Digital Realty Trust, Inc. at Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference - Final.(Broadcast transcript)

PAUL PURYEAR, DIRECTOR OF REAL ESTATE RESEARCH, RAYMOND JAMES: Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for the Digital Realty presentation. For those of you that don't know, my name is Paul Puryear, I'm Director of Real Estate Research here.

And so if you came in here looking for some more doom and gloom, you came to the wrong place. So the -- of all the real estate sectors that we cover, and there's a lot of different industries in the real estate sector, 10, 15 different industries, from retail and hotels to healthcare, this one is one where the demand is outstripping supply. So you're going to hear the story.

Now, let me introduce Bill Stein, the Chief Financial Officer.

BILL STEIN, CFO, DIGITAL REALTY TRUST, INC.: Thank you, Paul. Good morning, everybody.

First, a brief overview of Digital Realty Trust. Digital is the leading institutional owner of data centers in North America and Europe. We have approximately 350 tenants in 900 leases, and these are mostly global companies in various industries. In 2008 we had almost $528 million in operating revenues. We own 75 properties comprising 13 million square feet, and that includes 1.6 million of redevelopment space, which is our growth engine. Occupancy stands at about 95%. These markets are located, these assets are located in 27 markets throughout North America and Europe.

In terms of what makes data centers different from your run of the mill office or industrial building, it's really the technical systems. It's power management, so the power has to be steady. You have to have backup in case the -- in the event that the utility goes down. You have a lot of cooling because you have to keep the computers cool. And then you have security.

And to the extent these improvements have been put in by the tenants it represents a significant barrier to exit. It also, as you might imagine, discourages speculative supply, and today supply is severely constrained due to the lack of capital.

Digital has 250 employees who are headquarters in San Francisco. We have offices in LA, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, Northern Virginia, New York, and Boston, as well as London, Dublin, and Paris.

What makes us different from real estate companies is that we have almost half of our employees have some technical background. So our sales team is split-up into two groups, one is an enterprise sales team that calls on corporate America, primarily CIOs and CTOs. Then we have a channel sales team that calls on companies, like IBM, [Equinox], AT&T, firms that will generate repeat sales, because they're basically reselling our space as part of a larger platform.

Backing up our sales team, are data, and sales engineers. These provide, these gentlemen and ladies provide value engineering to our customers. And then because we are very active in building we have design and construction teams, as well as data center operations, technical operations people.

Our portfolio consists of two different types of properties, similar but different. First we have what are called internet gateways, and these are really very unique assets that are almost impossible to replicate today because of the IP network infrastructure. We'll have anywhere from 40 to 70 carriers inside these buildings, and this is where internet data traffic is handed off in any given metropolitan area.

These service the …