The Property Franchise Group PLC ($TPFG)

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Property Franchise Group plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review your questions submitted today and publish responses where appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to Gareth Samples, CEO.

Great. Thank you very much, and welcome, everybody. Good afternoon. Ben and I are going to be doing the presentation today. The items are going to cover highlights of 2025, financial review that Ben will take strategy moving forward, the outlook to the market this year and then at the end, give you the opportunity to ask any questions you'd like to ask. So highlights, I guess, 2025 yet again, a record year in a number of different parts of the business. For those of you that don't know us, we are the U.K.'s largest multi-brand property franchise business. We operate from 15 distinct brands, which is a 1,900 network of offices, both franchisees and licensees. We have a large mortgage business with 315 financial advisers working within it who last year had a record year and delivered 25,000 mortgage applications. We operate our Fine & Country brand both in the U.K. and in 19 distinct international territories. Last year, we opened in Dubai, Uruguay, Dublin, Barbados, Sydney. So that's a growing part of the business. I guess if I take you back to 2024, 2024 was very much transformational year for us. We bought our biggest competitor, Belvoir who were very similar business to TPFG and then 2 months later, we bought the Guild of professional estate agents having the Fine & Country brands and really we have now created a business of scale. Since 2013, we've done 7 acquisitions and integrated those really successfully, and we'll show you the numbers from sort of 2014 a little bit later in the presentation that really demonstrates the sort of growth curve we've been on over the last few years. A big part of the business is recurring revenue. We are predominantly a lettings business, 65%, 70% of our turnover comes from lettings and 51% of that revenue is recurring. So that underpins the real quality in the business. We're very capital light and generate really good levels of cash generation. So GBP 22.1 million of free cash generation in 2025 and that equated to 116% of earnings, which we were delighted about. And then a really strong dividend this year, moving it forward again to 22p that was a 22% uplift on 2024 and equates to current share price about 5.5% yield, which, again, we're delighted to be able to announce. One of the first things we did when we pushed all the businesses together and acquired the business in 2024 is we realized we needed to be clear about the 3 divisions that were in the business. And franchising is and will always be our biggest business and Ben will take you through the numbers in terms of how that works across the group. As I touched on earlier, a really big financial services business that came with the Belvoir acquisition and Michelle Brook runs that business, has built that business from one consultant many years ago to now. The powerhouse that it is and we're one of mortgage advice bureaus, largest introducers. And then our new division, licensing, which is similar to franchising, but certainly different. So we wanted to report differently on that. And that's our third division. And then I guess as the year has gone on, 2025, what we started to develop is this sort of platform model. So it's very much about providing services into the enlarged network. And this really demonstrates what scale brings to the party, I guess. So being able to do the research and development on behalf of our members to make sure that we pick the right products, the relevant products, the things that are going to assist our franchisees and licensees in growing their turnover over the future and negotiate really good deals for our members to be able to implement a range of services. And we'll touch on some of those later in the presentation, privilege being one of the big ones. But going forward, we've got tech services, we've got marketing, all of which will grow over the next 18 months and form part of our sort of growth strategy moving forward. Touching on the highlights, the operational highlights from 2025. Our managed portfolio now stands at 149,000 properties, slightly back on last year, but actually, we're really happy with -- there's been talk in the press about an exodus of landlords and for sure some have left the space. But to only drop by 3% or 4% in the year, we were delighted with that. So we are still the largest manager of properties in the U.K. looking after 149,000. I think Connells look after about 120,000 and then you've got Lomond and Leaders Romans Group about 80,000 and then LSL about 4,0,000. So significantly bigger than most in the property management space. And then we had a really good year in sales last year. We completed on 35,000 transactions. That was a record year for us. And there's still more growth potential in that area as we bring more and more franchisees to the party and get them to become better at selling houses. We launched our first sort of platform service, which was Privilege, and we'll talk about Privilege a little bit later, but that was a set of specific lettings products to sort of take into consideration the Renters' Rights Act and try and protect our landlords and our franchisees in the event of tenants increasing. Touch on the Financial Services division, record year, 25,000 mortgage applications, largest contributor to the Mortgage Advice Bureau network. And you'll have noticed in January, we also acquired another business, Smart Advice Financial Services that has added 35 additional financial service consultants into that business. So very much committed to our buy-and-build strategy in the financial services space. In licensing, Fine & Country had a really good year, 13 new licenses sold in the year, and 8 of those, as I touched on earlier, were international licenses and we've got a strategic plan over the next 3 years to really look at that international piece and look at how we can expand that out. We strengthened the leadership team during 2025. I think the business that we now run is far greater than prior to the acquisitions and making sure we have the right Board and the right senior leadership team is critical in terms of the next 3 to 5 years growth. So we've made really good progress with the senior leadership team. That frees Ben and I to look at additional acquisitions, strategy, investor relations, and that's worked really well for us over the last 6 months. And then significant progress in and for those that were here last year in the AI space. So we are now -- we've built some products. We've got them in trial in some of our own offices, and we're making really good progress in terms of developing those products that will be fit for our licensees and our franchisees to adopt into their business. So again, we'll touch on a little bit more about that later in the presentation. So the operational highlights. I'm now delighted to hand you over to Ben, my CFO, who will talk you through the financial highlights. Ben?

Perfect. Thanks, Gareth. So in terms of financial highlights, starting off with revenue, we delivered in 2025, GBP 84.3 million. That's up 25% year-over-year on a reported basis. Clearly, 2024, the comparative year was when we did the acquisition, so that's the year-over-year percentage. So looking at the pro forma growth, the real kind of underlying growth, that number for revenue was 9%, so still kind of really positive. Of that, as Gareth has already alluded to, 51% is recurring, very slight dip compared to 2024, which was 52%. And that's really just seeing the full 12 months of the significant financial services division that came along with Belvoir, which is less recurring in nature. And in terms of adjusted profit before tax, we delivered GBP 31 million, which year-over-year, again, on a reported basis is up 39%. But when you strip that out and you look at it on a pro forma basis with the real kind of underlying growth, it's 22%, which obviously fantastic and higher than the revenue really as a result of, I suppose 2 factors. One is the cost synergies that we've been working on post acquisition and the integration benefits that we've seen coming through, but also some of the revenue that we'll talk about today has helped, has dropped largely to the bottom line. In terms of the overall adjusted profit before tax margin, we reported 33% back in 2024 and that's actually climbed to just under 37% as part of our ongoing task challenge to try and move ourselves back to 40%, which is where we were prior to the Belvoir acquisition that had financial services, which is a historically lower margin. Dividend, 22p, which is up 22% year-over-year and from a cash perspective, ended the year with net debt of GBP 2.3 million context of that, some of you will remember that we took out GBP 20 million worth of debt to fund the second acquisition in 2024, the acquisition of GPEA. And already within that kind of 18-month period, we've been able to bring that net debt down to GBP 2.3 million, which is a testament to the cash generation of the business. Clearly, also at that level of net debt very lowly levered at 0.1x. And you can see the cash generated from operations during the year of GBP 22.1 million up significantly and will have contributed to our ability to be able to do that. The adjusted basic EPS, again up to 40.3p, up 27% year-over-year. So in terms of certainly at the top level, really, really happy with the results, really proud of what we've been able to achieve. If you just drop down to a divisional level. And this slide is just giving you a bit of a feel for how our revenue and our profitability mix is made up between those 3 divisions that Gareth outlined earlier on. And I think probably the 2 key messages to take away from this slide are franchising is still absolutely the core of what we do as a business. It makes up over 60% of our revenue. But as you can see from those charts, makes up over 75% of our overall profitability. And that's at the core of what we do as a business but also, you can see with those -- underneath those charts and those numbers which are demonstrating the pro forma growth in revenue, adjusted operating profit and EBITDA across all of those 3 divisions, you can see real strong growth across -- certainly profitability across all 3 divisions, which again, we're really happy with. Licensing a little lower than we had expected or that we have looked to achieve, and I'll talk a little bit more about that when we deep dive into that particular division. So just a quick slide on each of the divisions just to give you a bit of a feel for how they've performed and what we've been looking at. And one of the key things I suppose I want to be able to give you as investors is understanding what operational KPIs are very much relevant to that particular division, what the mix of the revenue kind of looks like and then actually how are we performing in the financials within that division. In terms of key KPIs, Gareth has already referred to the number of managed lets, the number of sales, but also a key operational metric that we monitor is the average MSF per franchisee, which again, is a demonstration of how successful our franchisees are being. And that's increased to just over GBP 40,000 per franchisee on average in 2025, which is up compared to 2024, which was GBP 36,000. Revenue mix within franchising and really comes from 4 fundamental areas. It comes from lettings MSF. And you can see in those charts that remains, again, very much core to the franchising division. You then got sales MSF, so the amount paid by franchisees on commissions that relate to sales activity. That's actually increased certainly in proportion to the previous year. And I think that's really as a result of it being a strong sales year within 2025, but also some of the initiatives that we've put into place to improve the general sales proposition, particularly in the Belvoir business, which was perhaps a little bit behind where TPFG had been historically. And you've then got the income from the 11 owned offices. Again, we're just trying to build and go from strength to strength and that the remaining, which is lots of other, I suppose, incremental income, part of which is actually some of the platform elements that Gareth was alluding to earlier on. Overall profit margin for this division is 59% and recurring is 68%. So really kind of financially strong business. Just jumping on to financial services. So again, those key KPIs that we monitor post the acquisition of Smart Advice Financial Solutions that we did in January, we're at 315 advisers, completed 25,000 mortgages during 2025. And again, another kind of key operational metric that we keep an eye on is the productivity, so revenue per adviser, which was up from GBP 70,000 last year to GBP 83,000 per adviser and is the result of great work that we've been doing both internally and also with Mortgage Advice Bureau in order to be able to improve productivity and our consultants. Next, we've got 2 elements, fairly similar businesses that we spoke about, which is the employed advisers, commissions and revenue generated from employed advisers and revenue generated from our business partners who are a little bit more akin to franchisees that are independent businesses that are using our status as an appointed representative of MAB in order to be able to trade compliantly and you can see that swung a little bit more towards employed advisers, which I suppose demonstrates our focus around that particular area given our ability to be able to drive productivity much greater than we can in the business partners section. Adjusted operating profit within this segment -- within this division is strictly 18% based on that kind of gross revenue number. I think what's worth understanding here is because the way that we have to account for the commissions coming in, we have to account for them at a gross commission before any of the pay aways that we have to do as part of the arrangement. And actually, if you look at a net commissions number, which we think is almost more appropriate kind of revenue comparison, you've got -- you actually see an operating margin much closer to 63%, which is, again, very similar to kind of franchising and I think much more realistic in terms of demonstrating the opportunity and the strength of the division. Just jumping on to licensing. So again, key KPIs that we monitor a number of licensees that we've got dropped a little bit overall in the year, predominantly as a result of seeing a little bit of a reduction. I'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. And secondly, also the average fee, the average license fee per licensee. You'll remember that licensing is slightly different to franchising in the respect that it's not dependent on the success of the licensee. It's not a percentage of their income. It is a flat price fee, which is collected on a recurring basis. So getting that fee right, making sure that we're maximizing the value proposition and therefore, maximizing our ability to be able to price accordingly is strategically is absolutely key. You can see in terms of the split between Fine & Country again stay very, very similar between 2024 and 2025 and in terms of the adjusted operating profit, making about 28% and recurring, again, because it's that recurring license fee is 74% within this particular division, so particularly high. We'll talk a little bit more about the Guild, I think, in a moment, but the key thing that we're trying to do around there is updating the value proposition. It's a little bit dated. We've got the capability of the wider group now and the commercial deals that are available to it, we should be able to apply into that value proposition; a, to make it more attractive to licensees, but also secondly, give us the ability to be able to price accordingly. So moving out to the divisions and just talking a little bit more about cash. We've already said about the level of net cash generated from operations, which was GBP 22.1 million. And you just see the kind of the key movements from the starting bank balance to the final bank balance of GBP 10.9 million in the table on the left-hand side. Nothing in particularly exciting within there. We have the remaining deferred consideration on GPEA that we paid back in May 2025. And actually, that was reduced by GBP 1.35 million after some negotiation with the original seller. We had a payment down of loans, but we also drew some of the RCF in order to be able to fund some activity and we paid GBP 12 million worth of dividends as well as actually seeing a bit of cash inflow from the sale of some shares in the employee benefit trust. Free cash flow per share landed at 34.2p, again, up compared to 2024, which is at 30p. So again, really kind of happy with that result. And I suppose just to talk about the performance over the kind of the last 11 years. I think this is a really important slide for us because something that not necessarily unfairly, but we generally kind of perceived to be because we're in the property industry and we operate within that sector, we must absolutely be at the whims of the property market and the macroeconomic impact of the ups and downs that, that property market goes through and therefore, our earnings and our profitability being linked to that. And I think what we're trying to demonstrate really with this chart in particular, is actually we aren't as cyclical as you might expect but we don't believe we're cyclical at all. If you look at our dividend paid, our adjusted earnings per share, our adjusted profit before tax as metrics over the last 11 years since 2014, with the exception of the dividend being paid in the COVID year when it was kind of held back to retain cash for obvious reasons, every single one of those metrics has climbed every single year. And you can see the CAGRs that have been achieved over those 3 metrics on the left-hand side as well, 17% dividend, 16% EPS, 28% of the adjusted PBT. And I think if you were to compare us to more corporate property agency estate agency business, you would see a lot more cyclicality. And the reason why you don't see it within our business is that franchising model is the lean towards the lettings piece of that high level of recurring income, which gives us that strength year after year to be able to see out or mitigate any of the property market fluctuations that, as I say, allows us to kind of continue on that pretty steady growth curve, which actually you can see over the last 5 years, we started to accelerate. And the final number really on this slide, which will move quite nicely into the next one is just trying to give you a bit of a feel for the potential cash generation of this business. I mentioned a couple of times that we generated just over GBP 22 million worth of cash in 2025. Even if I just took that number and times it by 3 to demonstrate the next 3 years, that's GBP 66 million worth of cash for us to play with and deploy for the purposes of returning best value to the shareholders. So I think probably worth at that point talking about our capital allocation and what our thoughts are. So clearly, financial resilience of the business is absolutely first and foremost. We look to pay down debt as best as we can. You saw the net debt was down at 2.3 leverage really low, and we'll continue to do that. Organic growth investment. In reality, this is an incredibly capital-light business. There isn't a huge amount to invest even with some of the things that Gareth has mentioned around AI and the privilege program, the amount of investment that we've had to put in certainly from a cash perspective has been quite minimal really in the grand scheme of things. Dividends -- business has historically always paid a progressive dividend is something that we and the Board are very keen to continue going forward. Historically, on average, paid circa kind of 50% over the last 2 years, we got that to about 56%. And I think we'll see that kind of continuing going forward. And then really after that, it's down to our acquisition appetite. And I suppose there's been some debate as to whether there needs to be other forms of returns to shareholders, whether we were to do a special dividend or a buyback. And I think our view is that with the platform that we're generating and the ability to be able to sell these additional services into the franchisees for their benefit and also for ours, actually, our money is much better placed at the moment to build on that platform to build on our financial services, buy-and-build strategy and also to look at other potential opportunities in terms of lettings book into our own offices. So that's really where our primary focus is going to be certainly over the next 12 months. I think with that, I will probably hand you back over to Gareth so he can talk you through our strategy.

Great. Thanks, Ben. We'll touch on the market first. So obviously, 2026, we were thinking was going to run very similarly to 2025. If I look at the lettings market, the guidance we sort of gave back end of last year is U.K. rents expected to rise by 2% to 3% of rent inflation, slightly lower on last year. Clearly, we've got the Renters' Rights Act that comes into force on the 1st of May. So we're doing an awful lot work, we have been for the last 2 years, but the final bits of work this year. So we've got all the offices ready from a paperwork perspective, a changing process perspective, and that's worked really well for us. And what we do think is there will be a shift towards a more balanced tenant market going forward. So lettings, we think will be nice and steady this year. There's still good demand for property. There's still a shortage of good quality rental property. So most of those fundamentals that we've seen over the last 5 years will remain. Financial services, we think we're in for another good year. There is a massive remortgage book this year based on 2021 and 2022's sales market. So if you remember back to COVID, coming out of COVID, everybody seemed like they wanted to move, and we did really, really well from a mortgage perspective in 2020, '21 and '22. And all of those mortgages are now coming up for renewal. So all of those 5-year fixed mortgages are coming up. So I think the estimate is GBP 320 billion worth of remortgage activity in 2026 and 2027. And if I look at last year, that was about GBP 250 billion. So big uptick on that. Sales market, we were predicting a very similar year, 1.1 million transactions, maybe 1.15 million transactions. And we see no reason today to change that. But we are obviously aware of what's going on in the Middle East and the change in mortgage rates being pulled and mortgage rates starting to slightly increase. So we've got to watch and brief on that. We've seen no downturn in activity over the last 3 weeks, but we need to be aware of it. It looks like it's going to go on longer than initially anticipated and that may have some negative impact on the sales market during the year. So that's a little bit about first 10 weeks of the markets, generally positive. We've then got the Renters' Rights Act and, what is it? It's the end of fixed term tenancies. It removes no-fault evictions and it brings in hefty fines for noncompliance, okay? We very much welcome regulation. I think it makes us as the professional managers of property more visible and more necessary. So we're embracing the changes. I don't agree with all of them, but we're embracing the changes, and we spent a lot of time over the last 12 months training our franchisees and making sure they're ready and that's gone incredibly well. And some of the things we've put in place in the last 6 months to mitigate the renter or the potential pitfalls of the Renters' Rights Act, I'm going to talk about now. So we've launched something called the Privilege scheme and that has 3 elements to it. First element is to try and protect all of our landlords and all of our franchisees for potentially an increase in rent arrears. So -- and this becomes one of those sort of platform products that we touched on earlier. So rent guarantee is the ability to ensure against rent arrears and for the insurance policy to pay out the rent to the landlord. And by doing that, that will ensure that the franchisee gets their management commission and selfishly, we'll also get our MSF. So we have sold in the last 6 months about 60,000 policies to our 150,000 landlords. That policy guarantees the rent, guarantees to pay the core cost, the eviction costs to get that tenant out of that property and also commits to pay for any damage that's done by that tenant during the eviction process, okay? And that policy costs the landlord GBP 300. The franchisee makes good money on that policy. But our biggest nervousness was court time. So if you take the average property in the U.K., the average rent is about GBP 1,300 per calendar month. To get a tenant into court, once they stopped paying the rent, we think will take between 9 and 15 months going forward, okay? So let's call that 10 months that's GBP 13,000 in lost rent to process the eviction court papers and to get court work cost somewhere between GBP 4,000 and GBP 6,000, that's GBP 19,000. And there's a likelihood there will be some damage in that property once you finally evict the tenant. So we're saying for landlords, that's potentially a GBP 20,000 liability lost income. Not many landlords could absorb a GBP 20,000 loss in income and still pay the mortgage and still keep the portfolio running effectively. So I think we've done the right thing. It's been embraced really well by the franchisees, got really good uptake. It's been embraced really well by the landlord. So still work to do. We still got the next 10 weeks to sell the remainder of the landlord database that hasn't taken it up yet. And we've also started to launch that to our licensee. So really important part of that sort of platform range of services and has gone really, really well. Second part Privilege is a sort of compliance saver program for business owners, for our franchisees. And it's a range of products like PI, AML credits, audit, Propertymark costs, Propertymark One tickets. So about GBP 6,000 worth of value packaged up by us and Propertymark and retail back to the franchisee about GBP 1,500 an office. And we have 97% of our offices take that product. So that's worked really, really well, and that's driven savings at a franchisee level. And then the final part is we have finally managed to get the TDS to develop a deposit product for our franchisees that will enable us to collect all of the deposits into one account as opposed to having 700 individual franchisee accounts and start to earn interest on the back of that, and we will be able to share that interest earned between us and our franchisees. So really relevant products that will either make the franchisee money or save the franchisee money. And that's been received really, really well. The other thing that we've done to combat the Renters' Rights Act is we've ran over the last 9 months about 80 landlord evenings. So the private rented sector in the U.K. has about 4.5 million properties in it. In terms of people like me, so managing agents, 2.25 million, so 50% of the 4.5 million properties are dealt with property managers like me and then 2.25 million are dealt with by self-managing landlords. So we've taken upon ourselves to get out there into the offices and to educate self-managing landlords about the Renters' Rights Act. And what's been really interesting is one most landlords' complete lack of knowledge about the Renters' Rights Act after we've done our presentation about the changes and the fines and they are terrified with Renters' Rights Act. And every single event, we have people at the end queuing to talk to us about taking on their properties, culminating the other week in Huddersfield with one landlord coming up and saying, "Look, I don't want to look after these anymore myself. Can you look after them for me?" And the franchisee said, "yes, absolutely. No problem at all". How many properties have you got? And he said 77. So a really big landlord, doesn't want to deal with the compliance of 77 properties going forward. So we see that very much as an opportunity. I think what it's taught us is we need to be the voice of the sector and we're working towards that and we'll carry on with these evenings, but we will do podcasts and e-mails shots to make sure that we continue to educate the self-managing well, all landlords, but self-managing landlords, and we see that very much as a lead generation tool to increase our portfolio size. So that's one area that we've learned over the last 12 months. Second area, we're going to focus on is how do we develop the next generation of buy-to-let investors. So, everybody says, "Oh, it's not as good as it used to be," and that's absolutely correct. But if you look at the returns, it's like any asset class, be it shares, be it building society interest, Bitcoin, gold, ultimately, it has its place for some people but nobody's sort of championing the sort of next generation buy-to-let investors. So we're going to take it upon ourselves to be the voice of the next generation of buy-to-let investors and really move that forward. That also then leads me into one of the growth opportunities that we're going to execute on in 2026, which is developing a landlord concierge specialist buy-to-let business. Okay. We're already big in financial services, not so big in buy-to-let. We've got 150,000 landlords, and we have no buy-to-let offering for them. And I think with the size we are the biggest in the U.K. We will be able to deal direct with lenders to drive exclusive mortgage products in either a company structure or an individual buy-to-let structure. So we're very committed to building that buy-to-let business going forward. We'll do a trial in 2026 and really launch that in 2027, along with a range of other landlord services that will be really useful for all of our landlords and help aid retention of that lettings book. So that's what we're doing in terms of the Renters' Rights Act. I think it's been a really useful year in terms of learning about what we can do to sort of drive the buy-to-let space forward over the next five years. So really, really positive initiatives. If I then move on to our growth strategy generally and some of this we've touched on before, some of it's new. So, if I look at lettings, obviously, rent inflation has always played a reasonably sized part in our growth year-on-year. In addition to that, we are encouraging our franchisees to continue to buy those portfolios from their competition. And first 10 weeks of the year are showing really positive signs, far more activity this year than last year. And Ben, when he came into the business, has done a really good deal with Barclays to provide funding to the franchisees, which has been embraced really well and the early signs in terms of the rates we're able to get our franchisees from Barclays is significantly cheaper than the funding sources they had prior to Ben doing his work with Barclays. So we expect to see an upturn in the number of portfolio acquisitions we will do over the next 3 years. We set a sort of internal target to 6,000 a year, which is punchy, but as I say I think that's there now we've got the funding agreed. And then obviously, big part is Privilege. Privilege will continue to drive our franchisees' income and our own income in terms of us taking that MSF with the increased income. So good growth opportunity for lettings. In terms of sales, again, those of you who have joined me before, I've always said we've not ever punched our weight, if you like, in the sales arena. Although last year was a record year, we can still grow. Even if the market contracts a bit in 2026, we can still do more because every single year we've got more offices embracing sales. So I think we will continue with that growth initiative to become better in the sales arena and to take more market share locally and drive the income that way. Financial services, Ben's touched on, we will continue the buy-and-build strategy. So we bought Smart Financial in January. That's a really good business. If I could do two or three of them a year, I absolutely would. So we're out there looking for other businesses that would be suitable to come into the group. Criteria for me is they've got to be profitable, and they've got to have at least 20 financial consultants working within them. So we'll continue to have those conversations. Then looking at ways in which we can increase Financial Adviser productivity. That's a really big measure. And some of the stuff we're doing in AI, which I'll come on to, we believe will dramatically improve individual financial consultant productivity over the next 18 months. So they're the growth initiatives within Financial Services. Then Licensing, probably twofold. So modernizing the proposition within The Guild, making that, bringing that up to the sort of modern day, launching Privilege into the licensees, along with expanding Fine & Country internationally, and filling in the gaps that we've got in the UK. So really focused on that value proposition for licensees along with the products that we can offer at a reduced price to all of the licensees for software, for marketing services, for canvassing, for print, all of those things, looking to drive those forward as well. And then we come onto the platform model, and the platform is, as I say, we've got insurance services which is contained within Privilege. We're going to have tech services, which is all about AI, and we're really excited about that, and we'll touch on that now. So we have probably been working on AI for the last 12 months and you know what our role within this sort of offering is to go out and do the R&D, the research and development on the market. What we did at a very early stage is looked at where this best fit the business, okay. We're a lettings business, so we thought property management. We have a lot of leads coming in because we've got 15 million data records, so being able to deal with triaging lead activity. Then a virtual assistant in an office to be able to take calls and do data capture and be able to do fulfillment. So we've got trials in place at the moment, in our owned offices. Our virtual assistant we've called Steve. Steve is taking phone calls. He's fulfilling customer requirements, so be able to book viewings, able to book valuations, able to book mortgage appointments. In the first sort of 8 to 10 weeks in the owned offices, he's currently producing a result that's 28% better than the humans, which is really interesting. That's one trial. We're beginning to then roll that out to the franchisees. The second and probably most important one is property management. Again, we identified really early that the property management is probably one of our franchisees' biggest costs and biggest jobs. So being a heavily focused lettings business, we focused on that from an AI perspective. If you think about property management, it's quite predictable. So my boiler is not working. I've got no hot water. I've lost my keys. I've smashed a window. My garden needs cutting. A variety of similar requests going in across the whole of the franchise group. So if we can triage those initial inquiries via technology, that could save an enormous amount of money from a wage bill perspective for our franchisees. So very much looking at getting that launch probably in the next six to eight weeks, understanding what the initial results are, and then really driving that forward across the franchisees and the licensees. So AI we see as a big part of 2026 and an even bigger part of 2027. I guess the two things, can it save money? Okay, where are the efficiencies? Where can AI be used from an efficiencies perspective, both for us as a franchisor and for our franchisees? And then lead generation. How can we develop more income-earning activity for our franchisees to drive their businesses forward? They're the two criteria we're looking at. We're working with some incredible partners who are helping us build this technology, and then we'll take it out as part of the platform offering to be able to put that into our franchisees and licensees businesses. The final part is acquisition. So buy-and-build strategy in financial services, absolutely. In terms of franchise businesses, there's only two big ones. Winkworth, listed, not for sale. LSL, listed, not for sale. So unlikely to do them. So then looking at where we could acquire businesses is in the services arena, and we're talking to a few businesses at the moment. Where we can buy a profitable business that we can then promote across the 2,000 office network to increase the profits, we would absolutely look to do that in the right circumstances. The people we've talked to so far, we can buy those businesses at 4, 6x profit, and we believe we can put them into the network and drive a much better profitable result. So absolutely, we would look to do that, and we will update you over the next six months. And then the other side from an acquisitions' perspective would be buying lettings portfolios into our owned offices. So we've got some really big owned offices in York and Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, that we have the opportunity to buy portfolios and always practice what we preach to our franchisees. Really focused on trying to buy some of those portfolios into the letting offices over '26 and '27. So it's overall, lots of opportunity. We've appointed a COO to help Ben and I develop and deliver some of these initiatives. As I say, we think ultimately, there's so much opportunity the scale has provided the business that we can really start to drive that forward over the next three years. Outlook, touched on this earlier. Q1, we're trading in line with expectations. Iran focusing -- is on everybody's mind, is on the news every day. So we'll keep a watching brief on that. Boost the revenue synergies via the group scale and platform strength. As I say, I think the biggest, not surprise, but the biggest sort of, plus in the last 12 months is understanding the power of this business and Ben's consistent delivery slide earlier. We built this business from a starting point of GBP 5 million adjusted PBT back in 2020, and we delivered GBP 31 million last year. So it's the exciting piece now is what can we deliver with GBP 31 million worth of firepower? That's really exciting in terms of the growth that we can push through over the next 3 to 5 years. We're actively pursuing acquisition opportunities and always will because of the cash generation we have. Growth supported by diversified revenue streams and strengthened leadership. I think we're really well-positioned to take advantage of the market conditions in 2026. Thanks for listening. We've gone through a lot there. We're now going to open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed by our investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. If I may just start off with the first question here, which reads as follows: What is the organic growth outlook for the next five years, given limited franchisee businesses left to acquire?

Okay. I think we may have covered that in the presentation, but absolutely the platform model. Looking at services that we can spread across our 1,900 offices, so the franchisees, the licensees, that really give them a competitive advantage at a price that's affordable, that's really important. That will drive income into the franchisor but also revenue at a franchisee level, of which we'll take the MSF from. So organically, I think the numbers in the market that we talked about on Monday or Tuesday is between 7% and 10%. Acquisitions will play a part. I wouldn't call acquisitions organic. Smaller acquisitions will bolt in. The financial services acquisitions will add to that organic piece, along with the letting book acquisitions in the owned offices adding to that organic piece. Our ambition is always to try and get organic growth at 10%. That's what we'd like to deliver year on year.

That's great, thank you. I believe keeping the share count low and generating double-digit EPS, at least 12%, is one of the best ways of generating shareholder value. Are the board considering aggressive opportunistic buybacks to create shareholder value?

I'm happy to take that one. I think at this point in time, and we go back to that platform model and the opportunity that we've already been able to demonstrate with just some examples, Privilege being one of them, AI about to kind of come through, that shows that actually we can create some really meaningful shareholder value through utilizing that platform and we want to continue to do that really as the first priority. Gareth's talked about some of the acquisitions and the benefits that those acquisitions would have across all three divisions, and we believe that's certainly at this point the best way to be driving shareholder value. If we were to get to a point potentially in 12 months' time, 18 months' time where we've not done the acquisitions, we've not found those that kind of sit within the realms of what we'd want to transact on, and we've got an ever-growing cash balance, then yes, of course, we will continue to assess whether or not buybacks are the better option. Certainly right now, acquisitions are where we're focused.

Yes. Again, we'll generate so much cash. It'll be one or the other if you think about it. Hopefully we can do the acquisitions and see better growth. But if not, we are accruing cash every single month and would need to, I guess, a higher dividend or a buyback.

Thank you. Just turning to the next question. Do we think the big increase in EPS is a one-off due to the Belvoir purchase and growth will go back to historical levels?

It's a pretty sizable increase and yes, there is an element of that which is the full year effect of Belvoir coming through. I come back to what Gareth I think was saying in terms of what we -- what we're going to be looking for in terms of that kind of organic growth going forward, and that's what we'd be looking to normalize. It's still attractive levels of EPS growth, but clearly not the same kind of big jump that's being driven by really primarily an acquisition.

Thank you. A question around dividends. How do you decide on the level of dividend?

I'll take this one again. I suppose there's a couple of key elements that the board considers. One is that kind of dividend yield, that clearly that's very much a moving piece depending on where the share price is at any one point in time but we certainly want to be in a position where we've got a dividend yield of at least 4%, so that's something that we're monitoring. Second one is obviously dividend cover and making sure that we're above that kind of 1.5 absolute baseline. Then I suppose thirdly, and something that probably drives it slightly more, is looking at it from a percentage of earnings ratio. So as I mentioned earlier on, historically we've been around kind of 50%, and the last kind of couple of years we've just upped that a little bit up to 56%. Those are the three kind of certainly elements of the discussion that we have at a board level and where we get to in terms of the final proposition.

Do we see any more large takeovers or just natural growth?

There's only two. We touched on those. One may happen, it may not happen. I think the acquisitions we can do can build quite nicely. If I can deliver GBP 2 million worth of additional profit a year for GBP 8 million to GBP 10 million worth of cost, that's quite attractive coupled with our organic growth. I don't think we necessarily need a big acquisition. If I look at Winkworth, it's not that big. It's GBP 2 million to GBP 2.5 million of adjusted profit before tax. And I think I can do that in a different way. I think we can still be acquisitive, but it won't be like a Hunters deal or the Belvoir deal. Those businesses are few and far between.

That's great. Are we keeping AIM status?

Sorry, say that again.

Are we keeping AIM status?

Absolutely. I think, when I look back pre -- towards the 2025 -- from June to December 2025, we were a net beneficiary for sure of AIM. We were one of the top 25 customer companies on AIM. We had a lot of IHT money came into the stock in the second half of last year. It drove the share price really well towards that GBP 6. It's been disappointing to see it drop off but we have no intention of moving to main market. We are happy with AIM today. We need to see it perform, but there's been a lot going on recently but we are very happy with AIM and believe we will be there certainly in the medium term.

The next question we have here reads: How would the business adapt in a rising inflation and interest rate environment, which the board of executives have just indicated is likely on the horizon?

I think probably the best way to answer this is actually say that we're already, I suppose well equipped to be able to deal with that type of environment. Those types of conditions are likely, if anything, to obviously impact perhaps house sale transactions within the UK. Just to give you a bit of a feel for perhaps how maybe exposed we are in terms of the housing market from a sales perspective, the average number of transactions in any given year is 1.1 million on average. Good year is 1.2 million. A poor year, 1 million. That's very kind of journalistic bookends. The reality is that with everything else staying equal in terms of our market share, if the market drops to 1 million transactions, because of the reasonably low proportion that we have in terms of sales business, because as I mentioned earlier on, we're predominantly or more focused certainly on lettings, the impact to our profitability is somewhere in the region of about GBP 0.75 million. That's certainly from a franchising position and even on the Financial Services side, which you might expect to be a little bit more susceptible to it, we also have the benefit of a fantastic back book, which enables us to be able to make sure we're continuing to drive income through the business, even when you've got potentially new mortgages coming or softening a little bit because of a softening property market and that will be even more the case within '26, where we're anticipating a really big remortgage market because it's kind of circa five years after that 2021 big transaction year at that point in time. So we're already pretty well positioned for it and as Gareth mentioned earlier on, think that in terms of 2026, it's a good outlook for us.

I think also is that long-term resilience. If you look at that slide and look at the years you've had Brexit, you've had tenant fee ban, you've had COVID, you've had the Liz Truss moment, you've had Ukraine. And each and every one of those has had some impact on inflation, cost of living, Liz Truss, the mortgage rates. And again, demonstrating that resilience and that consistent delivery through that period. And yes 2026 has already got some challenges, but we're good at overcoming those challenges. I think that's the strength of having lots of small business owners as franchisees. They have no choice. They've got to get on with today, they've got to deal with the market, and they've got to make a living and I think that's the resilience of that franchise model.

That's great. Just the last question we've got here reads: what is the strategy for Fine & Country?

It's an incredible brand. I don't know whether everybody saw the TV program, Britain's Most Expensive Houses, but we dominated that program. It's upper quartile. We've got most of the UK, Scotland, Ireland filled in. There's a few gaps, but not much. So it's a really strong brand in the UK. We're looking at how can we build this internationally. I touched on where we've opened up last year, so Uruguay, Barbados, Sydney, Dubai, they're big areas. We're then looking at how can we take the UK model to other countries like France and Italy. So in France, we say we've got France, but we've got Cannes. Well, that's not France. How can I have 20 or 30 in France, Fine & Country licensees? The same with Italy and the same with Spain. I had a conversation this week with interest from Australia, so a region of Australia Perth from a franchise, established franchise business that wants a mid to upper market offering, and they're very interested. They would take up to 40 licenses. So I think there's definitely potential. We've got a really good Fine & Country team that are passionate about the brand. They've got their conference next week at the Belfry, and that runs for three days. International franchise licensees come on the Thursday. The UK on the Friday. They've got an exhibition on the Saturday at the new Belfry Conference Center, so looking forward to attending that. But yes, it's a really good business. Got a really good reputation. The TV program has definitely upped the profile and the interest in the brand. So I think that's got real good growth opportunity over the next few years.

That's great. Thank you for answering all those questions you can from investors. And Of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Gareth, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?

Absolutely. So we're really excited about the next three years. I think we've bought the businesses, we've understood them, we've got the growth opportunities, and now we're going to go and push forward and drive that growth. As always, I'd like to thank all of you for your time and taking an interest in our business. As I say, we're really excited about the future, and hopefully that's come across today. Thanks for your time.

That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.