Hilary Spann: On 7 Times Square, I think the team here in New York has done a fantastic job of converting some of the space that was sublet by the major law firm tenant in that building to direct tenancies, and in the first quarter, we signed a direct lease at 7 Times Square for 27,000 square feet. So we’re continuing to chip away at the pending vacancy. I will say that the Times Square submarket unique more or less among markets in Midtown is exhibiting reasonable sort of weakness. In terms of demand, and that just has to do a little bit with the streetscape and some of the other things that are going on there, which we are working very hard with the city and other folks in the neighborhood to address. But I think we are encouraged by our ability to convert sublease tenants to direct tenants.
We are pursuing every tenant that’s in that submarket that makes sense for the building. And we’re just going to continue to chip away at it. But at the moment, I wouldn’t describe it as a submarket that’s got lots of large tenant demand sort of breaking down the door. It’s just chipping away at it lease by lease.
Operator: Thank you. And I show our last question in the queue comes from Camille Bonnel from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Camille Bonnel: Thanks for taking the question. Municipalities are looking for ways to manage the revenue streams and recently, the Mayor of Boston has been talking about raising commercial property taxes. I understand you can pass a lot of these costs through to tenants. So not much of an impact to your operating margins. But do you get a sense that these potential tax increases could change a tenant’s view on whether they take a lease in the market versus going somewhere else? And does this make investing in Boston less attractive, adding upward pressure to cap rates?
Douglas Linde: So let me take a stab at that, and I’ll let Bryan provide his perspective as well. We don’t think passing expenses on to tenants is a good way to treat our clients. And we do everything we possibly can to reduce our operating expense escalations every single year, and we spend hours and hours finding ways to change the things that we’re doing, so that we do not have to have dramatic increases. The commercial property sector currently bears a disproportionate portion of the benefit or the burden of taxes in the City of Boston. As assessments change and residential assessments go up and commercial assessments go down, obviously, we all know understand what’s going on with regards to overall environmental issues associated with interest rates, valuations, occupancy, capital cost, it’s very hard for us to think it would be a good thing for the commercial office property sector to bear a higher proportion of those expenses than they currently are bearing.
And so we’re — we don’t think that these types of policies are good for our business or good for the companies that occupy our buildings. We’re hopeful that these types of ideas will not do the day and that there will be pushback from the constituents in the various communities that we’ll sort of see that it probably isn’t the right time to be asking the commercial sector to have a larger proportion of the burden on any kind of regulation given the challenges associated with our business. Bryan?
Bryan Koop: Really no further clarification, Doug, other than we have made it quite clear to political leadership our position.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes our Q&A session. At this time, I’ll turn the call back over to Owen Thomas for closing remarks.
Owen Thomas: Yes, no further comments. Thank you all for your attention and interest in BXP.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
