The Property Franchise Group PLC (TPFG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Property Franchise Group PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives in the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to [indiscernible]. And I'd now like to hand you over to Gareth Samples, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm pleased to be able to present our interim results for 2023, which I'm delighted to say is a record for the business and outperformed the market in both lettings and sales. So we're really encouraged by the results we're going to talk about today. Next slide, please, David. Just to give everybody some sort of context about us, we are the U.K.'s largest property franchise group. We operate our 9 brands, 3 of those being national, 6 of those being regional. So we've got Martin & Co, Hunters and EweMove, our hybrid offering that operate nationally. And then regional brands, CJ Hole, Parkers, Country Properties, Ellis & Co, Whitegates and Mullucks as the regional brands dotted around the country. In terms of the scale, it's significant. We have 614 businesses operating within the group. EweMove in isolation, operates out of 194 territories. We look after 77,000 properties on behalf of landlords across the group and in the first half of 2023, sold over 9,000 property transactions. What our purpose is to support our franchisees, helping them to become more successful. And that's a really important point and where we've invested quite a lot of money over the last 3 years. And our vision is to achieve an increasing U.K. market share of letting the state agency transactions and property-related financial services. So that gives you some idea about the scale of the group. In terms of summary for the period, this is, I think, the sixth quarter of record results. So another period of revenue, which was record profit and a record interim dividend, increasing proportions of recurring revenue and outperforming both the sales and the lettings market. A key feature of those results is the lettings result. Lettings demand across the country continues to outstrip the market and impact on reducing number of U.K. housing transactions. So the sales market has gone down, the lettings market has gone up, and we'll touch on both of those markets in more detail a little bit later. Really strong performance, demonstrating the resilience of the offering and the strength of our model. I put out this morning in my announcement that the last 2 years have been really, really successful, but the market has been really strong. And I think this year's market has been more challenging and has really demonstrated our resilience as a group and our sort of share towards the lettings market in terms of being able to announce these results today. And then the final bit, which is the sort of add-on is the ongoing execution against our strategic initiatives that we've now been working on for the last 3 years. So that's a summary of the period over the last 6 months. I'm now going to hand you over to David Raggett, my CFO, who's going to talk you through some of the numbers behind that.

Good afternoon, everyone. Well, financials for the first half of this year, we'll get on to that slide. Group revenue increased to GBP 13.2 million. It's up about 1% from where it was this time last year at 13.1%. The most significant element of our revenue every year is that was generated by a franchise network and within that, the royalties that they pay us. So management service fees or royalties and they were up 3% to GBP 7.7 million from GBP 7.5 million this time last year. And I'm going to go on a little later and just sort of give you an idea of how that breaks down and what the movements have been so you can see on how that MSF is developing. Costs are down about GBP 300,000 from the same period last year, and that drives then an adjusted EBITDA results. So actual EBITDA with that share-based payment charge up slightly GBP 5.8 million versus GBP 5.7 million and also drove the adjusted operating margin, which I always want to be about 40%. And I think this time last year was saying we're just above 40%, and we should see some growth back to 45%. Well, we're at 42% so it should be known, that's not quite as far as we like it to be. But at 42%, perhaps that's healthy. So yes, a little bit more work to do there. But costs overall even being down against an inflationary environment means we do seem to have plenty of focus on and control. Just a bit more revenue to eke out, I think, from everything. So profit before tax, as a result, up 11% to GBP 4.2 million from GBP 3.8 million. And then net cash, not as high as I like, it's net cash of GBP 700,000 at the moment in time. It's typical for this time of the year because the second half of the year is the better half for us. And in the second half of the year, we have a much smaller dividend payment as we pay our interim, whereas in the first half of the year, we paid the final for the prior year. So there's more significant cash outflow in the first half of the year than the second as well, and that will come back. Now dividend declared for the year. Again, it's one of these things Board sits down and decides where is the business, how much growth that we had, how much are we paying away and we always work on about a ratio whereby earnings cover our dividend payments 2x. We pay 1/3 usually now and 2/3 after the end of the year in either May or June. And so with all that in mind, we decided as a Board to increase the interim dividend by 10% to [ 4.6p ]. And then just underlying all of that, where is basic earnings per share? Well, that's up 4% to 10.3p from 9.9p. The same if you were to dilute that number. So healthy, very healthy. Revenue mix on this next slide, left hand side, is 23%. Right-hand side is 22%. There's not too much change in the mix there. So I won't roll too long on that from this slide. But as you can see, the most significant element is the MSF from our franchisees. What's very encouraging is that this half year, the MSF from lettings franchisees generated is up to 61%. So it's come a good way since this time last year, it was at 55%. And as a result, the recurring revenue in the business -- so the recurring element of our total revenue is now 65%. And I would expect to see a little bit more tick on, on that as we run through this year because the lettings market is so strong, but not too much. So we'll high 60s in recurring revenue before we tick up to about 67%, 68% of total revenue. And then a snapshot of what's happening, lettings and sales wise, this is our MSF numbers for the high street brands we have, excluding Hunters. And on the left-hand side, what's happening in the lettings market really and what's on right-hand side in the sales market. So letting started off higher than this time last year and has followed more or less the trend that we saw last year, apart from the fact that there's more lettings income there, and therefore, there's more MSF for us. The sales market conversely started off sort of the similar sort of place, drifted away a little bit as we headed towards April, May, and this is interest rate changes and the impact on the market there and then we see some pickup. And that tick-up we've seen into June was carried on into July and into August. So this is following very much the trend of 2022 to August. And now we just need to see where the market finishes itself off. It's a bit difficult to tell because seemed everybody was away in about the last week, 10 days of August, and I was anyone working, but I'm sure it wasn't that way. But certainly, the activity would have dropped off at the end of August, and we'll pick this up again and see how the numbers are getting reflected in September. But what I can tell you is that last couple of months, that trend in 2022 has been reflected in our 2023 numbers. And finally, one on cash. Now as I said earlier, cash flow net cash generated from operations is always lower in the first half of the year than the second half. So I put 2022 as net cash generated in there, just for the first half year to show you how that compares to the final results for 2022. '23, as I've discussed, is down slightly. But as you can see, most of the growth in that comes in [ '20 ] -- in the second half of the year. So 2023, I'd expect us to tick that up. Will we get up close to that GBP 9 million? I don't think so. Forecasts are sort of saying it would just be over GBP 8 million. And I guess that's where I'd set the expectations at this moment in time. And net cash -- or free cash flow, sorry, from per share for us, again, it's low at this time of the year, quite naturally, but it will tick up. Will we get up to the final level we saw last year? Well, I think we will be close, but I don't think we'll quite get to that level. And there's probably 2 reasons for that going on, most significant of which must be the franchise network and some sales agents are struggling a little bit to generate the cash that they need. And so there's some investment in there from us for sure. And there's a few additions that we need to make to keep going with our digital marketing strategy. So I expect us to make those as well and they'll go through as more CapEx and therefore come out with free cash flow. But beyond that, I think we want to see a similar trend in '23 to '22. And overall, right-hand side, just sort of take you through the additions and indeed the deductions from our cash. So net cash from operations, GBP 2.5 million. Bank loan, we paid GBP 2.5 million, dividends paid out, [ as we said ], GBP 2.8 million, other movements, GBP 0.7 million, and that gets us to our final position at this moment in time of GBP 3.2 million. And with that, I will hand back to Gareth.

Thanks, David. Just to look at the market. I mean, the market has probably been the toughest of the last sort of 3 years in 2023. So -- and mainly the sales market. So U.K. property transactions were approximately 20% down year-on-year. So if I look back to 2021, there was about 1.55 million transactions in the sales market. Last year, that was probably 1.25 million. This year we set out saying if we could get to anything over 1 million that would be close to a normal year, and we are tracking about 1 million transactions, maybe [ 1.50 million ]. But that's a 20% drop year-on-year. So the markets dropped back significantly since 2021's levels and 2022's levels. Sales agreed pipeline remains strong. I think it was GBP 33 million at this time last year. It's GBP 28.5 million this year, and that's a decent pipeline to see us through the second 6 months. I think the big change in the second 6 months over the first 6 months will be pipeline conversion. So the time it takes for a sale to go from sale agreed to exchange of contracts. Our agents get paid when you get through to exchange. And that this year and last year has been chronically slow, about 6 months from sale agreed through to completion. And then in the second 6 months last year, that picked up to about 4.5 months between sale agreed and completion. And we're seeing that same trend followed this year. So we will do more exchanges second half of the year than we did in the first half of the year, and that will drive that additional income that David touched on. Letting strong rental demand continues to outstrip supply. So you may have read some reports in the press recently, there's something like 20 people for every single property that comes to the market to let. And that is driving prices higher and higher and higher. The other factor that's coming to play this year is landlords costs. So landlords mortgage payments have also increased, and that's driving rents also. So we've seen double-digit growth in the rental sector this year, and we believe that will continue next year just because of that demand. The other interesting stat is the time -- length of time people are staying in the property, the pre-COVID was about 2 years and 8 months, and there was a report last week saying that the average now is 4 years and 8 months. So people are definitely staying longer, which then restricts supply to the market. So none of those things are going to rectify themselves anytime soon. So that strong demand for every property is going to drive rents through 2024. So we expect to see double-digit growth this year and next year. And we expect the sales market to stabilize in 2024. And as I said at the start of this year, we talked about returning to a normal market and a normal market, it's 1.1 million transactions, and we believe we will get there in 2024. I guess the blips this year in terms of rents -- sorry, not rents, in terms of interest rates has been a factor and what we crave is, I guess, stability. I was talking to an investor earlier this morning, and there was a blip in May, which was unexpected, actually, where we almost went back to that sort of November [ list trust ] budget period. And there was an article in the press that 1 week said mortgage Armageddon for borrowers and then 3 weeks later, there was the headline mortgage crisis over, neither of which were true. But that was a 3-week gap between. So people haven't even paid a mortgage payment in that time. So what we want is stability. We accept the mortgage rates are going to stay higher than the last sort of 10-year norm. But I think the market is okay with that, but stability is important to get back to a normal market. And we hope through the remainder of 2023, we get that in place ready for 2024. So a stabilized market in 2024 with 1.1 million transactions is what we're after. In terms of why are we well positioned, I think with sales and lettings, we were predominantly lettings and a lot of people talk about our sort of annuity type income, our margin, our high-quality margin. But we're a robust business and a market leader with a proven franchise track record and a track record for growth. We now have 614 territories under management. So that's 614 individual businesses working locally being supported nationally by us, and that territory count increases every 6 months. We're strongly cash generative with a net cash position after paying about GBP 13.5 million of loans down over the last 2 years as a result of the Hunters acquisition. And now we're in a cash positive position with free cash flow conversion of 79% per annum. We've invested significantly in a really sort of best-in-class senior management team that didn't exist 3 years ago, but it's now supporting the network on a daily basis and that those people have an average sector experience of 24 years. So they can really -- it's really lonely running a business individually in one location to have that support from us on a daily basis has really built relationships within the franchise organization and been able to drive through the initiatives that we're pushing through the franchisees. We've got a clear and focused growth strategy, and I'll touch on that a little bit later in terms of where we see the potential over the next 5 years in organic growth. We're sort of in a really strong position to capitalize on any disruption, and that's really, I guess, touching on acquisitions at a franchisor level, which we're really, really keen to do. The acquisitions that we have done have delivered well on their potential. We've got a high proportion of recurring income, 65% in the first half of this year. And as always, a really strong focus on enhancing that margin back up to 45%. So that's why we believe we're really well positioned. Next slide, please, David. For those of you that are new to the story back in -- as we came out of COVID in 2020, September 2020, we put in place our sort of strategic growth initiatives where we believe we were -- we have the potential to really look at driving the business forward. And what we do every half year is give everybody an update on those strategic growth initiatives and some move forward quicker than others. So just to run through those, lettings growth is obviously a big part of our group. We look after 77,000 properties on behalf of landlords across the U.K. We've done 7 acquisitions this year, and these are local acquisitions that are taken by our franchise network. We will sometimes help fund some of these. We've added 806 managed properties to the network in the first 6 months of this year. and about GBP 800,000 worth of managed income. And we're actually quite disappointed with that. That's something that we want to really focus on over the next 3 years. And the target I have in my mind for the group is you want to be doing 3,000 units a year. So we're slightly off target in the first 6 months of this year, but a massive focus with the franchisees as to where we can spot those opportunities and bring them into the group. We've got a 61%-39% mix of sales and lettings. Lettings been 61%, sales being 39% of our income. And we've still got bags of opportunity within the sales operation to increase the number of units we do. So a lot of our support from our ops managers is very much focused on growing their lettings business, but working with them to increase their share of the local sales market and that's ongoing work. Financial services, we made an acquisition in the financial services space back in September 2021, Mortgage Genie. They've performed in line with expectations. But as you'll appreciate, the mortgage market has been quite subdued this year. Most of the activities through remortgage and product transfer and we've probably made little progress in our franchise network business from a financial services perspective because there's not that many purchase mortgages taking place. In terms of EweMove recruitment, EweMove is our disruptor hybrid sales agency that has grown very nicely over the last 3 years. We've added 17 new territories in the first half of this year which is, I think, 2 off of what we did in the first half of last year. We now operate out of 194 territories, and the potential for that business is to get to 400, 500 territories. So still a long way to grow. So significant growth opportunities ahead, but a really sort of an impressive result from that business in the first 6 months of the year. Acquisitions at a franchisor level, which I've touched on. Hunters and Mortgage Genie, both now fully integrated, both now realize the synergies that we believe we could make when we bought those businesses and both delivering a good result for the group. And one small acquisition we've made, some of you will be aware, some not that we own -- we actually own 9 state agency offices. We have offices in Leeds, Manchester, Harrogate York and then 5 in Birmingham. So we actually operate those offices as owned offices. And we've acquired a lettings portfolio ourselves in February and bolted that into our Birmingham operation, and that's already showing significant signs that are driving income and profitability. So we saw a practice what we preach to our franchisees. We will buy lettings books across those owned offices to continue to enhance their earnings and their profitability. But clearly, as a franchisor having gone through quite a busy period from an acquisition perspective, we are always on the lookout for the next big acquisition. We have the firepower now. We've paid off the debt that we took when we bought Hunters. So always looking to that next opportunity to grow the group still further through acquisition. And I guess the big thing that we've been working on for the last 18 months and where some of the spend has gone and putting that really experienced team of people together that I talked about earlier, is becoming a best-in-class digital market here on behalf of our franchisees. So we've invested heavily in new websites, new CRMs, new internal reporting, new lead fulfillment software along with the digital marketing capability and a team that is able to now digitally market on behalf of our franchisees at a group level. With 600 businesses, we have an enormous database of people that we can communicate appropriate messages to appropriate. We've also looked at this referral software. So people going into different parts of the U.K. to look for a property with a house to sell somewhere else in the U.K., we've never really been able to spot, and that referral has never been presented back to the agent where that house is located. The software that we've got can now automate that and send that lead to a franchisee anywhere in the country. So all of that is due to go live Q1 next year. We might be slightly ahead of that, might be quarter 4. But that plays a massive part in terms of our organic growth plan for the next 5 years and is really exciting. So a lot of investment, a lot of time and effort trying to join together all of the technology platforms that you need to be able to do this properly. AI is also going to play a much bigger part going forward. So looking at how that automated stuff can really help make our franchisees efficient, sufficient and deliver the very best result back to franchisees. So as an update on our strategic initiatives. In terms of the outlook, we believe we've got a really resilient business model, and we're well adept to continue to deliver amidst a challenging market. We do believe on that. We talked about that every 6 months for the last 3 years and every 6 months, we've delivered a better result than the previous year. Current market conditions are anticipated to continue through the second half of this year. And I talked about earlier, the desire is to just get stability in the market. We accept that interest rates are going to be higher, whether that's 3.5% or 4.5% once it stabilizes, we don't know. But there's undoubtedly demand at those sort of levels. So higher interest rates are not too much of a problem. Stability, that's the piece that customers need for confidence. Growth enhanced by digital marketing capabilities and improved data usage, which I've talked about earlier. And our ultimate goal remains to support our franchisees in order to help them become more successful. That's something that we put in place when I joined the business. We've built the relationships with the team of people that we put in to support our franchisees. The relationship with them is better than ever before. We're aligned in terms of ambition, and we will continue to drive those relationships over the next 3 to 5 years. And we remain confident that trading remains in line with expectations for the full year, which I think is really important. We're outperforming the market. We're outperforming most of our peers, and we're confident about the performance in the second half of this year. So thank you very much for listening. It's now over to you for questions. So, David, I think you're going to be the question master.

Perfect. Gareth, David, thanks very much for your presentation. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. David, as you can see we received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And if I could just hand over to you just to share the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Thank you very much, Andrew. So first question, one to you, Gareth. That's great you being one who is asking the questions. When taking on new franchisee, what are the requirements and what can you do to ensure their success?

I think that process -- don't rush the process, I think, is the key thing and taking on a franchisee, there's clearly always going to be risk with setting up a new business. And there's 2 types of new franchisees, I guess. We have resales, people coming to the time in life where they want to retire. So we have people who have been with us 20, 25 years that would want to sell their business. So finding somebody that's going to take on an established business. What do we look for? Again, we probably look for the weaknesses of that business and look for somebody that can fit where we think that business can go. And there's a structured interview process, they'll meet our Head of Resales, our Managing Directors, myself. They'll be -- they'll meet the franchisees. So it's a 2-way thing. They've got to trust us. We've got to believe that they have the right to the future because they probably signed up for 15 to 20 years, it's a big decision. And also the experience they've had before. So I think selection is really, really important. In terms of the new franchisees coming in to set up an absolutely new business, that probably takes place more so within EweMove and that's about, one, the financial backing they've got behind them. That's important because that first 12 months, it takes time to build a business. And then the support that we offer them through that first 6 to 9 months of trading, which is significant with our business development managers with EweMove helping them, yes. In EweMove, we also give them 6 months fee free. So they've got the opportunity to build their business over that period before income starts coming in with not a load of costs that they're going to absorb. So I think one, selection and 2 support would be the 2 things that -- and the ability of the franchisee, picking the right person and then giving them the right support in that first 6 to 12 months is critical.

Next question for you, Gareth, how many franchisees own multiple agencies? Is there any particular concentration of revenue from the larger franchisees?

So not many. I think our biggest franchisee has 8 offices. And our next biggest has 4 or 5 and then you're straight down to 2 and then you're into 1. So a lot of these are individual businesses, 1 office, 1 territory. Maybe 20 have more than 1. So it's quite small. And sorry, what was the second part of the question, David?

Any concentration of revenue from the larger franchisees as a group?

You're probably best to answer that one to be fair.

Well, there will be. That's the answer too as the larger ones by their very nature will be generating more revenue and generating more MSF for us. But as a sort of element of our overall business, no, it's by the very nature that most people are only running 1 or 2 franchisees -- franchises, I should say. That's the answer to that. Next one is for me. Congratulations on the results. And thank you for your presentation. I have a few questions. How many -- sorry, how happy are you with the EBITDA to free cash flow conversion? And where should we expect the ratio for the full year and maybe even next year? I am not sort of happy or unhappy with it. It's just looking ahead to see if it's following the trend I expect and what will happen for year-end. EBITDA conversion, I would expect to get up into the early 80%, which is very similar to the averages that we've seen right the way throughout the last 10 years on the market. So that's the level it will be at. Second question, what's your view on operating cash flow generation for the full year in sterling. And I think we're going to be around about just over GBP 8 million. So not quite as high as last year. Some reasons for that. One, there will be a tick up, I expect in franchisee debt as we run through this year, not material, but there will be some tick up. We will make some investment in our digital marketing program that's ongoing because we want to be ready to hit the ground running in 2024. And then we've got the tax rate that's gone up from 19% to 25% as of 1st of April. And clearly, that's the most significant outflow that we didn't have last year. So that will drive down the net cash generated at the end of the day. But again, to be expected in this cycle, I think. One for you, Gareth. How do you see the financial services business growing? What do you expect this to scale to as a percentage of revenue?

So slowly we've gone on, I guess, a slightly different part. We want to provide a financial solution to our franchisees for them to be able to enhance their income and profitability. So in terms of buying the big mortgage business, that's not in our strategy and that's a slow road. So we've got 20 franchisees that have taken on a financial consultant over the last 2 years and are slowly building our business and expanding that business, learning it. We have the arrangement with LSL, which has another couple of years to run, and they provide a Tier 1 service, which is our franchisees referring leads into their call center. And a Tier 2 opportunity where you can have a local financial consultant supporting your branch and that work is ongoing. We've got 50 or 60 locations identified where we've got a franchisee that wants a Tier 2 consultant. And it's marrying that Tier 2 consultant with the LSL financial consultants that can support us and that takes time. So we're -- it will always be an integral part of our income. We believe we can grow that over the medium term, but it's not significant at the moment. And if we could get back to generating for the franchisor GBP 1 million over the next 5 years, we'd be happy with that. So because we see sales, financial services conveyancing is absolutely necessary to complete that process. As to our franchisees, it's about making them better at referring, putting in the partnerships that support that growth and working with our franchisees to upskill them to get better at it. So it's a long road, it's sort of war, but I do believe we're making progress. I think the last 6 months have been difficult because as I say, a big percentage of the market has been all about product transfers and remortgages as opposed to purchase mortgages. And to do those, you need a big database of historical business, which we haven't got. But I do believe we've made progress in the last 6 months. I also believe the digital marketing strategy that we've got in place will drive financial services business because we'll do that on behalf of franchisees. So we'll capture that data, we'll have the appropriate conversation and [ call to action ] with that consumer and then drive them ourselves to the call center or the in-office financial consulting. And whatever we can take away from the franchisee and do for them, I think will drive a good result on our behalf.

Thanks, Gareth. Well, that ends the questions unless somebody is going to put one in now. So we'll just wait a moment to see if anyone put another question to Gareth. So Gareth, with the widely reported volatility in the market what's your view for the rest of this year and 2024?

So I think we touched on this sort of throughout the presentation. But I think what I want in the remainder of 2023 is to find that stability so that what is the interest rate going to be. We will still do as an industry in excess of 1 million transactions this year, and normal is [ 1.50 million ] to 1.1 million. So we're not that far off the normal market, albeit the market has been unstable. The second 6 months of 2023, we believe will perform better than the first half of 2023, and that's already showing signs in the first 2 months of 2023, that that pipeline conversion is quicker. So I think 2023 will be okay. 2024, if we've got stability of interest rates, we're not seeing massive reductions in house prices. We've got an election, so there's always a concern in the election year in terms of will that affect the market. But there's nothing I see currently that tells me that we won't be close to a normal market, 1.1 million transactions next year. And we will have already rightsized the business to that level of transaction in 2023. So I'm actually quite encouraged. I think boringly normal, which means what I pay, which sat in the sales market, I don't want these big peaks in interest rates and big announcements in the paper and scare tactics just stable. There is demand for all types of property across the U.K. There has been some affordability issues. So people -- some people have dropped out of that market that may have considered buying a property last year, but there is still demand for all types of property in the U.K. and a reasonable sales market. So does that answer the question, David?

It does. And any view on lettings in 2024, run out this year in 2024?

Yes, I cannot see that slowing down. We did -- I touched on earlier, we've got between 15 and 20 people for every property that comes to the market, that that's driving rents up. We've got landlords now that are paying a higher cost for their finance. They're needing to pass that on to tenants and landlords have been incredibly supportive for tenants through COVID and beyond. But this year, they're going to need to start thinking about increasing their rents. We've seen double-digit growth this year. I think we saw just about double-digit growth last year. And I think we'll see double-digit growth in rents next year because it takes a long time to wash through 77,000 properties to get those to the correct rent probably 3 to 4 years. And therefore, I believe 2024 will be just as strong as 2023 in the lettings market.

Okay. Well, that is the end of the questions.

Perfect. Gareth, David, thank you very much. I think you've addressed all those questions from investors. And of course, the company will review all those questions today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. But just before redirecting investors to provide with their feedback, which is now particularly important to you both, Gareth, could I just ask you for a few closing comments.

Just thank you for taking interest in the business. We're really excited about the future and the organic opportunities that the digital marketing play will give us over the next 3 to 5 years. But thanks for giving up your time and taking interest in the business, and hopefully, we'll be able to report back to you really successful end of year results at the end of the year. So thank you.

Perfect. Gareth, David, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. It's going to take a few moments to complete because I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of the Property Franchise Group PLC, I would like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.