Aroundtown SA (AT1) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome, and thank you for joining us for Aroundtown's 9 months of 2023 results call today. You can view this presentation on Aroundtown's website, either on the Home section or under Financial Reports of the Investor Relations section. I am Katrin Petersen, Aroundtown's Group Head of Communications, and with me today will be CEO, Barak Bar-Hen; CFO, Eyal Ben David; Chief Capital Markets Officer, Oschrie Massatschi; Executive Director, Frank Roseen; Investor Relations, Timothy Wright, and representatives from Grand City Properties. [Operator Instructions] With that, I want to pass you over to Barak and to the rest of the team who will guide you through the presentation of our results.

Good morning, and thank you, Katrin. Warm welcome to our 9 months' 2023 financial presentation. Our business operations are progressing in our different asset types, albeit with headwinds, we feel, in the office sector. New letting demand in the office market remains below historic levels, but on the other hand, we also see prolongations. Due to the CPI indexed leases or agreed step-ups, the rent increase currently offsets the lower demand. The residential markets in Germany and London are performing well as the supply-demand gap is further widening, resulting in higher rents and record low vacancy. The hotel market in Germany continues its recovery path, and we expect next year to reach pre-pandemic levels, and in addition, we have a few new hotels opening. Again, our portfolio diversification provides a certain level of protection while offering beneficial opportunities to capture. On a macro level, since our H1 financials, the ECB has increased interest rates 2 more times. And although recent data showed inflation is leveling down, it is not clear if the ECB has stopped hiking rates, considering that energy prices might remain volatile this winter again, and 2 wars are additional geopolitical risk to the macro environment. We believe it is crucial to prepare the company for further potential headwinds, whether that applies to access to funding, further slowdown in transaction, subdued letting demand, higher operational costs or further devaluations of the portfolio. We thus remain very focused on maintaining our strong liquidity and headroom to our covenants while following opportunities to further increase our cash balance and reduce leverage. On the following slide, we explain how we intend to implement that and what progress we achieved so far. Slide 4 presents our highlights achieved in the first 9 months of 2023. The net rental income for the period amounted to EUR 895 million and decreased by 2% year-over-year, which was the direct result of disposals offset by 3.5% like-for-like growth. The like-for-like growth, as we will present later in the presentation, comes from good results across all of our asset types. FFO I came in at EUR 255 million, decreasing by 7% year-over-year as a result of higher interest expenses and perpetual note coupons. On a per share basis, the FFO I amounted to EUR 0.23. We comfortably confirmed our 2023 guidance. We continue to strengthen our liquidity, which increased to EUR 2.8 billion as of September and now covers 20% of our total debt, providing us with a strong and flexible debt structure. LTV is at 41%, with no change compared to June 2023 and only 1% up from 40% in December 2022, despite a 6% devaluation in the first half of 2023. We didn't revalue the portfolio in the third quarter and will carry out a full portfolio valuation as part of our full year report. We will provide more details on our financial position and the other KPIs on the next slide. Slide 5 is probably familiar to most of you. Here, we continue to outline our strategy to navigate the ongoing volatile markets. As you can see, all action items are aimed at increasing cash liquidity and reducing leverage in order to keep the company healthy and in position to sustain the current situation for an extended period of time. We are constantly evaluating each of these action items and adjust our strategy for each, depending on what we are experiencing in the market and our expectation going forward. Although we have high cash and liquidity balance, which covers debt maturities until mid-2026, we look for a period beyond this date. We have very large maturities in the second half of 2026 as well as in 2027 and 2028, and we aim to increase our liquidity to start covering part of these maturities as well. Moreover, the European real estate industry has large refinancing needs in 2026 and the years after, and we expect the market needs the capacity to digest it. We will explain each action item on the next few slides. Oschrie, please continue.

Thank you, Barak. Please move to Slide 6, where we outline the progress of our disposal activity. As we explained previously, it has become more challenging to dispose properties as there are only a few buyers out there. There's still low demand from funds with deep pockets, which can stem large portfolio transactions. PPS have announced several larger transactions with large funds, which come with particular conditions. We also explore this front, but the market conditions and especially the uncertainty creates wide gaps between the expectations of buyers and sellers. Current demand remains, therefore, focused on smaller deals from buyers such as family offices, municipalities, tenants or wealthy private individuals. Year-to-date, we signed EUR 710 million of disposals at an average of 5% discount to their book values, of which EUR 260 million were signed since the beginning of the third quarter. In the first 9 months, we closed disposals of EUR 960 million, which includes EUR 530 million which were signed last year. You can see on the pie chart the breakdown of our diversified disposals segment, including development rights. The majority was sold in non-core locations as well as in London, Hamburg and Dresden. The average multiple we sold for was 18x, and we achieved EUR 71 million profit over total cost from disposals. We are not limited to sell only specific asset types and locations. Instead, we focus on getting a good deal. It remains challenging to sell properties as the gap between buyer and seller expectations is wide and transactions are being executed because of the combination of our strong sourcing network and attractive assets we are able to offer. On Slide 7, you see the summary of our bank debt we raised this year so far. We signed EUR 1 billion new debt financing since the beginning of the year, of which EUR 790 million were drawn in the first 9 months. The loans were signed with an average maturity of over 7 years and an average margin of 1.4%. We're utilizing our high share of unencumbered assets as well as our strong banking relationships, which you can see on this slide. Although we do not have any material near-term maturities and sufficient cash liquidity to cover our debt maturities for close to 3 years, we continue to focus on obtaining more bank financing as we have been doing for the last 1.5 years. The process to obtain bank financing is much longer than in previous years, and recently, we are experiencing a further slowdown. Banks' appetites, especially for some commercial real estate segments has reduced, and generally, banks have become more selective. Potentially, we also see a probability that banks will become even more selective when all the loans mature, and the borrowers are not liquid and can't provide the additional equity needed, or in cases, the head covenants are getting tight or even in breach. This potential risk would lead to more difficult access to further bank financing, and thus, we act now to obtain new funding instead of waiting when our debt matures. As explained before, liquidity is crucial to withstand the current market environment, which has a potential to last for longer than expected. While this approach comes at the cost of higher finance expenses, we believe that the benefits outweigh the additional costs. On Slide 8, we present our successful liability management efforts this year-to-date. We have bought back EUR 1.3 billion of bonds at an average discount of 20%, which enabled us to reduce leverage. We will continue to buy back bonds on an opportunistic basis as long as our bonds will be traded at steep discounts. As part of our cash retention, we will mainly focus on bonds with short maturities, which enables us to maintain our liquidity headroom that we have in order to cover our upcoming debt maturities. Our recent buybacks reduced 16% of the debt maturing between 2024 and 2026. Currently, we have the liquidity to cover our maturities until mid-'26 and aim to extend this period further. On Slide 9, we show our approach to our perpetual notes. We realize there is a misunderstanding about the features and treatment of these instruments. Perpetual notes provide a strong cash retention security, which becomes ever more evident in current uncertain economic times. The equity characteristics include the right not to call them when markets are volatile to retain our cash position and headroom to covenants. Toolbox also includes different coupon payments, if we deem it necessary, to retain more cash and headroom. Please note that these instruments remain 100% equity according to IFRS and for the bond covenants. So far this year, the group, which includes GCP, has not called its perpetual notes with call dates this year. This resulted in a reset of the coupon at current mid-swaps and thus at higher than previous coupons. On an annualized level, this amounts to EUR 65 million, higher coupon payments starting from next year. Again, not calling had no impact on the accounting treatment of these instruments, and thus, they remain 100% equity also for our debt covenants. We are aware of the pressure that not calling a perpetual note has on our corporate rating, as losing the equity content of this specific note, even if only for rating purposes, is harmful to the rating metrics. We will continue to monitor the markets and to assess all options going forward, but in our opinion, the best economic option was not to call these instruments at the particular times. We will take a decision about future perpetual notes closer to each call date, with the next one in January '24. You can find an overview of our perpetuals in the appendix. Moving on to Slide 11, where we present our portfolio and the operational position. There was no material change in the asset class distribution of our portfolio since last publication. As of September '23, our balanced portfolio value split was 41% offices, 32% residential, 20% hotels, taking -- together making 93% of the portfolio value. The remaining 7% are logistics and retail. 90% of our portfolio is well distributed and diversified within Germany, the Netherlands and London. Within these locations, we are focused on top-tier cities, which are benefiting from strong fundamentals. Berlin, London, Frankfurt and Munich continue to represent some of our single most important investment markets where we still see upside potential in the mid to long term. For each asset class, we provide more detailed information in the appendix. Slide 12, we present our cash flow drivers, all of which have shown good progress in the recent period. Firstly, our commercial portfolio. The CPI-indexed and step-up rents have supported a like-for-like performance of nearly 4% in the 12 months ending in September 2023. This level is slightly up from last period and reflects our ability to transfer the current inflationary environment into growing and higher rents, which more than offset the increase in vacancy. We also present our well-distributed commercial lease expiry, which shows only 10% expiries by the end of '24, providing us with stability and operational robustness. The residential portfolio saw as well a strong like-for-like rent increase of around 3%, coming from the very strong operational dynamics in Germany and London, specifically in our portfolio locations. From an operational perspective, the residential rental market is very strong, with a wide demand supply gap which has been accelerating in recent periods, supported by increasing rent tables, which all result in steadily growing cash flows. We see the fundamentals of the residential portfolio being very sustainable, which will keep driving rents upwards in the coming years. The vacancy trend is also a reflection of the strong rental performance due to a positive net migration and simultaneous decreasing volume of newly-built housing reaching another historic low at 3.8% with a clear downward trajectory. Our hotel portfolio continues to recover, with rent collection edging up towards full recovery, which is expected to be achieved next year. Our collection rate is now reaching over 85% for the 9 months of '23. We have more than EUR 30 million less provisions for the hotels in the first 9 months of this year compared to the first 9 months of last year, which is contributing to offset the higher interest cost. We continue to be selective on CapEx and focus to execute works with high returns, which enable us to manage our liquidity on one side and increase our FFO on the other. Slide 13, we break down our diversified portfolio and stable tenant structure. Our group portfolio at the end of September amounted to EUR 26 billion, with an annualized EUR 1.16 billion recurring net rental income and a rental yield of 4.8%. The WALT remains long and stable at over 7 years. We have seen a slight uptick in the vacancy rate of 0.2% in the third quarter to 7.9%. However, the good like-for-like rental growth more than offset the negative impact. We highlighted around 75% of our office tenants are in the public sector or large blue chip companies, providing additional quality to our portfolio. Our 10 largest tenants continue to account for less than 20% of the group's rental income, keeping low dependency on single tenants, ensuring that there is only limited exposure to any single tenant in case of financial distress or inability to pay rents. Frank, please continue with the market overview.

Thank you, Oschrie. On the next few slides, we would like to provide you with a short summary of the current market trends impacting the operation of our main asset classes. On Slide 14, we highlight the impact that current market uncertainties have on the demand from office tenants. As was the case with the uncertainty caused by the COVID pandemic, there is currently a lower take-up, which is down 36% year-over-year. We see similar trends in our own office portfolio, with tenants focusing mostly on prolongations and managing costs. At the same time, the lower new supply is accelerating, with completions down 30% year-over-year and expected to be down 50% for full year 2023 as more construction projects are being delayed or canceled. Market experts expect only a moderate increase in vacancy while rents continue to rise, mainly driven by CPI indexation. We know that CPI indexation is expected to slow down due to lower inflation levels. On Slide 15, we want to provide some details on the differences between our main office markets compared to some of the main global office markets that many of you are familiar with. There is a large discrepancy between the office markets in the U.S. and in the U.K. compared to our portfolio locations across Germany and the Netherlands. Firstly, our main markets of Germany and the Netherlands had record low vacancies entering the current market uncertainty, while in the U.S. and in the U.K., there was already oversupply of offices. In addition, markets such as London, New York and San Francisco have been more dependent on specific industries such as tech and financial services, while top German cities tend to have a more diverse demand, structure with Frankfurt being an exception with a relatively high dependency on the banking sector. This position Germany and the Netherlands in a better starting point to digest lower demand as a result of macro certainties. Furthermore, office in Germany and Amsterdam is significantly higher than in main markets in the U.S., while at the same time, there are less desks per employee, reflecting a healthier market situation. Looking at the Netherlands, in particular, we highlight that hybrid and co-working already coexisted with the traditional office model sustainably for many years. Moreover, commute times in the main German cities tend to be shorter when comparing to cities such as New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and many others. As a result, there is no drastic and sudden increase in market vacancies due to a high office attendance rate and basically no redundant supply. On Slide 16, we saw one of the main drivers of the strong operation dynamics of the residential portfolio resulting from the large and increased supply demand gap in both Germany as well as in London. Due to high and rising construction costs combined with the slow bureaucratic process, new supply remains significantly constrained in both markets, despite ambitious targets from both the German government as well as the greater London authority. At the same time, demand is accelerating. These combined impacts have further widened the prevailing supply-demand gap and are driving up market rents and occupancies further. When it comes to the hotel market on Slide 17, we highlight the recovery path of several key Western European hotel markets. We focus here on the occupancy rate, ratio of states by international tourists and the RevPAR. Some European countries, and in particular those that have a significant exposure to leisure travel, are seeing a faster recovery compared to our markets. However, reports from our hotel operators as well as independent statistics like the one that you see on the slide are showing solid progress in all metrics, also in our main markets, which is giving us the confidence that a full recovery will be achieved next year. Leisure hotels continue to be the main beneficiaries of the market's recovery and have seen a full recovery in booking and collection levels already in the current summer period, despite high cost level and as such result in travel and accommodation expenses. Due to the continued high cost levels and sources of qualified staff, the RevPAR needs to be around 20% higher than the pre-pandemic levels to achieve the same level of profitability. As a result, we expect the average room rates will also remain on elevated levels in the near future. On Slide 18, we outlined some specific factors that the hospitality industry was challenged with during the year. After a long period of restrictions and forced closure due to the COVID pandemic, the interest is now recovering, but this has slowed down by the lack of staff, significantly higher costs, mainly for energy and staff, and several demand drivers recovering gradually but more slowly, namely business travel, conferences and events. International travel are also not fully recovered yet, mainly from the U.S. and China, which have additional been impacted by geopolitical events and which is a strong demand factor for city hotels. Leisure hotels have recovered and performed well, but city hotels, which also depends on business travel and conferences, are still not at pre-pandemic booking levels this year. On current rent collection rates, our current rent collection rate is over 85%. And for the next year, we expect the market to further recover to pre-pandemic levels. On Slide 19, we update our efforts and progress for a greener portfolio. We are proud to announce that we have successfully green-certified the full Dutch office portfolio. Including our continuous progress in our German office portfolio, the total share of green-certified office property stands currently at 29%, up from 15% since year-end 2022. We will continue to obtain further certification. And while we have progressed well in recent periods, we know that this is a lengthy process, and it can take some years to obtain green certification for the entire portfolio. In addition to the office portfolio, we are currently also analyzing the options to certify our hotel properties. Eyal, please continue now.

We continue on Slide 21. Our revenue increased by 1% year-over-year, while the recurring net rental income decreased by 2%, which is the result of our strong disposal activity and was partially offset by our rent like-for-like performance of 3.5%. The like-for-like performance was mainly driven by the office portfolio, which leases are mainly CPI-linked or include step-rents, with a like-for-like performance of 4.8%, and the residential portfolio with a growth of 2.7%. We did not have our portfolio evaluated in Q3 after it was evaluated for H1 financials. So the devaluations of negative EUR 1.9 billion only increased slightly in Q3, mainly from the impact of CapEx and negative capital gains as we sold our properties at a slight discount of 2% to book values. We will perform a full portfolio valuation again for our full year financials. As the hotel market recovers and we are collecting a higher share of our rents compared to last year's period, we booked a lower amount of extraordinary expenses of EUR 28 million compared to EUR 60 million for the same period last year. The impairment of goodwill of EUR 117 million incurred already in H1 and is mainly attributed to the reduction in GCPs and TLG's deferred taxes due to the revaluation losses in those 2 companies and due to the smaller portfolio size following the disposal activity. Our finance expenses increased to EUR 165 million as we raised new debt at higher rates while we also repaid debt with near-term maturities, which had lower coupon rates. Most of our interest rates are fixed, with a hedging ratio of 83%. However, the variable part of our debt as well as the capped part was impacted by the higher interest rates and resulted in higher finance expenses. The bottom line for the period resulted in a loss of EUR 1.4 billion and a negative EUR 1.02 per share. Please move to Slide 22. The adjusted EBITDA for the first 9 months amounted to EUR 748 million, which is a decrease of 1% mainly due to disposals. Please note that we exclude from the adjusted EBITDA the impact of held-for-sale portfolio as we intend to sell them in the next periods and thus their impact is nonrecurring as well as the impact of the provision for uncollected hotel rents. On Slide 23, we highlight our FFO performance. FFO I decreased by 7%. The decline was mostly the result of the disposals, higher finance expenses, and higher perpetual loans attribution from the reset of 3 perpetual notes, which had a partial impact in the current period. On the other hand, the decline was partially offset by a lower provision for uncollected hotel rent and a strong like-for-like performance. The FFO I per share amounted to EUR 0.23. FFO II, which includes the disposal gain of our total cost amounted to EUR 327 million as we closed EUR 960 million of disposals at a margin of 8% of the total cost. As we sold more properties last year, the FFO II for the 9 months was lower compared to last year. Moving on to Slide 24, we highlight our EPRA NAV metrics. The EPRA NAV amounted to EUR 11.1 billion or EUR 10.1 per share as of September '23, both 10% lower compared to last 2 year and 2022. The EPRA NTA amounted to EUR 9.1 billion or EUR 8.3 per share as of September '23, 10% and 11% lower compared to year-end '22, respectively. Note that we reclassified EPRA NTA at year-end '22 to exclude rent. The decrease in these metrics is mainly the results of the negative revaluations partially offset by positive operational results. Please note that these KPIs do not include goodwill, so any change in goodwill is neutral. Oschrie, please continue with the rest of the presentation.

Thank you, Eyal. On the following slide, we emphasize again how far ahead our cash liquidity will cover our upcoming debt maturities. As of end of September, our cash and liquid assets balance stood at EUR 2.8 billion, EUR 300 million higher compared to June mainly from closing several signed disposals, new bank financing and FFO generation offset by debt repayments. We expect an additional EUR 300 million of signed and not yet closed disposals as of September. So far in Q4, we closed around half of these disposals. The cash and expected disposal proceeds cover our debt maturities until Q1 '26. Including the future proceeds of EUR 650 million vendor loans, which have a weighted average maturity in '25, our liquidity amounts to EUR 3.7 billion and will cover our debt maturities further until mid-'26. This gives us sufficient time to further increase our liquidity mainly through disposals, new bank debt, FFO generation and collecting our vendor loans, and loans to own until markets recover and refinancing through capital markets becomes favorable again. We outlined earlier that we have several other options in our toolbox to further increase our liquidity if we see necessary and our other options become depleted. Maintaining a strong liquidity is crucial to successfully manage the current market environment we are in and which we expect will prevail for some time. If markets will deteriorate further, the high cash balance, including our toolbox, will become ever more important to navigate through a crisis. On the other hand, when markets recover after crisis, buyers with strong liquidity are the ones who can benefit from unique opportunities. Continuing on Slide 26, we reiterate our significantly large headroom to our EMTN bond covenants. Getting into detail, you can see that we can sustain a total asset value loss of 38%, which is over EUR 13 billion on an absolute basis, before we reach our leverage covenant of 60%. Our secured debt covenant remains negative as we have more cash than secured debt. And in combination with the unencumbered covenant, you see that we have a very large potential for drawing further bank debt, which is also rare among our peers. Technically, we could fully replace all our unsecured debt with secured debt, but we expect market volatility to level down sometime in the future and to enable us to access capital markets again at reasonable prices. The ICR covenant is to remain 1.8x, and we stand at 4.6x. Let's move to Slide 27, where you can see an overview of our capital structure. Our LTV remained fairly stable compared to year-end '22 despite the negative revaluations, thanks to our leverage reduction and measures of selling properties and buying back debt at discount. We will continue to put a focus on leverage reduction also going forward. On the top right, you see that we continue to have a large amount of unencumbered assets of over EUR 19 billion, which reduced from year-end last year due to our achievements of closing more bank debt. Our average cost of debt is now at 2.2%, which has gradually increased over the last period as we have drawn debt at higher rates, repaid debt with local poor rates as well as the impact of the higher interest rates on our debt was variable or capped interest exposure. Our interest hedging ratio now stands at 83% after several hedging instruments matured this year. There are no more material hedging instruments maturing from now on. Our interest cover ratio decreased to 4.3x as finance expenses increased, while adjusted EBITDA stayed basically stable as the rent increase offset the disposal effect. Net debt-to-EBITDA decreased to 11.2x as net debt decreased compared to a fairly stable adjusted EBITDA. On Slide 29, we present our guidance for this year, which we confirm. We guide to achieve FFO I of EUR 310 million to EUR 340 million for the full year '23, and EUR 0.28 to EUR 0.31 on a per share basis. This is lower compared to '22 as the negative drivers outweigh the positive drivers. Negatively impacting our FFO generation is the effect of disposals, which reduce our leverage and increase our liquidity, higher finance expenses and the reset of the perpetual coupons, which we did not call. Positively impacting our guidance is the like-for-like rent increase and the higher rent collection of our hotel portfolio. This concludes our presentation. As always, you can find further material in our appendix.

Thank you, Oschrie. So before we invite your direct telephone questions, we would like to answer questions that we have received by e-mail prior to this call. For simplicity reasons, we have taken liberty to group similar questions in order to answer as many questions as possible. Allow me now to read out these questions. First question is going to Oschrie. How is the situation on the office market? How are the letting activities? When do you expect the situation to improve?

The macroeconomic uncertainties regarding a potential recession or at least a material slowdown remain, and this continues to weigh on the decision-making of existing and potential tenants. The market is challenging, and potential tenants remain hesitant to expand their office footprint while existing tenants prefer to maintain their existing space or even reduce space due to changes in working habits or economic pressure and even due to higher rents from indexation. Office space take-up remains below previous year's demand. Nonetheless, as a result of CPI-indexed leases and step-up clauses, rents are currently increasing, more than offsetting the impact of slightly higher vacancies. Going forward, we expect the current situation to continue. It is difficult to predict if we will enter a heavy recession or if the economy will pick up again. In the latter case, pent-up demand might support a fast recovery as we saw after the initial uncertainty at the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. We have 88% occupancy ratio spread out evenly at a long average lease schedule and strong tenant structure with a high share of governmental tenants and large corporates. Therefore, we believe that we will be able to sustain this current situation well for some time with a slight impact on occupancies, which are at least currently being more than offset by higher rents. In the last 12 months, our like-for-like rent increase was 4.8%, offsetting the negative impact of the vacancy increase. The office portfolio vacancy currently stands at 12.2%, only slightly up compared to last periods. In the last 9 months, 147,000 square meter were prolonged at a WALT of 5 years, and we had new lettings of 84,000 square meter at a WALT of 6.8 years. We achieved 11% higher rents for these leases compared to previous leases, which is a testament to the revisionary potential of our portfolio.

Next question. The operations of your residential portfolio are very strong. How long do you expect this trend to continue? Do you expect regulatory changes? Would you continue to increase your stake in GCP considering this asset class is performing well?

The strengths of our residential markets is the result of the prevailing demand and supply gap in our markets. The gap has been widening further in the past years, not only as demand has been increasing but also supply is decreasing. These trends are sustainable, and we expect them to continue. Demand drivers are strong due to the long-term trends of urbanization and decreasing household side, and have been further increasing from the inflow of refugees and higher mortgage rates, which decreased affordability to own housing significantly. The higher mortgage rates have especially boosted rental demand in our London residentials. Supply has not been meeting demand for many years, mainly due to a lack of land in metropolitan areas as well as bureaucratic hurdles. And in the last year, also cost inflation and higher financing rates further reduced new construction activity. Projects have either been halted or completely canceled. This year, in Germany, around 250,000 apartments are expected to be built, while 500,000 to 600,000 are needed to match demand. Also, in London, supply is not matching demand by a wide margin. The residential portfolio is thus recording record low vacancies and constantly increasing rents. The like-for-like performance was 2.7%, and we believe this strong performance to continue as we believe the fundamentals will prevail long term, which positively impacts occupancy and rents. Regarding regulatory aspects, we do hope that new regulation will focus on supporting new construction. However, in the past, we have also experienced populistic decisions focused on limiting rent increase or even expropriation, which only worsened the situation by reducing supply even further. The German government just announced new measures to support more construction, of which one measures include financial support to convert commercial properties into residential. Referring to our position in Grand City Properties, we believe in the strength of the residential real estate market and thus have always maintained a large share in GCP. We currently hold 63%, and we will continue increasing our stake gradually if the price is right, as we have done in the past years.

How is the recovery of the hotel market in your locations progressing?

The recovery is progressing well and at a steady rate and according to our expectations. The summer months in Q3 were as usual characterized by strong leisure demand. In Q3, the international and business travel as well as conferences were still lagging from pre-pandemic times. We believe that these demand factors will recover next year and will bring our collection rates to pre-pandemic levels. Room rates are significantly higher compared to previous years, those positively impacting RevPAR, but occupancy is currently in the factor that needs to push RevPAR to former profitability levels, which remain impaired by high inflation, especially for energy and staff costs. Nowadays, hotels need to make at least 20% more revenue to end up at the same profitability compared to pre-pandemic times. The recent reduction from peak energy cost levels will support the recovery of the hotels. We believe that next year, our tenants will achieve sufficient profitability to pay the rents, while this year, we expect our collection rate to be in the range of 85% to 90%. In Q3, we had a collection rate of 90%, supporting our expectation for this year. We also have a few hotels currently closed for fully refurbishment and expect these hotels to open in the next few months, which will further benefit our hotel portfolio's performance next year.

Where do you expect valuations to move in Q4 this year?

We believe that the recent hikes in interest rates have not only -- not been fully digested, and it will take some more time for this to trickle down to valuations and reach a bottom. On the other hand, yields have also been increasing from the strong rent increases mainly due to CPI-indexed leases, which ease some of the pressure on the valuation. The valuation momentum is still negative, and the disposal activities taking place by real estate owners also add to the pressure. We had the full portfolio valuated for our H1 financials, and we'll carry out another full portfolio valuation as part of our full year report. We assume these effects could lead to around 5% further value decline by year-end 2023. But it is hard to estimate the [ financial. ]

Which asset classes were the biggest contributors to your rent like-for-like performance? What do you expect going forward?

The biggest impact [ had on our ] like-for-like rent growth of our office portfolio with 4.8% driven by CPI indexation and step-up rents. The strong rent increase have more than offset the slight increase in the vacancies. As inflation is reducing, we expect the like-for-like performance in office portfolio to reduce gradually as well. The like-for-like performance in the residential portfolio was 2.7%. As vacancy rates in the residential portfolio reach very low levels, the biggest driver is and will continue to be the in-place rent growth. Due to the persistent supply-demand gap, rents are expected to increase in similar levels. The like-for-like performance in the hotel portfolio was a slight positive of 1.3%, mainly from leisure-focused hotels as city hotels lack full recovery of business travel, events and conferences. For next year, we do not expect much growth in this segment, but on the other hand, we expect higher rent collection. For the full year, we expect around 3% like-for-like rental growth for the full portfolio.

What is your plan to reduce leverage?

We focus on increasing our liquidity whilst decreasing our leverage for a while already. We utilize several measures to achieve this goal and expect to continue with these, which are mainly continuing to dispose properties, buying back debt at a discount, collecting proceeds from our vendor loans and increasing our cash from operations, including a higher rent collection from hotel tenants. We've also become more selective on cash outflows, as we did not distribute any dividends this year and reserve also additional options in our toolbox. So far, our deleveraging activities have largely offset the impact of devaluations, which were around 9% since peak levels, and the LTV increased by only 1% to 41%. We aim to mitigate the expected increase in LTV in the next period from further value decline through our continuous efforts to dispose assets and increase our cash liquidity.

So the next question is for Eyal. What is your dividend policy? Will you pay next year? And if yes, how much of your FFO?

We didn't change our dividend policy, which is to pay out 75% of FFO I per share. We didn't decide yet if and how much we will pay next year, but market conditions should improve significantly in order for us to feel comfortable to pay dividend next year. We will need to assess the situation next year prior to our AGM based on several factors, among which include impacts of valuations, leverage, liquidity, access to the capital markets, bank funding, future cost of debt and perpetuals.

Over time, your finance expenses will gradually increase with drawing new debt at higher rates. In addition, your perpetual notes are resetting to higher coupons when you don't call them. How will you maintain a positive FFO going forward?

Our strong cash balance provides us with flexibility to explore options as we can cover debt maturities for close to 3 years from now. From the financing perspective, the higher interest rates will have an impact on our FFO as is the case for the entire real estate industry due to the nature of the business. We will continue to explore options to maintain a strong profitability long term in addition to further increasing our liquidity and utilizing the funds to repay debt and extend the time to refinance. Concerning the coupon rates of our perpetual notes, we believe this will continue to be higher than currently regardless of being refinanced or not called. However, the perpetual notes with call dates in '24 and to '26 have recent rates not much different to current bank financing, while perpetual loans have strong equity characteristics with no repayment date, no covenants, no default triggers and optional deferral of coupon payments. On the other hand, our liquidity also generates financing income that offset part of the higher interest cost that we assume. From an operational perspective, we expect positive like-for-like growth also next year, supported by higher collection rates and additional rent from the new hotels that will open in the coming periods. This alone are not able to set off the increase in cost of debt, and therefore, we will continue with our disposal activity and liability management.

How much of your disposal are you targeting? And any special asset types of locations you are willing to dispose?

So far, we signed year-to-date over EUR 700 million disposals, which supports our goal to increase liquidity and decrease leverage. The disposal process has become lengthier process, mainly as obtaining bank financing for the buyers has become a longer process and sale volumes have become smaller as large buyers stay absent and mainly smaller buyers are active such as family offices, private individuals, municipalities, tenants, et cetera. We feel that it is getting harder to sell and that the transaction market is still muted. We have sizable pipeline for disposals. Our current assets held-for-sale balance is EUR 0.5 billion, of which half have been already signed. In parallel, we are working on a lot of deals. While not all of which will lead to signing, we are confident that we will be able to continue selling but have no guarantee that we will eventually be able to continue and dispose at this rate.

Next one's for Eyal. You had a good progress on obtaining bank financing. How much do you plan to draw each year going forward? Is there a limit to the amount you can or want to draw?

We have worked hard to obtain bank financing from many different banks, utilizing our banking relationships. So far this year, we raised close to EUR 1 billion on top of close to EUR 500 million we did last year. Effectively, we do not have any limitation on how much secure debt we can raise, as we have sufficient headroom under our unsecured debt covenants. And as long as rates in the capital market remain elevated, bank financing is the preferred option. It is currently difficult for us to assess the amount of bank debt we can raise each year going forward as we are starting to experience a much longer process to obtain bank financing. We believe this is related to banks becoming much more restrictive in granting new loans, as with significantly higher rates nowadays and pressure on valuations, many secured loans have limited headroom to covenants or even in default, thus creating a potential problem for most banks. Furthermore, there are some concerns that real estate borrowers might go insolvent and have a ripple effect on the bank's ability to carry out new loans. For example, just last week, we saw a big real estate company reported significant financing difficulty and potential insolvency. If such events would intensify, we believe banks will significantly reduce their loan capacity to real estate, thus making the access to this source of funding tougher. In anticipation of a potential dry up from bank funding, we are focused on obtaining new bank debt in the last 1.5 years, although we didn't have any material near-term refinancing. We see strong liquidity balance which covers debt maturities for several years as crucial to weather the current prevalent situation.

Your 9 months annualized FFO remains ahead of your updated guidance. Do you expect to exceed your guidance?

We slightly update our guidance for H1 results as the performance in H1 was slightly ahead of our initial expectations. So far, H2 is within our expectation and within the guidance range.

S&P revised your rating outlook to negative after you decided not to call your perpetuals this year. Would you consider a downgrade is inevitable if you continue not calling your perpetuals? How far would you go to protect your rating? Would you consider an equity increase?

S&P's revision of our outlook was not only as a result of not calling the perpetual note but also a result of current high interest rate environment on the entire real estate industry. Not calling perpetual has a negative impact on S&P's financial ratios but allow us to keep a high level liquidity that is viewed positively by S&P. On the other hand, not calling in volatile times demonstrate the equity characteristics of this instrument, and those, S&P adds a qualitative benefit on this impact to their financial ratios. If we were to continue not calling our perpetual notes, our headroom of S&P ratios would reduce further. The rating will also depend on our deleveraging progress and the development of interest rates. Our strong liquidity supports our rating, and this is where we will continue to put our efforts and focus on.

Next question for Barak. What is the status of your development projects? You mentioned previously some [ leisure ] hotels will reopen soon. Any other projects currently in process and when do you expect them to finalize?

Three hotels which have been fully closed during their full refurbishments are expected to be opened in the next month, subject to final permits. This will add over EUR 35 million rental income after full ramp-up, which is expected in '26 and '27. Part of the next year will be given as rent-free, and after that rent will increase in steps until full ramp-up. Additionally, we are in the construction phase of new build logistics and storage building in Kassel, which is fully let and expected to be finalized next year. In parallel, we are currently checking options for building another logistic hole on this site as one of our tenants is looking to expand further. These are just some examples of former and actual activities to increase rents and FFO going forward. It should be noted that we have become more selective on executing projects to the ones with the highest returns. In addition, we continue to identify building rights as there remains market to sell these, especially in Berlin. You can find further details, as usual, in the appendix of our presentation.

What is your progress with your green building certifications and what are your road map going forward?

We are gradually obtaining certificates for our assets. Due to the size of our portfolio and the process time, it will take a few years to get the majority of our portfolio certified. So far, we have green certificates for 70% of the commercial portfolio and 29% of the office portfolio. We initially started with pilot project in the Netherlands in 2021, where we now have achieved 100% certification of the Dutch portfolio. Utilizing our knowledge from the Dutch portfolio, we started this year to obtain certificates for our German offices. We are preparing also to get hotel properties certified. Compared to the Netherlands, the process in Germany takes longer as the certifying board in Germany, the [indiscernible] as well as the auditors have a capacity constraint. In addition, we have trained the team internally, which analyzes and assesses which properties can be green certified and which ones need adoptions. This will speed up the process and give us more planning clarity. We aim to have continued progress in increasing our share of green certifications in our portfolio, and we will continue to publish our progress.

Thank you. So these were the questions that we have received prior to this call, and we can now start the open session for your questions. [Operator Instructions]

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from [indiscernible] from Bank of America.

I have 2, if I may. The first one is, do you have an update on the disposal of the Center Parcs, please? And the second one was more around your shareholding structure. I've seen in your report that now Stumpf Capital increased their stake to 10%, becoming the second-largest shareholder. What does it mean for the long-term capital structure, please?

Thanks for the questions. Regarding the Center Parcs, we, at the moment, didn't find or didn't receive -- or find a buyer that -- we and him find the right -- the common ground on the pricing. These properties are generating a very nice rent and are supporting our FFO, and if, in the future, we'll find a potential buyer that we and him will find the right price, there could be a transaction. Referring to the new shareholder, we are happy to have new shareholders in the company. We understand that the new shareholder sees himself as the financial investors that use the low share price, use the opportunity to increase his position. So far, we didn't hear any specific requests. I mean we are happy to welcome any shareholder that want and see the potential in our company.

The next question comes from Ellis Acklin from First Berlin Equity Research.

Thanks for the very detailed presentation as always. Just a quick one from my side. With your focus on bank debt now, I was just wondering if you have a floor in mind with your unencumbered asset ratio that's been coming -- creeping down on the last couple of quarters.

Ellis, look, we don't have a floor in our mind. It's anyway a very lengthy process. We have EUR 19 billion of unencumbered assets. It will take a very long time for us if we really want to get secured financing on all of them, so I think the discussion on a floor at the moment is not so relevant. We will continue and focus on this source. We believe that what we achieved this year was very good with the EUR 1 billion, and we'll try to continue and get more loans in the coming periods. Thank you.

The next question comes from Manuel Martin from ODDO BHF.

One question from my side on your toolbox. So if I understand it correctly, in your presentation, the toolbox is also maybe skipping the dividend but also kind of equity tools. Can you detail that a bit or give us some flavor on the equity tools? Would that be capital increase, given the low share price? Maybe not the most optimal solution, but maybe you can clarify that a bit for us, please.

Thanks for the question, Manuel. I -- the toolbox is a general toolbox. It's not necessarily something that we see attractive at the moment, but it's there for us to use in case we wish to do it. We share some opinion as you that at the moment, capital increase is not as accretive and attractive move, and that's why it's not been used. The idea of mentioning the toolbox with any kind of elements from a capital increase and rights and deferring coupon and the postponing dividend as well in the future, these are all tools that we have. We hope that -- each one of them have, for sure, a certain impact. At the moment, we feel that with the current capital structure, when we managed to keep LTV on the level of 40%, 41%, we don't need to use, let's say, or to do any capital increase. Clearly, we need to see what's the impact in the future. We need to see how funding is coming, access to capital, what's happened with valuations. And based on that, we'll need to see how and if to use these tools. Thank you.

The next question comes from Paul May from Barclays.

Just a couple from my side. On the first one, what's to the confidence around the asset values? I mean you mentioned sort of 5% down in the second half. Just noting that CBRE had moved the peak to Q3. Average decline in Prime Germany is a bit about 33% in terms of capital value declines, and Prime yields are between 4%, 4.7%. I think your yields are about 4.7% now, when you're [indiscernible] would it be considered to be the equivalent of what CBRE continues to be the premise of the price. So I think the other thing, we saw an acceleration of value declines in Q3, I think they're sort of down 10% just in Q3. Just wondered what gives you that confidence that your portfolio would be sort of performing better than the Prime CBRE assets? And then I'll come on to the second question after.

Paul, thanks for the question. I think valuation result is -- or the valuation process includes several elements, and rent is only one of them. I think that with the diversification that we have in the portfolio, with -- and diversification in asset classes and also in locations, and when you add to that also that we continue increase our rents and which are linked to the CPI or step rents, and the improvement in the hotel collection that are also being reflected in valuation, the initial indications that we got so far and are at the moment are not a representative quantity. That's why we are very careful in coming with this number, is about 5%. We are -- we started the process of the full portfolio valuation. We are now at end of November. This process will take until the beginning of the year, and they will have, let's say, more accurate results. But at the moment, that's the basic indications that we see. Thank you for the question.

Just a second question I had on -- you mentioned as a risk that banks could reduce financing should further stress become evident. Are you seeing any change in your conversations with banks sort of in the last week basically post SIGNA's issues. I think you mentioned sort of SIGNA as a potential factor within that. Have you noticed anything else yet? Or are your conversations with banks around lending still presuming what they were, say, 2 months ago?

We didn't receive any specific indication in the last, let's say, 2 weeks since the event was published, but we expect this to have a certain impact. It clearly depends which banks are exposed to them or not. We are not aware of all the bank relationships, but we are referring our opinion based on our general discussion with banks in the last few months. It's not something that we feel now. But the event that we talked about, it's clearly another event which is negative in the industry. So clearly, we believe that banks will be, in general, more caution, more careful. And in any way, the process takes longer. So this is where we come with this approach.

The next question comes from Kumar Neeraj from Barclays.

I have 2 questions. So first one is in regards to your stake increase in Grand City. I mean I understand that you see well in resi, but I was trying to understand how you see it from an angle of liquidity outflow, especially when you mentioned that liquidity situation is challenging in the sector? And if you have any like target level of holding in the Grand City. And my second question is, what sort of return do you make on your cash balance in the current environment?

Thanks for the questions. Referring Grand City, our position didn't -- in recent months, didn't improve. I mean we kept it relatively stable. We also saw that share price was a bit improving in the last few months. We feel very comfortable with this position that we have, but if we see that the discount is increasing again, we will consider if we want to increase the stake. Referring to the interest income, what we see today, it depends on the length of the deposits that we put the horizon, but it's in the range of 2% to 4%. Thank you.

With that, thank you all very much for your participation in this call and the questions you've raised before and during the call. We wish you all the best, and goodbye.