Aspen Group (ASX:APZ)
Australia flag Australia · Delayed Price · Currency is AUD
4.740
-0.020 (-0.42%)
Apr 28, 2026, 4:10 PM AEST
← View all transcripts

Earnings Call: H2 2025

Aug 21, 2025

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining today. I'm David Dixon, the Joint CEO, along with John Carter. We have Hamish Perks here as well, who runs our Transactions business, and Patrick Maddern, as most of you know. I will briefly introduce Aspen, then hand over to the other three to run through the results. As most of you know, Aspen is an affordable housing provider. We call affordable the price at which the bottom 40% of households by income can afford to pay in either rent or price. We're fully integrated. We own 100% of all our assets. We think that's important because when there's good opportunities, we want to make sure the returns flow entirely to shareholders. We are a very intensive operator of assets. We're not a simple rent collector, we operate quite intensively and offer overnight through to lifetime leases. We develop both brownfield and greenfield to add value and to create product that's continued in time and place. We're a capital manager. It's not just about the way we run our balance sheet, but it's about making decisions as to whether we sell or lease dwellings and/or land. We're very flexible playing around with either land leases or dwelling leases. At the end of the day, it's running real estate, it's running communities, it's offering affordable housing, but it's really optimizing that capital structure as to who owns what part of the total equation. The reason there's such a big opportunity in Australia to provide affordable housing profitably to shareholders is that in Australia, the government doesn't compete in the supply of affordable or social housing. The chart here shows you the amount of supply that the government used to provide in the 1950s and through to the 1980s, about 20% of new houses. We think 15% - 20% is the right level that, of the market, they will always find housing unaffordable. It's a competitive market. People with more income can always afford to pay more. There will always be a structural shortage of affordable housing. We think 15% -2 0% is probably the right number. That was the level at which the government used to supply in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. That has collapsed to about 2%. The government's got out of the supply of affordable housing. Instead, they support the market, they support the demand side by offering various subsidies, including Commonwealth rent assistance. That's a very healthy environment for us to operate in because it means the market's not becoming distorted and less of a supply-side by government as it is in other parts of the world, particularly in places like Europe. Handing over to Hamish for the results.

Hamish Perks
Transaction Manager, Aspen Group

Thanks, David. Aspen made $0.38 per share of comprehensive income pre-deferred tax liabilities in FY2025. This reflects the total value creation for security holders based on the audited statutory accounts. Alternatively, Aspen delivered a $0.10 per share dividend plus a further $0.31 per share of NAV uplift to shareholders, which we believe is a strong result. EPS increased 22% to $0.168 per share. This is ahead of the latest guidance and is 12% ahead of the initial guidance. DPS increased 18% to $0.10 per share and NAV increased 14% to $2.54. This extends Aspen's strong track record of growth with five-year compound EPS and NAV growth of 20% and 17%, respectively. Net rental income increased by 14% with the margin expanding by two percentage points to 52%. This was despite two project disruptions with corporate clients at Darwin and Highway 1 and a student visa change that interrupted UMG. Development profit increased by 47% with improvement across all key metrics being volume, price, and margin. The $2 million earnings from Eureka reflect our estimate of the pro-rata share of Eureka's underlying earnings. Importantly, the underlying earnings exclude the realized gain on the stake, which was overall about $10 million. Corporate overhead increased by 7% with the management team expanded and enhanced. This included additional hires to both the WA team and to marketing and distribution. Aspen has a highly diversified and valuable profit stream. Strong growth, particularly from the lifestyle division, means that compositionally there's now roughly a third, a third, and a third split between the residential, lifestyle, and parks divisions. Alternatively, 75% of income is derived from net rental income with a quarter from development. This high level of net rental income supports the group's conservative debt levels, which funds growth.

Patrick Maddern
Head of Asset Management and Development, Aspen Group

I'll be running through the rentals and the development business now. As Hamish has touched on, the net rental income for the period is up 14%. That's a component of two parts. One, the rental pool's increased by 6% across the group. The other part has been through the average net rent going up 7%. Probably most importantly in that is actually to highlight that the average gross rent is only up 3%. We're still focusing on maintaining affordable rents, but we're actually managing to extract more money out of every dollar of rent. How are we doing that? In a number of ways. One is that we're operating assets more efficiently and effectively, and that's coming through in improved margins. The other thing that is now starting to show after three to five years of work is that the work on the development business in terms of the CapEx and improvements of the assets is now flowing through to those improved margins, and we're seeing a better rate across both short and long stays as a result. We expect to continue to see this flow through over the next few years, which we think will contribute to growth going forward. We clearly are trying to remain very disciplined on the affordable rent points, and you can see that here in the modest increasing in gross rents. That's partly through an increase in land lease sites, but also partly as a result of recycling rents which have got beyond our price points and putting them back into other projects. A good example of that is Burleigh Heads where rents were in excess of $800 or $900, and that has been rolled into a project like Viveash where the rents are more around about $350, and we'll continue to look to do those sorts of things. This slide here provides a bit of an overview of the drivers for growth in the rental pool. As you can see, the predominant driver has been in the metro areas in long stay rents, and that's an area that we still see as being strong. However, probably some of that quite strong growth over the last two or three years is moderating a little bit. However, structural supply issues still remain, and we think that will persist. In the land lease, you can see that the growth in the rental pool has increased, which is as a result of the development business, but we've stayed pretty flat in terms of the actual rents achieved, and that's largely to do with the fact that some of the newer assets that we're bringing on are at lower rent points, and that is being offset by the 3%- 4% increase in the existing land lease sites. We expect that to persist for a little bit, but over time that will grow as well. The parks or rental pool remains steady, as you can see, but we've worked hard, as I mentioned earlier, over the last few years to try and drive better margins and also better rates out of these assets, but still be affordable to the market. Moving on to development, the development, as you marked earlier in the year, has been a big driver for the earnings this year. As you can see here, we've increased the development profit by 47%, and that has actually been both across the number that we've done, but also the margins that we've achieved. As you can see, pleasingly, there's been a material uplift in the actual margins, so it's about 2%, but there's also been an uplift in the number of land lease homes that we've done. We're slowly trying to increase that, and that obviously flows back into the net rental income. We still are maintaining the proportionality roughly from previous years, but we're just growing that stream. On top of that as well, you can see that the price that we're achieving for this year, which is $464,000 on average for a land lease home, is above what we've done in previous years. That's partly as a result of customer preference. What we're finding is that customers prefer a three-bedroom home, and so we're now producing more of those as a proportion of what we're totally doing or have done in the past. That has the benefit of actually having a higher gross margin and higher percentage margin for us, and that's what has driven some of the increase in both gross margin and percentage margin. Here we have an overview of our development book as it stands at the moment. As you can see, we've got about over 50% of our development book, which is 2,188 approved sites. Of that, over 50% are approved, and the balance of that is planned, and they're in various stages of approval, and we're going through that. Some of those processes are imminent, and some of them are longer dated. If you had a look at this whole book, and we're aiming for around about 200 sales going forward in the medium term, that's over 10 years of supply. We think that this sets the business up really well for organic growth, both from development profit, but also from the net rental income, which flows as a result of the development business. Here we've provided an overview of the performance of the development business over the last five years. You can see here that we target 30% as our margin, and we've been at or around that throughout the period. We also target 20% for a ROIC. We're a little bit below that in FY2025, and that's largely to do with the fact that we've increased our development book quite substantially. Moving forward, we would still like to target the 20%, and that represents our current development book at opening is around about $90 million of assets, and we're still trying to focus on the 20% ROIC.

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

In terms of the business, going from left to right, back in FY2020 and 2021, the business was really largely about rentals. We've purposely added more development sites, and generally they've been ones in FY2022 and 2023 that had already approvals. Our latest iteration, which is more in the last two years, has been a mixture of ones with approvals plus some that are a lower cost without approvals in place. We think this sets us up really well for growth, and I'll touch on the cost of these shortly. Acquisitions, a number of small ones, so the top two are small, Viveash, which we've now completed the refurb and is now fully leased. An acquisition from council, we see a lot of potential for those with both not-for-profits and councils and state government going forward. The one on the top right, we acquired some land so that we can grow the village at Alexandrina Cove because that's selling extremely well. Ravenswood down the bottom, we think we bought this land extremely well. We're in the process of getting an approval for around 60 land lots and also the medium term to get our lifestyle village approved on that site. We think it's a great spot, and recently adjoining land has sold out of lots, so we think we're very well positioned there. Finally, on the bottom right, we've got our property at Australind. We're in the process of working with council to convert about 100 of the existing units into self-contained. In the next few weeks, we're planning to submit that to council, make them self-contained, and we can then either rent them on a long-term or a short-term basis. All of those things are progressing well and give us a lot of growth. Just onto the balance sheet. The main things here are we're really well set up with only $87 million of net debt. Our interest cover at the moment is about 6x , so really healthy. The final point here is we've got more than $150 million of capacity to buy assets. Going on to this page, we think the portfolio is very conservatively valued. Overall cap rate of 6.9% weighted average or $141,000 per dwelling site. Residential is still around 5%. When we've sold and recycled our residential in the last year, we sold that at around 3%. We think the 5.1% is very conservative. Our lifestyle village cap rate of 6% again is about 100 basis points higher than many of the other lifestyle assets are valued in the sector. Development sites are valued at $39,000 for our approved and $24,000 for ones that are planned. Again, we think they're really attractive entry prices. The total book value, as Patrick mentioned, is about $93 million, which is only 14% of our total assets. The total ROIC of 18% for the year was impacted by the fact that we bought some more inventory, Ravenswood and Australind, late in the year. Going forward, we think we're well set up to get back to a 20% return. Finally, on the outlook and guidance on the rentals, we're expecting to get 3% - 5% on those. The short stay, we've started the year really well. Darwin has gone through most of its peak, doing a lot better than last year and currently doing better than FY2023, which was a very strong year. Forward bookings for all of the parks are ahead of last year, so we're being encouraged on the parks. We've got a larger rental pool, which will help us with the business this year with both Viveash and Adelaide Villas. We expect to settle Adelaide Villas shortly, which will be great. We also have made a decision on new leases for land lease to standardize a new rent of $200 a week. This is well below the CRA cap, but we will get a reversion for resales for most of our portfolio, and that's higher than some of our villages, so that will help. We've got a net rental income guidance of $38.5 million, which is up 10% for FY2026. Going on to development side, SA and WA continue to be very strong. New South Wales and Victoria were a bit slower, but more recently in this, we've seen much, much better inquiry and inspections in those two states. We're sticking with the guidance of 140 settlements for the current year. I'm very pleased, and the team's done a really great job to have 72 in place already. We're very well set up for this year. Our development profit guidance of $17.5 million for this year is up 30% on last year. If you work back, what that shows is our profit per sale is higher than last year by about $10,000, which is really good. We don't assume any further acquisitions in our numbers. We are working way carefully on trying to find some more. In summary, we're guiding to an EBITDA of $47 million, an EPS of $0.19, and a DPS of $0.11. We'd welcome some questions, and thanks for your attendance.

Operator

Thank you. We will now open the Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question, please click on the raise hand icon that's at the bottom of your screen, and then I will introduce you in order. Your first question comes from Andy McFarland from Bell Potter.

Andy McFarland
Head of Real Estate Research, Bell Potter

Hello guys, how are you going? Thanks for your time and the presentation. Just a couple for me. Appreciate the color on the components and guidance. Just a couple to extend from that. Just wondering what you're expecting to come into the rental pool for FY2026. In terms of tourism, just wondering how far you are ahead of the PCP so far this year.

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Yeah, so we've had Viveash, which was largely empty last year. Ravenswood is now fully leased, so it will contribute fully this year. We have Adelaide portfolio coming in, expected to settle tomorrow. We've secured about a 6% yield on that portfolio of retirement villages. We've clearly had more sales of lifestyle land leases last year, and we'll have more this year. That's sort of driving the 10% growth in volume in that lifestyle business. The other thing I'd flag is that UMG up in Upper Mount Cove was deeply impacted last year with those student visa changes. It got down to 42% occupied in June. It's now about 100% occupied again. I would caveat that we're going to do some works on upgrading the central facilities and car parks, and that'll disrupt it again in its second half. I guess that kind of confirms to us that it really was a wild impact last year given student visa changes. That's the extra widgets in the rental pool. In terms of parks, last year we thought parks' result would be flat. It was kind of flat from a revenue. It was a flat environment. We had a couple of negative impacts from corporate clients, but I think the 6% growth in net income sort of surprised us a bit. I think what's been even more surprising is we're feeling like we've seen a kick-out, particularly Darwin, which is in its peak season. It's performing very well this year. AKV is essentially full. It was expected to grow this year, but it's probably gone faster than we thought, and the rents are stronger than we thought. Tourism's definitely a lot stronger. Corporate activity is stronger. Big change this year, I think, will be a much better margin out of our parks business because we're being much more aggressive on rates versus occupancy, and we're able to do that because of the sort of three to five years of refurbishments that have been going through that portfolio. Right now we're making a very big uplift in revenues. It's only two months in with almost no change in labor costs, and that'll really change the margin quite a bit in that business.

Andy McFarland
Head of Real Estate Research, Bell Potter

Very helpful. Thank you. Just on development, just interested in a little bit more color in terms of the timing of settlements, noting you've got 72 kind of banked between settlements and contracts on hand. Just wondering, I guess, twofold, how much of that is settlements to date, and then just interested in some color on the profile of settlements coming over the next six to twelve months, please.

Patrick Maddern
Head of Asset Management and Development, Aspen Group

Yeah, what we've been aiming to try and do for this year is to try and sort of remove, I guess, seasonality from the settlements. We'll be aiming to try and do basically half this half and half in the second half, and that's set up to do that. At the moment, we've got about 15 - 20 that are settled for today, and we'll be aiming for around about 70 by the end of the half. To get to the 140, we'll do another 70 in the second half. Of those, there are some of those ones of the 72 that are in for FY2027, however, not many at all. Yeah, the land at Mount Barker, which is selling very well, we'd expect most of that, and there's 30 blocks here, we'd expect most of that at this stage to settle in the first half.

Andy McFarland
Head of Real Estate Research, Bell Potter

Thank you. Just lastly, on development, just wondering about the project launches, I guess, also over the next six to twelve months, which will lead sales, and then just finally on composition of the settlements across land lease and residence for 2026.

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Yeah, we're sort of managed to a ratio, but sort of a cold pants pie chart. Three quarters of our sites are lifestyle, a quarter residential. In addition to that, those lifestyle lots own twice the dollar margin than a residence lot. So residence is a big part of the business, but we'll sell residence around it, but makes more money than a gay lifestyle. We don't manage to that. As John mentioned, we get this potential seasonality in residence lots because we don't like to pay land tax at June 30th, so we like to title it July 1, which kind of forces us to want to sell in the first half. Going forward, I think the ratio will probably be roughly this much in terms of sales widgets, but much, much more skewed to lifestyle as we move forward in terms of dollar profit and ongoing rental streams, obviously, on top of that.

Andy McFarland
Head of Real Estate Research, Bell Potter

any launches over the next six to twelve months?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Yeah, I'm not seeing anything at this stage. I'm seeing no contribution coming from Ravenswood or Viveash. At this stage, it's just what we already have under production and active. There is a potential that Ravenswood could come in too this year. We've already applied for 60 residential land lots that could come in this year. Another stage of Mount Barker could come in this year. At this stage, we're just not assuming any additional contribution.

Andy McFarland
Head of Real Estate Research, Bell Potter

That makes sense. Just a final one, if I may, just on evaluations. Talked a little bit about the market at 6.9%, which is up a little bit on the prior period. Just wondering, you gave some color in terms of 6% on lifestyle and looks conservative versus peers. Interested on your views on a like-for-like basis over the next 12 months and just some color around the resi market and parks within that too, please.

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Yeah, the value is good. Sort of using almost 5% net sort of cap rates on resi. There's no real sort of sales of residence buildings, whole buildings. For some reason, they believe generally that the cap rate should be higher for a whole building versus a strata unit. It might sell at three yield. We don't see opportunities to buy any existing residence at 5% net yield. We don't know what the valuers might start doing. I think there is, you know, we had people like Murdoch and some of the certain funds starting to talk about sub-4% cap rates for residence, which is much more rational. We don't know where they're going to mark our book. We just need to, the directors' valuations have to follow what our external valuers are saying. In terms of our lifestyle, we're comfortable with the 6% cap. We think we have good, we have potentially better growth than a lot of our peers because our rents are lower. We definitely have a lot less depreciation given we don't, you know, we have quite a sort of measured view on the amount of facilities and clubhouse. We just feel that that 6% yield can help get a hold of that. The parks, you know, cap rates didn't move. They moved out a bit because AKV is making a lot of money. The cap rate keeps moving higher, which is fine. Again, that asset is in our books at half replacement cost. We think the cycle's going to go a long way. I just think cap rate, the weighted average cap rate might be exactly the same a year from now, but it sort of just doesn't, we don't think too much about that. Yeah.

Hamish Perks
Transaction Manager, Aspen Group

I think, Andy, on the lifestyle, as some of our villages get more houses and they get proven up, the valuers are getting more confident on the cap rate side. I think that will come through. I think the valuations will move up because you'll have more houses, and also the margin in our lifestyle business, because a lot of the houses aren't built, is going to go up. Even if the cap rate doesn't move, which arguably it could, the values are going to move up a fair amount of time.

Andy McFarland
Head of Real Estate Research, Bell Potter

Yep, makes sense. Thank you, guys. Appreciate the color.

Operator

Okay, thank you for that. Your next question comes from Murray Connellan from Moelis.

Murray Connellan
Equity Research Analyst, Moelis

Hi, good afternoon everyone. I was hoping to get a bit more color on the outlook for acquisitions. There's clearly still plenty of capacity on the balance sheet. Just maybe a bit more color on the sorts of things that you're looking at, where you're seeing value. Obviously, some things will convert and some won't, but it'd just be good to know what's out there and where most of the opportunities are.

Patrick Maddern
Head of Asset Management and Development, Aspen Group

Yeah, good question. We're chipping away on a number of things. Interestingly, some things that we were looking at six to twelve months ago have come back to us for various reasons. Some of the types of things we're looking at include land where we can do lifestyle and residential and maybe build to rent. We're looking at opportunities to buy buildings and upcycle them into residential at attractive prices. A lot of the opportunities at the moment are close to metro type locations. Our sort of ideally one, maximum two hours from metro areas where we get a really attractive entry point. We're also seeing some opportunities to buy units or buy, you know, sort of backpackers or things like that that we might be able to convert into things which suit our model. Quite a varied variety of things that we're looking at and in a number of states, including Eastern Seaboard. We would like to buy some more things on the Eastern Seaboard as long as we make sensible returns.

Murray Connellan
Equity Research Analyst, Moelis

Got it. Just on the other side of that coin, clearly still plenty of capacity on the balance sheet, but are there any assets that you might call out that are maybe on the, I guess, more mature end of the spectrum for you guys now and where some of those funding sources might be in the future?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Yeah, look, it's unchanged. We're still not really into the tourism business. We still hold some of those small seasonal tourist assets. They will be sold at some point, most likely. Once we get to sort of $600, $700 rentals in some of our other resi properties, we plan on selling those assets and recycling that capital into lower rents.

Murray Connellan
Equity Research Analyst, Moelis

Got it. I know you've sort of spoken to the cap rate story previously, but I just wanted to focus in on Karratha for a second and how that market's going. Just noticing that the cap rate that's been used to value that asset is now up to 23%, which is the highest that we have on record. Is there any potential to monetize that asset? Maybe just a bit more commentary on Karratha would be good, please.

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

I think Karratha is a very different market to what it was 10 years ago. The economy is diversified. It's a lot more than just oil and gas nowadays. We have more than 100 corporate clients staying with us. We used to have one client who had all the leverage. That asset's changed a lot. We now look at that asset as much more like a Darwin, which will have, you know, over the long run, a more stable base of customers. It won't get a zero occupancy in our opinion, but it'll be at some point below 100% occupancy. It's a very high fixed cost asset. Any increase in revenue at the moment is almost entirely flying through to net profit. It's a highly volatile net rental income strength. We think it's going to stay higher for longer because most of our corporate customers we talk to request rooms from us and tell us about project delays and needing more people. At the moment, there's plenty of demand and there's plenty of suggestion that this cap deck cycle that's currently going on in Karratha is going to last quite a few years yet. Would we sell it? Would somebody pay us enough or will we see a cycle of three to four years of high income and then a sustainable income beyond that? I doubt that we would be a seller with that income strength.

Murray Connellan
Equity Research Analyst, Moelis

Thanks. David, is there anything that you can call out with regards to your debt book and the facilities there? Have you been seeing any opportunities to change the balance of funding sources, something that might have a positive impact on margins down the track?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Not really. We pay 185 basis points over. We've had a great relationship with Westpac. We added Bank of Queensland into a syndicated facility to give us that flexibility to be able to go wider in the future and probably get more duration at some point. To date, we've always run a pretty low sort of drawn debt balance relative to what the banks have been willing to provide. There's been no real reason to look for anything cheaper. Even if we don't get it a little bit cheaper, at the end of the day, the relationship's pretty important to us. Those two banks are showing a lot of flexibility as to what they're prepared to do going forward.

Murray Connellan
Equity Research Analyst, Moelis

Got it. Thanks. That's it from me.

Operator

Thank you. We've got the next question coming from Scott Hudson from MST.

Scott Hudson
Equity Research Analyst, MST

Yeah, good afternoon everybody. Just a couple of quick questions. David, could I just confirm, did you say that the Adelaide portfolio, which settles tomorrow, is included in your rental guidance?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

It is.

Scott Hudson
Equity Research Analyst, MST

Thank you. I guess, just in terms of the inventory balance, it was obviously up a fair bit relative to the PCP. Could you give us a sense of how many completed homes and/or residential land lots are included in that balance?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Yeah, look, we have, in terms of completed houses that are on the ground that a customer could buy today, we have about 16, 17 houses only. In terms of land lots, because we don't want titling before 2032, those land lots are still, those completed land lots in that bucket are completed. They're sitting in inventory. Half of those lots are already sold and haven't settled. As a deliberate increase in manufactured housing inventory from $12 million to $24 million, we have about, on top of what I just mentioned, we have about 10 display houses now completed and sitting in that inventory, and we want to keep those display houses going forward.

Scott Hudson
Equity Research Analyst, MST

Okay. I mean, are you at the, I guess, I think we're going to go back to the capital raising presentation you talked about being at a sort of a 200 production run rate for FY2025. Are you at that run rate currently?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Yeah, we're doing more than 200 in FY2025. It's just all at various stages of either issue or if it's settled. It's all the system can produce more than 200 widgets efficiently.

Scott Hudson
Equity Research Analyst, MST

Is the plan to sort of maintain that production rate? Because I guess the question is, if you are, how do I reconcile that with the 140 settlement guidance for 2026?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Our guidance is, you know, 140, 170 going to 200. Obviously, we won't keep producing 200 if we are only selling 140. The discipline here is the 20% weight on the development assets. That discipline, sort of if you're trying to marry development assets to 20% and guidance, they're all pretty consistent.

Scott Hudson
Equity Research Analyst, MST

Thank you. Just in relation to competition in the land lease space, are you seeing some of your more recently listed peers talking about entering into South Australia? Are you seeing any increased competition for land in that market in particular?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

We should expect it. We're not seeing it at the moment. In fact, if anything, we're seeing less competition because it's quite local where we are in our locations. It's quite a local competition set. What has been happening is competitors have been running out of inventory. Places like, you know, Australind that we just bought, that Eden Life across the road is now fully sold out. Ravenswood, the resident land right next to August, is now fully sold out. Alexandra in the Cove, you know, the local, the closest competitor sort of sold out a year or so ago. We're not, at the moment, there's less competition, but you know, we always assume competition's coming, which is why, amongst many reasons, why we like to get in at the cheapest cost so that should a competitor come into our market, it will always have that advantage.

Scott Hudson
Equity Research Analyst, MST

Thank you. Lastly, in terms of DA approvals on various land lots, is there any sort of updates on which of those will be first to be achieved or first cab off the rank, so to speak?

Patrick Maddern
Head of Asset Management and Development, Aspen Group

I would love to give you that much clarity. I don't quite get that much clarity from the regulators either, but where we are at is that both Normanville and ACP have both progressed to be able to go to a meeting, as in a council member meeting, which is a good step, which means that it can then be assessed. I think Normanville, we've got through in terms of with, I think I updated last time that there were issues with sewer capacity and other items that are related to infrastructure. We've now got to a point where that's been satisfied to a point where it can go to the meeting. That's excellent. We will be doing that in the next month or two. ACP, we will also be going to a meeting in the next two or three months. The council have indicated that they're supportive of our proposal and there's a few things that we're doing just to finalize a few things that they'll ask for for the meeting. We expect to go to that meeting in the next two or three months as well, and that's looking positive. In terms of Australind, we are shortly going to be lodging a DA to convert the existing structures there to more longer stay or sort of two-bedroom apartment style stock. That's progressing. On top of that as well, we're working through the DA process to get the land lease on the vacant part of the site. The council has been supportive of that the whole way along. I think they're genuinely trying to try to help us, which is excellent. Finally as well, we've got Ravenswood. Ravenswood, once again, the council's been supportive. We've already got a plan lodged for the first 65 residential lots. We should be getting a notification on that in the next couple of weeks or a month or so. We don't believe that there's any reason why that won't be approved, but we just have to wait to see it comes out. It's in line with the broader master plan that was approved over the site. We are working closely with the council on getting the approval for the land lease there. We expect to be able to get that in the next six to twelve months.

Scott Hudson
Equity Research Analyst, MST

I appreciate that color, Patrick. Thank you. Lastly, David, do you have any CapEx guidance for 2026?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Not really. We spend about, it's probably declined a bit because a lot of the stuff that we could fix up and just moved on. Parks, we've been buying broken parks of late. It might be $10 million of general CapEx that we're aiming to make a 10% plus return.

Scott Hudson
Equity Research Analyst, MST

Good. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you for that. Your next question comes from Michael Peet from Paradice. I'll just unmute him now. Michael, go ahead.

John Carter
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

You're on mute.

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

I've got him on mute.

John Carter
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

I think, Michael, you might need to unmute yourself.

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Is that to various questions?

Operator

No, I think he asked some of those questions. If you want to just provide an overview, what will the FY26 CapEx and acquisitions that have been announced be?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

That have been announced is just the Adelaide Government, so the Adelaide Villas portfolio. There's about $20 million, which is the retirement villages. That is it.

Patrick Maddern
Head of Asset Management and Development, Aspen Group

Yeah, there'll be some minor works done on those to get them to a state that they can be released, but we're sort of talking, you know, less than $200,000.

Operator

Yep. His other question, does FY26 guidance include any rental contributions from Australind?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

No.

Operator

What do you expect the mix for development volumes for land lease versus residential land or house land sites?

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Yeah, look, at this stage of the 140, we only have 30 residential land lots at Mount Barker, the rest are lifestyle. Whatever that mix is, but keep in mind that the profit out of the lifestyle is twice what it is out of the residential.

Operator

Great. No further questions or no one in the queue. If there are no further questions at this time, I'll now hand back to the Aspen management team for the closing remarks.

David Dixon
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to listen in. As always, we're available whenever you need us. Just call in with any questions. Happy to set up one-on-one meetings after this. Thanks for your time.

John Carter
Joint CEO, Aspen Group

Thank you.

Operator

Thanks. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your attendance and participation. You may now disconnect.

Powered by