Grainger H2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
November 21, 2024

There are 12 speakers on the call.

Operator

So good morning, everyone, and welcome to Grainger's Full Year Results. Once again, we've delivered an excellent performance as we continue to accelerate our growth. That's growth in our income, growth in our earnings and growth in our margin. We've added to last year's record year with another strong year of delivery, adding over 1200 new homes to our portfolio. This growth is set against a backdrop of compelling fundamentals of growing demand for rental homes and reducing supply and a new government that is supportive of the Build to Rent sector.

Operator

We are building a bigger business of significant value with a lot more growth to come. So the agenda this morning is I'll take you through the highlights of our excellent financial and operational performance, our portfolio expansion and how we are delivering compounding growth as our pipeline delivers. I'll also tell you about the government's rental reforms and how we are well placed for them. Rob Hudson, our CFO, will take you through our financial review, our growth in our income, our strong secured and derisked balance sheet. And as it's less than a year away, he'll also outline our progress to REIT conversion.

Operator

I'll then give you an update on the market together with how our operating platform is delivering leading performance, high levels of customer satisfaction, and then we'll finish on our investment strategy in our 2025 launches. So in the year, we delivered 14% growth in our net rental income and in our dividend. And this has been driven by the delivery of 12 36 new homes. We've also delivered strong like for like growth of 6.3% with high levels of occupation over 97%. And although it's not on this slide, it's worth remembering that over the last 3 years, we've delivered 20% like for like rental growth, largely offsetting outward yield movement whilst retaining above average occupancy and high levels of customer satisfaction.

Operator

This year, we've delivered even stronger growth in our EPRA earnings, up 21%, demonstrating the operational leverage in our business model. And today, we are once again upgrading our EPRA earnings guidance for full year 20 26 to CHF 60,000,000 We delivered £274,000,000 of non core asset sales, and this was the highest level of sales since the start of our strategy in 2016. And with around 400 transactions, that's demonstrating our expertise in transacting. And all of this work enables us to convert to a REIT in less than a year. Our strategic self funded growth continues at pace.

Operator

Our GBP 274,000,000 of disposals have enabled GBP 270,000,000 to be invested in our pipeline. And despite higher interest rates and a subdued real estate investment market, over the last 2 years, we've disposed of £468,000,000 and invested £582,000,000 We have a great track record of buying well, developing well and selling well. And the rotation out of our lower yielding, older dispersed stock into our new purpose built communities has, as you can see, more than tripled our net rental income since the start of the strategy. And our rent is due to grow again rapidly with the delivery of our pipeline to €191,000,000 We've expanded our portfolio in our key regional cities, and in most cases, we're building on our operational clusters. The Copper Works, our first scheme in Cardiff, was launched in February.

Operator

And in June, we launched our next scheme in Bristol and in July, our next scheme in Birmingham, 2 of our top investable cities adding to our operational clusters. In September, we acquired another 65 homes to build on our windless apartment scheme, and these homes are just launching. Importantly, we acquired the Astley in Manchester from M and G. Now this is a great location. It's a fully stabilized asset, and it will add choice to our Manchester residents and drive margin through our operational cluster.

Operator

The successful delivery of these schemes mean we're upgrading our EPRA earnings forecast. And so to our pipeline. Our regulated tenancies and non core portfolio represents 19% of our portfolio with around 1500 homes. Our purpose built, build to rent portfolio is 9,500 homes, and we have a pipeline of almost 5,000 homes. This represents significant further growth.

Operator

Our commitment to growing our portfolio since the launch of our strategy has been unrelenting. The lack of existing purpose built homes to rent and our commitment to quality has meant that our team have commissioned or directly developed the majority of our homes. Now the acquisition of the Astley from M and G represents a further route to growth, which we indicated at the half year that we'd be pursuing. So in addition to our usual forward funding and development route, tenanted acquisitions or acquisitions of existing assets or portfolios and asset repositioning are more levers we can now pull as this asset class matures and we continue our growth. And to illustrate this point, our future pipeline will be delivered from a variety of routes, from strategic joint ventures and partnerships such as with TfL, Network Rail, the Ministry of Defense from stabilized acquisitions like the Astley in Manchester and from our strategic land portfolio in Exeter, Wellesley and Bearwood and from future phases of our existing schemes where we've either acquired or contracted on the adjacent land next to our schemes at Cardiff, Sheffield and Guildford.

Operator

And as we deliver on our strategy, we have a proven track record of delivering compounding growth. Even during the pandemic, we had positive rental growth, and this has accelerated since. Now unlike many real estate businesses, our EPRA NTA has remained resilient. And whilst we've experienced yield expansion of 25%, this has largely been offset by like for like growth rental growth of 20%, and our delivery of our pipeline has maintained our NTA resilience. Our income has averaged 15% per annum, and we've delivered for shareholders with compounding dividend averaging 19%.

Operator

With a strong pipeline and many routes to build our business, we see many years of strong growth in our incomes, earnings and dividends. So our growth is fundamentally underpinned by a growing demand for renting and a shrinking supply of homes to rent. And this provides us with a positive long term outlook. Several, using the English National Housing Survey, predicts a 20% growth in a requirement for homes to rent by 2,031. So that's over 1,000,000 homes.

Operator

And the strongest demand they predict is coming from Grainger's core demographic, 25 to 34 and in Grainger's cluster locations. We've had an undersupply of housing for decades, and the housing supply is worsening with planning applications and housing starts down. And the suppliers of small landlords is shrinking as they've been leaving the market. So I'm going to give you a few more stats on that later on. We have a new government, and they're looking to stimulate the supply of housing of all tenures, but it will take some time to deliver.

Operator

This new government has committed to increasing supply, but they've also stated openly and widely their opposition to rent control, which they acknowledge would worsen supply. Now there are changes in the rental market, but we feel that Grainger is in a prime position to benefit. As people rent for longer, they have higher expectations. There are also changes with the government's renters rights bill. But unlike many small landlords, this business is best placed to thrive in a changing rental market.

Operator

So just looking at these proposed changes, increasing rental standards, well, we have a high quality portfolio and a leading operating platform Rising customer expectations, our in house operating platform has a customer centric culture, and we are delivering excellent Net Promoter Scores. There is a drive to longer term tenancies, which we welcome and our data and insights platform show us who are likely to stay with us, and on average, they're staying with us for 31 months. There is legislation coming forward to drive Energy Performance certificates to C or above by 2,030. 94% of Grainger properties meet that standard. We have a modern energy efficient portfolio, And the Grainger platform is powered by our Connect technology, enabling us to have insights and responsiveness ahead of our peers.

Operator

This is my favorite slide. We are ambitious for the growth of this business, and we have a strong track record of delivering on our ambitions. We have delivered strong growth in our income. And as we've pivoted from a trading business to a resilient investment business, we have delivered strong growth in our EPPA earnings. We have significantly improved our EBITDA margin.

Operator

Our growth will continue as we grow our portfolio and drive efficiency further. We're growing our income, doubling it through our pipeline from 2023. We're growing our EPRA earnings. We have upgraded our guidance for full year GBP 26,000,000 to GBP 60,000,000 and we see the potential to drive a 50% increase from current levels in the medium term. And we're driving our operational leverage with an ambition to reach 60% EBITDA margin by 2029.

Operator

We have a track record of delivering on our ambitions, and this slide is why I say we're building a bigger, more valuable business. So the highlights in summary, it's been another excellent performance. We have strong market fundamentals. We have a positive outlook for earnings. And we have REIT conversion less than a year away, another major milestone in Granger's transformation.

Operator

We are set to deliver accelerated growth. And with that, I'll hand on to Rob to give you the details of our financial performance.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Helen, and good morning, everybody. Today, I'm going to be covering off the financial performance for what is another strong year of compounding growth, and I'll be outlining why we see many more years of strong growth to come. FY 'twenty four has been another year of excellent delivery. Like for like rental growth across our stabilized portfolio was 6.3%. This strong underlying growth, combined with continuing delivery of our high quality pipeline, has driven a 14% increase in our net rents to £110,000,000 EPRA earnings growth continued to be very strong, up 21%, demonstrating how top line growth is further compounding our earnings growth through the operating leverage in our business, which is built for scale.

Speaker 1

As expected, adjusted earnings were lower by 6% due to lower sales profits as a result of our ongoing success in disposing of our regulated portfolio. Our dividend per share is also up 14% as we continue to deliver the strong sustainable dividend growth. Aper NTA was down 2% in the year to 298p. However, this would have slightly increased were it not for the first half change in tax treatment for the removal of multiple dwellings relief. Importantly, the second half saw a return to NTA growth.

Speaker 1

Looking at the income statement in more detail. Our overall like for like rental growth was strong at 6.3%, and this rental growth was split between PRS new lets at 5.6% and renewals at 6.8%, with rental growth in our regulated portfolio also strong at 6.6%. Stabilized gross to net improved by 50 basis points from the prior year to 25% as the benefits of our scale and our clustering model start to drive greater efficiency. Fees and other income increased due to compensation payments from developers known as LADs for loss of rent on scheme delays. Interest costs increased due to higher average levels of debt throughout the year, combined with lower amounts of capitalized interest.

Speaker 1

EPRA earnings saw very strong growth of 21%, demonstrating the strong compounding earnings growth that we're delivering. And as expected, profits from sales were lower, reflecting our reducing regs portfolio as we continue our strategic focus on growing recurring rental income. Other adjustments include a derivative valuation movement of £6,600,000 and an additional £5,000,000 fire safety provision. As a reminder, we have very little fire safety exposure as a business given the majority of our portfolio has been built post Grenfell. During the year, we've been progressing work on remediation, and the provision is before the benefit of any recourse to contractors.

Speaker 1

Now turning to the moving parts of the 14% increase in our net rent for the year. Strong like for like rental growth of 6.3% contributed €6,100,000 of this growth. And the successful leasing of our pipeline launches where demand for our products has been strong means we've let up ahead of underwriting and ERV, and this has added £10,900,000 Our asset recycling program offset this growth by £3,400,000 Looking forwards, we'd expect FY 'twenty five to be another year of double digit growth in net rental income, and we'd expect to add a similar absolute growth in total net rents. This chart shows the key movements in NTA over the course of the year. And our EBITDA came in at 2.98p per share, which was down 2% or 7p for the year.

Speaker 1

But importantly, we saw a return to valuation growth in the second half. And the removal of MDR in the first half of the year had an impact of 8p per share. Excluding this one off adjustment to purchases cost assumptions, then NTA would have slightly increased. Net rents and fees added 17p with overheads, finance costs and tax offsetting this by 10p. Overall, our portfolio valuation for the year down 0.8%, including the impact of the MDR relief change and up 0.8% excluding MDR.

Speaker 1

In the PRS portfolio, ERV growth of 5.2% more than offset the outward yield shift of 20 basis points. Valuations on the Regs portfolio were down only 0.2%, demonstrating their resilience and strong demand given their unique nature. Further details of the valuation can be seen on Page 46 in the appendices of this presentation. Over recent years, our assets have demonstrated resilience from a valuation perspective with the continuing theme of strong ERV growth largely offsetting outward yield shift. But with yields now stabilizing, the balance of these two components should prove to be more positive going forwards.

Speaker 1

As a reminder, there are many elements of our business not captured within our NTA as we've outlined on this slide. Within our NTA as we've outlined on this slide. Turning now to movements in net debt. Net debt was marginally up in the year with just a modest increase of €37,000,000 to 1,450,000,000 euros It was another big year of pipeline investment with €270,000,000 invested in our new schemes, which was more than matched by our operating cash flows. As a reminder, we're a highly cash generative business, and it's been another strong year for operational cash flow, which increased to €304,000,000 with a recent record €274,000,000 of gross sales delivered during the year, in line with our plans.

Speaker 1

This high level of asset recycling ensures our property level returns are optimized and our income is enhanced as we recycle out of lower yielding assets. It also provides capital for further investments and ensures we manage our net debt in line with our plans. Going forwards, we'd expect investments to be funded out of operational cash flows. Our balance sheet remains in great shape with strong liquidity and a strong hedging profile with rates fixed in the mid-three percent for the next 4 years. Both net debt at $1,450,000,000 and LTV at 38.2 percent have decreased from the half year levels, demonstrating our ability to manage our capital structure by flexing sales of our highly liquid asset base.

Speaker 1

Our business continues to be highly cash generative, which will continue to fund our future pipeline. In addition, we plan to reduce our debt and our LTV. Our strong operational cash flows and our highly liquid asset base give us substantial flexibility to deliver this. This LTV reduction will be managed with reference to our 4 year hedge maturity. As LTV is brought down over the medium term, this will help mitigate the impact of rising finance costs as our low rate hedging rolls off.

Speaker 1

This will ensure we continue to deliver strong earnings growth over the medium term as our finance costs rebase. REIT conversion is under a year away now and remaining on track for October 2025, and this will enhance our returns and support our progressive dividend policy. While conversion will not alter our strategy in any way, it does represent a significant landmark in the transition of our business away from a regs trading model to one with a strong compounding BTR income focus. It will remove any corporation tax on our BTR income and will grow our returns by 50 basis points per annum. As a predominantly rental business, we'll move to using EPRA earnings as our key earnings metric, although we will continue to report adjusted earnings, which includes sales profits.

Speaker 1

Our dividend has seen substantial growth over our transition period, and we remain committed to delivering a strong progressive dividend. Post REIT conversion, we'll move to a policy of distributing at least 80% of EPRA earnings as a dividend with a top up of REG sales profits in our initial couple of years to maintain our strong dividend trajectory, which will remain unchanged upon REIT conversion. FY 2024 was a strong year for net rent and earnings growth, but there is substantial growth in both to come. Pipeline completions will drive significant year on year increases in our net rent. Net rents will increase by €38,000,000 to €148,000,000 compared with FY 'twenty 4 as we deliver our committed pipeline, and that's an upgrade of $4,000,000 per annum since last year's guidance.

Speaker 1

Beyond that, our secured and planning and legal schemes will deliver a further $43,000,000 of net rent. And combined, the entire pipeline will see our net rents continue to accelerate to €191,000,000 This strong top line growth delivers even stronger earnings growth as the operating leverage from our business model and our Connect technology platform continues to drive meaningful margin improvement. Near term, we're providing upgraded guidance of delivering EPRA earnings of £60,000,000 by FY 'twenty six. That's a £5,000,000 increase on previous guidance and our second upgrade over the course of the year. We also have the potential to grow our current EPRA earnings by 50% over the medium term.

Speaker 1

That's just from the delivery of our committed pipeline and also after absorbing the impact of higher interest rates. Key positive drivers of this include the benefits of like for like rental growth at our long run average of 3.5 percent the yield pickup from recycling out of our lower yielding regs assets into our growing build to rent portfolio and also scale efficiencies with EBITDA margins growing to over 60%. So that delivers a 50% increase in EPRA earnings even after absorbing the net impact of higher interest costs and reduced leverage. We see this as conservative as it excludes any further accretive opportunities as outlined by Helen and is based only on the delivery of our committed pipeline. We see Granger is delivering a medium term sustainable return of at least 8% with stable yields.

Speaker 1

And this comprises 2 components: our recurring earnings yield of 3.5% plus 4.5% capital growth based on the long run rental growth assumption of 3.5% adjusted for leverage. And this total return is extremely robust given the predictable income elements and rental growth assumption that's backed up by decades of evidence. And I provided further details on this for you in the appendix. We continue to make good progress in our sustainability agenda. During the year, we've continued to drive our net zero carbon plans.

Speaker 1

And at the start of the year, we launched our Scopes 1 to 3 net zero pathway. We have net zero asset plans across all of our PRS assets, and we've executed on a number of efficiency initiatives and upgrades. These have successfully delivered a 9% reduction in our Scopes 1 to 3 average operational carbon intensity during the year. And we prepared our SBTI compliant net zero plans and will work with SBTI assessors to hopefully achieve approval during 2025. We've engaged our supply chain to help us meet our targets, including our ambitious aims for a 40% reduction in our embodied carbon output by 2,030.

Speaker 1

And we continue to drive strong community engagement following our community blueprint in the areas in which we operate. So to summarize, our liquidity and our balance sheet are strong, giving us the flexibility through disposals to reinvest into our committed pipeline and manage our debt. We've continued to deliver a very strong operational performance with strong growth momentum in our net rental income up by 14%, which will continue at a similar level next year. With this, our dividend per share is up 14% and will continue to grow strongly as we convert into a REIT next year. We're on track to deliver a transformation to our rent, EBITDA margin and compounding earnings with the 2nd upgrade to our FY 'twenty six earnings guidance to £60,000,000 And medium term earnings has the potential to grow by 50% based purely on our existing committed pipeline, which is fully funded and excludes any upside opportunities.

Speaker 1

This strong earnings growth underpins our medium term sustainable total returns target of 8% based on stable yields. And with that, I'll now hand you back to Helen.

Operator

Thank you, Rob. In this section, I'll illustrate why the U. K. Residential market is so resilient and why Grainger has a key competitive advantage from our strong operating platform, our investment in technology and our commitment to customer service. So unlike many other forms of real estate, residential homes for rent are a needs based real estate asset class.

Operator

Everyone needs a home to live in. Population growth and housing for sale affordability mean that demand for renting is continuing to grow whilst the supply shortages worsen. Our population is growing and the point at which people are committing to home ownership is delayed. This means people are renting for longer. The average age of a first time buyer in the UK is 30 four and 35 in London.

Operator

And at the same time, the number of landlords exiting the market is growing. The pressure on smaller landlords by fiscal and regulatory changes has meant that we've seen 300,000 fewer smaller landlords since the first increase in stamp duty in 2016. And we have a significant fall in housing supply starts, which is only going to exacerbate the problem. And all of this means that we've got a positive rental outlook for Grainger. We've seen strong rental growth over the last 3 years, and this has been linked to wage inflation, and we see a positive outlook.

Operator

We anticipate the strong fundamentals of our market and our offer mean that in 2025, rental growth will continue to grow above the long term average of 3% to 3.5%. At Grainger, we have a fully integrated platform, which means we do all of our own leasing. We have great data about our customers and we know that on average, our customers pay 28% of their household income on rent and this insight and our customer surveys tell us that our customers are robust. In addition, our customer base benefits from a diverse employment spread. Our customer demographic is solid.

Operator

84% of them are in the 20 to 40 year old age bracket and the age this is the age that you tend to see the strongest growth in income. And all of this is positive for Grainger's rental growth. Now I often talk about Grainger's leading operating platform because it is a key differentiator and it is a driver of value. Our hands on approach means that we have access to great data and our market leading data and analytics team provide us with great insights on performance. Our investment in technology gives online capability for leasing and servicing our customers.

Operator

And the scale of the portfolio and our dedicated procurement team are improving our buying power and they're driving efficiencies. And our best in class customer service team are keeping our residents happy and staying with us. And the outputs of a strong operating platform are evidenced by our strong operational performance. It shows in our results. This leading platform has delivered strong operational growth and strong like for like growth.

Operator

High occupancy. And just as a reminder, 95% is considered fully let in the build to rent world, and we're frequently over 98%. We've got high rent collection. We collect 99% of our rents first time, and the lease up of our new schemes has been ahead of underwriting. Granger's rental growth has tracked wage growth, and all of this is driving improvements in operating margin and compounding our earnings growth.

Operator

This is a well oiled machine delivering great financial performance. Since our investment in our platform, we've been investing in customer service. Now everyone at Grainger, no matter what role you have, is trained in the Grainger style of customer service. And this investment has paid off. Our Net Promoter Score has improved again this year by 12%.

Operator

So we're now well ahead of many well loved consumer brands. And 89% of our Google reviews are 5 star and we have 63% retention rate. Our purpose of renting homes and enriching lives and our values support our ambition to be not only the largest listed residential landlord, but to be the most responsible. We have healthy customer affordability. We have high customer satisfaction.

Operator

9 out of 10 Grainger customers really like their Grainger home. I'm particularly proud that we are recognized as a top employer. We achieved this year the national equality standard, the platinum standard for equality and diversity, and for the first time, we've entered the top 100 large companies to work for. We are environmentally responsible with 94% of Grainger's portfolio already compliant with 2,030 minuteimum standards, and we care about our communities with almost 600 community events, enabling our residents to put down roots. And we're committed to our residents' safety with a safety culture that puts Grainger in the top 10% of all organizations undertaking the Health and Safety Executive Safety Climate Survey.

Operator

Now you've seen this slide many times. It's the foundation of our investment philosophy. Our research led approach to investing continues with us concentrating on areas of high growth potential and supply and demand fundamentals. And we're open in a new location in Cardiff and early in 2025, our first building in Oxford. So that's 2 more dots on the chart.

Operator

London, of course, remains our best rental city. And our clustering strategy has been further reinforced as we build on our clusters in Birmingham, London and Bristol. And next year, we've got further openings in London and Bristol. The benefits of clustering is that it gives us operational efficiencies, leveraging our brand and improving customer retention. And our expansion continues.

Operator

So 2025 is another exciting year of launches and another GBP 13,000,000 of rent roll. Our London portfolio has new launches at Tottenham Hill and Canning Town, adding to our clusters there. And just as a reminder, we've invested over £1,000,000,000 since the start of our strategy in London, our strongest rental city. We have launches in 2 other great cities. We are launching our 3rd scheme in Bristol and in Oxford, our first opening in this great rental city, which is why we are confident about future performance.

Operator

We have exceeded expectations for the growth of this business, and our future performance is locked in because of the fundamentals of our market and the strength of our pipeline. We have a compelling investment case, and Grainger will continue to deliver compounded earnings growth. This is a low risk business, and we're on course to deliver an 8% sustainable accounting return. Our balance sheet is in great shape. Our debt is fixed in the mid-3s for another 4 years, and our leading operating platform means that our EBITDA margin will grow to over 60%.

Operator

We're in a market with strong fundamentals, and we have a track record of delivering for shareholders. So in summary, another excellent performance. We're in a market with strong demand. We have a positive outlook on earnings, and we are set to continue our accelerated growth. Thank you.

Operator

I'm going to invite you to ask questions, and I will be joined by Rob Hudson, our CFO Mike Keaveney, our Director of Land and Development and Eliza Pattinson, our Director of Operations and Asset Management and I've got other senior leaders in the room here. So anyone listening in, you can submit questions through the webcast. I'll take questions in the room first. Chris?

Speaker 2

Morning. Thank you for that. It's Chris Melinta at Deutsche and Numis. I've got 3 questions. I'll go one at a time, Rob.

Speaker 2

I'll blast a load of questions at you. I just wanted to push Rob a little bit more on the medium term guidance about the 50% growth. And you mentioned a bit about debt pay down and also marking to market debt. I just wonder if you could kind of share a little bit more of that. And I presume there's no one answer, but just a range of kind of what you see happening there.

Speaker 1

Yes, yes. So I think the great thing with the 50% earnings growth is that we've got such strong growth, which is locked in. And this is quite conservative because it's based just on our committed pipeline. So the key drivers are the additional rents coming through from the committed pipeline, which are highly accretive given the platform that we've got in driving efficiencies. The accretion in EBITDA margin to 60% plus, which again is we see as very conservative and it's locked in because really it's just leveraging the central platform that we've got.

Speaker 1

So that we know that efficiency is going to come and we've got very good visibility over it. We've been quite conservative in terms of our assumption for like for like rental growth at 3.5%, which is the long run average, but clearly, we are performing ahead of that currently. And then finally, we do plan to adjust our leverage as I've outlined. And again, we've the beauty of the position that we're in, because we've fixed our interest rates for the next 4 years, we have plenty of time to manage our debt to whatever scenario we fall under ultimately in terms of where interest rates settle down to. And we will adjust our leverage to drive that level of earnings growth.

Speaker 1

But for example, we had to refinance at the end of the 4 year period towards where current forward yield curves are assuming, that will be around 5.5% and would equate to a deleveraging of around GBP 300,000,000 And we would see that as being extremely achievable when you think about the context of having delivered GBP 274,000,000 of sales in the last year. So we've got plenty of optionality and flexibility. We have over £1,000,000,000 of noncore assets to trade through, so we're very confident over delivering that.

Speaker 2

And should we think about the medium term in a similar context as the EBITDA margin? Would that be a fair assumption?

Speaker 1

Yes, that's right, which would be about 5 years. Okay. Thank

Speaker 2

you, Rob. Next one, it's just about comments around lower yielding asset sales. We obviously understand the strategy around regs, but I've seen this being a disproportionate amount of build rent and PRS sales in London in the current year. And we've now got the regional portfolio for the first time slightly larger than the London portfolio. I mean, does that say anything about your preference for the regions versus London or your desire for a bit more diversity?

Speaker 2

I'm just curious about what that signifies.

Operator

We're really committed to London as a city. I mean, it's a great rental city. It's where most of the population come to sort of at some point in their lives and particularly our demographic. The sales that we've made out of the London portfolio have been largely our older, smaller stock. And while they are PRS rather than build to rent, they tend to be reasonably high reasonable yielding, but they've got much higher CapEx costs associated with them just because of the age and type of buildings that they are.

Operator

So those are the things that we've exited this year. And that obviously gives us that upgrades on earnings.

Speaker 2

That's really clear. Last one is just about availability of opportunities. You've shown us the slide again about the portfolios and the long tails. Just curious about what is the availability of stabilized assets or portfolios of assets? Is there any stress emerging in the market?

Speaker 2

I imagine not with the rental growth, but again, just Yes.

Operator

No, there's no stress in the market. And you'll recall that at the start of our strategy, we had no option but to create our own portfolio because there was so little out there. There is more out there. And the acquisition that we got from M and G this year, which was effectively an off market transaction, means that there were people that will reposition their own portfolio either because of management or funding or whatever. But we're not seeing distress.

Operator

But this is a business and a sector that we know so well. We know every asset. We've seen it since creation. And it's still small enough as a market to get our arms around and know what we want to acquire. Miranda?

Speaker 3

Miranda Coben, Berenberg. Just following on from that really, I guess just in terms of replenishing the development pipeline, how you're seeing the opportunities? Are there still forward funding opportunities out there, more direct development? If you just talk a little bit more on that.

Operator

Yes. I'm going to come to Mike in a moment. Obviously, we've got a great secured pipeline, which is schemes that we've got consent on that we can bring forward. And obviously, we've got our Strathland portfolio as well. But Mike, do you want to take the point?

Speaker 4

Yes. Sure. So in terms of the pipeline, I mean, it's fair to say, you'll have seen on the graph that we've got some forward funding developments on-site and then we've

Speaker 1

got some direct developments further out. And they are

Speaker 4

currently going through the planning process further out. And they are currently going through the planning process for revisions. We're also looking at additional value creation on those and the level of affordable housing and the grant funding. And irrespective with the Gateway 2 and the building safety regulator, we expect those projects to be on-site in 2026. That's how long it will take to get through that process.

Speaker 3

And in terms of new acquisitions, what's the market like at the moment? Is it competitive?

Speaker 4

For so we're primarily focused, as Helen mentioned, on land, so land for future pipeline. And we're active in that market and looking at things all the time. And then stabilized acquisitions, the team run the rule over the entire portfolio of other people's stock very often. We track that closely. So, yes, it's a constant.

Speaker 4

We run an IC twice a week and a sourcing committee and a business development committee regularly.

Speaker 5

Good morning, team. Thank you for the presentations. Saram Choudhary from Jefferies. Just two questions, if I may. So the first one, I think, as the other analysts have alluded to, it's regarding future growth and uplifting rents.

Speaker 5

Do you see any opportunities in perhaps repurposing some of the older PRS assets? And what type of quantum could you look for there in terms of rental growth? And then the second question is this perhaps is a bit early, but do you have any view on gross and net impacts with perhaps increased overheads following the government's latest budget?

Operator

Thanks, Sam. Great questions. In terms of future growth, there's a slide in the deck. I can't exactly remember the number of it, but it has got the all the routes that we've got to growth. And one of them that I think you picked up on was asset repositioning.

Operator

We've got a fantastic track record in the business, particularly in what was the GRIP portfolio of repositioning assets and getting significant uplifts in value. And we have got a couple of opportunities within the portfolio to do that on core City Fringe locations. So it is it will be part of our suite of things that we can bring forward. The other one is on you asked about gross to net. We've made fantastic progress this year to hit 25% in terms of our gross to net.

Operator

That's brought down for those that can remember the start of the strategy, it was about 31%, 32%. So we really have brought that down. And of course, things like the NI budget change will impact us. But we're actually quite light in terms of compared to retail and hospitality in terms of the number of people. But I think we all wait to see the impact in terms of supply chain because obviously we all use people for repairs and maintenance, etcetera, but we're still targeting that 25%.

Operator

I mean the great thing for us is we're getting that top line growth coming through.

Speaker 5

Thank you. Thanks.

Speaker 6

Thanks for that presentation. I'm Sam Knott from Colytics. Just a couple of linked questions on that Slide 21, the bridge of net rental income across the pipeline. So first on the committed pipeline, is there a sort of breakdown of roughly how that grows to 148,000,000 splits between like lease up and stabilization compared to new builds, compared to just sort of 3 years of rental growth that you expect? And then in the longer term, is there an indication of sort of total CapEx required and sort of where you're going to expect to fund that from given the REIT conversion means that you'll be spending pretty much all

Speaker 7

of your operational earnings on paying out the dividend?

Speaker 8

Yes.

Speaker 1

I'm happy to take that. So in terms of the rental bridge, we've actually broken out, this is on Slide 21 of the pack. So you can see actually, we have within FY 'twenty five, we've got £9,000,000 of lease up from the completions in FY 'twenty four because a lot of them completed throughout the course of the year. So we've got very good momentum in those lease ups. So £9,000,000 coming through into FY 2025.

Speaker 1

And then the rest comes through as the new developments complete and lease up over that period. So hopefully that gives

Speaker 6

you Is there any rental growth on the existing stuff embedded in that 148?

Speaker 1

So it's just in terms of today's rent. So we've uplifted to that, but obviously, future growth would come on top. Really, thank you. In terms of the CapEx, there's £220,000,000 on that, just under £500,000,000 of committed pipeline of cost to complete. And then of course, we have optionality over the secured and the planning and legals.

Speaker 1

We have £1,000,000,000 of noncore assets, mainly the regs and then some older PRS assets and some old van positions as well to trade out of. That gives us really valuable flexibility in terms of being able to deliver growth and also to deleverage a relatively modest amount as I've already set out. So we can actually deliver both.

Speaker 4

Good

Speaker 9

morning. It's Jones Carswell from Peel Hunt. Just going back to the EP revenues, the 50% increase over the medium term. I mean, I appreciate lots of comments about how conservative that is. But if you just take the current kind of EP EPS inflated by 50%, also appreciate the dividend policy is a minimum of 80%.

Speaker 9

But if you were to just say 80%, you get back to dividend, not 1,000,000 miles from where we are today. I'm just wondering, do you think when we get to that point in the medium term, will you still be collecting some of the trading gains from the regs? Or do you think they'll have burnt off by then?

Speaker 1

That's a great question. Thank you for that, James. So certainly, for the 1st couple of years post conversion of REIT, we would expect a modest top up of regs profits because we will maintain a progressive growing dividend. After that, because we've got such strong growth in EPRA earnings coming through, we would expect that fully funding from EPRA earnings and to maintain that very strong trajectory. And of course, with EPRA earnings growing 50%, obviously, that's a great underpin to a strong growing dividend.

Speaker 1

What was the second part of your question?

Speaker 9

It's just where the contribution will still be there.

Speaker 1

Okay. So yes, we will continue to see I mean, the regs is a naturally declining portfolio, so we will expect our sales profits to roll off. We're selling around 10% to sort of the early teens in percentage terms through around 7% to 8% vacancy, and we always top up with modest amount of investment sales. We did about GBP 100,000,000 this year. As the portfolio reduces, that's a naturally reducing quantum and obviously say the regs profits will reduce.

Speaker 1

But we would expect for over the medium term to continue to have some regs profits. But of course, that's being more than offset through the very strong growth in Emperor earnings that we've got.

Speaker 7

Tim? Tim Luecky from Panmure Liberum. Just on the Slide 22, the next one, that doesn't that's on today's tax basis, right? So there's no contribution in that 50% number from the reconversion?

Speaker 1

So this is all of this guidance is based on pretax EPRA earnings. So that's the $48,000,000 figure. And we've reported that on the like flight basis because it becomes 1 and the same post rate protection. So the tax

Speaker 7

goes on top again.

Speaker 1

That's a further benefit in terms of our cash and our returns.

Speaker 7

And you said some BTR pretax profits, you got about $100,000,000 rent roll at the moment net. So share of G and A and interest expense, what's that $60 ish left? And you say 25%, 15,000,000 if we assume that on top of that?

Speaker 1

Yes. It is that kind of quantum and of course it's a growing benefit as the earnings compound.

Speaker 7

And then there's more scale to go because that's only a couple of years. Yes. Yes. It's the softest guidance we've ever seen.

Speaker 8

Hi, Helen. Selene Soren from Barclays. I've got a question from you on the like for like rental growth assumption for next year. So the ONS pointed to an acceleration in rental prices in October around 8%, But you're guiding to a 3% to 3.5% rental growth for next year. So do you think you're being too conservative here?

Speaker 8

And my second question is kind of linked to the first one. The new Labour government decided to address the housing shortage by increasing supply, but supply conditions could take some time. So could it be a case that we see higher than historical average rental growth for longer than you expect? Thank you.

Operator

Thanks, Lee. Yes, the O and S tends to have a real lag in it, and I think that one of the things that we do about actively managing and having our own operating platform is that we capture rental growth very quickly. So there is a lag effect in O and S. And so our 20% rental growth over the last 3 years, obviously, is significant. If you rolled back the ONS, it would be a lower number.

Operator

So I'm talking real time now. We've always worked on the basis that if you see long term inflation, sort of 2%, and this goes back decades, you'd normally get 1% to 1.5% on rental growth above inflation. So if we do get higher wage inflation coming through, we could see higher rental growth. So that's the sort of that's the fundamentals. And it's one of the things that's great about our business model is that you have that inflation linkage.

Operator

And because of the way we operate it, you get it very immediately. Your second point about supply and the fact that small landlords are going, but also the supply is not coming through. Supply and demand will affect pricing, but the other thing we also look at is customer affordability and occupancy. And so that's ensuring that we actually have well let buildings where people stay with us because that reduces a whole host of other costs rather than just pushing the rents and then actually seeing a more fleet of foot residence. So it's a very carefully calibrated way we look at it.

Operator

But as Tim sort of said, it could we could be on the cautious side, but 3%, 3.5% is we think we'll be above that for 2025. But I think our business model is predicated that, that is the long term rental growth.

Speaker 10

Thanks. Good morning. It's Tom Hasson at HSBC. I'm just on Page 51 looking at the committed pipeline. The gross yield targets there are sort of between 5.5% 6%, which has struck at the point of underwriting.

Speaker 10

Just wonder where those are today, if you mark those to market. And just to double check I heard correctly, on your earnings guidance, just as it relates to the pipeline growth, is that based on underwritten rents or today's rents, assuming there's a slight difference?

Operator

Do you want to take the second one first, and then I'll come back to the investment case?

Speaker 1

Yes. So based on that, it's based on today's rents, but we're not including future anticipated growth beyond that.

Speaker 10

Thanks.

Operator

Yes. And worth saying that we do normally rent above underwriting because remember, when we underwrite our schemes, it's usually 3 years in advance before we start on-site, which brings us to returns. Our returns in terms of our we've obviously considerably changed our investment returns. So we're looking at between 7.75% and 8% IRR on our schemes.

Speaker 10

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Questions? Great questions. Have we got some online?

Speaker 11

Got a few online. I'll read them out now. First one is from Carly Young at Royal London Asset Management. We sort of covered this earlier, but it was about the tax measures most recently announced in the budget and the cost base impact for Grainger.

Operator

Yes. So obviously, the main one is NI in terms of cost. I should say that for our competitors, if you like, the small landlords, they saw a much worse because it increased stamp duty to 5% on second homes, which obviously, again, impacts our competition more than us because of the way that we develop and also that we value, as you know, from the MDR discussion earlier this year, we include a 5% stamp duty in any event in our schemes. So the main one is NI and National Insurance changes, which actually are quite small for the business, less than €500,000,000 in terms of direct costs annualized, but we're looking at obviously, the supply chain and keep an eye on that.

Speaker 11

Thank you. And the second and final question from online is from Gerardo at Kempen, a 2 parter. The first question, please could you provide some indications on expected regulated tenancy sales for next year? What's the decline in the sales this year?

Operator

Yes. So I think it's one of the things that those that have followed Grainger for a long time will realize that part of the strategy was to sell out. Our vacant sales are a fact really a function of whether or not people leave us because they're long term residents. Average age in that portfolio is still 78. We get between 6% 7% per annum vacant.

Operator

There is a view that that will accelerate over time. And actually, the other thing, as Rob identified, because we're coming out of some of those regions, we actually are doing some investment sales, which don't generate as much profit because obviously we sell to investors. And so we don't capture the reversionary surplus in those. And that is in part why our regulated sales were down this year. We did a good number of them, but some of them were investment sales.

Operator

Rob, do you want to add to that if I

Speaker 1

I think you've summarized it well, but in the main, we did around GBP 100,000,000 of reg sales for the year just ended. We do have a naturally declining portfolio for the reasons that Helen's described. So we would expect each year to for that to reduce naturally and as that unwinds over time. The reason that we declined a little bit more than that specifically for the year just ended was not only do we have the reducing portfolio, but we had a very strong finish towards the end of the previous financial year. So there was a timing difference as well.

Speaker 1

But in the main, it's just the impact of having a naturally reducing Brexit portfolio. There's always in the low teens less to sell each year.

Speaker 11

There was one final question from Gerardo around the pipeline, particularly the planning and legals part of the pipeline. When could we start seeing some commitments to that and some of the launches from the co investment projects? I guess that's perhaps TFL.

Operator

Yes. Yes. The I think Mike's indicated the 2026 would be the early start on-site in terms of that as we go back around planning changes, etcetera, on that portfolio. The thing about doing that pipeline is that you never quite you don't realize how things drop through into the individual segments. But in that outer pipeline, we have got things like, for example, our Cardiff our Cardiff land, our Sheffield land, our Guilford scheme, etcetera, they're all in that outer pipeline, and some of them can come through very quickly once planning is achieved.

Operator

So it's land that we control that we're taking through the planning process. And I should say, because I haven't really talked about it, that the change in the planning system could accelerate that quite considerably. I stunned everyone into science. Thank you so much for spending your time with us on this cold morning. Thank you for everybody that joined on online.

Operator

We are here and available to answer any questions that you have. If not, just e mail either Rob, myself or Curt. Happy to speak to you about any queries. But thanks once again for spending time with us.

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Earnings Conference Call
Grainger H2 2024
00:00 / 00:00