Our off-market acquisition of prime retail in Williamsburg during the third quarter completes the redeployment of our 1031 proceeds and is consistent with our strategy to recycle capital into high-quality, well-located high-foot traffic New York City assets with strong demographic trends. Share buybacks remain on the agenda as a strategic part of our capital allocation. While we did not repurchase shares this quarter, from March 2020 to date, we have repurchased $294 million at a weighted average price of $8.18 per share, which represents approximately 12% of total shares outstanding since our share buyback program began. And now on to our outlook for the balance of the year. We have adjusted our 2023 guidance as follows: Our 2023 FFO guidance has increased to a tightened range of $0.85 to $0.87 per fully diluted share.
This is driven by an improvement in our same-store cash NOI outlook by 100 basis points, which is primarily due to higher rental revenues to date from tenant expense reimbursements and reduced full year buffer for a number of items in a downside scenario that were not realized year-to-date. Within our updated FFO guidance range, we do expect a sequential decline in the fourth quarter, which factors in an increase in operating expenses largely tied to the expected timing of major R&M projects underway. Our expense expectations for the full year are unchanged and continue to reflect some permanent property operating cost savings and efficiencies that we achieved from pre-COVID levels. Additionally, there is typical seasonality in the Observatory business.
While we feel good about the Observatory’s performance to date, we continue to leave room within our updated FFO guidance range for uncertainty around tourism fluctuations and bad weather that could adversely impact fourth quarter results. We maintained our expected Observatory NOI range of $88 million to $96 million for 2023, up from $75 million in 2022. Our NOI guidance assumes Observatory expenses averaged approximately $9 million per quarter in 2023. Our same-store commercial occupancy guidance is unchanged at 85% to 87%. In summary, the company continues to manage our best-in-class balance sheet prudently and strategically with strong liquidity to take advantage of attractive investment opportunities that may emerge in this period of uncertainty and capital dislocation.
Our commercial portfolio is now 87% occupied and 90.5% leased, and we continue to benefit from tenants demand for our high-quality assets and the unique value proposition as the best-in-class space in our rental price range and balance sheet strength that we offer as a landlord. Our Observatory recovery continues with good momentum year-to-date. And our fourth leg of growth, multifamily has performed well and adds to the resiliency of ESRT’s cash flows. And with that, I’ll turn the call back to the operator for a Q&A session.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first questions come from the line of Steve Sakwa with Evercore.
Steve Sakwa: Maybe, Tom, starting on the leasing. If you could just maybe give us a little bit more specificity on kind of the current pipeline? And are you seeing more demand today in kind of the Penn Station maybe Garment area? Or are you seeing kind of more strength over in the Grand Central submarket.
Tom Durels: Yes, Steve, we’ve got a good pipeline of activity. We’ve got activity and interest from tenants and that’s both proposals and leases in negotiation at One Grand Central Place, where we’re trading paper on prebuilts and full floor 250 West 57th Street, where we have a full floor that’s been prebuilt. We have activity on that. Empire State Building, we’re optimistic of getting another significant lease done there as well as some smaller prebuilts, and a 1400 Broadway, where we have some leases that are expiring next year as part of our known tenant vacates, we’re already in active discussions for tenants to backfill that space. So it’s really across the portfolio in terms of the pipeline, generally, I’d say, roughly somewhere around 200,000 square feet of leases in negotiation.
Timing will dictate as to whether those leases get signed in the fourth quarter or first quarter, but we feel pretty good about our overall pipeline of activity. And it really continues to be from a broad variety of industry types that include technology, fire sector, not-for-profit, professional services and consumer goods. And so look, we’re on a pretty good run here, right? We’ve had 7 consecutive quarters of positive lease percentage absorption in 9 quarters of positive mark-to-market lease spreads. So I think we’re incredibly well positioned.
Steve Sakwa: Good. Maybe, Christina, you had a good third quarter here at $0.25. I think the full year guidance implies kind of a $0.20 run rate for the fourth quarter at the midpoint. So can you maybe just walk us through what some of the, I guess, downward pointing arrows would be for the transition from Q3 to Q4?
Christina Chiu: Sure. So as I mentioned in my remarks, within 4Q, we expect the sequential decline driven by an increase in operating expenses. And some of that, in large part, is due to some major R&M projects that are underway. So this is just timing and where the expenses fall out. For the full year, though, we would note that OpEx change is as we guided, which is about an 8% increase. So that is consistent. And the other piece is the typical seasonality in the Observatory business. So if you look back, there traditionally has been some seasonality factor between 3Q and 4Q. And as we mentioned, we do factor in a little bit of uncertainty around tourism fluctuations and bad weather. So that would be the primary driver of that sequential decline.
Steve Sakwa: Okay. And then just last question. I know you’ve got a mortgage coming due up in Stanford. I think it’s kind of late in 2024. That asset is around 80% occupied. I’m just curious kind of the discussions with the lenders today, how you’re thinking about that asset? And is that something that’s kind of long term for the portfolio?
Christina Chiu: Yes. We continue to have active discussion with our lenders on that piece of property in mortgage as well as other maturities, and we’ll keep the market apprised but we run the portfolio, and these are discussions that we always have and continue to discuss what makes the most sense with our lending partners.
Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Michael Griffin with Citi.
