First, we anticipate taking our occupancy back to approximately 95% from the current level of approximately 90%.
Year-to-date, we have signed over $11 million of leases and considering our initial pipeline with $6.5 million this is a pretty good start.
And if and when cap rates do compress we'll have well over $1 billion of retail in Fund V alone, clipping mid-teens yields, while we wait and keep in mind, buying out of favor existing cash flow is just one of the many ways we have created value in our fund platform over the years, whether it's buying retailers with significant embedded real estate value, such as our investment in Albertsons and the rest of our RCP activity or opportunistic acquisitions where we saw significant rent bumps and then monetized opportunistically as was the case in Lincoln Road and Miami or a variety of redevelopments and value-add projects where tenant demand warrants it.
Finally, keep in mind, at our size, roughly every $100 million of new investments, whether core or fund, adds about 1% to our earnings.
I will start off with a discussion of our third quarter results, followed by an update on our continued progress on the $25 million of anticipated internal core NOI growth and then closing with our balance sheet.
Our third quarter earnings of $0.27 a share exceeded our expectations, landing us in the upper end of the $0.25 to $0.27 range that we had guided toward on our most recent call.
And this was driven by rent commencement on new leases, continuous improvements in our cash collections, along with some accretion from the approximately $140 million of external investments that we completed during the quarter.
In terms of near-term FFO expectations, we continue to anticipate $0.25 to $0.27 of quarterly FFO, excluding any potential Albertson sales for the next few quarters.
So whether it's next quarter or next year, using Albertson's most recent share price, a sale of our position would result in a gain in excess of $30 million or in excess of $0.30 a share of FFO.
As it actually represents a beat in excess of 10% off of our initial midpoint.
As you'll recall, within our initial range of $0.98 to $1.14, we had incorporated $0.05 to $0.13 of core and fund transactional activity, which, as we highlighted, was primarily attributable to the sale of Albertson shares in 2021.
So after adjusting for the $0.05 to $0.13 of transactional income, we had guided toward $0.93 to $1.01 for a midpoint of $0.97.
And given our expectation of near-term FFO of $0.25 to $0.27, this gets us in the [Indecipherable] 15:04 106, 108 in range for 2021, and that's without any Albertson shares, which is more than 10% above the midpoint of our initial range as well as 5% to 7% above the high end of our range.
In terms of cash collections, we received over 97% of our core billings during the quarter.
And as a reminder, each 1% increase in collections equates to increased earnings of approximately $500,000 per quarter or $2 million, representing over $0.02 of FFO when annualized.
Given the high-quality inventory we have available to lease, we are closely watching the sales productivity of our new tenants, particularly those recently leased street locations as this educates us not only on the level of future tenant demand, but more importantly, the potential upside to drive rents beyond the $25 million of core internal NOI growth that we are anticipating.
For example, some of our recent openings in Chicago and New York Metro are already seeing early results trending in the $2,000 a foot range.
Same-store NOI also came in above our expectations at approximately 7%, and this was driven by improving occupancy and a continued reduction in our credit reserves.
It's also worth highlighting that the 7% is a pretty clean number.
In fact, this was evident in our leasing spreads this quarter as we saw a cash increase of approximately 11%, along with a GAAP increase of 19%.
And this was driven by our street leasing during the quarter, including a cash spread in excess of 20% on one of our key street locations on Melrose Place in Los Angeles.
Additionally, as Ken mentioned, we are seeing similar trends on Armitage Avenue in Chicago, with recent trends in excess of 30%, which is also well above our initial underwriting.
Now it's also worth mentioning the structural differences between our street and suburban leases and why the point in time lease spreads that are disclosed in our quarterly results are often not really comparable when evaluating deal profitability or more importantly, future growth expectations, given that we tend to reset our street leases to market every five years or so as compared to 10 to 15 years or often much longer on a suburban lease.
Coupled with the fact that street rents contractually increase 3% annually as compared to 1% of suburban lease.
And just to illustrate the difference, if we were to assume that a street lease grows contractually 3% a year and achieves a fairly modest 5% spread every five years.
In order for our 10-year suburban lease that has grown at 1% to achieve an identical CAGR, it would need to achieve a spread of approximately 25%.
And as a reminder, we anticipate growth of $25 million by year-end 2024, resulting in over $150 million of core NOI.
As a reminder, the three key drivers of our approximately $25 million or 20% increase in our core NOI off of our 2020 NOI include: first, net absorption, which is the profitable lease-up of our core portfolio and is offset by anticipated tenant expirations over this period.
And we are anticipating that this generates us $10 million to $15 million of incremental NOI, representing $0.11 to $0.16 of FFO.
Second piece is further stabilization of our credit reserves, contributing $5 million to $6 million of incremental NOI or $0.05 to $0.06 of FFO; and lastly, contractual rental growth of $8 million to $10 million.
In terms of the most impactful are the $10 million to $15 million of net absorption, I want to provide some insights on how we see it playing out over the next few years.
Given the significant volume and profitability of the new leases signed to date and using our anticipated rent commencement dates on these executed leases, this should largely replace the NOI of the previously discussed tenant expirations at 565 Broadway in SoHo and 555 nine Street in San Francisco for the first half of 2022.
As previously discussed, the impact of these two expirations, which occurs in October 2021 for 555 nine and January 22 for 565 Broadway is approximately $4 million or roughly $4.6 million of annual NOI when factoring in recoveries.
As Ken discussed, we have already profitably leased 565 Broadway several months in advance of the current lease expiration, thus significantly minimizing any downtime with an anticipated rent commencement date in the second half of '22.
So when coupled with the remaining portion of our $16 million lease pipeline coming online, this sets us up for solid NOI growth in the $2 million to $3 million range in the second half of 2022, with the balance of that remaining growth coming from positive absorption split fairly evenly between '23 and '24 as the balance of our pipeline kicks in.
At a 97% cash collection rate, we are continuing to incur charges in the $1.5 to $2 million range or $6 million to $8 million when annualized.
We are continuing to see the 3% contractual growth in our street leases.
So when blended across our suburban and urban assets, this averages to about 2% a year, contributing approximately $3 million of incremental annual NOI.
As Ken mentioned, given our size, each $100 million of investments, whether it be core fund, should result in FFO accretion of approximately 1%, and our balance sheet is well positioned to capture this accretion with ample liquidity available in our corporate facilities, along with the cost of capital that we believe enables us to accretively transact on a growing external investment pipeline.
Including land, our blended cost basis for these two centers is approximately $130 per square foot.
In comparison, the cost to construct a new suburban shopping center is approximately $200 to $250 per square foot, and that's excluding land cost.
Due to our selectivity at acquisition, we've seen a Fund V collections rate that is now in the high 90s, consistent with our core portfolio and a stable mid-teens leverage return, which we're able to achieve given our use of 2/3 leverage in our fund platform.
Even during the pandemic, our cash-on-cash yields only dipped to approximately 13%.
Looking ahead, we expect to be back to 15% relatively quickly.
Similarly, on an unlevered basis, our 8% yield dipped to approximately 7% during the pandemic and is now on a projected path back to 8%.
First, real estate borrowing costs have returned to their pre pandemic levels in the mid-3% range.
While private market cap rates for the type of product we're targeting have remained flat at approximately 7.5%.
As a result, we believe that signals are pointing to a reversion to the mean in the private markets too over the next few years and when that happens, we will have aggregated a $1 billion portfolio, where every 50 basis points of cap rate compression would add 250 to 300 basis points to our projected IRRs, increasing overall fund profitability and in turn, our GP incentive compensation.
To date, we've allocated approximately 75% of our Fund V capital commitments, and we have until August of 2022 to deploy the balance.
We continue to see positive momentum at this iconic property with shopper traffic and tenant sales both continuing to increase and the recent opening of BASIS Independent and Elementary School in approximately 60,000 square feet in Phase III.
On the leasing front, we're pleased to report that last week, we executed a lease with an international retailer for 70% of the space formerly occupied by Century 21.
The new lease replaces nearly all of Century 21's prior rent obligations with 30% of the space still remaining to be leased.

Summary:
Our third quarter earnings of $0.27 a share exceeded our expectations, landing us in the upper end of the $0.25 to $0.27 range that we had guided toward on our most recent call.
In terms of near-term FFO expectations, we continue to anticipate $0.25 to $0.27 of quarterly FFO, excluding any potential Albertson sales for the next few quarters.
And given our expectation of near-term FFO of $0.25 to $0.27, this gets us in the [Indecipherable] 15:04 106, 108 in range for 2021, and that's without any Albertson shares, which is more than 10% above the midpoint of our initial range as well as 5% to 7% above the high end of our range.