Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome, thank you for joining the Deutsche Konsum REIT-AG H1 2022-2023 financial results call. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touchtone telephone. Please press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rolf Elgeti, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. This is Rolf, CEO. Thank you for your time and interest in Deutsche Konsum's H1 figures. We have uploaded the presentation, we will also, for those able to see it, just click through it on the web if you want to follow it.
If you can't do that, just please look at the website, where the presentation is there, and I will refer to the page numbers as well. As per usual, I give a very quick overview of what we regard as the key highlights and the key issues, and then there's ample time to ask questions. Let's start with the highlights on page four of the presentation. Firstly, a few words on the operational business, then on purchases and sales, and then the rest. The operations have been very strong to extremely strong. You can see firstly that our rental income is up 6.8% year-on-year. Let's not forget the number of shares has remain constant over that time.
6.8% rental income upwards. What we don't say here, but what you see in the accounts, the margin, operational margin has expanded slightly. The result from rental has actually grown even slightly more than the rental income, which is also very reassuring. Firstly, the rents keep coming in and they rise, and secondly, we do not have a cost issue. On the contrary, the margin has expanded, very strong results from the operations. The FFO is down 5.8% year-on-year, that's mainly due to high interest costs. We'll come to that in a second.
Our AFFO, so that's the FFO post CapEx, is down much more than that, and that's mainly due to two properties, that we are kind of reworking completely, the Schleiz and Gmünd , where we invest over EUR 11 million in total, or have. That's nearly finished, so the AFFO is going to jump back upwards in the near future afterwards, and we currently don't have any new sort of CapEx-intensive projects. Our like-for-like rental growth is 3.4%. Like-like means on a same store, same square meter basis. That's also quite strong. Don't forget, of course, that the vast majority of our contracts are CPI linked. Still, at 3.4%, upwards.
We in terms of acquisitions and sales, we have sold one property in the first half, which was a DIY property in Chemnitz, Saxony, which we sold at a yield of 5.7%. We made no significant acquisitions because we think, I guess, like virtually everybody else in the sector that the price adjustment due to the changes in the macro environment, most notably the interest rate environment, has not been fully re-reflected into the prices yet. Whilst we see an extremely attractive acquisition pipeline, we are just not executing it yet. Our soft forecast is that this will change in the second half of the year, but for now, we have not acted. Third point here, the balance sheet.
The balance sheet remains boring and strong as before. Our interest cover ratio is 3.5 x EBITDA. Our LTV is just over 51%. Our target LTV is at 50%, we are mildly above it, but not meaningfully. The NTA per share has increased to EUR 11.27 per share. Don't forget that the NTA is the fully diluted sort of net value of the assets. The bad news is, of course, that our average cost of debt went up to 2.6%. Sorry, there was something going on. I'll repeat. The bad news is that our average weighted cost of debt went up to 2.6%.
That's including unsecured debt. The good news is that we're still able to refinance our loans in the first quarter of this year. The second quarter of our fiscal year, we have refinanced a EUR 35 million loan from one bank with other banks. In total, we have refinanced EUR 49 million worth of loans with sort of our existing network of banks. Don't forget we have many sort of banks that refinance our loans. All these loans are just very plain vanilla mortgage debt, standard German contracts. The good news is these loans are still available. Banks are still happy to lend to us at the current or similar or even slightly higher LTVs.
The bad news in here, of course, that the interest rates went up. As you can see from the new interest rate of 4.5%, that is literally a lateral movement along the yield curve. Crucially, we get asked this quite often, but crucially, the margins of new loans is actually not widening. In one case, it has actually come down. The refinancing side is very stable as far as we can see it. Moving on to our good old tax issue with the Brandenburg tax authorities. For those who are not in the loop, the Brandenburg tax authorities think that we are not a REIT.
We of course disagree, and we have now officially filed our lawsuit to appeal against that. We expect a first judgment within the next six months. There's no news, just to report that we're doing everything we can, and also just to give you some guidance on when sort of the first next data point is expected, which is probably in half a year's time. We have last week already sort of lowered our FFO guidance by approximately 10%. That's simply because we previously thought that we would acquire this year. Of course, when we made that forecast, we've changed our mind. Of course the rise in interest rates has not helped either.
We reduced this to now assume that we don't acquire anything at all in the fiscal year. That's reduction to the guidance. I mean, it's still high FFO yield, but it's lower than our previous guidance. That's the broad sort of forecast over-overview of where we stand. I'd now like to go to page number seven, please, which is giving you an update on where some of the key portfolio metrics stand. Those of you familiar with us, you know that I always like to highlight the last line in the table, which is the WALT, the weighted average lease term. That is, as far as I can see, one of the most important variables about us.
You can see that it has gone up from 5.2 by the end of the last fiscal year, so in September 2022, to 5.3 so six months later, i.e., sort of end of March this year. Whether it's 5.2 or 5.3 is not really important, and whether it goes down by 0.1 or up by 0.1 is also not important. I'd like to stress this at, in every presentation, because let's not forget that the key to our business model is that we accept shorter lease terms than many other investors in this space. By shorter, we don't mean ridiculously short, but we mean approximately five years. That's the sort of where we play at.
The quick proposal of these shorter leases is that we get a significantly higher acquisition yield, which at the moment is a stable level, and that's the case. Because if that wasn't the case, then our strategy is really stupid. If we are able to keep the leases together and keep extending them, then of course, it may be at least mildly intelligent, what we're doing here. That is the case. That has been the case since the chap-conception of the business. I'd like to stress at the end, because these are unusual times, and they're risky times, and even in those times, our tenants keep continuing to extend their leases. That has many layers.
First, they extend the leases at all, which you can see here in the WALT, the weighted average lease term. Also they extend the leases on average at higher rents than before. I repeat, at higher rents than before on average. As you can see, the rents went up from EUR 6.60 - EUR 6.72. Of course, that's not an astronomic explosion of rents, but it is important, I think, again, to stress that in this environment, our rents are growing, and they're also growing when we extend leases. It's not just the inflation link. If you remember, the inflation link is 3.4%, and the total rent increase was 6.8. There's more to it than just those clauses.
You can see it, I think a very powerful number when you look at the total annualized portfolio rent, which has gone from EUR 73.2 - EUR 78 in the space of six months. Again, the number of shares has been unchanged over it. I keep stressing this just to say that the intrinsic operational strength of the portfolio, the intrinsic capacity and capability to generate cash flow on a sort of constant capital per share basis, has actually improved significantly over the last six months.
If you then look at this rental level and compare it to where the market might be and what the rental level might be, where you would see new construction, then you won't be surprised that at a valuation yield of roughly 7%, the fair value per square meter in our books, is just over EUR 1,000, which of course is very significantly below construction cost. That's sort of the, I think, the last point I would like to make sort of on the whole portfolio operational side. It, it may have sounded very boring because it's the same story since inception of the business, but it's important to stress in these times that it's still the case and actually accelerating in terms of some of the positive momentum here.
I'd just like to basically flick through some charts very briefly. First on page nine, where you can see where our rents come from, 67% from non-cyclical tenant. About 50% is the food-based retail. It's 80% if you include DIY. Some people like to call this fast-moving consumer goods. That tenant base has remained unchanged and it's very stable. You see on the next page 10, that our CPI-linked leases represent about 85% of the portfolio. On the next page, 11, you can see that the expiry profile is very much unchanged as well, quite broadly sort of distributed over the next five years and then about half the leases are running for six years and longer.
It's a very healthy mix. But of course, that's just, it's not a strategy that just happens when you have a big portfolio, which you can see on the left chart, where we just show you sort of our relationships to the various tenant groups. Again, a chance we've, we have in the presentation for a long time, just updated, and you can see that we, of course, are getting more important for some of these tenants. Page 12 shows you, the some valuation sensitivities, as per usual. Looking at where the shares trade. And here doing sort of fully diluted math, you can see that, if you buy the shares, well, with that current trading level, that was yesterday, today, they are even more attractive.
You probably buy the portfolio at a yield of sort of 8.9%, just over 11x rent, which everybody can have his own opinion on whether that's a good or bad deal. That's basically what the math are. Looking at page 14 to the debt structure, as I mentioned, we've refinanced a fair chunk of the debt. What remains to be done in this year, not fiscally, but this year is EUR 49 million, not a lot. We are in negotiations here. We have term sheets for some of the debt already. Most will simply be extended, others will be refinanced with existing banks. We are working already on refinancing the bonds expiring next year.
The vast majority of that is actually senior secured bonds, so we can simply swap those with senior secured mortgage debt as per usual. Also very important, we've had a confirmation of our rating, which is done by Scope, which we also published yesterday or early this morning, point out that we keep our investment grade rating here. That's, of course, helpful too. I think that's where I'd like to stop. Now give you the opportunity to ask questions if you, if you have any.
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wished to ask a question may press star followed by one on their touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selections. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. First question is coming from Manuel Martin from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, Rolf. One question from my side, please. On the refinancing, do you have an idea or could you give a kind of guidance where your total interest rate cost might go for 2023 and 2024, given the refinancings that you might have in mind?
That's too difficult for me. I'll hand over to Christian, our CFO.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. This is Christian, CFO. Your question is what the latest interest rate levels are, where we have withdrawn the latest loans. At the moment, we are taking new loans between 4%-4.5% in average. We look for a very short duration of between three to five years to have more flexibility at the end when interest rates would come down potentially in the future again. What we expect for this year with the refinancings we need to do till the end of the year is the total average interest cost level of around 3%-3.25% at the end.
That's the expectation I have at the moment.
Hmm. Okay. Okay. Thank you. That's it from my side. Thank you.
Just as a reminder, if you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone telephone. One moment for the next question, please. There are no further questions at this time. I hand back to Rolf Elgeti for closing comments.
Great. Yeah, thanks very much. Thanks very much again for your time and interest. Should there be any follow-up questions, we are of course, around and happy to help. Thanks very much and have a great weekend.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.