LondonMetric Property Plc

Okay, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to London Metrics full year results for the year ending end of March 2022. Great to see so many people here in person, and we very much appreciate this. As usual, I'm joined on stage by my colleagues, and you'll hear later from Martin and hopefully from Mark and Valentine. once we open it up to Q&A as you can see if Martin can't answer the questions on finance we've got a second finance director on the far left for some reason I'm not quite sure if that's succession planning or not but let's hope it's not for a number of reasons which I'd better not go into. So I'm going to start, give you an overview, headline numbers, and probably get all the good ones out of the way, and then before passing over to Martin, who will take you through the more mundane numbers, and then I'll come back and talk you through the valuation, the make of the portfolio, and for us, more importantly, our thoughts on the period ahead, both on our market perspective and also the wider real estate market before then opening it up to Q&A. So let's make sure that we know how to work this. Okay, so an overview after what has obviously been a pretty strong period for us. And as I said to a number of people this morning, these results aren't just materialized in the last 12 months. They are courtesy of a number of years of planning as we pivoted the portfolio towards what we consider to be the winning sectors within real estate. And it's those macro trends that continue to shape our portfolio composition and our thoughts around allocating shareholder money into real estate. And I think that where we sit today, 75% of the portfolio is in logistics, 22 and a bit is in long income. I think that we're very much on the right side of some of those structural changes, and no doubt we can dive deeper into those during the Q&A session. The sector calls have delivered some strong performances. As you can see there, total property return of 28%, with logistics being the standout performer at 31%. And again, I'll I'll dive deeper into that later on in the presentation and our long-income strategy delivering a total property return of 19%. For many years, we've been focusing on income, its strength and reliability and growth, and that's something that is incredibly important to us. Our contracted rental income, as you can see there on the right-hand side, is up 15% over the period, and that's helped us generate like-for-like income growth of 5.4%. I'll come on to talk about rent reviews later. I think these are often overlooked. For me, they are a fantastic insight into the desirability of your real estate, and I think this is going to be increasingly important going forward. And we are confident that we have a portfolio that is capable of capturing those reversions. You can see there our ERV growth in logistics at 14% is a reversion that we expect to collect over the coming period. Our discipline in capital allocation, we run London Metric with what I call an ownership culture. That ensures that the hugely successful equity raise at the end of last year, 175 million, which was oversubscribed many times, has been invested successfully as opposed to spent irrationally. And that, I think, has further strengthened the portfolio. £575 million was invested in our two strongest conviction calls over the period, and we disposed of £208 million. Again, I'll go on to that later in the presentation. We've also done post-period end transactions. You can see there 43 million of acquisitions off of net initial yield of 4.5%, rising to 5%, and then a number of post-period end disposals, 86 million acquisitions. So, turning to the numbers, as I said, I'll probably focus on all the good ones, leave Martin to deal with the rest. So, as I say, net rental income out is up 8%, 133 million. Earnings, 93.5 million, up 9.2%. Earnings per share, up 5.5%, just a smidgen over 10 pence a share. which has allowed us to announce this morning a final dividend, 2.65p, bringing a total dividend for the year of 9.25 pence per share, up just under 7% on the year, and 109% covered. Our NAV, or NTA as we now refer to it, is up 37.2%, courtesy of a revaluation gain of 632 million, which was generated by a 10% increase in ERVs and a 61% basis point movement, inward movement in yields. And again, I'll go through that in more detail later on in the presentation. And that together with that increase together with our dividends has allowed us to report a total accounting return of 41.9%, which is, as you can see, comfortably ahead of our three-year average of just over 21%. So on that note, I will pass over to Martin, who can take us through

Thank you very much. Thank you, Andrew. So in a period of great uncertainty, now whether that's COVID-related or macroeconomic, I think we've produced a really strong set of financial results, significant earnings growth and NAV progression. Pleased to report that our net rental income of £133.1 million is an increase of 7.9% over last year and an increase of 42% over the last three years. We've added significant income from lettings and rent reviews, from completed developments becoming income producing, and from additional income from net acquisitions, which total in excess of £10 million. Net rental income is again exceptionally well supported by our rent collection statistics in the year. We've collected 99.5% of rents due in the year. We think these levels of rent collection continue to reflect the strength of our occupier relationships and our focus on strong credits in the right sectors in strong trading locations. So although our administrative overhead has increased marginally from £15.8 million to £16.1 million, We continue to monitor our operational costs really closely, and our EPRA cost ratio has reduced by 110 basis points in the year to 12.5%, which I think is one of the leading performances in the sector. As a consequence of our financing activity in the year, our net finance costs are 24.7 million. That's an increase of 2.2 million in the year, primarily due to holding a higher average debt balance in the year. The average interest rate payable over the year has broadly remained in line with the previous year. That focus on cost control on top of our net rental income growth has driven our EPRA profit to 93.5 million or 10.04 pence per share. That supports the 6.9% increase to our dividend for the year to 9.25 pence and provides really strong 109% dividend cover. The strong profit growth on top of the unprecedented valuation gain in the year of £632 million allow us to report an overall profit for the year of £734.5 million. Turning now to the balance sheet, the portfolio has grown by over £1 billion in the year. The valuation of £3.6 billion is an increase of 39% over last year. Disposals in the year with a book value of £184 million were more than offset by acquisitions of £457 million, but the main contributory factor to the valuation increase is that revaluation uplift of £632 million. Gross debt at the year end is £1.05 billion. That's an increase of £177 million over last year and represents an LTV of only 28.8% given that significant increase in our portfolio valuation. In November, as Andrew said, we successfully raised new equity of £175 million through a placing that was substantially oversubscribed and which was utilised within three months, including the further strengthening of our London Urban Logistics portfolio with the acquisition of the Savills IM Income and Growth Fund for £122 million. The net liability position at the year end is £39.4 million, the main component of which, as in previous years, is rent received in advance. In summary, therefore, before I come on to talk about the debt arrangements, our EPRA net tangible assets at the year end were £2.56 billion, or £261.1 per share, a significant increase of 37.2% over last year's £190.3 per share. The increase in the NTA, as Andrew said, together with the dividend paid, resulted in a total accounting return of 41.9%. We were very active in the year in managing our capital structure. As you can see, we completed 930 million of debt financings in the year. which included the new £380 million private debt placement, which was upsized from an original £150 million due to the level of demand and extremely keen pricing. The refinancing is including a new short-term facility of £150 million completed in November, and that was part of the funding for the Savills acquisition. Our debt maturity has increased with those refinancings from 4.2 years to 6.5 years, and we're now 71% hedged against future interest rate rises. Our current cost of debt is 2.6%, and our marginal cost of debt is 1.8%, and we have unutilised facilities at that rate of £245 million. Our total headroom, including our cash, is a shade under £300 million. Our interest cover is 5.2 times, and we have excellent cover on all of our banking covenants. Conscious of the likelihood of rising interest rates in the foreseeable future, our only debt repayment this year is 50 million of our shortest-term facilities, and we would intend to meet that repayment by the proceeds of asset sales, which, given where yields are, is likely to be earnings accretive. But looking further forward into the second half of FY24, we have further refinancings of the remainder of our shortest-term facility, together with the shortest tranche of our very first private placement. If we look at the current incremental cost of those refinancings, assuming Sonia at 2%, we think that would cost us about £2 million per annum. So manageable. Yeah, I don't know how to go back. So, actually, I have to go back? That wasn't, yeah. So, Val, do you want to do this one? If you can come and move the slides for me. So, our contracted rent roll is now 143.3 million. That's a 15% increase on last year, and we would forecast that to grow to 151.1 million pounds. I've adjusted that reported net rental income to account for the busy post-period end. So whilst net divestments have deducted £2 million off the rent roll, our development and asset management pipeline adds a further £9.8 million to the rent roll. So the forecast rent roll of £151.1 million, net of interest and overhead, which are currently running a little in excess of £40 million, would generate earnings over the foreseeable future of more than £100 million. That's approaching 11 pence per share. And I think that significant level of growth in our rent roll supports the confidence that we have that we will continue to be able to grow our earnings substantially and therefore progress our dividend. And we would expect the dividend in Q1 for FY23 to increase by 4.5% to 2.3 pence per share. And finally, a brief look back, which puts the increase in the rent roll into context and clearly demonstrates that since our merger, which was way back in 2013, we have been able to more than double net rental income and earnings per share. We have trebled our total property return and our total shareholder return has increased fourfold through share price appreciation and dividend returns. That equates to an almost 17% compound annual growth rate. And on that note, I'll hand back to Andrew.

Thanks, Martin. So, right, deeper dive into the real estate portfolio. As you've heard us say, so that's valued at the end of March, 3.6 billion. That's up a billion pounds on this time last year. And as you can see from the pie chart, dominated by our exposure to the three subsectors of the distribution logistics market. Occupancy is high, lease lengths are long, and 61% of the portfolio benefiting from guaranteed rental uplifts. We'll talk about that in a bit more detail later. Standout performance was from our urban and regional portfolios, which is probably not surprising. where you can see there on the far right-hand side of the table, I'm conscious there's a lot of numbers here, so the dotted dashed lines are supposed to guide you to the right, at 33.3% and 34% respectively, driven by ERV growth, but also some yield compression, as you can see there, and also an acceleration of performance actually in H2 over H1. Strong performance is also from our three mega warehouse investments and also our long income at 20.7% and 19% respectively. I would just point out that actually the 58 basis points compression that we enjoyed in our long income was actually after absorbing 49 basis point outward movement on our four remaining cinema investments. So it wasn't a case of all boats rising on that demand for long income. But it undoubtedly has been an incredibly strong sector and remains so as evidenced by some of our post-period end disposals. And the standout performance in many ways was the 36.4% total return that our remaining retail parks enjoyed. I suspect there was no ERV growth on those, but courtesy of 223 basis points of compression as investors, you know, I suppose – to that subsector and as others have reported. So as Martin and I have already said, so overall it was a 61 basis points of compression. It was 10% uplift in ERVs, delivering a full year capital value appreciation of 22.9%, which as you can see with income gave us a 28.2% total property return. So looking at distribution. That portfolio is valued at £2.7 billion, 98% occupied, and enjoys long-weighted average unexpired lease terms. Urban is our strongest conviction call. It's also our largest exposure at £1.6 billion, 127 assets. And probably one of the most important numbers on this slide is the fact that we think it's led off a very Affordable, £7.50 a square foot. And as I mentioned earlier, as we think, it's got a lot of reversion there, which we hope to capture through the review process. Over the year, we settled 37 rent reviews across our urban logistics portfolio, on average at 20% above previous passing. I'll come on to talk about that in a bit more detail later. I have a slide on rent reviews, given how keenly I focus on them. Our regional portfolio put in a very, very strong performance. It's now valued at £681 million across 13 assets and, again, let at £6.70 a foot. If you put that into context, in the period we let our 320,000-square-foot unit at Bedford at £8 a foot. So it kind of gives you an indication of where we think regional rents could get to. And, by the way, I'm not capping out at £8 either. I'm just telling you where I think the market is today. And that portfolio is currently 17% reversionary. We carried out three rent reviews in the period. They were actually all indexed, so there was no open market rent reviews on that, which delivered 16% above previous passing. We have three assets in our mega logistics portfolio, valued at 425 million. As you can see there, let for a very long period of time, 18 years, weighted average unexpired lease term. One rent review in the period, it's a fixed uplift, and that delivered an 8% uplift on previous passing, assuming a five-yearly review cycle. So our long income portfolio, as I said, delivered a strong return over the period. Total property return of 19%. Value today at a smidgen over 800 million. Continues to enjoy very long unexpired lease terms. 14 years, it's fully let. 68% of the rent is indexed. And over the period, we carried out 44 rent reviews here that delivered a 13.1% uplift, guaranteed uplift in rents. And increasingly, the focus here is very much on the grocery and the roadside. We continue to see strong demand. In many ways, alongside some of our logistics assets, we take a lot of incoming on the assets within this portfolio, which is why you've probably seen us being more active on the sales side, more recent to post-period end than we might have been on the buy side. And we're always open to that. Investment activity, just a little bit breakdown on the 575 million of acquisitions that we undertook in the year. Martin's touched on the biggest asset acquisition, which was the portfolio that we acquired from Savills Investment Management. So 432 million of logistics investments, 143 million of long income. Post-period end, we've acquired another 43 million of a net initial yield of 5%. Our 208 million of disposals was dominated by the sale of one of our mega-sheds, Selecta Primark, up in Thrapston, for 102 million off an net initial yield of 4.1%. As I said, we have reacted to approaches we've received from investors for some of our long-income assets, both during the period and, as you can see, they're also post-period end. We also continue to sell non-core offices, residential we're now out of, but also one of our largest retail park, which was sold in the summer up at Kirkstall in Leeds. And on average, our sales post-period end, as I think was announced this morning, have transacted an average of 14% above the March 22 valuation. So we're still seeing quite good liquidity for a number of our assets. So our asset management, which is a big source of rental growth for us, it delivered 77 lettings, but also the re-gears delivered £8.5 million worth of additional rent. And as you can see, our obsession with long leases, those transactions took place on an average weighted unexpired term of 16 years. We have very, very low late vacancy. I think it's 192,000 square feet of vacancy in the portfolio. But the pie chart is I put the pie chart in really to try to illustrate that, you know, the demand is good, but it's also, you know, broad and deep. And I think that. When you look at some of those names, some won't actually be that familiar to you. Some will. But we're seeing demand, and I made comments in my statement about where that is all coming from. There are online retailers. My first year is an online retailer. But it's also coming from, you can see there's some dark kitchen lettings that we did in a period, packaging businesses, grocery, pharmaceutical logistics, trade, discount retail. So there's a wide spectrum of demand across both sectors. logistics and our long-income convenience retail assets. And that's underscored in many ways by the fact that we only have 192,000 square feet vacant at the moment. The rent reviews, I think this gives you a terrific snapshot into the suitability and the desirability of our real estate. I've for many years thought rent reviews would give you a fantastic window into how your assets are going to perform going forward and also the sustainability and the durability of your yield. The fact of the matter is yields are supposed to reflect the security, the longevity, but also importantly the trajectory of your rents as opposed to pure weight of money chasing a particular sector. Eighty-nine rent reviews in the period added £2 million to our rent roll. The contractual uplifts came through it, and those are various, you know, CPI, RPI, fixed uplifts, but on average delivered a 12.6% uplift on previous passing rents. The open market delivered close to 19%. And We probably we actually expect that 19 to improve over the current year as, you know, 2016 rental evidence gets replaced by 2021 rental evidence. So if you look at it, the 20, we have 20 reviews live today. And at the moment, it looks like they're going to deliver us uplifts of let's call it 25 percent to make the math easy for me and everyone. two finance directors. You know, so it feels pretty good, you know, because 2021 evidence is higher than 2016 evidence. So this isn't a snapshot for one particular year, it's just how the review cycle works. So at the moment, on track to deliver uplifts of around about 25%, 26%, which would indicate that the 4% per annum is going to rise to 5% per annum. That's how we feel today. We signed a rent review yesterday, just to give you a flavour, because I'll come on to talk about it in a minute. We signed a rent review yesterday down in Basildon with a 3PL. The rent went up 45%. I mean, that's a big number. So don't put 9% in all your numbers, please. But, you know, it's happening. It's happening. It's real. You know, if you look at the urban settlements over the period, you know, the average in urban was 22%. That's a wide range in there. You know, we can talk. I mean, actually, it doesn't include. our settlement yesterday. But during the period, it ranges from, you know, there was an 88% uplift in Croydon, there was a 46% uplift in Hales-Owen, there was a 29% uplift in Hamel. But the counter to that is there was 7% uplift in Maryhill. And 7% in business. So it's a wide range. So, you know, our job is to find a few more Croydons and Hales Owens and Hemel Hempsters and maybe a few less Mary Hills and whatever. So it's a wide range. But, you know, it's good. It's good. As I said earlier, we didn't have any open market in regional. And on our three mega warehouses are all contractual uplifts. And then, as you can see there, our long income predominantly benefits from fixed uplifts. But actually, if you look at it, you know, if you look at the chart on the bottom, the line graph, you know, our urban ERVs is running way ahead of where we think RPI and CPI is. And it comes back to a comment I made earlier. We have 61% of the portfolio with contractual uplifts. Yeah, there are parts of the portfolio I wish it was zero, you know, Particularly, you know, you wouldn't want a fixed uplift in Croydon, Hale-Zoan or Hale-Humsey, would you? So it is a broad spread. But, you know, if your worst settlements are up, you know, seven, you know, that's more than counted by some of the other settlements that we're getting across the portfolio. And as I say, we expect that trajectory to improve going forward. Our development activity. Excuse me. We've invested investing one hundred forty eight million pounds across six schemes, all of which will be delivered this year. And Martin referred to it earlier. We'll add, excuse me, nearly seven million pounds to our rent roll for logistics schemes and too long income. Ninety five percent has been pre-let average lease terms of over 20 years. and the average yield on cost of 4.5%. We've given you a snapshot of where they are. Ipswich is logistics, as you can see. Leicester is logistics, where we're pre-funding two buildings, one of which we'll take letting risk on. And then down in Weymouth, we're building a small, long-income retail park, which is pre-let to McDonald's, Costa, B&M, and Dunelm. Phase 1 is already completed, which is an Aldi. And phase three will see us introduce a GM food offer subject to planning, which will, as you can see, all in all, deliver us a yield on cost there of over 6.5%. So upgrading our portfolio, we continue to help us improve our environmental metrics, which increasingly shape our thoughts. We believe that we are very, very strong stewards of under-invested assets. We won't shy away from buying what are considered to be poor energy-efficient buildings because... You know, we have the energy, we have the desirability, we have the skill set and the capital, you know, to improve those. I mean, I know in other sectors people consider this to be, you know, upgrading buildings to meet ABC credentials, but predominantly A and B, to be a defensive maintenance CapEx issue. For us, we consider it to be a – we think it actually to be – You know, for example, we've given a couple here of urban warehouses that we bought. I mean, I'd love to show you what Streatham looked like before we refurbished it. But, you know, I'm actually amazed it got an EPCD, to be frank, looking at it. But anyway, you know, on a good day, it had a pre-refurbishment ERV of £15 a foot. We invested £38 a foot on it. And we've let it up now at an average. I think, actually, I thought the average rent rate was a little bit higher than that. But anyway, let's call it £25. So, yeah. We secured £10 of additional income for investing £38. I mean, you know, we'll do that every day of the week. I mean, that would be much better if we could find enough of those opportunities than just buying investments in the market and paying the Chancellor a lot of stamp duty. You know, again, in Tottenham, you know, we took an empty building, you know, with an EPC rating, or poorish C, and improved it to an A, courtesy of £50 of CapEx. But actually, we took... We bought it with an underlying ERV of £18. We've added, you know, call it £4.50 to that. So £50 to add £4.50, again, you know, smidging over 9% return on your marginal cap X. Again, you know, what's wrong with that? And that's now under offer as well. And across the rest of the portfolio, we've considered to add solar capability and also EV charging across the portfolio. And we have a framework agreement, as you can see there, with Motor Fuel Group that covers an initial six sites but is capable of being rolled out further down the line as well. As you can see there, I'm not sure we've touched on this already yet, but our EPC ratings across the portfolio improved from 74% A to C last year, 85% today. So Just looking at the outlook, we'll start with the logistics market and then we'll move on to the wider real estate market. Our outlook is increasingly framed by our occupational experiences in lettings, rent reviews in particular. We think the demand supply tension across the whole logistics market, mega, regional and urban is strong. and we think demand is high, broad, and deep. However, we are a bit more size and geographically focused today than we might have been three or four years ago. I think that it's not just the case of getting on the logistics train or any logistics train. I think you have to think more carefully about which carriage you want to go into and which seat you want to place your bets on. And I've said this many years. I don't think anybody listened to me, actually. But not all warehousing is great in the same way that not all retail was bad. You know, I've said that for many years, and I think that in some ways the last 12 months have highlighted our thoughts on that. Some of these statistics you already know because they're printed by, you know, these are CBRE statistics. You know, we've had record logistics investments over last year, but, you know, that's continued into Q1 this year, as you can see. Take-up is pretty strong. I mean, I think take-up is really good. $10 million in Q1 across 41 deals. That's a doubling of where we were a year ago. And supply. I mean, in logistics, and certainly in regional and urban, it's hard to turn on the tap. I think it's a little bit easier in mega. But still, you've got vacancy here at 1.6%. I've said before, I think the UK might run out of warehouse space. I think we're getting closer to that. You know, the fact of the matter is, you know, a lot of commentators will say, look, rental growth starts when vacancy drops below 10%. I'm actually not as bullish as that. I think rental growth starts when vacancy drops below 5%. This sector is well below 5%. You know, and you might get a bit more supply coming through in certain subsectors. But there's demand. You know, there is demand. And so as a result, we expect, you know, our rents to progress, you know, certainly across our urban and regional portfolios, and they will absolutely lead the way. And as I said earlier, you know, in the rent reviews, you know, 4% settlements on average per annum last year, we expect that to increase, and we are hopeful, you know, no, we're only two months in, we're hopeful that that will rise during the course of the current financial year to nearer 5%. So looking at the outlook, you know, We think that the macro environment is still supportive of the right real estate. We think it can not only provide a comfortable margin over your costs of debt, even if they are increasing, but also deliver growth at least equal to the elevated levels of RPI and CPI. And that was the point of putting that line graph in the rent review slide earlier on in the presentation. As I said before, we think COVID has accelerated many changes in our behaviour, how we live and work and shop, but also we are living increasingly with geopolitical events that disrupt the supply of goods. We think that localisation and just-in-case strategies are becoming more relevant than globalisation and just-in-time, and we think that is good for the warehouse sector. That said, we think that polarization of performances will continue, maybe not quite as wide as it was over the course of 2021. Like I said, we think distribution is still the standout sector to be in. In retail, we prefer parks over centers. Parks, we probably prefer them from an omni-channel rental perspective. I think my comments on centers are well reported, so we don't need to go into that. And as far as offices are concerned, we think that the outlook is uncertain. And so, therefore, when it's uncertain, it's harder to predict returns. Plus, we're not very good at it either, so we won't be investing in offices. That's fine. It's comfortable. And I think that the market dynamics continues to support our strategy of trying to pick the winning sectors and then focusing on owning the best assets in the best geographies that will deliver that income and income growth. I think our all-weather portfolio has done well. You know, we came through unprecedented periods of lockdown, you know, in great shape. You know, we continue to collect our income. We continue to pay an increased dividend. And it's something that we hold, you know, very, very close to our wallets at heart. And we think it's that strategy of collecting, compounding and compressing which will allow us to continue to focus on not only a well-covered but also a progressive dividend for the periods ahead. So on that note, I'd like to thank you for your time and ask whether or not there are any questions in the room and then I'll come to the phone lines later. So thank you. Miranda.