Foxtons Group plc (FOXT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the Foxtons 2023 full year results presentation. I'm joined by Chris Hough, Group CFO, and we will both be available at the end of the call to answer any questions you may have. This presentation is a fraction longer than usual, but it is incredibly important to highlight just how much we've achieved in a short space of time. In my eyes, we've delivered over 3 years of progress in just 12 months. Starting on Slide 5, where I will run through the key highlights for the year. First, we delivered revenue and profit growth in the year as growth in Lettings mitigated a significantly weaker sales market and investments to rebuild our competitive advantages. Operationally, we delivered at pace and ahead of schedule. The Foxtons operating platform has been strengthened, and we drove outperformance in the year, which positions us for long-term growth. In 2023, the platform drove a level of market share growth unheard of for a business of our size. Growth was delivered across all areas of our business. And pleasingly, for a London only estate agent, Foxtons was both the U.K.'s fastest-growing large estate agency and also the U.K.'s largest lettings brand. The platform also drives growth from Lettings acquisitions through top line revenue growth and the application of cost synergies to deliver ROIs in excess of 25%. With over 3,600 agents in London alone, we have a great opportunity to drive growth by consolidating our highly fragmented sector. Since joining, our renewed strategy has been to deliver growth in noncyclical lettings revenue. Over the past few years, we have transformed the group's financial profile, and today, Foxtons is a far more robust business, delivering growth no matter what the external sales market. Finally, last year, I highlighted my aim to return to Foxtons being London's go-to estate agent and unlocking the undoubted potential that we have. We delivered both operational progress and shareholder returns in 2023, but there is more to come. Looking ahead, we are on track to deliver our medium-term target of GBP 25 million to GBP 30 million of adjusted operating profit and in doing so, create a significant further shareholder value. Turning now to Slide 7 and an update on the London lettings market. As you can see on the graph, from 2021 onwards, we saw a COVID-19-driven dynamic of lower rental inventory combined with record-ever levels of tenant demand. This led to rapid rental price growth with rents growing nearly 30% over the last 2 years. However, the supply and demand imbalance normalized through the second half of last year, and rents have stabilized. Positively, for Foxtons, the improved supply of rental properties provides a great opportunity to deliver organic market share growth by more aggressively leveraging our technology, data and highly motivated sales force. Through 2023, we have significantly overhauled, updated and optimized our lettings processes to deliver a level of organic growth not seen since 2016 and outperformed many of our competitors. This includes developing a new end-to-end digital lettings platform, which has significantly increased the efficiency of registering, onboarding and servicing over 0.5 million lettings inquiries, which we receive every year. This is achieved by providing a highly efficient digital journey, which allows us to lead score and prioritize inquiries to drive productivity of our fee earners. Looking over the longer term, whilst supply and demand dynamics are normalizing, we expect rental prices to remain at their elevated levels. Tenant demand remains historically high and is expected to continue growing each year as London's population grows. This growth is unlikely to be met with a meaningful supply of new rental properties. And ultimately, this structural imbalance will underpin rental values. Over time, I expect the market to return to delivering a more modest long-term consistent rental price growth as seen in the past 20 years prior to COVID. Turning now to Slide 8 and an update on the London sales market. As you will be aware, the sales market was highly challenging in 2023, driven by the impact of the September 2022 mini budget on buyer demand at the beginning of the year, rapid growth in interest rates impacting affordability levels, turbulence in the mortgage market, including the withdrawal of higher loan-to-value mortgage products and periodic wholesale removal and repricing of products by providers. And finally, there were further headwinds in new homes linked to the end of the Help to Buy scheme. Against this backdrop, pricing softened in the year with average prices in London dropping 2.4%. Volumes were 22% lower. And to put this into context, last year's Sales transaction volumes were close to the historic low levels seen during the financial crisis. Taken together, the value of the sales market was over 24% lower than the prior year. In comparison to this, Foxtons outperformed the market with revenues just 14% lower, reflecting a considerable 21% growth in market share, and in doing so, reclaiming our position as London's #1. On Slide 10, we have laid out the upgrades we have delivered in 2023 to significantly strengthen our industry-leading operating platform. Starting with technology. We forensically reviewed all of our processes, making hundreds of iterative upgrades and delivering productivity gains. For example, in Lettings, we have reduced the time to market by over 40%, invaluable in our multi-agency environment where speed is key to winning deals. On top of driving efficiency, the focus in our technology departments is delivering new and innovative products. Historically, Foxtons was at the forefront of innovation in the sector, which drove constant outperformance, and our upgrades are once again creating a clear competitive advantage. I'm incredibly impressed by the speed and quality of our digital product delivery. The end-to-end digital Lettings platform I mentioned earlier was delivered in just 6 months, a feat which is nearly impossible for any of our competitors. Moving now to data. On my return to the business in September 2022, I was disappointed by our low levels of data maturity as subsequently confirmed by an external review carried out by Microsoft. Since then, upgrading our capabilities has been an overriding priority. In the year, we embedded highly sophisticated Microsoft Azure-based data infrastructure to create a data platform, which brings together content-rich but previously siloed and inaccessible databases alongside real-time market data and advanced data science and analytics. The comprehensive reporting suite has been rolled out across the entire business, creating a complete visibility of performance and enabling data-led decision-making. In addition, we developed a new lead-prospecting platform, which combines our database of over 5 million properties and 2.5 million customers with sophisticated lead-scoring and behavioral modeling. It is important to highlight how the insights generated by the data platform have improved productivity and identified areas of underperformance in real time. To date, our Sales business is generating a 37% higher level of offers per person. And across the group, we have significantly improved levels of property instructions, and rates of cross-selling of property management and financial services. Moving now to brand. Our strategy for 2023 was to significantly increase our brand visibility. With our new marketing campaign, get it done with London's #1, we have gone out with a bold offering, which leads into our latent brand awareness and reinforces our status as London's go-to agent. Our new data platform has allowed us to considerably increase marketing ROI. And along with marginal increase in spend, we have grown market share at a rate significantly above all our competitors. And finally, our brand premiumization strategy is working. For example, we now have the largest market share in the GBP 1 million to GBP 3 million sales price bracket in London, which was an area that we'd previously been pushed out of. Our leading hub and spoke model has also been upgraded in the year with a focus on driving productivity and customer service across the group. The Lettings property management department has been a key focus as delivering the highest levels of service here is key to ensuring the long-term retention of landlords. Headcount, training, technology and core processes have been enhanced. Remuneration has been overhauled to align with our group strategy and a new real-time customer experience feedback system has been embedded. In addition, a key driver in our decision to acquire Ludlow Thompson was its out of London property management hub based in the West Midlands. This creates an incredibly exciting opportunity as we will invest here to deliver on our vision to create a property management center of excellence whilst also benefiting from reduced operating costs. And over time, this will allow us to reduce space in our London headquarters and deliver further cost savings. Finally, we have totally rebuilt the once powerful Foxtons' culture, returning to a high-intensity winning mentality focused on delivering the best results for customers and always striving to deliver exceptional service. Fee earner headcount has been rebuilt to reflect the size of the opportunity and high performance is once again recognized both key drivers in delivering market share growth in 2023. We also relaunched our industry-leading training programs, increasing in-person training by a factor of 10 to significantly improve the productivity and retention of our staff. Additionally, working together with a global recruitment consultancy, we have completely redesigned and implemented a new employee value proposition, and we have overhauled our entire recruitment approach. Today, we receive somewhere in the region of 10,000 job applications per month, and our new system will allow us to identify, process and engage with the highest caliber individuals. Together, these have turbocharged a new high-performance sales culture, improved retention and tenure rates and ultimately supported the delivery of market share growth at a rate completely beyond my expectations. Taken together, these rebuilt areas have created a uniquely powerful operating platform and leaves us well positioned for long-term growth. I'll provide more detail on the operating platform later in the presentation. Turning now to Slide 11. This time last year, I presented our refocused strategy and a GBP 25 million to GBP 30 million operating target. This will be achieved through returning to growth in Lettings alongside returning Sales to profitability through aggressively growing market share. And I am pleased to report that we have made significant progress in 2023. Lettings, we delivered 7% organic growth to outperform our target. Operational upgrades drove higher average revenues per transaction as we considerably improved the cross-sell of property management and secured longer tenancy lengths to drive landlord retention. We completed 2 excellent Lettings acquisitions in the year adding a further 2,800 tenancies into our portfolio and growing our total portfolio size to over 28,000. Prior acquisitions continue to deliver returns comfortably ahead of our 20% minimum return expectations, and with a good pipeline of future opportunities across London's highly fragmented market, this is an area where investment will continue to deliver higher returns. In Sales, we delivered an impressive 21% growth in our market share of exchange deals, allowing us to significantly outperform the market. Our sole focus itself remains on driving market share growth and ultimately return this part of the business to profitability. Finally, Financial Services. Unsurprisingly, revenues were lower due to the levels of turmoil in the mortgage market. However, operational upgrades and investments in adviser headcount delivered outperformance as we delivered an 11% increase in our share of mortgage underwriting across the U.K. Finally, to Slide 12. Crucially, the benefits of our strategy can clearly be seen on this slide with the following standout trends. We have grown our portfolio of noncyclical and reoccurring revenues, which has totally transformed the group's financial profile and resilience. In 2023, this supported the delivery of growth in revenue and operating profit despite a significantly weaker sales market. And the level of transformation and robustness of the group today is illustrated by a comparison with 2019. We delivered over GBP 14 million of operating profit this year versus nearly a GBP 1 million loss in 2019 despite similarly weak sales market volumes. These results show solid progress against our plan to deliver further profit growth and reduce the impact of sales market cyclicality. I will now pass over to Chris, who will run you through the financial overview.

Thank you, Guy, and good morning, everyone. 2023 was a year of investments, enabling the group to deliver good operational progress. And crucially, we are on track to deliver against our medium-term adjusted operating profit target of GBP 25 million to GBP 30 million. Looking at Slide 14, which provides an overview of financial performance. Revenue grew 5% to GBP 147.1 million as Lettings growth more than mitigated a significantly weaker Sales market. We delivered GBP 14.3 million of adjusted operating profit, which is 2% higher than 2022. This is a resilient result against a challenging sales market backdrop, inflationary cost pressures and investment in fee earners who take time to become fully productive. Adjusted EBITDA grew by 6% to GBP 17.5 million. In Appendix 2, I've set out a reconciliation between adjusted operating profit and adjusted which is defined on the same basis we report our RCF covenants. Statutory profit before tax was GBP 7.9 million after charging GBP 4.5 million of adjusted items, primarily relating to the integration of Ludlow Thompson and the decision to close and consolidate 3 branches within the Foxtons network. The Ludlow Thompson integration steps will lock around GBP 3 million of annualized cost synergies from 2024 onwards. There was a GBP 0.1 million net free cash outflow, which includes a GBP 10.8 million working capital investments in our Lettings business, which I'll talk to later in the presentation. Finally, we've proposed a final dividend of 0.7p per share, taking our full year dividend to 0.9p per share. Turning now to Slide 15 on the adjusted operating profit walk, starting from the left-hand side of the chart, with GBP 13.9 million of adjusted operating profit in 2022. Revenue increased by GBP 6.8 million or 5%. Variable staff commission charges were GBP 1.4 million higher due to the increase in revenue. We invested GBP 3.8 million into fee earners as part of our strategy to rebuild operational capabilities. This included an 11% increase in headcount and the introduction of new and competitive fee earner remuneration packages to drive the attraction and retention of the best talent and align behavior and incentives with the group's strategic priorities. Today, fee earner headcount across Sales and Lettings is broadly where we need it to be for the current market conditions. We incurred a further GBP 1.9 million of incremental acquisition operating costs, reflecting the cost of managing a larger lettings portfolio and the timing of cost synergy delivery. We delivered GBP 3.2 million of cost savings, which more than offset GBP 2 million of inflationary cost pressures. And finally, amortization and depreciation was GBP 0.5 million higher, primarily reflecting noncash charges related to acquired lettings intangibles. These movements, taken together, resulted in an adjusted operating profit of GBP 14.3 million or 2% higher compared to 2022. Turning now to Slide 16 on performance in Lettings. Revenue grew by GBP 14.3 million to GBP 101.2 million and surpassed the GBP 100 million milestone for the first time in our history. Growth comprised GBP 6.3 million or 7% of organic revenue growth, GBP 3.9 million of incremental revenues from acquisitions and GBP 4.1 million of additional interest income on client moneys. There were a number of key drivers behind the organic growth. Firstly, an operational focus to secure longer tenancy terms, which has not only driven revenue growth, but will also improve retention of the portfolio over the medium term. Secondly, significantly improved levels of cross-sell of high-value property management services, increasing the penetration of new deals under management by 9% year-on-year. Thirdly, an 11% increase in the market share of organic instructions, which boosted available stock and supported new deal volume. And finally, an 8% year-on-year increase in average rental on new deals, primarily driven by rental price growth in the first half. New deals accounted for 53% of total deal volumes. The operating leverage within the Lettings business, alongside synergies delivered from acquisitions, resulted in GBP 25.8 million of adjusted operating profit, a 44% year-on-year increase. Moving to Slide 17, where I have presented more detail on the returns from our Lettings acquisition strategy. Since 2020, we have acquired 8 portfolios, of which 6 have been trading for a full year following integration onto Foxtons platform. Through delivery of revenue growth, high levels of landlord retention and synergies in the cost base, total EBITDA has grown around 9x from the levels prior to acquisition, demonstrating the synergies that Foxtons platform can unlock. And on a valuation basis, on average, we've acquired these portfolios at around a 3x multiple of EBITDA after synergies, a level we consider highly competitive. Acquisitions continue to deliver a good level of return on investment, delivering, on average, a 25% annual return on invested capital, comfortably above our 20% target rate. These returns highlight why we view Lettings acquisitions as an efficient and proven route to delivering growth. In 2023, we completed the acquisition of Atkinson McLeod and Ludlow Thompson, which added a further 2,800 tenancies into our portfolio. Both portfolios have now been integrated into the Foxtons platform and the delivery of synergies is on track. Moving now to Slide 18 and an update on the Sales business. Revenues were 14% lower as we outperformed the market, which was down over 24% in value. Key drivers were a 21% increase in market share, which limited our volume decline to 11% versus a 22% decline in the wider market. Average sales prices were 1% lower as increased volumes of higher-value properties offset a 2.4% price decline in the wider market. And finally, Sales commission levels were marginally lower at 2.25% versus 2.29% in 2022, as we introduce more flexible pricing to support market share growth in higher-value markets. Our commission rates continue to represent a significant premium above our competitors. Sales incurred an adjusted operating loss of GBP 10 million. This was expected and reflected weak market volumes, which were just below the level seen in 2008 and 2020, years impacted by the global financial crash and COVID-19, respectively, as well as investments in fee earner headcount. Fee earners typically take up to 12 months to become fully productive, which impacted profitability in 2023, but we are already seeing the benefits in 2024. Productivity has increased and the value of the under-offer pipeline was 31% higher at the end of February this year versus 2023. Through continuing to deliver market share growth supported by normalization of market volumes, the business is set up to progress towards profitability. Moving on to Slide 19 on Financial Services. The mortgage market was very turbulent in 2023 and this was reflected in a 14% decline in revenues. The key drivers included lower new purchase mortgage volumes reflecting the challenging sales markets, an increased proportion of lower value product transfer refinance mortgages as the availability of mortgage products was significantly reduced for much of 2023. We were not alone here as this dynamic has been widely reported across the industry. These headwinds were partly mitigated by an 11% increase in market share and an increase in cross-sell of ancillary products. Investments in fee earner headcount and operational upgrades supported volumes. And in fact, we delivered a small uplift in volumes despite the challenging market. Similarly to Sales, new fee earners take time to mature and will support growth in 2024. At the end of February, the Financial Services pipeline was 16% higher than 2023. Moving now to Slide 20 and the operating cash to net free cash flow bridge on the left-hand side, which shows the items contributing to the GBP 0.1 million net free cash outflow. In 2023, there was a GBP 10.8 million in working capital outflow, which reflects Lettings revenue outpacing cash collections as a result of the introduction of shorter billing periods for landlords opting to agree to longer tendency terms. Simply put, for a good proportion of our portfolio, we have changed the way we collect our Lettings commission, moving from collecting cash upfront to collecting cash in multiple tranches over the course of the tenancy. This initiative improves the competitiveness of our lettings proposition and importantly, support the retention and organic growth in the portfolio over the medium term by building landlord loyalty. The working capital line is expected to normalize over the course of 2024 as subsequent tranches of cash are collected. Capital expenditure was GBP 3.6 million, primarily relating to technology development spend and branch phaseouts. 2024 capital expenditure will be broadly at similar levels as that's seen in 2023, which includes continued investment in technology and the branch network. Looking at the opening to closing net cash bridge on the right-hand side, we started the year with GBP 12 million of net cash and ended the year with GBP 6.8 million of net debt. This reflects the GBP 0.1 million net free cash outflow, GBP 13.9 million of acquisition spend and GBP 3.8 million of shareholder returns. In 2023, we used some gearing to accelerate our Lettings acquisition strategy, enabling us to acquire Ludlow Thompson in November. Continued conservative use of our debt facility will continue to support this strategy. As reported at the half year, we successfully refinanced the RCF with our existing lender, increasing the committed facility from GBP 5 million to GBP 20 million and extended the term to June 2026, with an option to extend to June 2028. At the year-end, the net debt-to-EBITDA leverage ratio was 0.4x, comfortably below our covenant limit of 1.75x. Moving now to Slide 21, my final slide, on our capital allocation policy. As stated previously, our main priority is ensuring we have sufficient cash in the business to serve our working capital requirements, whilst being able to invest and enhance our operating platform in order to drive market share and deliver profit growth. Reflecting the group's evolution to a business focused on lettings, for 2024, the Board intends to adopt a progressive dividend policy whilst maintaining strong dividend cover. The new policy aims to provide a more reliable and growing income stream to investors as well as enabling the group to pursue its strategic growth objectives. I'll now hand back to Guy, who will take you through detail on the Foxtons operating platform.

Thank you, Chris. So far, I have highlighted the actions we've taken to strengthen our operating platform. On this slide, I will provide more detail on its various components and how they drive growth. Starting with our technology platform, known as BOS, business operating system. BOS is an end-to-end fully integrated and internally developed platform powering every aspect of Foxtons' estate agency operations. BOS is widely acknowledged as the leading estate agency software and is a key driver for staff productivity, workforce collaboration and our unique competitive culture. Key functions of BOS include an end-to-end estate agency CRM and transaction management platform, which manages controls and connects every single area of our business. Secondly, a sophisticated lettings property management platform, delivering high levels of customer service and productivity through automated workflows, self-service and issue tracking systems and allows us to deliver service to our tenants 24 hours a day. This is in contrast to many other estate agents who continue to use the old-school approach of e-mails and telephone calls. BOS also controls the business-critical area of ensuring we correctly build, receive and remit over GBP 0.5 billion of tenant rental payments annually, alongside the complex task of administering and arbitrating the rental deposit process. Externally, we created the industry's first portal for landlords, sellers, tenants and buyers called My Foxtons. This provides full visibility of their entire customer journey 24/7, including the ability to complete a transaction digitally and provides landlords full visibility of their portfolio, payment status and property maintenance programs. And finally, BOS powers our data-driven automated lead prospecting and marketing platforms. As BOS remains fully internally managed and developed, we can deliver upgrades and new technology products at speed such as our new end-to-end lettings platform. This is in contrast to the majority of agents who use third-party systems with very limited customization or new product innovation. This creates a significant competitive advantage for Foxtons and allows us to really drive innovation in the sector. Finally, this platform is highly scalable. We can power a significantly larger user database in London or nationally. This allows us to expand the size of our business, both organically through acquisition rapidly and without incurring incremental technology cost. Moving next to our new data platform. As previously mentioned, we have embedded best-in-class data infrastructure to drive our transition to becoming a truly data-led business. By embedding internal reporting and data visibility across the business, we are creating a culture of data usage. We are empowering every member of staff to identify and flag any operational challenge they find. In effect, this creates a workforce of data analysts who are continually monitoring data to find a competitive edge. In addition, the platform better utilizes our leading content-rich databases. These contain over 1.6 billion data points and includes customer and property details, transactional data and in-depth customer behavior insights built up over 20 years. By pairing these with advanced data science, the platform is future fit and provides a long-term advantage. Today, Foxtons is leading the industry's transformation, from its historical more gut feel approach to becoming a truly data-led and data-enabled industry. This shift within our own business has already delivered considerable uplift and has the potential to supercharge our growth in the coming years. Moving now on to our brand, which occupies a leading position in London. We generate the highest levels of brand recognition in a highly fragmented industry. And somewhat surprisingly, for an agent with over 95% of its operations in London, we have fantastic recognition across the entire U.K. with 1 in 3 people recognizing the Foxtons brand nationally. Uniquely in our markets, we maintain a fee premium versus our competitors whilst simultaneously operating in the mass market and being the largest estate agency brand in London. The Foxtons brand represents a significant asset, which, when properly leveraged, can cut through a crowded marketplace and deliver a fee premium to drive growth. Moving now to our hub and spoke operating model. We operate a highly optimized model with a network of interconnected single-brand branches supported by specialist sales and operational support teams. This role specialization drives high levels of productivity. Fee earners are focused solely on delivering results for customers whilst centralized support functions benefit from economies of scale and optimized processes. And our analysis suggests our model is up to 20% more efficient than our competitors in London. Finally, to our people, culture and training. A state agency remains at heart a people business. At Foxtons, our business is built around a winning culture focused on delivering results for customers with high levels of service. Fee earner pay compromises a lower base salary with high levels of uncapped commissions. This aligns their incentivization with customer outcomes and creates a culture of sales intensity. Further reinforcing this intensity is a full performance transparency, including real-time automated ranking systems to drive internal competition, supported by targeted rewards including new car targets, overseas trips, and we've also created a culture which recognizes and celebrates high performance. Supporting this are our industry-leading training programs, which support the development of our people to being the most knowledgeable, experienced and productive in their markets. Together, these 5 elements of the operating platform will drive shareholder value. We create high levels of lead generation and property instructions, the lifeblood of the estate agency industry. Deal excellence drives revenue growth and our portfolio of reoccurring revenues creates high lifetime customer value. Finally, we are highly scalable, and well positioned to rapidly grow our business. And ultimately, these will support delivery of our operating profit targets. Slide 25. And finally, some thoughts on trading this year and an outlook for the rest of the year. Lettings continues to trade in line with expectations. Rents have remained stable as supply levels continue to recover, supporting our organic growth ambitions for the rest of the year. In Sales, we've continued to outperform the market. Aided by our strengthened operating platform, we bring the most properties to market. And now with the right number and caliber of fee earners, we are driving a significant uplift in the number of viewings and offers generated. This, supported by some recovery in buyer demand, resulted in the under-offer pipeline increasing 31% at the end of February versus the prior year. And this growth in the sales activity feeds through to Financial Services, where their pipeline has grown circa 16% in the same period and with a similar outlook for the rest of the year. That concludes our formal presentation. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Chris and I look forward to meeting with many of you in the coming weeks, and I'll now pass over to the operator for any questions you may have.

The first question is from Chris Millington from Numis.

I've got a few if I could, please. Firstly, just like to ask around stock levels in both Sales and Lettings. It does sound like market share should have added to that. So just wondering where you are around February time. Next one is just around capacity for more letting book deals. I suppose what I'm getting at here is how much balance sheet capacity do you have. What's availability like and has pricing changed at all? And the final one is just really about drop-free rates in the Sales business. You've obviously put quite a lot of investment there. You're starting to get some efficiency on the headcount investment. How would you see that trending to additional revenue?

Thanks, Chris. Morning, it's Guy here. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Very happy to answer your questions. Let's jump off with our stock levels. So today, our available stock levels compared to the same time last year in Sales, we're seeing a 19% increase in the available stock, and actually, for Lettings, we're seeing a 25% increase in stock. However, it's important to recognize that, that is still less than we had on the market available in 2019 before the lettings dynamics changed as a result of COVID-19. We're proud of both of those results because obviously, it reflects the very strong growth in our market share over last year. And as you -- as we heard, we're the fastest-growing large lettings and sales agency across the whole of the U.K. last year, which I think points to some of the transformational changes that we made, particularly focused around improving our operating platform, BOS, and how to best get the value out of this huge historic database that we have and also rebuilding the culture to focus on market share growth as much as we can do. So very excited about that. I think your second question, Chris, was around further capacity for acquisition. Yes, absolutely. We -- as you know, we have an in-house acquisitions team. They're constantly talking to many of the 3,600 independent agents operating across London. We build that pipeline across the year. Ultimately, it will come down from availability and where we see the opportunity, but we would expect to do another acquisition towards the end of this year because it's fair to remind ourselves that actually we brought forward, at the end of last year, the Ludlow Thompson acquisition, just because it was a fantastic opportunity, and we wanted to make sure that we have the full year benefit from it across this year as well. And then second -- third question, I think I can hand that one over to Chris.

Yes, Chris, in terms of the drop-through on sales, I think I'd start with saying in terms of the capacity we've got in that business today, that is broadly where we need it to be to ask quite a lot of build last year, we've got enough heads in that business to really serve the current market. In fact, we had average headcount growth of around 9% last year. That equates to about 30 more heads -- fee earner heads in the Sales business. So actually, when you look at incremental revenues for 2024 versus 2023, I'm looking at somewhere between 60% drop-through, which really is representing and reflective of that operating leverage in that business.

The next question is from Greg Poulton from Singer Capital Markets.

A couple of questions from me, please. Firstly, just on Sales market share given the strong performance there, when do you realistically expect to meet your 4.5% target? And do you think this will be increased? And then second question is just a follow-up on Chris' question on the Lettings acquisitions. And can you just update us on progress there and expected timing of deals and what we're going to expect this year, please?

Greg, thank you for your question. I'll take the first part of that, which is around when should we get to 4.5% market share on exchanges in London. We've made incredible progress over the last 18 months. Obviously, as we know, we've grown. In 2022, our market share was 3.4%. In 2023, it was 4.1%. And obviously, that -- for an agency of our size, that is huge jump forward, which was obviously created by growing our market share of listings, number one, and then having the talent and the volume of negotiators to be able to pull that through into revenue. We expect to be able to get to 4.5% on current trajectory in the next 18 months, dependent upon what's happening in the sales market, obviously, but we're very encouraged by our current progress. Obviously, it's important to recognize that the higher up that number becomes and higher -- the bigger we grow it, the harder it is to deliver those similar incremental increases. But just looking at the way that we've grown the market share of listings and the fact that we've delivered this enormous increase in training and retention of our fee earners in the front office for Sales, we're confident to be able to continue to achieve that in that time frame.

And Greg, on your second question around the timing of acquisitions, so Ludlow Thompson, I'll see that as an acceleration of our strategy there. We got that in November, and we're very pleased with how that business is bedding in and indeed the earnings profile that will deliver in 2024. So ending the year on around GBP 6.8 million of net debt, there's a little bit more working capital to flow through in H1. And then when we're looking into H2, noting we've got the GBP 20 million RCF facility, and we're ending the year on around 0.4x leverage ratio. We'd be comfortable to take on a little bit more on that facility to enable us to acquire the rights of the business towards the back end of this year. So that's pretty broadly where I'm looking at timing, but it ultimately will be opportunity led and we've got a good pipeline, which we are progressing and developing.

[Operator Instructions] We have no more -- yes.

We have 3 questions from the web from Andy Murphy, Edison. First one is around the out of London property management hub. How does that fit into our network? And is that a change of strategy in any way?

I'll take the first part of that. Thank you for your question, Andy. We're really excited about the West Midlands hub. Obviously, this was a function of why we wanted to closed the deal on Ludlow Thompson, this fantastic lettings business we bought at the end of last year, which came with their back-office support functions being carried out in a hub outside of London. This is an idea that we started to actually build ourselves over the last 18 months in a different location. But now this allows us to be able to accelerate the plan particularly as we grow our managed portfolio. We plan actually organically to grow headcount in Worcester, by around about 3x its current levels over the next 18 months. And ultimately, our vision with this very firmly is we want to be able to create a center of excellence for property services, where particularly in property management, we want to be able to deliver a level of service that is unheard of and unachievable in the marketplace today because ultimately, that is what will help us retain our clients across the longer term and help us to be able to continually deliver that organic growth, which we're very excited about. So yes, very much a big part of the strategy, the big part of us wanting to do the Ludlow Thompson deal. And ultimately, that will, in the long term, allow us to reduce the amount of headcount space that we need here in London at our London headquarters. We won't be certainly closing our London headquarters. It's just a reduction in the required floor space. And ultimately, that allows us to offset some of those costs to a different lower cost center like we have in West Midlands.

Second question is around GBP 1 million to GBP 3 million Sales market. What had happened here historically and what actions have we made to return to a leading position?

As Foxtons in general over the last 7 years, lost Sales market share, we actually lost a disproportionate amount of our market share in the higher-value GBP 1 million to GBP 3 million market, where we were essentially pushed out by other mid- to upper-end agencies, who essentially were doing a better job than we were doing. I'm very, very encouraged to see that over the last 12 months, we've dramatically increased our market share and regained our position as actually the largest listing agent across the whole of London in that price category today, which wasn't a position that we occupied 1.5 years ago. So yes, I think we've made very good progress, and we'll continue to focus on this as a great area for the business.

And the last question is around the operating platform. What has been the reaction from competitors? And do we expect much response in 2024?

Well, it's been widely acknowledged in the industry that the Foxtons BOS operating platform is not just a little bit better than what's available off the shelf that everybody else uses. It's in a completely different ballpark. And ultimately, that's always -- this -- the advantages that operationally BOS is able to give us has always been there. But now what we're able to do is really turbocharge that advantage because we're now truly getting additional advantage out of that database because we've built this Azure -- state-of-the-art Azure Microsoft platform, which will enable us to deliver further marginal gains as we grow into the next few years ahead. And ultimately, it will be impossible for our competition to be able to build something as comprehensive and as uniform as BOS, which is -- controls every aspect of our business, whether it be the website, the operational CRM for the front offices or even receiving the GBP 0.5 billion of Lettings income as London's largest lettings agent. So yes, I think we will continue to grow this and it's a big area of investment for us as we continue to eke out that further competitive advantage.

No further web questions.

Thank you very much for joining us, everyone. I very much appreciate your time and look forward to meeting you all in the coming weeks.