Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from Irwin Guzman with Citigroup.
Irwin Guzman - Citigroup
Good morning. Can you talk a little bit about how closely you're looking your stock price, when it comes to deciding whether or not start developments, I realize that a lot of it is driven by sort of what you are seeing in supply demand in your markets. But when you think about development yields right now trending sort of pretty much inline with what the implied cap rate is on your stock, how much will movement in your stock influence whether or not you choose to start developments going forward?
William P. Hankowsky - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
I think Irwin, a couple of comments. One is, as we indicated in our last call, we are looking for greater yields on development, now than we were 12 months ago. So, when you look at the pipeline, what you are seeing is the historic underwriting that happened, in some cases 18 months even longer ago, resulted in a lease transaction on, if it is a build-to-suit or started on a spec building. Then the leasing happens and we move forward. So actually the pipeline, I think went up from 30 basis points, from last quarter to this quarter in terms of average yield, and that's reflective again. It takes a while when you have this many 34 buildings in it, but as you begin to add in the newer developments, it will have somewhat higher returns than the ones that we are putting there historically. The pipeline's average will come up over time.
So, one is, I think it is important to just understand that when you are looking at this going forward. So, we are clearly being responsive to not just the starts from the standpoint of market condition, we don't want to start a building unless we need it for our teams to have inventory, and unless the market justifies developing it. But we also want to build buildings that are profitable for the company, and therefore we are looking for returns sort of candidly at least are 100 basis points better than they were a year ago. And I think that's the main way we are looking at this. I mean we obviously are looking every metric when we consider how we want to deploy our capital. But I think that's the major thrust of how we are looking at.
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