation of U.S. Space Command headquarters to Huntsville. You mentioned this could be a great opportunity if maybe you can give us some more color and details around this. Yeah, so to give you some history, Space Command, Space Force was initiated by President Trump. By the end of his term, there was competition that occurred to identify the best place for the unified combatant command for space called Space Command. It was determined that Huntsville was the best location on the Redstone Arsenal. When President Biden came into office, it was contested several times by locations that didn't win the contest. In each case, it was readjudicated for Huntsville and Redstone Arsenal. Through a presidential order, it was maintained in Colorado Springs, but it was never funded properly to create the facilities they need. That decision was reversed last Tuesday. Appropriations have been set aside to build a new command for Space Command. It's been publicly announced that it will be on the enhanced use lease that COPT Defense Properties has on Redstone Arsenal land, and we will be the developer. It looks like that development will represent three buildings, 450,000 square feet to 480,000 square feet, to move the entirety of the command to the arsenal in two years or less. We're the only solution that can get them to facilities they so badly need that have been politicized for five years and get the mission in its proper form. Beyond the command, the command has led us to expect that the contractor support tail that they currently expect to follow them could be twice as big as the area required for the command. It would apply another 1 million square feet of development opportunity over the coming years as the new facility is constructed, the SCIFs are completed and certified, the command's relocated, and the contractor's following. Can you let us know maybe the timeline around that initial three buildings? We're ready to start. We've been planning these buildings for a long time. We had developed this plan over five years ago. We've prepared the land with utilities, and we're ready to commence. We'll start one building very shortly. We wouldn't start that building without a signed lease. As we get a lease document formulated, we'd sequentially develop the next two right behind it. Great. Thank you. Any questions in the room? When you enforce a lease with a company, what kind of knowledge do they take? Are they allowed to take this? Our company? We kill them. You got to have a little fun. It's the end. It's the end. It's the last comment here. No, you know, we've got an amazing history of long-term service to the company through retirement. It's staggering. Over a third of our employees have been with us for like 20 years or more. Those that tend to retire, they stay pretty involved with us. We maintain very good relationships with them, and rarely do we see anybody leave to go to a competitive company. Not that there is one that's strictly competitive. The one million square feet of contractor, I guess the wireless, for lack of a better word, what's your thought about how much of that you will? It's a little less clear, Jordan. First of all, how much will we see? To the extent it comes, it's a guidance from the government for our expectations. We started our Redstone development with our first building in 2011, and we've grown that to 24 buildings and 2.5 million square feet, not quite half the capacity that we can develop. We have rarely lost a new tenant to another location in Huntsville because of the advantages of being on our development. My expectation is we would get the lion's share, and by that, if it wasn't over 90%, I'd be surprised. When it comes, these are contractors supporting the mission. Until the mission's ready to move, I don't think they're going to relocate. Certainly, if they're going to require SCIF, they're going to have to build in a lot of time to have that SCIF created and provisioned. It's a very time-consuming, very technical process. My guess is we'd start to see firm commitments to relocate lease space and start the SCIF process in roughly a year. Will there be a number of pieces as you develop? It's too early for me to know that. I don't think it'll, we expect our delivery from building one through three to be a matter of a month or so, not longer periods of time. What their actual strategy is to populate, I can't speak to that. We've routinely developed our defense contractor buildings over the last three years at 8.5% cash on cash. Often, by the time we punch out the project, it accretes up. No, it's just cash on cash. Initial, not average, not capped cash. I need to walk off. I don't see a clear gate economics given the fact every month it's so long without suicide and panic off. The ROC is also pretty high. We are always looking to do better than I say we do. I don't like to make statements I can't back up. Great. Maybe turning over to the Golden Dome, the opportunity, and just overview what exactly that entails. The Golden Dome's a fascinating initiative, maybe one of the biggest our DoD has committed to in 30 years. It represents creating an anti-missile defense shield for the United States of America, the entire country. Currently, we're protected by what's called GMD, Ground Missile Defense, and Ground-Based Missile Defense. That program is run out of the Redstone Arsenal and the contractors in our buildings at Redstone Gateway. This is elevating that from just a defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles to any missile of any form. Initially, we're advised that it will be an enumeration of disparate technologies from a wide variety of contractors combined and integrated into a cohesive defense structure distributed across the country. Eventually, new technology will have to be advanced and created to both improve identification of threats and potentially target them from space. The initial budget is estimated to be $175 billion, and they would like it to be operational by 2029 or 2030. The One Big Beautiful Bill appropriated $25 billion for a down payment on the system, and that is in the fiscal year 2026 spend. That implies $150 billion of incremental investment over, call it, the next four years to integrate current technology, advance, improve, or new solutions, and deploy. It's pretty exciting. The Missile Defense Agency is at Redstone Arsenal, and it will be the primary vehicle for coordinating all this activity. Beyond Space Command, this development of a new system will be parallel to it. We expect that'll be a strong driver of leasing demand as well. Over the last, I'm not sure what the right time frame is, 10 years, you've done a very good job of transitioning from a company that describes its activity from providing a defense space to an actual company that provides defense. On the space left, that would be the exhibit of either government West mission-critical or the thing that is not defense-related. Is any of that subject to the, you know, the kind of review, overall review that's gone on on going into real estate space used by the government? First of all, part of the clarification, I did join the company 14 years ago, and we were more than 50% defense tenancy. We were less disciplined in concentrating into defense. In the nine years I've been CEO, every incremental investment has been into the defense IT space, and we're now at 90%. It went from roughly 50% to 90%. What's left that is not in our defense IT portfolio is just five buildings. They're legacy assets that we were unable to recycle when the market would support that efficiently, and we've identified them as recycling targets as interest rates provide a more attractive way to do that. Within our defense IT portfolio, I made this comment in our remarks. 80% of the space has high-security improvements. There is some defense contractor space that is not SCIF, but it's a very small fraction. I think I answered the question. Did I miss anything? Yeah, so you're saying essentially that there's nothing at risk relative to the broader review of government. Oh, yeah, I missed that nuance. Yeah, those really had no impact on our company at all. If you really go back and read Pete Hypsa's comments, he wanted to find 15% savings in administrative and overhead costs. He didn't want to cut spending. He wanted to reallocate that money to support mission. The one thing we've been extraordinarily disciplined at is when we build, lease, or buy a building, and what we elected to sell is corollary. We want mission work. We don't want headquarters work. We don't want back office. We don't want executives. We want the mission work in our buildings. The movement in this efficiency environment is to get more money to the mission, and that plays right to our portfolio. You touched on the strength in leasing, and you know, you almost met your full year target at the half point of the year. Maybe you could just kind of give an overview now of the demand out there in the market, what you're seeing, how the leasing pipeline is shaping up. Yeah, so we maintain every week a leasing pipeline that probability ranks all our prospects, and then it measures that as a percentage of vacant space left in our portfolio. That pipeline currently is just over 70%. That means we have prospects for over 70% of the space that we have vacant. That's a very strong level. From a timing standpoint, we expect the second half volume to be a little less strong as our first half because of the timing of the appropriation of the fiscal year 2025 defense budget. With the change in the presidency, that budget, we experienced the longest continuing resolution in the history of the U.S. government. It was appropriated on July 4, and much of the demand we're working with is anticipating new contract awards that'll allow them to expand their footprint. The timing of that will be more 2026-oriented because it took so long to get the One Big Beautiful Bill and that appropriation done. We will hit our full year elevated guidance of 450,000 square feet, which, by the way, represents more than a third of the vacancy we had on January 1. I like occupancy, and I love retention. That's a better question. We like to think when we get defense tenants in our buildings, they typically co-invest to create SCIF and specialize, and that drives our just uniquely immense, immensely high retention rate. We're always looking for occupancy. You know, rate, you know, we have to be sensitive of what the market rate is. As a strategy, we want to be a business partner to our tenants, and we never want to be in a position where they feel like we've taken advantage of them because they need to be in our portfolio. We get premiums, but we don't push them to outrageous levels. Our simple comment is, pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered, and you never want to be all that. If you look at our tenancy, you take out our biggest two tenants, we average four to six leases with defense contractors in multiple locations. It's that partnership that we're really driving for. I think I kind of ducked it, but I talked about it. Could you give an update on the data centers? Sure. I forget the number. We have over 6 million square feet of data centers. A significant portion of those are in a joint venture that we use to recycle capital and support our development in prior years when we need more capital to fulfill our development opportunities. Those were developed over a longer period of time. I can say this much. Many of them have marked to market on renewal, and those marked to markets have been 100% or more increases in the rent. Although we extracted great development profit from those, their value has more than doubled since we joint ventured them. We continue to have about 2 million square feet that we've developed and retained full ownership of, including two that are going to develop this year. In terms of future development, we did acquire 365 acres outside of Des Moines, Iowa, as a long-term investment in land for a new location to re-energize that development component of our business. We expect it'll be roughly four years before we start break ground because of the power constraints nationally and in particular in that particular service area. I'm sure you can answer the question, but I apologize. apologize. That's me at the end. Why Des Moines, Iowa? It is the fifth biggest hyperscale market in the country, believe it or not. You have to get on a plane and fly there, Jordan, and drive around. I'd identify all the tenants that are there, but then by omission, I might imply who our customer is. I won't, but all the bigs are there. There is a significant amount of really impressive data center facilities in the area. It was a place for us to bring a new idea, an execution capability to a long-term customer that was compatible with their own objectives. It was just a good fit for us. For later. They do quite a bit. Kind of on that, it seems a little outside of your things. Not quite as much as you. We're looking long-term. The opportunity set in Virginia has become extraordinarily low. We spent $32 million on 366 acres. If we'd have bought that land, if we could find it and buy it in Northern Virginia, it would have been $1.2 billion at the then current market value that existed last year when we made the investment. The communities in Northern Virginia have become decidedly anti-development for data centers. They've kind of had their fill of it. One of the counties that is an opportunity is contemplating a new law that says for every acre you develop into a data center, you have to set aside five acres for farmland, which suggests you'd have to, for every acre you develop, you have to own six, and the price per foot is no lower. It's becoming very difficult. It will, but it's still, it's an expensive game of poker. We look long-term. How do we set up a win-win for us and our customer in a new market that allows us to support their business and thereby benefit our shareholders? Do you have any competitors in the markets? In our core defense world, competition tends to be local or fragmented ownership. Our probably most competitive market is Northern Virginia. It's a very big office market, and we don't dominate the square footage in that market. We certainly have a dominating franchise where we tend to win more opportunities because of what we can offer those defense tenants. In most of our locations, there is not strong competition. There's theoretical competition, and there's no company that touches as many markets as we touch. What's the alternative use of your original building? Then it's vacant. Yeah. The government buildings, I talked about eight campuses. Those are in secure locations where they're clustered and they're fenced. We've never, in over 30 years of developing and leasing to the government, had a full building not renew. Hypothetically, it'd be awkward if that building was behind a fence and it did not renew, but it's never happened. In terms of non-fence buildings, they're office buildings. If we had to lease them to a non-fence tenant, it's no different than any other building. The trend is really the contrary. One of our headquarters is Columbia Gateway. Traditionally, our tenancy has been roughly half defense tenants, half not. Over the last four years, that has really trended to the point where 75% of the same building set is defense tenants, and almost all of that growth was cyber, or we'll call it signals intelligence related, and required SCIF facilities. Unfortunately, we're out of time, but I'd like to conclude with rapid-fire questions we've been asking all the REITs presenting at the conference. When the Fed starts to cut, do you expect rates for long-term debt to decline, stay flat, or rise? They will decline. I expect them to decline, but it's going to take six to nine months. Last year, the majority of companies stated they're ramping up spending on AI initiatives. How would you characterize your plans for the next year? Spend more, flat, or less? Flat, which is virtually nothing. Do you believe same store NOI for your sector will be higher, lower, or the same next year? It'll be lower, but ours will be higher. Thank you very much.