Harworth Group plc (UK6A.SG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. So good morning, everybody, and welcome to Harworth's full year results presentation for 2023. I'm Lynda Shillaw, Chief Executive, and I'm delighted to be joined by Kitty Patmore, our Chief Financial Officer. It's great to see so many of you join us in the room here today. And I'd also like to welcome anyone who's watching this online, too. So this slide shows the agenda for the morning, and I'll begin with an overview of our performance during the year and report on the progress that we're making in delivering our strategy. I'll then hand you over to Kitty to take you through the financials. And then I'll provide an operational update, our outlook for the business for the remainder of 2024 and our thoughts on what this means for our strategy. We'll then close the session with some Q&A. And just as a reminder, if you're watching online, you can submit questions through the webcast page and we'll aim to answer as many of these as we can at the end. So down to business, I suppose. I'm turning now to our 2023 results and I'm delighted to say that once again, Harworth has delivered a strong performance and an outperformance relative to the sector, resulting in one of the sector's leading total returns. This saw us complete serviced land and property sales at prices broadly in line with book values, achieve lettings ahead of estimated rental values, continue to move sites through the planning system and progress some exciting acquisition opportunities as we build our future pipeline. And I'd just like to pull out a few highlights initially. So firstly, the management actions taken during the year to unlock the value from our size, progress the planned applications, underpinned a 4.4% increase in our EPRA NDV per share to 205.1p. This growth in EPRA NDV alongside a payment of 1.466p per share dividend, resulted in our total return for the year being 5.1%. We closed the year maintaining our really strong financial position with low financial gearing and significant available liquidity. Our LTV of 4.7% is the lowest in the sector and provides us with significant financial flexibility and firepower. So then across the bottom of this slide, you can see that our future pipelines remain robust with our industrial and logistics pipeline at the highest ever level. Our residential pipeline has reduced slightly, but this is a function of the strong sales programs that we've had in recent years. And as we progress the acquisitions that we have in train through this year, we expect this figure to increase. And finally, we measure the positive impact we have on our people, communities and planet in many different ways. But these figures provide a flavor of what we have achieved. We saw a 24% reduction in Harworth's operational carbon emissions this year and the estimated gross value add of our portfolio rose from GBP 4.6 billion to GBP 4.8 billion over the year, underscoring the enormous potential of our portfolio to deliver economic and social impact. The chart on this slide uses MSCI data and highlights Harworth's consistent outperformance of our wider sector over the past 5 years. Harworth represented by the dark blue line has delivered a cumulative total return of over 40% during the period, significantly higher than the cumulative total return of the MSCI All Property Index, which was just 4.9%. And this also remains the case even when using indices focused purely on regional, industrial and residential assets. And before I hand over to Kitty, I just want to take a few more moments to talk through our strategic scorecard. I'll start by saying that we remain confident in our ambition to reach our GBP 1 billion of EPRA NDV by the end of 2027. And this slide shows the progress we made during the year against each of our 4 key growth drivers and also how we're going to get there. Starting with direct development. We built 193,000 square foot of speculative space during the year across our Gateway 36 site in Barnsley and the AMP in Rotherham. As to our more mature industrial and logistics side, they're established locations, and we're pleased with their letting progress today. 2023 was also a big year for infrastructure investment, and it so as beginning to prime our consented land for development. At year-end, enabling works are underway to support 1.5 million square feet of development at Chatterley Valley in Staffordshire, at our Droitwich site in Worcestershire and the next phase of Gateway 36. And these works will continue through much of 2024 alongside the developments currently under construction at the AMP. The 6.1 million square foot of consented land contains sites such as Wingates in the Northwest and South Skelton Grange in Leeds and during 2024, we plan to start work to open up these sites. And this is crucial to unlock in the next phase of our pipeline, and it enables us to scale up delivery in the later years of our plan. In terms of accelerating sales and broadening the range of residential products, against a really challenging backdrop for housebuilders, we completed 1,170 residential plot sales during the year, transacting at prices that were broadly in line with book values. We also progressed our mixed tenure sales, signing our first forward funding agreement with the registered provider, Great Places as part of our affordable housing portfolio, and we signed a further agreement with them after year-end for the delivery of 155 homes in total. We also have several other transactions in the pipeline. For our single-family BTL product, approvals are now in place for 45% of sites. I've said in previous presentations that we have experienced a much slower planning process on our BTL sites than we anticipated, but we're making progress, and we're progressing towards exchange of contracts with selected investments and delivery partners. Take a look at land acquisitions and promotion, we further strengthened our pipeline with the addition of 1.8 million square feet of industrial and logistics space and 809 residential plots during the year through a combination of freeheld acquisitions, option agreements and PPAs and we also have a pipeline of exciting sites at various stages in the legal process, including our first strategic partnerships. Our ambition to transform the investment portfolio to fully Grade A also took a major step forward during the year and it now stands at 37% grade A compared to 18% just a year ago. This was [Technical Difficulty] by the challenges in the investment market during the first half of the year. The developments that were on site with this year plus any vacant space on recently completed developments have the potential to add GBP 5 million of annualized headline rent to the investment portfolio. So to summarize, we really have been quite busy, and you can see that we've stepped up the momentum in bringing forward our land bank for development, which underpins the progress that we're making against our strategy and our confidence in reaching our GBP 1 billion goal. And with that, I'd like to hand you over to Kitty to take you through the financials.

Thank you, Lynda, and good morning, everybody. I'm pleased to be reporting a strong financial performance for Harworth during the year, and I'd now like to take you through this in some more detail. So starting with our income statement. Total property sales in the year were GBP 125.9 million, slightly lower than 2022, but well ahead of the 5-year average of GBP 105.7 million. Revenue from our income generation portfolio was lower during the year, reflecting the successful sale of properties from the investment portfolio as well as reduced income from coal fines and royalties. Combined with fees generated, this gave us underlying revenue of GBP 151.6 million and statutory revenue of GBP 72.4 million. As Lynda has noted, the letting of vacant space on recently completed developments plus lettings from vertical building to start on site this year is due to add a further GBP 5 million of annualized headline rent, which will more than make up the reduction in the rental numbers this year in income generation. Looking forward, 72.1% of budgeted sales are either completed, exchanged or in heads of terms creating a strong revenue pipeline at this stage in the year, and this is consistent with our position at the same point last year. Administrative expenses increased by GBP 5.3 million from last year, and this is principally due to higher salary expenses from the full year impact of increased employee numbers, cost inflation and progressing strategic objectives. Increases in the fair value of assets held for sale and investment properties through the revaluation exercise resulted in other gains increasing to GBP 69.3 million. And all these factors combined resulted in a profit after tax of GBP 38 million, a 37% increase on GBP 27.8 million in the prior period. Finally, the Board has decided on a final dividend of 1.02p per share, bringing the total dividend for the year to 1.466p per share. This represents a 10% increase on last year's dividend, which has now increased by 10% for 7 consecutive years. Our EPRA NDV per share increased by 4.4% during the year to 205.1p, representing EPRA NDV of GBP 662.9 million, and keeping us on track to reach the GBP 1 billion target by the end of 2027. This is driven by valuation gains generated primarily by management actions focused on leveraging the unique attributes of each of our development sites to create the opportunities to unlock the use with the greatest value. Net debt as at 31st of December was GBP 36.4 million reduced following land and property sales, which more than offset development expenditure and acquisitions. Combined with the dividend, the EPRA NDV increase led to a positive total return of 5.1% during the period, a significant increase from the 0.1% seen in 2022. Now the next few slides cover the valuation movements across our industrial logistics and residential portfolios and we're presenting these in a new format that provides further granularity on individual movements. But just to note that the equivalent data in the old disclosure format can still be found in the appendices to the slide deck. So starting with the industrial and logistics land portfolio over the year. The sales from this portfolio were broadly in line with book value before transaction costs, and they were the reason that resulted in a reduction in portfolio value of GBP 69.3 million. Pleasingly, we added GBP 2.1 million to annualized rent, and this helped to more than offset continued outward movement in yields, resulting in GBP 5.5 million of valuation gains in this portfolio. As Lynda said, the residential market was more challenging in 2023. House prices declined 1.8% over the year. Costs increased on site and housebuilders reported fewer land acquisitions. Despite this, the sales of our 1,200 service plots demonstrated continued demand for our service land product and helped to underpin valuations. Over the year, the residential strategic land portfolio increased in value by GBP 6.1 million following planning progress and site acceleration but the major developments portfolio, which is the part where we have planning, and creating service land parcels for sale reduced in value by GBP 9 million, around 4%, which predominantly due to cost inflation reflected in forward cost plans on these sites, in particular on horizontal civil engineering works. Overall, sales prices for land sold were in line with book values before transaction costs. We recognized a small loss on sale of about GBP 5.5 million driven by the impact of selling costs and also inflation on future site-wide infrastructure costs allocated to prior year sales. Following all these movements, the next slide provides a breakdown in our GBP 768 million portfolio as at the 31st of December 2023. Industrial and logistics land and properties shown here in shades of green account for around 60% of our portfolio by value, with residential land and property shown here in blue, accounting for most of the remainder. The table on the right-hand side summarizes value generation for each segment measured in pound per square foot for Industrial and logistics sites and pound per plot for residential sites, and it shows quite clearly the significant value that we generate by taking sites through our business model. For example, residential strategic land sits at GBP 5,000 a plot, and our average sales price for service land housebuilders or mixed tenure operators is about GBP 53,000. Industrial and logistics strategic land sits at GBP 7 per square foot, the value of completed Grade A buildings in the portfolio that we're building at the moment is around GBP 130 a square foot. These charts also show the huge potential value of our currently unconsented strategic land pipeline, which has increased due to acquisitions in the year and represents 33 million square foot of industrial and logistics space and around 21,000 residential plots. Taking the portfolio as a whole, it has an estimated potential gross development value for full build-out values of around GBP 13 billion. The chart on this slide bridges the decrease in our net debt position from GBP 48.4 million as at the end of 2022 to GBP 36.4 million as of December 2023. The main driver of this decrease was the proceeds from our significant sales during the year, which more than offset our development expenditure and acquisition spend as we continue to progress our growth strategy. This chart also shows the headroom afforded by our cash position and revolving credit facility, which I'll provide some more detail on now. So as spoken about before, our financing strategy remains to be prudently geared with a target net loan to portfolio value at year-end of below 20% and a maximum of 25% during the year. At December, our net loan to value was just 4.7%, lower than 6.6% in December '22 and well within our target levels. So in summary, this was a really strong set of results for the group. We continue to grow -- continue to deliver our growth in our net assets and EPRA NDV against a challenging market backdrop whilst working hard to continue to protect our strong financial position with low loan to value, cash and available facilities of GBP 192 million and no major refinancing requirements till 2027. And with that, I'd like to hand you back to Lynda to take you through the operational review.

Thanks, Kitty. Now I'd like to provide some more detail on our operational progress during the year. Slide 16 provides an overview of our 37.7 million square foot industrial and logistics portfolio, over half of which is held freehold or in joint ventures. Over 6 million square feet of this space has a planning consent and in excess of 10 million square foot has a planning application progressing through the planning system, including Gascoigne Wood in North Yorkshire, where we expect to receive a planning decision in the coming months. Planning status bar at the bottom of this slide shows that 2/3 of this portfolio is at different stages in the planning system. In particular, you can see that 9.2 million square feet has an allocation in an adoptive plan or a draft allocation in a plan under consultation. Both are important drivers of value. Examples of this are our Northern Gateway site, which is on the table for the first time and an increase in the scale of planned developments at Wingates from 1 million square feet to 2.5 million square feet. Both Northern Gateway and the additional London Wingates are currently working their way through the local authority cabinets in the Northwest as part of the Greater Manchester combined authority strategic plan. And if approved during the course of this week, will be allocated in that plan, enabling Harworth and in the case of Northern Gateway, our joint venture to prepare and submit planning applications. So the Northern Gateway plant space that you can see on this table represents Harworth's share of the 5 million square feet owned by or under the control of the joint venture. And the allocation here represents the main employment growth area for Greater Manchester in its strategic plan. So really in the foothills on this exciting site, and we will provide further updates on progress as we go. You will see from the table that the potential gross development value to come from the selection sites, and it does exclude Northern Gateway at this stage, could be as high as GBP 2 billion, demonstrating our significant pipeline of development over the medium term, and signaling the potential value that we can unlock as we continue to assemble schemes and work them through the planning process. So if we have a look at our GBP 220 million investment portfolio in more detail. This portfolio delivers an annualized rent roll of GBP 14.1 million reduced over the year due to the previously mentioned sales program, and it continues to deliver really robust financial metrics. You can see from the chart on the top right of the slide that the occupier base is diverse and focused on those sectors that are currently driving demand, such as manufacturing, wholesale and third-party logistics. And you can see from the bottom right of this slide, that the operational metrics remain strong with a long weighted average and expired lease term of 12.9 years, a low vacancy rate of just over 1% when excluding direct development work that was completed in the past 12 months and 98% rent collection. And during the year on this portfolio, we completed 462,000 square foot of lettings, adding GBP 2.1 million of annualized rent, and we transacted at premiums to the previous passing rents in ERVs. This included the letting of the last remaining units at Bardon Hill to bring that development to full occupancy. As we go through 2024, we're focused on the developments of 187,000 square foot at the AMP, completing enabling works at Chatterley Valley and Droitwich, and letting the remaining units at Gateway 36 and the AMP. And this will add a further GBP 5 million of rent offsetting most of the reduction in rent from 2023's asset sales as we continue to reposition our portfolio towards Grade A assets. So we turn to our residential portfolio, which has the potential to deliver over 27,000 housing plots, which over 5,000 have a planning consent. Sales were completed with 6 different housebuilders, comprising national and regional operators and including 2 housebuilders that we transacted with for the first time, and these were homes by Honey and Forge New Homes. The largest of the disposals was the sale of the whole site in Killamarsh, Derbyshire where we received a planning consent for almost 400 homes for the site earlier in the year, and we subsequently sold that jointly to Harron Homes and Homes by Honey. As a master developer, we pride ourselves in investing in residential sites to provide great infrastructure, amenities and green spaces for residents. And some of the highlights of this during the year have been the opening of new parks at Cadley Park in Derbyshire and South East Coalville in Leicestershire, a new learn to ride cycle track at Waverley and the startup works for a new school in South East Coalville, of course, Olive Lane, the new mixed-use heart of the community at Waverley. If you stay with residentials for a moment, one of our key strategic objectives is to broaden the range of our products. Offering these products alongside our traditional service plot product has many benefits. And while by value, they account for any small proportion of our portfolio, they provide us with an important diversification and allow us to accelerate the delivery of our residential sites, and they give us the opportunity to control build quality, innovation and sustainability. All of this is crucial for maintaining a sense of place for preserving land values and meeting our net zero carbon goals. Our affordable housing portfolio comprises land for approximately 550 homes across 4 sites. We've signed 2 forward funding agreements with Great Places for the developments of 50 homes, our Riverdale Park site in Doncaster and 105 homes at Simpson Park in Nottinghamshire, and we continue to progress the remaining sites with other counterparties. If we look at our built-to-rent product, as I said earlier, we now have planning concept for almost half of the plots in this roughly 1,000 plot portfolio, and we continue to work towards exchanging contracts with our preferred investments and delivery partners. We've also really recently launched our Net Zero Carbon housing products called Coze Homes. This will be directly developed by Harworth as a small-scale pilot at our Prince of Wales site in Pontefract and at Waverley. The pilot is designed to deepen the group's understanding of the technical requirements of the relatively still immature net zero carbon homes market, which will help us to develop improved master plans for future developments that further embed climate resilience and respond to emerging regulatory and social needs. The Prince of Wales site has received its planning consent and construction is expected to begin shortly with Waverley following later in the year. And finally, we continue to assess opportunities to work with partners to deliver senior living at several of our sites, and we look forward to updating on our progress here in due course. So as a specialist regenerator and placemaker, a commitment to communities, to our people and to the planet is at the heart of everything that we do. Critical to this is having lasting positive impact on the communities that we serve, supporting new homes, jobs and infrastructure. And the Harworth way is our program for ensuring this happens. During the year, we published our Net Zero Carbon Pathway, outlining in detail for the first time the steps that we will take to address the challenges and opportunities that decarbonization brings for Harworth. It provides clear and practical guidance for the business and a framework through which progress can be measured as we move towards our target to be operationally net zero carbon by 2030 and net zero carbon for all emissions by 2040. And we've made great early progress having reduced our operational emissions by 28% this year, principally through the use of alternative fuels for our site preparation works and the increased use of electric vehicles within the business. We also began a woodland planting scheme in Chevington in Northumberland, which will significantly boost our sequestration capabilities. And alongside this year's annual report, we'll be releasing our communities framework which explains our approach to delivering social value, both in the communities that we serve and wider society. And this approach ranges from creating sustainable communities to preserving heritage and promoting healthier lifestyles through to growing regional economies and supporting jobs. And our portfolio has the potential to support to deliver GBP 4.8 billion of GVA, support up to 76,500 jobs and generate up to GBP 82 million in business rates, underscoring the huge potential our activities happen to benefit society. So turning to the outlook. The scale of our land portfolio and our skill set in being able to assemble and deliver our sites to unlock value enables us to self-propel our growth as we execute our strategy. With an GBP 800 million GDV near-term pipeline on our industrial and logistics sites, the sustained demand for our service land product and the flexibility afforded by our mixed tenure products, we remain confident in our ability to hit our GBP 1 billion target by the end of 2027. Now since 2021, we've significantly increased the scale of our operations as we've implemented the early years of our strategic plan. We have not only focused on growing the business, but also in investing in our teams, the systems and processes and on defining authentic ESG targets that look like Harworth and identifying the data we need to collect to enable us to report our progress. Harworth has a proven track record for assembling and developing large-scale complex sites and delivering above-market returns through the cycle. As we move into year 3 of the delivery of our strategy, we have primed our delivery capability across our industrial and logistics portfolio and our front end pipeline while also creating the financial headroom to crystallize this value. Our low leverage and strong balance sheet position us well to continue our strategy and provides us with the firepower and flexibility to capitalize on opportunities and drive value from our portfolio. Now where our markets are concerned, the structural drivers of demand remain largely intact in the industrial and logistics sector and supply in our regions remains relatively constrained. So in the year ahead, we'll continue to derisk our development by focusing on pre-lets and build-to-suit opportunities whilst progressing the rest of the major sites. For residential, while affordability challenges will weigh on the house buyer demand in the near term, the supply of development ready land will remain constrained, and we're confident our consent to derisked service land will continue to appeal to a wide range of buyers. At the same time, our increasingly diversified range of residential products will provide us with exposure to markets that continue to grow. As we move through 2024, macroeconomic conditions look set to improve modestly with inflationary pressures easing and the prospect of interest rate cuts from the middle of the year. However, the economic impact of the last few years and some of the resulting structural changes are still working through the system. And in the near term, we think that this is still likely to weigh on sentiment. That said, despite the unpredictability of the last couple of years, which has thrown more than a few curve balls at the real estate sector, I'm as excited about what Harworth can do as a business and what we can become today as the day that I joined the company, and I would like to thank my colleagues for all of their hard work and support to deliver another successful year. And with that, I would like to open up to any questions. So we'll take them first from those in the room, and then we'll move to any on the webcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you.

James Carswell from Peel Hunt. Kitty outlined the low leverage and the liquidity the business has. I'm just wondering what you're seeing in terms of potential acquisitions? Are you seeing kind of many interesting kind of ideas across -- coming across the desk? Or is that liquidity more so for developments that you already kind of have inside the portfolio?

Yes. I mean it's a little bit of all of the above James. I mean, the -- a lot of the acquisitions and land assembly that we undertake as a business actually takes more than a year to do. So we don't start the beginning of 1 year and finish at the end. Some we do, but actually, some of the things that we're -- that you've seen sort of come through this year or that we're still working on the things that we've been working on for a number of years. And I suppose, actually, that doesn't put us that much sort of a risk of what's happening in the market on a day-to-day basis, it's a very long-term approach to land assembly in the right place at the right size. It's fair to say we've not seen a lot of distress. We're not seeing a lot of emergency land sales. And I think actually, we've probably seen it. It's the same with industrial and logistics stock coming, as we went through the back end of last year, those started -- we started to see some transactions in the second half, but it was actually sort of pretty thin on the ground. So largely the capital we have that we throw up from the sales that is there from our banking facilities is about that self-propelling. We've got the land. We've got the skill set. We've got the cash, and we basically are recycling that through into developments as well as acquisitions.

Yes, I think a combination, I think, that's definitely seeing that probably, James, a bit of a pickup than not. So as Lynda says, cheap land and we often say, land's cheap for a reason, in a lot of instances, but definitely got sort of a healthy sort of acquisition pipeline as it stands at the moment. So hopefully, some more to talk about over the course of this year.

Just a question on the occupational market. You've mentioned new opportunities, including data centers. Could you touch a little bit more on those types of opportunities?

Yes. I mean we run an annual sort of horizon scanning exercise as part of looking at sort of where we are with our strategy, sort of what markets might be opening up and whether it's sectors like data centers or if you look further forward into the future, sort of what's going to happen in manufacturing with as more robotics and AI is introduced or stuff like vertical farming, all those things come up in the screen. And I think it's fair to say that actually, if you look at quite a lot of our sites and you think about what they once were, some of them -- if the power availability is still there, some of them lend themselves to users such as data centers. But traditionally, that market has been quite London and Southeast centric. But it is not unusual, only Segro have quite a lot in their portfolio. So it's one of a number of things that as we screen for opportunities that we look at, and we -- and it's all about working out what drives the sort of optimum value from our sides.

Just 2 questions for me, if that's okay. Just in terms of reaching that GBP 1 billion target, I guess, how much of that are you relying on market conditions improving over the next few years compared to how they were this year in terms of housebuilders coming back and buying plots from you. And then my other question then is in terms of the built-to-rent market. I know it's been slower as you had hoped in terms of getting those planning commissions through. Would you expect to now come by the end of this year? Or is that the year still unsure at this point in time?

Yes. So it's an -- so absolutely, as we said in the statement, still confident of reaching the GBP 1 billion of target. I think what I would say is market conditions have been more challenging over the last few years that you can see actually how the business has continued to grow [indiscernible] that time. And in doing that, we've continued to tap into that service lands market with the housebuilders as part of that. So we do anticipate that, that will continue. There will continue to be demand for the product. But we're not wholly dependent on market conditions to get us to that point. I think the key part of Harworth's business model is that actually, we add significant value through the management actions that we take on site, and that's the biggest component of driving us sort of towards that GBP 1 billion target. On BtR, you're right, it's been sort of a longer journey, in particular, on the planning side than we had anticipated, but those planning commissions are starting to come through. So we've now got 45% of that portfolio consented, and we know that we've got other consents that are very soon to come forward. So we're certainly very hopeful of reaching an outcome and progressing that portfolio this year.

No, we have no questions from the webcast.

Right. So let's take the another question. Yes.

What's the yield on the remaining non-A-grade space that you're looking to produce?

So on the remaining space, it's broadly sort of between 7% and 8% on the remainder. So it's not -- it's secondary rather than Grade A, but it is certainly sort of not tertiary stock within that portfolio. So there's opportunities to uplift rent. We will be refurbishing some of those units. So it's certainly not just a sell sort of everything type approach. But what we want to do is that by the end of 2027, that whole portfolio is Grade A.

I mean you'll see in the appendices, I think it's about 75% of the stock is EPC C or better today. And the bulk of the rest of it is in D. So it's not in bad shape as a portfolio anyway. Right. Well, thank you, everybody, for being here. Thank you for watching us online, and we'll probably see a lot of you as we go through the course of the next week and a bit. Thank you.