Jim Thompson
Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Regency Centers
Thanks, Lisa, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate the comments and very much look forward to finishing my career here at Regency with strong 2022 results and Q1 was a great way to start the year. As Lisa mentioned in her remarks, the operating environment remains robust. We continue to see healthy foot traffic and strong tenant sales trends, particularly among our grocers and restaurants. New leasing volumes in the quarter were nearly 40% above the historical first quarter averages, and we are seeing terrific demand across all unit sizes, both shop and anchor space and across our portfolio geographically with a flight to quality being a driver. We were pleased to cover -- we're pleased that over the past quarter, our same-property percent leased rate held firm at 94.3% and our percent commenced rate was actually up 30 basis points sequentially which is extremely positive, in my view, as we typically experience a seasonal occupancy decline in the first quarter of the year. Year-over-year, our percent lease rate is up 170 basis points and percent commenced rate is up 120 bps.
These positive trends really speak to the leasing progress we've made over the last year in addition to the quality of our centers and the hard work of our team. Not only are we making progress filling vacancies, but our renewal retention rate also remains ahead of our historical average. Blended rent spreads in the first quarter averaged 6.5%, which is reflective of the healthy demand for space across the portfolio. We also remain judicious in our leasing capital spend as we continue to be successful in our efforts to embed solid rent steps into leases which gives us an opportunity to keep pace with market rent growth throughout the life of the lease. This three-pronged approach to growing rents, number one, focusing on contractual steps, marking to market at exploration and limiting capital spend is reflected in both our GAAP and net rent -- net effective rent spreads, which are both in the mid-teens for leases executed in the first quarter. The culmination of both our occupancy and rent growth trends is embedded in our same-property base rent growth, which will be the most meaningful contributor to same-property NOI growth in 2022 and going forward.
We do recognize the macroeconomic and geopolitical headwinds that persist, including inflation, supply chain issues and labor shortages. So far, in the trade areas in which we operate, most of our tenants have largely been able to pass increased costs through to consumers. So we have not seen a meaningful impact yet from the tenant perspective. Permitting delays and the availability and cost of materials and labor are potential impacts that we continue to monitor. But so far, we haven't yet seen a material impact on rent commencement dates as we've been working hard to try to mitigate these impacts on our business. Examples of this include: helping our tenants coordinate permitting, source supplies, facing some approval processes and ordering long lead time items in bulk. In the context of our development and redevelopment projects and pipeline, we are diligently monitoring pricing trends and are conservatively underwriting cost escalations into our estimated yields. But that has not stopped us from moving forward and we're making great progress on our value creation pipeline currently with about $350 million of redevelopment and development projects in process.
At our East San Marco ground-up development project here in North Florida, we anticipate delivering the public store this summer with rent commencing later this year. The project started just over a year ago and has an expected stabilized yield that exceeds 7%. Even before delivering the anchor space, we are nearly 100% leased today with only one shop space remaining. This project is a great example of the leasing demand we are seeing for new grocery-anchored centers and top trade areas. We were excited in Q1 to commence construction on another ground-up development project called Glenwood Green with a pro rata cost of $40 million and an expected stabilized yield of 7%. The project is located 30 miles south of New York City and Old Bridge, New Jersey and will serve as the retail hub of a new 250-acre master planned community.
The 350,000 square foot center will be anchored by ShopRite, Target and a single-tenant medical building. All three will be operated on a ground lease and construct their own buildings, helping to mitigate our risk of cost escalations over the construction period. Both of these ground-up projects reflect our ability to continue sourcing and executing on value-add projects, attractive yields in this current environment. As we consider new development and redevelopment projects for our future pipeline, we are excited to continue partnering with best-in-class grocers and are encouraged as they continue to expand their footprints in top trade areas. Overall, our team remains energized by the robust retail activity we are seeing across all regions and categories and I look forward to sharing more details over the next several quarters. Mike?