David Simon
Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President at Simon Property Group
Our cash flow increased to nearly $3 billion year-to-date, consistent with pre -pandemic levels. We recorded increased leasing volumes, occupancy gains, shopper traffic, and retail sales. Demand for our space from a broad spectrum of tenants is strong and growing, and our various platform investments continue to outperform. Third quarter highlights from funds from operation starts with $1.18 billion or $3.13 per share. Included in the third quarter results were a non-cash after-tax gain of $0.30 per share from the contribution of our interest in the Forever 21 and Brooks Brothers' licensing ventures. For additional equity ownership in Authentic Brands Group, we now own approximately 11% of ABG, and a loss on extinguishment of debt of $0.08 per share from the redemption of the $1.65 billion of senior notes.
Our domestic operations had another excellent quarter. Our international operations have improved. However, the quarter was below our budget by roughly $0.03 per share, primarily due to various COVID restrictions. Domestic property NOI increased 24.5% year-over-year for the quarter and 8.8% year-to-date. These growth rates do not include any contribution from the TRG portfolio or lease settlement income. And if you did include TRG and international properties, our portfolio NOI increased 34.3% for the quarter and 18.7% year-to-date. Occupancy was 92.8%, which was an increase of 100 basis points compared to the second quarter. Average base rent was $53.91, however that excludes percentage rent. And if you included that, that would add actually another $7 to BMR.
For the first nine months, we signed 3,500 leases for 12.8 million square feet, which was nearly 3 million square feet or approximately 800 more deals compared to the first nine months of 2019. Mall sales for the third quarter were up 11% compared to third quarter 2019, up 43% year-over-year. Our sales are over 2019 peak levels. These results are impressive, in particular, given the lack of international tourism, which we believe will start to increase after the restrictions on international travel are lifted, beginning next week.
Our company's focus, as you know, is cash flow growth, which will allow us to fund our growth opportunities and increase our dividend. We would encourage the analytic community to focus on our cash flow and its growth because there are many levers that contribute to it beyond what is contained in one or two operating metrics. A simple case-in-point, our mathematical open and close spread has declined, yet our cash flow has significantly increased. Leasing spreads are calculated at a poignant time. We have studied the leasing spread metric across the various retail real estate companies and highlight the following. Spreads are significantly impacted by tenant mix. Our leasing spreads include all openings and closings, and it's not the same space measure. However, we believe many other companies use only the subset for their calculation. We do not include variable lease income in our spread calculation, others do. And there's no consistency in approach. We intend to spend the next several months working to achieve uniformity on this metric, much like we did for sales reporting, although the shopping center sector still does not disclose any sales productivity for its retailers.
Let's keep in mind that all of these metrics we need to put in perspective, and we encourage you to take this opportunity to refocus on the importance of cash flow. We opened our fifth premium outlet in Korea and our 10th in Japan is under construction. Our redevelopment activity is accelerating. Northgate Station opened, Seattle Kraken Community Iceplex, and we have many developments ongoing at Fifths, King of Prussia, Southdale, and many others. Our share of net cost of development projects is now approaching $1 billion. Our retail investment platforms are performing very well, including SPARC, Penney, and ABG. SPARC outperformed their budgets on sales, gross margins, and EBITDA and we're very pleased with the JCPenney results. The Penney's team has stabilized the business, improved financial results, and we've added private and exclusive national brands to it. Our liquidity position is at $1.5 billion, and there's no outstanding balance on their line of credit.
And we're very excited to announce -- and in fact, his first day is today, Marc Rosen. He has joined the company as the CEO. He's got a terrific background, great leader and we look very forward to working with him as he builds on the momentum Penney has established this year. Penney's success is an excellent example of how to better understand our company. We appointed Stanley Shashoua as the interim CEO for nearly a year ago and look at the results. Much like the variety of our investments, no other company in our industry has the capability to put an executive in an interim role and produce these results. This is a testament not only to Stanley, but to the Simon culture.
TRG is operating above our underwriting, posted also impressive results for cash flow growth, occupancy gains in retail sales, which were 16% higher. As you know, we amended and extended our $3.5 billion revolving credit facility. We refinanced number of mortgages and our liquidity stands at $8 billion including $6.9 billion available on our credit facility, the rest in our share of cash. We paid a dividend of $1.50 in September. That was a 7.1% increase sequentially and 15.4% year-over-year. Today, we announced our fourth quarter dividend of $1.65 per share in cash, which is an increase of 10% sequentially and 27% year-over-year. Dividend will be paid, December 31.
Now we raised our guidance from $10.70 to $10.80 last quarter to $11.55 to $11.65 per share. This is 85% increase on the midpoint. That's 27% to 28% growth compared to 2020 results and basically $2 higher than our initial budget this year.
And let me just conclude by saying the following. Even though our stock has posted impressive year-to-date returns, we strongly believe it is still undervalued. Our current multiple of 13 times is approximately 3 turns lower than our historical average and screens very cheap compared to the REIT sector at 24 times and in many cases, even close to 30 times. We have unequivocally proven with our results year-to-date that we've overcome the arbitrary shutdown of our business due to the pandemic and our cash flow has bounced back dramatically, which many have doubted.
We have growth levers beyond our real estate assets that are unique attributes of our company. We have proven to be astute investors. We have unique business models and diversity of income streams. Our balance sheet is industry-leading and as strong as it's ever been. Our dividend yield is 4.7% and growing, well covered, higher than the S&P yield of 1.9% and the REIT average of 2.9%, and we have the potential to perform very well in an inflationary cycle.
We're now ready for questions.
