Nick Wibbenmeyer
West Region President at Regency Centers
Thank you, Alan. Good morning, everyone. We had another very active quarter of accretive investment activity, further building our value-creation pipeline, including the start of two ground-up development projects, great execution on our in process projects and additional acquisitions in high-quality grocery-anchored shopping centers. Year-to-date, we've started more than $220 million of new development and redevelopment projects at blended yields exceeding 10%. For the second consecutive year, we anticipate starting more than $250 million of projects with roughly half of those costs associated with ground-up developments in 2024.
In the third-quarter alone, we started nine projects totaling over $100 million, including two new ground-up developments. One of those we discussed on last quarter's call, a 160,000 square-foot HEB-anchored development in Houston called Jordan Ranch, which will serve as the retail component of a new thriving master plan community. The second is an 80,000 square-foot Safeway anchored ground-up project in the Bay Area called Oakley Shops that we started in August. This project will serve as the primary retail destination in this attractive suburban trade area. We've also continued to make great progress executing on our in process pipeline, which now totals over $600 million.
Leasing activity on both development and redevelopment projects remained robust with the projects currently more than 90% leased on average with blended returns exceeding 9%. This quarter, we completed the Glenwood Green ground up development in Old Bridge, New Jersey. We've seen strong community reception to this Target and ShopRite anchored project, now over 95% leased with tenants performing extremely well. In fact, we've meaningfully outperformed our underwriting expectations due to the strong leasing demand, enhancing the IRR and resulting in a 50 basis-point increase to our estimated stabilized yield.
As Lisa discussed earlier, our ground-up development program is a key differentiator for Regency across the peer group. We fully expect it to be an increasingly additive component to total NOI growth in coming years as we bring many of these projects online. The strong momentum and success of our sector-leading development program continues to be supported by the macro tailwinds within the shopping center industry as well as the hard work of Regency's experienced development team, which I believe to be the best in the business. Our talent and relationships combined with our flexible balance sheet and free-cash flow provide us with an unequaled advantage in the shopping center development business today, particularly with ground-up opportunities.
In addition to our $220 million of project starts and $200 million of share repurchases this year, we've also successfully completed the acquisition of more than $90 million to shopping centers, bringing our year-to-date investment activity to more than $500 million. In August, we acquired a neighborhood center in a strong suburban trade area in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, anchored by a market-leading grocery. Subsequent to quarter-end, we acquired an HEB anchored center located in a prime retail node in the Austin suburb of Brown Rock. Our team continues to be actively engaged, sourcing and underwriting additional deals that fit our investment criteria.
In closing, our entire investment team is engaged and excited about our opportunity set. We look-forward to not only seeing the growing benefits of our larger value-creation pipeline, but also continued success sourcing new projects and accretive acquisitions. Mike?