Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining, and welcome to NSI's 2024 half- year results presentation. We will start with the presentation from management, and after that, there will be an opportunity to ask questions, either by phone or through the chat function. Presenting today will be our CEO, Bernd Stahli, and our new CFO, Elke Snijder. I will now hand over to Bernd Stahli, the CEO.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Martijn. Thank you for dialing into this call in which we provide our first half updates on the business. At the last full year presentation, post the sale of Laan van de Poort to ING, we made clear that we're back on the front foot. And we elaborate, and we elaborated back then what this meant for our strategic priorities. On slide five, we summarize these once again. These are our clear strategic priorities. In Amsterdam, we're more than just offices. We're offering customers what they need and want. We continue to lead the industry in sustainability, and ultimately, we're looking to pursue profitable growth. We will go into more detail on each of these over the coming slides. Slide six shows our strong focus to Amsterdam that we have today.
Amsterdam remains the largest, most liquid market with the strongest economy, and it is, and will remain, the key magnet for talent and businesses. This is where the opportunity ultimately sits. More than half of our assets are now in Amsterdam. We are already the largest investor in offices in Amsterdam by number of buildings, which tells you the market is highly fragmented, and that this offers plenty of opportunity to grow, improve, and consolidate, and drive profitability. Slide 7 shows that today, NSI is already more than just offices, and maybe just offices is the wrong word. We're more than offices today. 8 of our 45 assets are already used for other purposes than office use. We've got our life science cluster in Leiden. We've got a student complex, we've got a school, we've got residential.
Some of our office assets in the Southeast Amsterdam, which you can see on this slide, are in a location that is turning much more into a new residential district for the, for the city of Amsterdam. We are, at this point in time, reviewing the highest and best use for these assets, and it's entirely conceivable that residential is the option that is most likely for the future for some of these office assets. We have a strong belief in the location of these assets, but maybe the future is no longer offices. None of this is imminent. It's more medium-term, but it's something that we fully embrace at NSI. Slide eight shows how the market is changing and is how it's starting to look at offices differently.
As we stated in our first half report, customers are increasingly discerning and prefer to take less space in better locations with better amenities, services, and sustainability credentials. To attract and retain talent, they may end up using less space at the same cost, maybe sometimes slightly less, but they're willing to pay more for the right product. That's what we're seeing. The strength of our operating performance proves that our portfolio is very much able to accommodate this shift in demand. Our vacancy rate of 4.9% tells you that there is demand for the product that we offer. We cannot sit still, however. The asset class is operationalizing, and that means much more of a leisure or hotel service-like approach to the sector. We do that already through HNK.
We're expanding that throughout our portfolio, and we see opportunities for us, as a business, to pursue in the area ahead to drive further profitability. For the next slide, slide 9, we show you a couple of examples of how we're actually changing the product, we're changing the look and feel, changing the positioning of HNK to slightly higher-end brands that offers exactly what the market wants. HNK Amsterdam Sloterdijk, some of you will already have seen it. We opened that in September 2023, and we're now signing leases, fourteen percent or at 14% ahead of what we had as year fees pre-opening. HNK Rotterdam Scheepvaartkwartier is a HNK that we redid and reopened in March 2024. It's too early to give you concrete data as to what is happening, but the first signals we're getting are pretty optimistic.
We're also showing you that we're actually starting the next HNK in Q4 2024. For the next two points, I will hand over to Elke, our new CFO.
Okay, thanks, Bernd. On this sheet, we're showing the fourth pillar of our strategy. We remain a leader in the industry with respect to sustainability, as we show continued strong performance on all indicators like GRESB, with a score of 94, and also BREEAM. As to BREEAM, you can see that 98% of our assets are with label, and a big 43% of the assets is at excellent level, where in total, the Dutch market is only at 10% excellent. And you can see this on the bottom right. Strong focus is on improving our energy usage, as we think that this is the most important contributor to our sustainability journey. Our continued EPC score, that you can see on the top right, underlines the efforts to this theme, with labels now nearing 100% at A or better.
As labels are, for us, not a great distinguishing factor anymore, since we're already scoring this high for improved energy usage, we internally have switched our focus on improving actual kilowatt hour per square meter per year, which we follow with the CRREM performance. This performance to date is far ahead of the pathway set for Paris Proof. You can see that on the bottom left... and we strongly believe in continuing our sector leadership here. Moving on to the next sheet, it shows our fifth pillar of our strategy, and that's growth. Over the past eight years, we have rotated assets to fewer, but much better assets in prime locations. You can see in the bottom left graph that we have disposed about EUR 240 million more assets than acquired over this period.
Very simply put, that's this, about EUR 760 million, minus the EUR 500 million and about EUR 30 million that you see on the right of the chart. Logically leading to a lower gross rental income, as shown top left. Over this period of asset rotation, we have maintained an about stable cost ratio, and currently, we are very happy about our starting position. We have a solid balance sheet with relatively low LTV, leaving room for financing growth, and this growth can actually be found twofold. Of course, inside our portfolio, where via CapEx investments, we're improving on our assets, and we'll show that on our next slide, and redirection to other high and best uses for some assets, where current office usage might not be optimal for the long term. Besides inside our portfolio, we're also looking outside of our portfolio by continued assessment of possible acquisitions.
As you can see on the bottom left graph, for the past two and a half years, we felt the limited opportunities just were not right. As you can see, we are very open to buying, but not trigger-happy. Lastly, on this slide, I want to emphasize that we have a platform of people that have planned meticulously for and can absorb a growth phase. We are focused on maximizing profit over a longer period, and we are not into minimizing costs at every point in time, which we feel would hurt our platform and limit the drive for growth. Growth will ultimately lead to higher cost efficiency, and also to more relevance for investors. Okay, back to you, Bernd.
Well, slide 12 then basically brings all of the strategic objectives together in one specific project as an example. HNK Rotterdam Alexander. It's a building that we've owned for multiple years. We've been preparing for a redevelopment of this asset for quite some time. And if we basically peel it down, if we say our strategy is Amsterdam and selectively elsewhere, this fits in the selectively elsewhere. This is the second train station of Rotterdam. It's a building that will get the full works in terms of sustainability upgrades. We're aiming to achieve Paris Proof for this building. It will get the HNK upgrades in terms of look and feel, but also in terms of product offering. And as a result, we'll have a very strong asset to add to our portfolio, aiming to complete Q3 next year.
The incremental CapEx is also the way to grow. It's about EUR 20 million, and the expected net yield on cost, incremental cost, is over 10%. So for us, it's a great example of how we would like to expand our portfolio. If we can and find more of these type of opportunities, we'll certainly not hesitate to pursue them, certainly with these type of returns. For the financials, I'll hand it back to Elke.
Okay, nice. Now, looking at the key performance indicators. The top line shows you that vacancy has dropped significantly versus H1 last year, with the main improvements coming from the Amsterdam region, which dropped from 9.5% EPRA vacancy in H1 2023 to 5% in H1 2024. Gross rental income, you can see top right, has risen on the back of some limited indexation of rentals, but mostly the vacancy improvements I just talked about. You can see this also in the 3% like for like movement. Net rental income sees a slight drop, as OpEx is about 13% higher than last year, with maintenance, letting, and municipal taxes all a bit higher. I'll move into that a little bit later. This results, obviously, in a lower operating margin as well.
Looking at financial performance, I'll dive into EPRA earnings per share on a later slide, and, you must have noticed that we're keeping our dividend per share at EUR 0.75. Looking at the highlights of the balance sheet, LTV, still very sound, and even though we had a valuation drop, by about 1.7%, take-on debt was also lower, leading to still a low LTV. NTA per share, I will touch upon in a few slides, and non-financial indicators I already talked about, but again, please note the continued improved performance. Okay, moving to slide 15. EPRA earnings. Here you see the rundown from gross rental income to net rental income to EPRA earnings.
Noticeable here are the administrative costs have remained flat, and administrative costs is mostly our staff, and we have maintained the core of our staff, as said earlier, to plan and be ready for growth. But in some other areas, we have kept open some vacancies to absorb wage increases. So even though we are not focused on cost minimization, we of course still keep our eye on being smart about costs. Financing costs are also higher, but more on that later on. We also now see corporate income tax that you didn't see in H1 2023 as a result of the internal restructuring we did in 2023. We expect a direct corporate income tax rate for the full year of about 3%-5%. Moving on to the next slide.
It's the EPRA EPS, earnings per share, and it shows a bridge from H1 2023 on the left, earnings per share, to H1 2024 earnings per share all the way on the right. As said earlier, no noticeable acquisitions or progressions on development to mention. The marginal disposals impact includes missed rent on Laan van de Poort that was sold to ING beginning of this year, and HNK Ede and HNK Den Bosch, both sold in 2023. Gross rental income shows the impact of indexation and reduced vacancy that we already talked about, slightly higher, higher service costs, not recharged, and operating costs having risen by EUR 0.9 million, impacting EPS by those EUR 0.05 that you see in the bridge.
Again, this is mainly composed of maintenance that was +EUR 0.4 million, letting +EUR 0.3 million, and municipal taxes +EUR 0.2 million. Some of these costs are not really influenced by us, or the phasing of it or the magnitude, like municipal taxes. Some are supportive of business, like the letting costs, and some are under continuous scrutiny of us to weigh their necessity. As mentioned earlier, administrative costs are flat. The financing costs, I did discuss earlier, but financing has become more expensive due to both higher variable interest rates, that was a EUR 0.5 million impact, and the lower income on our swaps, that was a EUR 1 million impact. New in H1 is the direct income tax of EUR 0.5 million, and that translate into the EUR 0.02 that you're seeing here in this bridge.
Our total is then EUR 0.91 per share, and if you might wonder, impact thus far of the share buyback is about EUR 0.01, but it does not show up explicitly in this bridge. Okay, so moving on to revaluations. The graphs on the left show market data, and the graphs on the right show NSI data. From the market data you can see on the bottom left, is that investment volumes are low, and with this lack of liquidity showing little benchmark for the appraisers. Bottom right shows that the write-downs on our portfolio have decelerated, where of course, I would like to make the claim, that this is the bottom, but considering the previous points that were lacking proof points to support this direction claim.
But looking at the yield development on the top right, we are back at the 2016 levels. But do note this is with a completely different underlying portfolio, and this yield also shows a considered risk premium on top of bond rates to include a risk premium for the asset class. Okay, moving on to the next bridge. This is where we're showing EPRA and NTA per share, and it shows it from the values of end of 2023 to June 30, 2024. Again, going from left to right, we paid out the second half of our 2023 dividends, amounting to EUR 0.77 that are shown in the graph. The EUR 0.91 I talked about earlier, and then the impact of the revaluation comes down to EUR 0.86.
We had a marginal profit on the book value of the sale of Laan van de Poort to ING, hence the +EUR 0.01, and the deferred tax that is noted here is related to the indirect corporate income tax caused by the negative revaluation. The direct corporate income tax effect is in the EUR 0.91 of the EPRA earnings. The effect of the share buyback here is EUR 0.50, very simply put, as the denominator is becoming smaller with less shares freely floating, resulting in total in NTA per share, close to the starting point for end of 2023. Okay, moving on to the next slide. Almost done. Two more slides to go, so bear with me. Looking at our balance sheet KPIs.
On the top left, you can see that our cost of debt remained stable this year after having gone up last year, at the time, due to rising variable rates and a reset on our swap rates in H1-2023. As said earlier, LTV is low and well within the bounds of our covenants. Interest coverage ratio movement, mostly explained by the higher financing costs and net debt to EBITDA remains comfortably low, also when looking at our peers. Okay, last financial slide. We have some maturity and hedging profile. As we sold Laan van de Poort development to ING, we were in less need of capital. Let's reassess the loan book. Just after closing of the books for this half year, we changed our loan portfolio. On July 5, we paid down on the Berlin Hyp loan by drawing down on our existing RCF facility.
The impact, twofold: first of all, loan maturity profile changed just a little bit as the RCF's maturity is half a year shorter than the Berlin Hyp loan, as you can see top right and bottom left. But more importantly for us, now all the lending is fully unsecured, so none of our assets are collateralized, leaving tremendous funding flexibility for the future. All right, that's it with respect to the numbers.
Then to the outlook. Slide twenty-two. We highlight again our strategic priorities. We are working on each and every one of them. We're still working on asset rotation, and if there is a deal, you will get the announcement. It's hard to commit to any data specifics on this point in time, but we're looking to sell, and we're looking to acquire at this point in time. The development team is working hard on getting residential projects ongoing for some of these older offices that we have in Southeast Amsterdam. It's gonna take time. It's a long process, but it's work in progress on the background. Same, we're looking at Well House to see if and when that can be revisited, restarted on a profitable basis to expand our footprint in Amsterdam. Vitrum is, at this point in time, being let-...
But we're also there still going through the legal process to get all the approvals we need for a full redevelopment of that asset. We're expanding HNK through Rotterdam Alexander. We're also, at the same time, looking at ways to expand our HNK service offering and the way we look at our product offering throughout the entire NSI portfolio. Sustainability, we're continuing to invest in our portfolio. You've seen a small reduction in energy intensity in the first half. Our aim is that it will be a gradual process from here as we make the investment, as and when appropriate, either on lease expiry or on larger redevelopments, for example, like the Rotterdam Alexander. Growth, actually, at this point in time, it's more like shrinkage for the very simple reason that we're doing the buyback. That process is ongoing.
You will have seen the announcement that we've passed the 3% mark in terms of share ownership, as we had to notify the AFM for that. The program is set to end by September, and it actually has helped us to drive the guidance in terms of EPS, and that's what I would like to finish with. The guidance has been raised at the bottom end of the range from EUR 1.85 to EUR 1.90. The top end of the range has sort of remained stable. This now includes the impacts of the share buyback program. It was EUR 0.01 in the first half. It will be a larger number for the full year, which is now fully reflected. With that, I would like to end our presentation and hand it back to Martijn for the Q&A.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question on the phone line, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Once again, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait to be announced. If you wish to ask a question on the webcast, please type in the question box and click Submit. Thank you. We are now going to proceed with our first phone questions. The questions come from the line of Vincent Kopmeijer from Degroof Petercam. Please ask your question.
Hello, good morning, Bernd. Good morning, everybody.
Morning.
Thank you very much for the nice presentation. I just had maybe two questions, especially on the residential strategy you mentioned. You mentioned it is mostly a medium-term strategy, but I was just curious, since from my understanding, the main idea would be to transform some of the offices into residential. But the first question would then be, how is the administrative process on these, reconversions in the, in the Netherlands? And secondly, do you already have an idea what type of yield you could expect for such a reconversion? Thank you.
Good questions. The process, it’s not gonna be a redevelopment in that the existing structures stay in place. In virtually every case, it’s gonna be demolishing the existing structure and building new. To be able to do that, you obviously have lease expiries that you have to deal with. You have to go through a process with the local municipality to change the zoning, so that the change of use allows you to actually convert what is destined to be office space to residential use. That’s a process that takes time. There are multiple conversations over time with the municipality. Based on where we stand today, the first is likely to start in 2027.
But obviously, as all along the way, we will have to look at our opportunity to see if it actually is driving the maximization of our profits at that time. The yields, market yields for residential today are probably shy of 5%, just below 5%.
All right. Okay, thank you very much. I had two additional questions, if I may. So, of course, you mentioned that you're also looking at some disposals and even acquisitions. Last year, at the same time, you announced you identified a potential EUR 150 million asset rotation. Is this still a number that you would be considering? And then second question: If I understand correctly, the guidance for 2024 also still does not consider potential disposals, right? Thank you.
I can confirm that the guidance at this point in time does not include any disposals. Having said that, the further you go throughout the year, disposals have a minimal impact on earnings in that year anyway. So any disposals you do now will have more of an impact in 2025 than it would do in 2024. The EUR 150 million that we mentioned was predicated on a variety of variables. One, the capital commitments that we had with respect to ING projects. With that project gone, obviously there is less pressure to rotate the assets than we may have had before, because as we now have balance sheet capacity to expand rather than that we had to shrink to sort of allow for the capital outlay on Laan van de Poort.
That said, we've made clear that we're still looking at asset rotation. There's still a process ongoing, where we're looking to sell assets, and we've identified them before. It's like Eindhoven, it's Den Bosch, it's Hoofddorp, and selectively elsewhere, to focus more on Amsterdam, which is where we think long term, the best opportunities will sit. To make promises at this point in time with respect to asset rotation is very hard. Liquidity in this market is still just so low that it's not that easy to see how quickly these transactions, disposals will happen.
All right. Very clear. Thank you very much. My last question would maybe be on your new core shareholder, and I was wondering whether you had also more discussion with them and seeing through that they also have this mix between office and leisure, how much there could be synergies between the, the two parties? Thank you.
Interesting question. We don't choose our shareholders. They choose us. Obviously, when people choose us, we're happy about that. We love them all equally, and in that respect, I think there is nothing at this point in time that we'd like to add to that.
Great. Thank you very much. That's all from my side. Have a nice day.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. If you wish to submit your questions on the webcast, please type them in the question box and click submit. We are now going to proceed with our next phone questions. The questions come from the line of Alex Kolsteren from Van Lanschot Kempen. Please ask your question. Your line is open.
Hi. Yes, good morning, team. Thank you for taking my questions. I have three at this point, and let me start off with the first. So on the EPS guidance, the press release now stated you assume a tax rate of 3%-5%. I was wondering if this is a different assumption, compared to the initial guidance given at the 2023 full year numbers.
At that, what you would have to accept is that as we restructured to adjust for a new world where the FBI regime is no longer active in the way it was, that it was very hard at that point in time to see what our full tax rate was gonna be in 2024 or in 2025.
Mm-hmm.
We made an assumption, and we've now clarified exactly what the detail is with respect to our tax rate for 2024.
All right. Clear. Thank you very much. Then, the other one, which ties into the third one as well. So looking at CBRE reported, prime market yields, they've reported more or less 200 basis points expansion since the end of 2021. If you look at NSI, that's, about 120. Of course, I understand the higher starting yield of, of NSI portfolio. Do you think that your assets are now in line with the market?
I'm not sure we lost you. Can you say that again? Because I don't think I caught exactly your question.
Yeah.
Can you repeat the question?
Yeah, so looking, for example, at the CBRE reported prime market yields in the Netherlands, over 2021 until now, you see that they have reported a 200 basis point expansion, more or less. Comparing it to the NSI portfolio, that's about a 120 basis points difference versus 2021. So I, I understand that NSI has a higher starting yield, but I was wondering if you think that your assets are now in line with the market yield?
If you go to slide 17, top right, you can see how our gross initial yield has shifted over time.
Mm-hmm.
We've gone from 6% to 8%.
Mm-hmm.
That is 200 basis points. I'm not sure where you get the 120 basis points from.
It's on a net initial basis.
Yeah, but that's not what CBRE quotes. So I don't think you can compare the two numbers. We've had our 25% reduction in capital values from 2021 to 2024. That explains the gap from 6 to 8 to 200 basis points.
Mm.
I can't comment on what CBRE reports. We can only report on what we see and what our own failures tell us that the reality is at this point in time.
Okay, yes, clear. Thank you. And then finally, like you said, there is some balance sheet, room to maybe look into acquisitions at this point. What would be the sort of yield you are looking into, when buying an asset?
I don't think it's necessarily yields that is the only metric we look at, because obviously, when you do an acquisition, you look at both the risk and return. So it's not just the return. And the return is not just the yields. There's more to an asset in terms of return than just the ingoing cash flow. It may well be that our ideal acquisition is a well-located in Amsterdam, next to train station, vacant building that has no ingoing yield, where the previous owner didn't have the time, knowledge or capacity to do the redevelopment that is necessary to bring that asset back to life. So I wouldn't necessarily look at it just from a yield point of view at this time.
Okay, that's clear. That's it from my end. Thank you very much.
We have no further questions on the phone line. I'll hand back to you for the webcast questions. Thank you.
Yeah, so there's only a single question from Aidan Bolton, to clarify what the original tax rate was, for the guidance.
I think we already answered that in the previous question, so... Okay, thank you all for joining. We'll be ending the call right now, and if you have any more questions, be sure to reach out to me. Thank you all.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.
Thank you.