Second, we have a terrific development pipeline of $363 million that is 79% pre-leased and attractive land sites where we can build an additional 5.2 million square feet.
Our balance sheet is strong with net debt to EBITDA of 4.87 times and G&A as a percentage of total assets at 0.32%.
On the operations front, the team delivered $0.69 per share in FFO.
We leased 271,000 square feet with a 10.5% increase in second-generation cash rents.
We placed our 10,000 Avalon development project into service.
In addition we acquired a land parcel adjacent to our 3350 Peachtree property in Atlanta for $8 million through a 95% consolidated joint venture.
Most recently, Apple announced plans to create, at least 3,000 jobs in the Raleigh-Durham area.
In December, Cousins acquired The RailYard, a creative office asset in the South End submarket of Charlotte for $201 million.
We also purchased an adjacent land site, for a gross purchase price of $28 million.
On April 7, we sold Burnett Plaza, a one million square-foot office property in Fort Worth for a gross sales price of $137.5 million and with that, exited a non-core market.
Last night, we announced plans to commence construction on Domain 9 in Austin, where we have a growing pipeline of demand from small, medium and large customers some already in Austin and some potentially new to the market.
As our Domain 9 project illustrates, we are not opportunity-constrained at Cousins.
Our financial results will reflect several known move-outs from past value-add acquisitions such as 1200 Peachtree and 3350 Peachtree in Atlanta and One South at The Plaza in Charlotte.
First, physical customer utilization continues to track at an average of about 20% across the company.
For instance, our Atlanta, Dallas and Tampa portfolios are all running at about a 30% or higher average utilization rate.
Similar to last quarter, we collected 98.8% of rent from all customers and 99.1% of rent from office customers in the first quarter.
As expected, our total office portfolio leased percentage and weighted average occupancy declined to 90.2% and 89.3% this quarter, respectively.
The biggest driver of occupancy by a wide margin was Bank of America's final phase of exploration at One South in Charlotte, which took occupancy at this 891,000 square-foot project to 57.3%.
A second driver, albeit, much smaller was the addition of our 10,000 Avalon new development in Atlanta to the operating portfolio, adding about 50,000 square feet of highly desirable first-generation office vacancy.
I would note that leasing interest at 10000 Avalon is very encouraging.
Looking to the balance of 2021, our occupancy will continue to trend down into the second half of the year, largely due to the long-anticipated 200,000 square-foot move-out of Anthem at 3350 Peachtree at the end of June.
As for leasing activity, we executed 271,000 square feet of leases this quarter.
Second, we executed the highest overall number of leases since the first quarter of 2020, increasing 43% over the last quarter.
And finally, new and expansion leasing as a proportion of total leasing activity increased versus last quarter coming in at 30% of our total leasing activity.
I'm also pleased to report that rent growth remained remarkably strong in the first quarter with second-generation net rents increasing 10.5% on a cash basis.
With this continued rent growth and concessions only modestly higher than our eight-quarter run rate, net effective rents this quarter came in at a solid $23.53 per square foot.
During the 12 months ended this quarter, essentially the time horizon of the pandemic to-date, our completed leasing activity yielded weighted average net effective rents 1.1% higher than our completed activity during the 12 months leading up to the pandemic.
In fact inward migration to Florida is back to over 1,000 people a day.
I'm sure many of you have already seen the recent KPMG survey that found just 17% of senior executives plan to reduce their usage of office space down from 69% in the last survey in August.
Specifically, this quarter the number of active proposals outstanding increased 68% and the number of space tours increased 89% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020.
FFO was $0.69 per share.
Same-property cash NOI declined 2.7% year-over-year.
And as Richard said earlier, cash rents on expiring leases rose by a very healthy 10.5%.
Before moving on, I did want to highlight that we have increased cash rents on expiring leases every single quarter since the onset of COVID last spring with a weighted average increase of 12.4% over that period.
Focusing on same-property performance, first quarter results represent a positive change in trend and are an improvement over the previous two quarters, which averaged year-over-year cash NOI declines of 3.1%.
If we pull One South out of our same-property pool to get a better sense of performance for the balance of the portfolio, same-property cash NOI adjusting for COVID-related parking losses increased 2.7% compared to the first quarter of 2020.
One asset 10000 Avalon was moved off of our development pipeline schedule and into our portfolio statistics schedule during the first quarter.
The remaining development pipeline represents a total Cousins investment of $363 million across 1.3 million square feet for assets.
Our remaining funding commitment for this pipeline is approximately $94 million which is more than covered by our existing liquidity and future retained earnings.
In mid-March a land parcel was acquired in Buckhead, next to our 3350 Peachtree operating asset for $8 million.
This transaction was completed through an existing 95/5 joint venture partnership with Cousins investing $7.6 million.
Subsequent to quarter end, we sold Burnett Plaza in Fort Worth for a gross sales price of $137.5 million.
Built in 1983, Burnett Plaza was 80% leased at the time of sale.
A new $135.7 million nonrecourse loan was obtained replacing the original $77 million construction loan.
As a quick reminder Carolina Square is held in a 50-50 joint venture partnership.
At the end of the first quarter our net debt-to-EBITDA was 4.87x.
Incorporating the Burnett Plaza sale as well as the potential Dimensional Place sale which I'll discuss in a moment will reduce this ratio to approximately 4.5x.
We also increased the dividend during the first quarter by 3.3%.
Our dividend policy is set by our Board and is based on an FAD payout ratio between 70% and 75%.
Last year our FAD dividend payout ratio was 68%.
We currently anticipate full year 2021 FFO between $2.68 and $2.78 per share.
This is down $0.08 at the midpoint from our previous guidance of $2.76 to $2.86 per share.
The start of Domain 9 during the second quarter has no material impact on our guidance and there are no other dispositions, acquisitions or development starts included in our guidance.

Summary:
On the operations front, the team delivered $0.69 per share in FFO.
FFO was $0.69 per share.
We currently anticipate full year 2021 FFO between $2.68 and $2.78 per share.