Thanks, Jerry and good afternoon, everyone and good morning to our friends on the West Coast. On the

Good afternoon. My name is Ashley and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Colonial Properties Trust first quarter hilton garden inn louisville 2010 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background hilton garden inn louisville noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions)
Thank you, Ashley and welcome to everyone joining us today. We released our earnings this morning via Business Wire. A copy of this earnings release may be found on our website at colonialprop.com. We are also webcasting this call for your convenience. The replay will be available for your convenience at our website for one week after the call.
Tom Lowder, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Reynolds Thompson, President and Chief Financial Officer will lead today's hilton garden inn louisville call. On the call, they will discuss our business developments, hilton garden inn louisville financial results for the first quarter and our guidance for 2010. After their comments, we'll open up the call to take your questions. Paul Earle, our Chief Operating Officer is also here to field questions.
We remind you that much of the information that we discuss in this call, including the answers we give in response to your questions may include forward-looking statements regarding our beliefs and current expectations with respect to various matters. These forward-looking statements hilton garden inn louisville are intended to fall under the Safe Harbor provisions hilton garden inn louisville of the securities laws. These estimates are also based on a number of assumptions, any of which if unrealized could adversely affect their accuracy. Please see our latest SEC filings for the detail and explanations of risk. Any non-GAAP financial measures we discuss are reconciled to the closest GAAP financial measures in filings that can be found on our website.
Thanks, Jerry and good afternoon, everyone and good morning to our friends on the West Coast. On the call today, we will discuss first quarter results, our guidance for 2010 and the initiatives we are pursuing this year.
The first quarter was a good start to the year with multifamily praying fundamentals hilton garden inn louisville beginning to stabilize earlier than we had originally anticipated with signs of improvement in almost all of our marks. Our multifamily same-property occupancy hilton garden inn louisville ended the quarter hilton garden inn louisville at 96.7%, which is up by 200 basis points from year end with new rental rate declines abating and renewal rates trending up.
We raised $33 million of new capital in the first quarter through our ATM program that has allowed us to reduce our net debt to assets hilton garden inn louisville ratio by another 80 basis points to 53%. Also during the quarter, our interest expense was slightly better than anticipated as interest rates continued to stay low. We will continue to focus on our top priorities for the year, namely, simplifying the business, improving margins, further strengthening the balance sheet and growing the company. I will discuss each of these as well as our guidance at the end of the call.
Thank you, Tom. FFO for the first quarter was $0.28 per share compared with $0.87 for the prior year period. Operating FFO, which we define as FFO before hilton garden inn louisville transaction income was $0.28 per share compared with $0.38 per share for the prior period. As a reminder, the first quarter of 2009 included $0.49 per share of gains from repurchasing our unsecured senior notes and from development dispositions.
Our first quarter same-property fiscal occupancy closed at 96.7%, which is up 200 basis points sequentially and 210 basis points compared to last year. 11 of our 12 major markets experienced occupancy improvements sequentially. Revenue was down 3% year-over-year, but our revenues were nearly flat on a sequential basis and net rental income has trended positive three consecutive months. Although rates on new leases decreased hilton garden inn louisville approximately 9.3% for the quarter based on 5100 new leases, the rate of decline has improved five consecutive months. Renewal rates for the quarter were flat, based on 3700 renewals.
As additional color, hilton garden inn louisville for the month of April, new leases hilton garden inn louisville were down only 4% compared to the prior year and renewal rates were up 1.5%. On the expense side, we experienced a 5.7% increase over last year primarily due to an increase in repairs and maintenance. The increase in R and M was primarily hilton garden inn louisville the result hilton garden inn louisville of preparing more apartments for move-ins and costs related to the atypical winter weather in the first quarter.
Overall, same-store NOI declined 8.7% versus the first quarter of 2009 which was slightly ahead of expectations. Sequentially, NOI declined 3.2% primarily due to weather related expenses previously discussed. Also during the quarter, we recognized almost 800,000 of casualty losses as a result of fire damage at two apartment communities and carport structural damage as a result of inclement weather.
Qualified traffic for the quarter increased 10.5% compared to last year. Turnover improved 140 basis points year-over-year and 70 basis points sequentially to 63.6%. Move-outs due to home purchases were approximately 14% and financial and job related turnover was 27.5%.
LRO has been a useful tool in identifying turning points in our mark. Recognizing increased department demand, we have been able to improve occupancy and begin working on rents throughout hilton garden inn louisville the first quarter. We see this trend continuing, favoring rental rate growth as we move into the spring leasing season.
During the first quarter, we've been able to increase effective asking rents 2.9% since the end of the fourth quarter. We've also seen a greater acceptance of renewal rate increases and have moved our minimum increase up to 3%. On the whole, fundamentals hilton garden inn louisville are showing signs of bottoming and turning in a positive direction. These early signs of a recovery appear to be very broad based and are evident act doctors all of our markets.
Fundamentals have improved, most notably in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Orlando, Phoenix and Raleigh where we generate over 50% of our NOI. On the disposition front, we sold four condominium units for total sales proceeds of $1.5 million, hilton garden inn louisville bringing the total book value of our two remaining condominium projects to $17.7 million at quarter end.
During the quarter, we resumed development of Colonial Promenade Nord du Lac in Covington, Louisiana. Recall that we had postponed this development to alter our development plan on the project from a lifestyle center to a power center and phase the development.
First phase will be 261,000 square feet and is anchored by Kohl's, hilton garden inn louisville Academy Sports and Outdoors and Hobby Lobby. The total development cost of this phase is expected to be $27.1 million and is scheduled to open in October of this year.
Our capital hilton garden inn louisville market activity for the quarter was concentrated on our at the market equity program. We issued $2.5 million shares during the quarter at an average price of 13.25 per share, raising $32.4 million of net proceeds. Our current authorized ATM program is for 50 million. We anticipate executing the balance of the program in the second quarter. The capital we raised improved our net debt, plus preferred, to gross assets ratio by 80 basis points from year end to 53%. We have a well laddered debt maturity schedule with only $20 million of consolidated debt maturing in 2010 and $57 million of consolidated debt maturing in 2011. Our line of credit matures in June 2012. Consistent with last quarter our board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per share.
Thanks, Reynolds. As will you note in the release, we've made a few modifications to our 2010 guidance assumptions and changed our 2010 operating FFO guidance range. We're now projecting that there will be no gains on the sale of land or from bond and preferred stock repurchases. We were originally anticipating gains up to three pennies per share. But based on the current pricing of both of these securities, we expect that there will be few opportunities hilton garden inn louisville for repurchases at a discount.
More importantly, we have adjusted our full year same property hilton garden inn louisville NOI guidance range from 6% to 8% to 5% to 7%. Our revenue guidance is now at a decline of 2% to 2.75% and our expense guidance is at a growth of 2.5% to 3.5%.
In our original guidance, we had anticipated the stabilization of the multifamily fundamentals to occur in the latter hilton garden inn louisville part of the year. However, as we noted earlier, we're ahead of where we thought we would be with occupancy and effective rents. The positive trends we have seen to date make us more optimistic about pace of the recovery. We left the assumption of 25 to $50 million in acquisitions unchanged. We're actively looking for opportunities but acquisitions remain difficult to find.
Cap rates continue to be in the 6% range. Should the multifamily fundamentals continue to improve in market where we have sites ready for development, we would be more likely to start select multifamily development project we had previously postponed so that we can deliver hilton garden inn louisville units in late 2011 or early 2012 where we expect significant rent growth.
We have kept the overall FFO guidance range intact at $0.92 per share to $1 per share. Our FFO has been positively impacted hilton garden inn louisville by the improving multifamily operating trends and low interest rates but offset by the issuance of more common shares through our ATM program hilton garden inn louisville sooner than we had originally planned and the elimination of all transaction income from our guidance.
Turning to our directives for 2010, I would like to note that we're entering the year in a much stronger position than last year. We've made significant progress on the balance sheet and on simplifying our business. With only a little over $75 million of consolidated debt maturing over the next two years, we don't have the near term maturities that we had a year or two ago. Still, we have much work to do and our directives are holding hilton garden inn louisville our people accountable and focusing them on continued improvement.
Again, these directives are to simplify the business, improve margins, strengthen hilton garden inn louisville the balance sheet, grow the compa