This year in 2024, and that's up almost around 5% compared to the 2023 number. And as I said, looking forward to Q4 seems to be or promises to be a good quarter for us also in terms of take up, and with that, CTP remains market leader in most of the CEE countries, so the four countries where we started: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, but also market leading in Serbia, and also quite positive about the Polish market. Also have seen some take up in Amsterdam at our CTPark Amsterdam project in the harbor of Amsterdam, which is very positive. A couple of leases signed. Yeah, demand comes from existing clients, as explained, mostly CEE as a business smart location in Europe. It has been, but also nowadays, when there's a bit more pressure on cost, you see more companies moving to Central Europe.
Labor cost is not the only thing. It's also productivity. It's the location, the newly developed infrastructure, and also definitely the culture, the overall business smart attitude, I think also from local governments, et cetera, which we enjoy here in Central Europe, which makes many companies, yeah, successful and continue to grow in this part of the world. Some of our clients come from Asia. Just returned from a 10-days trip. I've been to, obviously to see our Taiwanese clients in, in Taipei. Clearly involved in semiconductor business. We are doing multiple projects for, for them in the Czech Republic, but also in other countries, in Germany, for instance. Also met many of our Chinese clients who decided to bring more activity to Europe. It's in Europe for Europe. So they de-risk their, footprint or supply chain, also decarbonize, and need to be in Europe for their European business.
And there's all type of different industries which we see come from Asia to set up business here in Central Europe for European markets. And, yeah, that, that is also because of geopolitical and other reasons. And that is a trend which we believe will continue. Defense industry is another driver. But also we see demand coming from the consumer, FMCG or, fashion retailers, which we do a number of, projects for. Out of Bucharest, you can now supply the region, which includes Greece, which includes part of Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia. So I think, business smart also means well-developed infrastructure, road networks, et cetera, et cetera. I mentioned automotive, also because of Asian companies coming to Central Europe for automotive. They follow big car makers like, Volvo, who are doing a one point something billion project in East Slovakia.
BMW, who are building a factory in Hungary and invest more than EUR 2 billion, and also Volkswagen, their best plant, as they say themselves, is in Bratislava, Slovakia, and they recently invested more than EUR 1 billion. We are not involved in those big projects. We are involved in helping to accommodate some of the suppliers. If you look at automotive, our exposure, I think, is around 20%. In the past 12 months, I think, the amount of leases we signed related to automotive are a bit down, I think, 16%, 1.6%. The companies involved in automotive industry, for us also means aftermarket. So you have companies who store tires. We have Bridgestone, Continental, Pirelli. We have a couple of them in different parks. Brake pad producers also for aftermarket. That's all. That was all what we think is automotive.
We don't have any engine producers or something like that or gearbox producers in our portfolio. But we do have companies who produce interiors, car interiors, for example, airbags or dashboard or even car seats. Yeah, we have them and they're quite successful. They like to be close to where the big car makers are. And yeah, we continue to see a trend, business smart, which also means from more expensive countries moving into the Central European region. We have seen that before. As I said, just returned from Asia. Also, if you look at the technology and the autonomous driving and the different car makers and yeah, the electric cars, et cetera, et cetera, there is fantastic and huge opportunities in that industry because of the change. And I think CTP will continue to benefit from all of that extra demand coming from this change going forward.
Before I hand over to Maarten, summarize shortly our business lines. Operator, of course, is the income producing part of the business. Good quality buildings, which we work hard to keep them in an excellent condition. All BREEAM certified. Operator is good. We continue to add solar panels on the rooftops, and we've been able to grow till almost 13 million sq m of lettable area, which is good for EUR 700 million of rental income per year. With many different businesses and companies in those properties. Tenants, I mean, more than 1,000 blue chip tenants from all over the world involved in in all different range of industries. That's one. Then the developer, mostly, of course, continue to build land, which we have in existing business parks. So land with infrastructure permits, et cetera.
Those projects are being done by local teams on site, project managers, et cetera, construction teams. They continue to build properties in different sizes, extensions, but also new developments and new projects for new companies, which is also very important because keeping your existing tenants happy is one thing, but acquiring new business is also another thing, which is very interesting. We are working hard on that. It's often come through the ecosystem people we know. The developer has almost 2 million sq m on the construction, 75% of that in existing business park. When we lease that up, there will be another EUR 140 million of rental income. We are continuously leasing up the space, which we have on the construction. There's some pre-leases. There's, we are leasing while we build, as you know. Unit costs continue to be north of 10%.
We expect upon completion that we be at 80%-90% occupancy when these buildings are complete. That's for the developer. I mentioned solar, 120 MW installed by year-end. This doesn't mean that everything is operational. Sometimes it takes time to get all the permits in place and to start producing energy. Installing solar rooftop solar plants is one thing we do that at the same time we install smart metering systems. So we know exactly in a business park what different tenants consume at what time of the day. So we do energy management. So also we then know better if we produce solar energy, then when do we use it, where do we use it, when do we sell it. To improve efficiency, but also obviously to look at results and how we can run that business in a better way.
That's happening at the same time. So, happy to answer any of your questions. I think for now I'll just hand over to Maarten, and Richard later. Thanks for joining and your support. Thank you.
Moving on to our financial highlights. The like-for-like rental growth came to 4.4% in the first nine months of 2024, driven by indexation and stronger rent reversion. Occupancy at the quarter end remained stable, while the reversionary potential now stands at 15.1%, and we have proven to be successful in capturing this potential for the leases that came before expiry. Our gross rental income for the period increased by 15.9% year- on- year to EUR 488.4 million. The net rental income went up by 18.3% year- on- year as we reduced our service charge leakage. Consequently, the NRI to GRI ratio came to 97.4% in the first nine months. Annualized rental income increased to EUR 702 million, illustrating the strong cash flows generation of our standing portfolio, and we target to reach an annualized rental income of EUR 1 billion by 2027.
The company-specific adjusted EPRA earnings per share increased by 11.7% year -on- year to EUR 0.60, on track to reach our guidance of EUR 0.80-EUR 0.82 for the year. CTP's strategy is built upon long-term client relations, around 2/3 of our developments taking place in existing parks for existing tenants. This de-risks our business model as these are proven locations with existing tenant demand, and it feeds as well into our valuations and the huge opportunity we have with our 27.1 million sq m land bank. Assuming a 50% build-up ratio, we can build over 30 million sq m of lettable area on our current land bank. Taking into account the average construction cost of EUR 500 per sq m and land prices of EUR 50 per sq m, the total investment cost for one sq m of GLA comes to EUR 600.
This, while the standing portfolio, excluding the former Deutsche Industrie REIT, is valued at EUR 1,000 per sq m, which allows us to realize a potential development profit of EUR 400 per sq m. This also enables us to continue to generate organic double-digit NTA growth also in the years to come. Now looking at the valuation results. For the Q1 and Q3 results, only the investment properties under development are revalued. In the third quarter, the revaluation amounted to EUR 167.4 million, driven by the leasing and construction progress on our developments. This brings the year-to-date revaluation to EUR 604.1 million. CTP's reversionary yield stands at a conservative 7.2%. And looking ahead, after the 80 basis points increase we experienced in the last two years, we are at a clear inflection point for yields. And we do foresee further positive ERV growth in the Central and Eastern European region.
In most CEE markets, inflation-adjusted real rents remain lower than 15 years ago, illustrating the affordability of the region for our tenants, as well as the rental growth potential. Our EPRA NTA per share increased from EUR 15.92 at year-end 2023 to EUR 17.52 as of 30th of September 2024, representing an increase of 10.1%. Now I hand over to Richard.
We have a robust balance sheet and strong access to multiple pools of capital. In 2024, we raised EUR 300 million of equity through an ABB in September and EUR 1.8 billion of debt, of which EUR 1.3 billion was unsecured, with the remainder being secured. Over the past 12 months, we have made attractive accretive acquisitions, particularly in Germany and in Romania, and we anticipate allocating the proceeds of the September equity raise into further accretive acquisitions over the next 12 months as we see transaction markets recovering across Europe. Our cash position stands at EUR 1.3 billion , more than sufficient to meet our cash needs for the next 12 months. When including our RCF, our liquidity position amounts to EUR 1.8 billion . The average maturity of our debt stands at five years with no material debt maturities until June 2025.
At the end of the third quarter, CTP's average cost of debt came to 2.7%. This will continue to tick up going forward as we bring on new funding at today's higher interest rates to finance our development-led growth. However, we have seen our marginal cost of financing come down during 2024, and depending on the maturity, this is now around 4%. Thanks to our strong cash-generating portfolio, we have a healthy interest coverage ratio of 2.75x , while our normalized net debt to EBITDA reduced further to 9x . As shown during our recent Capital Markets Day, thanks to our development yield on cost of over 10%, each euro we invest in our pipeline improves both our ICR and net debt to EBITDA ratios. Following our recent equity raise, our loan-to-value ratio is now back within our target range.
Our LTV will come down further as our development pipeline is completed and the revaluation gains become fully booked. Looking ahead, we are confident in the outlook for CTP. We have a strong tenant lead list, and in addition to what we have already pre-let in our development pipeline, we have nearly 180,000 sq m pre-let for future projects where we have not yet started construction. We continue to see rental growth across our markets, as well as nearshoring speeding up in many industries. Our pipeline is highly profitable and tenant-led, and thanks to our industry-leading yield on cost of over 10%, we are able to deliver sustainable and profitable organic growth while maintaining our strong financial position.
We confirm our EPS guidance of EUR 0.80-EUR 0.82 for 2024 and expect to deliver 1.2-1.3 million sq m of developments this year, in line with our long-term growth targets. Thank you for your attention. We now welcome your questions.
Good morning, everyone. It's Remon Vos speaking from Prague with an update on.
From Bernstein. Marios, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Good morning, all. Thank you for taking my questions. I've just got two questions from my side. Firstly, you hinted at it in the presentation, maybe going into a bit more detail on the allocation of the proceeds of the recent capital increase. It sounds as though you're seeing better opportunities in the acquisition of existing assets. Can I check where these are coming through across your locations, or are you seeing land opportunities as well? And then secondly, just on your tightened guidance range for development and completions this year, I think in the last call you hinted it could be closer towards the upper end of the prior guidance. So is there anything specific here driving this timing? Thank you.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the question. Regarding the allocation of the ABB, yeah, I mean, we had already invested some of the money in Q4 of last year when we were buying in Germany, Q2 of this year when we were buying in Romania, and we continued to see a number of interesting opportunities. That is across the network. So I wouldn't say that it's specific to one region. I don't know if Remon wants to add anything specific there, but generally we see an increasing amount of interesting opportunities for us to continue to grow our development pipeline, but also acquire assets and land at interesting prices. And as we said in the presentation, we are expecting to be fully allocated on that within the next 12 months.
Regarding the development completions, we're at the start of November now, so we have a clear transparency on what we're going to deliver this year. We will be within the 1.2-1.3 range, so we thought it was sensible to tell the market that that's where we're going to be. But we had 1.9 million sq m under construction at the end of Q3, so the other 600,000 are coming on during the next months. Whether they come on in Q4 of this year or they come on in Q1, Q2, Q3 of next year, there's a small timing difference, but overall the trend towards us continuing to deliver a material amount of highly accretive 10%+ yield on cost developments continues.
Okay, very clear. Thank you. So this is more just revising the pipeline slightly for demand rather than anything specific to a particular project.
I wouldn't call it demand per se, but it's just a combination of when we are finishing the construction and when the tenant is moving in, and for us, whether they move in 1st of December or 1st of March doesn't really make a big difference in the great scheme of things.
Okay, thank you very much.
We have a question from Gerardo Ibáñez of Kempen. Gerardo, please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I have one question. So in an interview for a local newspaper, you mentioned that clients are asking about opportunities in Mexico. What are your thoughts about growing outside your current geography, also aside from Mexico? Thank you.
Yeah, that's me speaking, Remon. Yeah. So the business now is 10 countries, and that's what we focus on. We have many good projects and a lot of land, and that's where we're busy with. That does not mean, however, that we're not going to look at other markets, and as we have done and as we have been able to grow always with existing tenants, so demand comes from tenants, and obviously, as I explained, our tenants are changing their global footprints when it comes to where they manufacture for what markets, etc., and they're de-risking and decarbonizing that. That's why we see different changes and shifts, and obviously, there are tenants asking whether we would develop for them in Mexico, so far, we have no, we have nothing in Mexico, but we could definitely look at, and we will look at other markets.
But I'm not sure whether it's Mexico or not, but we always do keep an eye open on where we see opportunity. And so I would not exclude it, but I wouldn't confirm it. We don't have anything there. But we have been looking at different markets, and we'll continue to look at different markets. We keep our eyes and ears open, and we chase opportunity, and we like to grow. We are a very entrepreneurial business. So yeah, we will look at opportunities going forward. Also, when that means that we would extend the amount of countries where we operate in case we see good business opportunity, and in case we think that we can make money in new markets, and then we would only go with, as I said, with existing clients.
Yeah, so I've never been to Mexico, so it looks like a good reason to maybe go and check it out. We do have actually people who have, maybe I should add that. If we continue to extend the team, we are currently almost 850 people, 50/50 male, female, 38 years of age average, so young, motivated group of people in the different countries. But also we have recently also joined some senior people who do have experience doing developments in Mexico for logistics and other companies. So we do have in-house knowledge of the Mexico market in the meantime. But those people also have knowledge of other markets outside of where we currently operate. So yeah, of course, the BizDev team, we have also people in the BizDev team who know about data center business.
So obviously, we continue to learn and look at different opportunities going forward. So that was not short, but that is how I would reply to that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, that's quite clear. Maybe one additional question, if I may, be possible to add. Maybe could you please provide some color on the kind of pre-lets or developments to be delivered best last year and how confident are you to reach the 80%-90% target, given that you currently stand at 64% today?
Yeah, so hi, Gerardo. This is Maarten here. If you look to the pre-lets, that always evolves a bit quarter- by- quarter. What you see typically is that it grows. In the first quarter, we start at the lower rate, and it grows over the year as most of the deliveries are in the fourth quarter. So we have now 64% of the 24 deliveries pre-let at the 30th of September. Now, where we are, beginning of November, that percentage has increased even more. We are very confident to get in the 80%-90% range. You also saw the deliveries we did already in the first nine months of the year, which were 95% pre-let. So that's the consistent trend, and we expect again to be back in that range for the fourth quarter.
That comes back also to the comments that Remon was making on leasing that we are doing, where we have more hot signs than we did last year, and we see a good outlook there for the fourth quarter. We expect to deliver in the 80%-90%. Indeed, if you look to the exact figure, it's a few percent below last year, but that's just a slight timing issue, nothing else. We confirm the guidance range, and that's also why we confirmed the 1.2-1.3 million sq m of deliveries for this year.
Okay, quite clear. Thank you.
Our next question is from Frédéric Renard of Kepler. Frédéric, please go ahead.
Yes, hi. Good morning, team. Maybe two questions on my end. First, on the land bank, it continues to climb quarter- on- quarter, and specifically this year. Can you describe a bit the competitive environment there, and are you acting just opportunistically in order to secure your future growth? Then the next question is, what is refraining you from giving a guidance for next year already? Is it because you have a lower certainty of future projects? Thank you.
I do the second question. Yeah, no. I think in line with a lot of our peers, it makes sense for us to give guidance for 2025 as we publish our 2024 numbers. So I think rather than we are in line with market convention. There, it doesn't reflect any lack of conviction or uncertainty on our part about the development of the business, which I hope you were able to take from the presentation and you will get from the questions and answers now.
And then just to add on that, we have given, of course, all operational underlying elements for next year at the capital markets day in terms of deliveries, in terms of rental growth that we expect, in terms of cost of debt. One of the things is, of course, how quickly are we allocating the proceeds of the ABB? And we said that we will do so in 12 months. Other than that, I think you have all the elements to determine where we will be landing next year, and we will give guidance like Richard said, in line with the market with our full year 2024 results. Okay, maybe with regards to the first question, we talk about land bank. I think your question, Frédéric, was related to land bank and how competitive and how difficult it is, if I understand well, to buy land at a good price.
Yeah, first of all, we have a lot of land, mostly land in our business parks to continue to grow and extend those parks. That makes a lot of sense because we have already built the infrastructure and we have people on site in such parks, as you know, and all kinds of amenities, utilities, da da da. So buying land to extend a project is key, is a priority. You want to do that also to avoid someone else buying it, so it can be very competitive. Obviously, what we do is we try to keep the infrastructure and utilities in our ownership so that you can only connect to that if you own it, so that avoid that other people would buy. But you have to deal with that.
We have local teams to keep an eye on because also you cannot buy all of the land in the world, so you need to be a bit careful there. That's the kind of thing we do and we've been doing. You need to be careful not to buy too much, not to pay too much, and try to negotiate a good deal. Having money in the pocket helps. Cash is king. This is also what Richard and Maarten just confirmed. I think we can spend it quick, the proceeds from the ABB. Maybe we will. I think that very much depends on what kind of deals we can do, but for sure, you can do a better deal if you have cash in the hand than if it takes more time to close and to pay and da da da.
I think we are ready for deals. We are open for business. In some markets, you see more opportunities than other markets. Yeah, so with that, maybe I refer to the German market where we see some opportunity here and there to buy what we think good land for good prices, which we could develop for a CTPark concept. And then in Germany, for the moment, our German pipeline is a bit of a mix, but it's also smaller units. Some call it SBUs, small business units, units of 1,000-3,000 sq m. Segro do it as well. We've done it a lot in the Czech Republic and think that is also a good concept going forward. Those are generically designed units, which you can lease to a large variety of all types of businesses, etc., etc. But it's also inner city locations.
And I think that there are a couple of those locations available in Germany, we are currently looking at. But also at the same time in Germany, we are building the semiconductor industry, which we are well connected to in Taiwan. For the past more than 20 years, we've done many projects for our Taiwanese clients, and we are currently doing multiple of those, but one in Germany as well in Jülich. So yeah, Germany, we could spend part of the money in Germany. We could also spend part of the money in our core markets, as we have done earlier this year. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think it's our job to not be in a rush and to pick the right deal at the right terms. Yeah, but it is always competitive. So it is also here. Yeah. Yeah, it's competitive.
But again, we see good opportunities.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, you're welcome.
As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our next question is from Steven Boumans of ABN AMRO-ODDO. Steven, please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking my question. So I appreciate you are positive on demand, but I still have some questions to get more comfortable there. So first, could you comment on the lower retention rates? Why is that? Where's the weakness, and what can we expect for the coming year? Second, do you have any data on underlying usage of space by your tenants? So what percentage do your tenants actually use and the trends seen here? And third and lastly, maybe some comments on sub-leasing in the market and your portfolio and the trends seen here. Thank you.
I'll start with that one. Steven, thanks for the questions. In terms of the low retention rate, that's statistical. Normally, those things can change a little bit, plus or minus. But generally, if you look over the years, we've always been around the 90% for the retention rate. I think we ticked up to 95% earlier this year, which is a little bit of an anomaly on the positive side. So I wouldn't read anything into that. There's nothing, no trend that we see there. So as you know, as being very vertically integrated, we have a lot of people on the ground, our people in the parks looking at what's happening with our tenants and to our tenants. And we are not seeing material decrease in their utilization of space. If we would be seeing that, you would also see a slowdown in leasing.
Overall, we continue to see an increase in leasing across the region. So we're not seeing a slowdown. I know that there's a number of broker pieces out there talking about subletting. And that for sure is happening in one or the other sub-market. It may happen with one or the other tenant, but it's not something that we see as a specific trend or something that we are particularly concerned about at the moment.
Okay, very clear. Thank you.
Our next question is from Eleanor Frew of Barclays. Eleanor, please go ahead.
Morning, team. Thank you for the presentation. I follow up on a previous question. So you said you've already allocated some of your EUR 300 million ABB proceeds. Can you give any guidance on how much you expect to spend over the next 12 months given that? Then on the wider transaction market, you said you're seeing a sign of improvement. Also, I think you said you're seeing more competition, so maybe some more color on that too. Is the speed of capital deployment what you were expecting back when you did the ABB? Thanks.
Yeah, so in terms of total amount of investment, that's a difficult question to answer because that really depends also on the opportunity set. But if you figure that we raised EUR 225 million net of Remon's participation, then at a 45% loan to value, that means that we're investing plus or minus EUR 500,000. So we invested a chunk of that ahead of the ABB, but we have still material firepower for the next six to 12 months. In terms of the opportunity set, I think Remon was talking to that. We continue to scan multiple markets to look for the best opportunities for us. As Remon said, we can't do everything everywhere, so it's on us to maintain the disciplined allocation of capital that we've shown over the last 25+ years as we continue to grow the company in an extremely profitable way.
We're not going to change that just because we did the ABB. We're not in a hurry, as Remon said. We do see a number of very interesting and attractive opportunities that we think we'll be able to execute on over the next months.
Thanks very much.
Our next question is from Cezary Bernatek from Erste Group. Shall we expect the fiscal year 2025 deliveries to come at around this year's level and around 5% year-on-year LFL rental growth in the fiscal year 2024E for CTP's portfolio looks achievable?
Hi, Cezary. Thanks for your question. With respect to the deliveries for next year, I refer to what we said during our capital markets day in September. We said for 2025 to expect the deliveries between 1.2-1.7 million sq m. And that comes back to our continued growth rate of typically slightly above 10% new space per year. So also, if you look back again for this year, of course, what we said, the 1.2-1.3, while we started the year at around 11.5. So 10% growth. Also next year, we expect the pipeline to be slightly above 10% compared to our standing portfolio. So that feeds into the 1.2-1.7 for next year. And then on your question, on your like-for-like, we are currently at 4.4 in the nine months.
What it will be at the full year, I would expect it to be somewhere mid four, high fours. We have, of course, all the indexation already done. It has happened on the 1st of January. So like for like movements in the fourth quarter will be driven by two things: occupancy and reversion capturing. So in terms of reversion, we continue to see that we are able to capture it when the leases come up for expiry. And in terms of occupancy, that comes back to the earlier comments we made around demand with also good outlook for the fourth quarter. So overall, I would expect like for like to be around this level or maybe slightly higher.