Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the AEW UK REIT plc Q4 update. Throughout today's recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and as usual, we'd be grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to today's management team. Henry, Laura, good morning.
Thanks, Mark, and thanks everyone for joining us today. As Mark said, this is our Q4 update on the company. Before we start today, I'd just like to address, perhaps some of you have seen some announcements or press articles linking AEW UK REIT with a possible merger with Alternative Income REIT in recent weeks. It was announced by both of the companies yesterday afternoon that a recommended position between the two Boards hadn't been reached. I would urge shareholders to have a look at both of the Rule 2.8 announcements, the withdrawal announcements from those discussions by both companies yesterday afternoon for more information in respect to that. Now, what we can say is governed by the regulations of the City Code on Mergers and Takeovers .
I'm afraid I can't say any more than that to you today, but please do look at those announcements, and you will understand that, of course, we can't take questions on that matter either. In respect of any other part of the presentation today, please do submit your questions, and we can take those at the end. For anyone who I haven't met before or spoken to before, I'm Laura Elkin. I'm the portfolio manager for AEW UK. Henry and I have been managing AEW at AEW UK now for coming up to 11 years. It's the same strategy that we have been running throughout that time. We are sector-agnostic value investors, which means that we can look with an AEW strategy across the whole of the U.K. commercial property market to find value at various points in time.
We like to think that that is key to the outperformance of AEW's strategy over the course of the last 11 years. That outperformance has really been sustained. We think that's because the strategy is nimble, able to operate countercyclically between the different property subsectors. Being not constrained by sector, we think is a really key part of our strategy, being able to deliver that high income and outperformance to our shareholders. We also think that that strategy really speaks to the strengths of our team.
As value stock pickers, as value asset managers, we think that those are some key strengths of our team, and hopefully displayed to you in the high level of dividend that we have paid out now for 42 consecutive quarters and also in the attractive, very strong total returns, showing very strong outperformance over the MSCI index in the U.K. over that 10-year period. Just pointing to the things that we do buy. When we're looking for assets to acquire, we have a very strong focus on location. Again, we think that helps to future-proof our assets and our business plans. If through the course of a hold period, which can last for numerous years, things change and perhaps tenants' businesses change, it is that location which clearly in these real assets cannot change. It's something that we focus on very strongly at purchase.
Because we deliver that high level of dividend, we like to buy high levels of income. Now, we think there are a lot of opportunities to buy high income, but actually relatively few that deliver that income stream sustainably. We think it is absolutely our job, our main homework on deciding which assets to acquire, is choosing those that we think have that sustainable income stream that can continue to deliver that high income and high earnings level, which feeds through to the dividend into perpetuity during our hold period. Just moving on to the next slide, which shows a snapshot of our financials as at the end of March, which was our financial year end. We have 34 properties in the portfolio, 130 tenants, showing a really strong level of granularity and diversification in our income stream there.
We always point you to our initial yield and reversionary yield differential, which is figures which are decided by our independent valuer, CBRE. You'll see that that gap is clearly wide, demonstrating the company's ability to grow income. Actually, this quarter, that gap is wider than normal. Our net initial yield for this quarter has come down slightly because we have a number of vacancies in the portfolio. You will have noticed our earnings for the quarter are down slightly, and that is what's represented here. I'm going to just touch on a few properties which are leading to that. We have a tenant in Southampton, Barclays, who would have been a long-term tenant of the company, who vacated. We have that unit under offer to another tenant to take occupation.
We expect the initial yield to increase in future periods because of that. We also have some quite significant vacancy at the moment in an asset in Queen Square in Bristol, which has been a long-term hold of ours. We are actively doing some refurbishment work at that property at the moment with a view that we have a tenant who will take space in that building once those works complete, and hoping that will complete next quarter. While the initial yield has come down, leading to earnings being slightly down in the quarter, we expect that and have a clear route to seeing some strong recovery in that in coming periods. Obviously then the differential up to the rest of the reversionary yield, demonstrating really strong potential for rental growth.
Henry will talk about some examples of where we expect that to come from on slides coming up. Again, as I've just described, our vacancy rate is up slightly again this quarter, but we do expect that to come down in future periods. In fact, by next quarter, as those business plans continue to progress. I'm just going to touch on our debt position. We have a single term loan in the company with a current very favorable rate of just under 3%. Now, that loan does come to maturity in just over 12 months' time. We have an in-house debt team at AEW, who you will have heard us refer to before. They are continuously sourcing debt products for other activities going on at AEW UK.
For me, that provides an awful lot of comfort to know that this team is very well tapped into the market. We have already spoken to a number of lenders, including our incumbent lender, to gain terms. We have every confidence that we will achieve a successful refinancing over the course of the next 12 months. I'll hand over to Henry, who can talk through some of our performance.
Thank you, Laura, and good morning, everyone. This first slide looks at our NAV total return versus the peer group. A 9.45-year annualized NAV total return and a 9% 10-year annualized NAV total return. Many of you will have seen this slide before, and it's good to see those lines still diverging on the right-hand side as at June 25. We will provide a more up-to-date version of this in the next presentation. I think the main two themes that I kind of want to touch on here is where our performance diverges from the peer group. That happened around 2019, 2020. The reason for that was, one, because of our high weighting in sheds, about 55% at the time. We also had a low weighting to retail. Obviously, at that time, we had the COVID pandemic.
There was a move to e-commerce away from traditional retail, and we had some really strong valuation performance then. Also, because we have shorter lease profiles, roughly kind of three years to break, five years to expiry, it's no coincidence that our performance moves away in 2019 to 2020, because that is when we are engaging with tenants, extending leases and adding income. Good. Next slide, please. This slide looks at the property total return versus the MSCI benchmark, and looks at our outperformance. Just looking at the right-hand side of this slide first, I think what is great to see here is the consistency of the performance and outperformance over a seven and 10-year period, both at 9.4% total property return. Over the five-year period, the performance was the strongest, and that is no surprise because that is when we had the highest weighting of industrials.
Over three years, the outperformance is the strongest, and that was because we had our very successful sale for an alternative use at Oxford Business Park, which we sold for life sciences. More recently, the performance is a little bit more muted, but it's worth bearing in mind that we weren't fully invested for the last 12-month period. We sold Coventry in December 2024, and we reinvested those proceeds in March with the asset purchase in Hitchin, and then June with the asset purchase in Leicester. There's quite a lot going on in this slide, but I think all this information is important because it really does show the journey that we have been on over the past 10 years. There are sort of three main themes that I like to touch on when I present this slide. I think the first is the consistency of the income.
It's that blue bar running right through the middle of this chart. As you can see, that income is consistently at around 8%, which is no surprise given the dividend policy that the board pays out. The income does slightly drop off a little bit in 2021, 2022. That is because we are a total return strategy, and we had to take on a higher vacancy to maximize value at a number of assets, the most relevant one being the Oxford Business Park, which I mentioned a short time ago. I think the second theme here is a counter-cyclical strategy. We are buying sheds in 2017, 2018. We're selling them in 2022, 2023. We are buying retail when it's sort of going through the eye of the storm, and we think there's some really good value there. More recently, we've been buying leisure.
We have a low weighting in offices more recently, and obviously, people are still figuring out the return to office, but it's good to see more and more people returning to the offices. I think the third theme here is just knowing when to sell your assets. We are constantly sort of at least fortnightly, monthly having sell and hold meetings, and we take the decision to cash in our chips and sell the assets at the right time, which obviously leads to this strong performance. Here are all the disposals since the beginning of AEW. As you can see, a 41% average sale to purchase price premium.
I suppose the general theme here is that more recently we've been selling out of lower yielding industrials for yields kind of in the low 6% and recycling that cash into high yielding assets, 8%-9% +. The most recent disposal was actually a small vacant office, which was included when we bought a chunk of retail in Hitchin, and we sold that a couple of quarters ago for twice what it was held at book value at GBP 1 million.
Thanks, Henry. I'm just going to take over here and touch on what we believe here is this kind of persisting purchase opportunity that exists in the market, has been running for quite some time now. Looking at our pipeline, we believe that this is still a strong opportunity today. This very wiggly red line that we're showing you on the chart is using the CBRE Average Value Index, CBRE being the U.K.'s largest valuer of commercial property, so effectively using their kind of value index as a proxy for values across the whole commercial property market. You can see here over the last 20-odd years, some significant peaks and troughs as you would have expected to see associated with these quite significant global and U.K. political events. We've marked right in the middle of the chart there, AEW UK's IPO.
Clearly values have been quite sort of tumultuous during that time as well. Actually what this chart reminds me of is that, I feel that our strategy has performed very strongly in order to be able to deliver the kind of total return performance that it has done during a time when values have been this challenging. If we look at the last three years of this chart, we'll see that red line wiggle down quite significantly, post the Liz Truss premiership, to below the average line and having not recovered since then. Of course, interest rates have been a significant factor in that. The outlook there has really sort of wobbled over the course of the last quarter with kind of global political events. We will see how that progresses.
Something else is kind of underlying this, and that has been quite a significant reduction in the volume of investment transactions taking place in U.K. commercial property. Actually, this is more sort of centered than the overall numbers would suggest because a strong concentration of those transactions that have taken place have been in the prime industrial market. Outside of that, with overall volumes being lower, actually the volumes in other sectors have been quite significantly lower because of that strong concentration. In the types of sectors, which AEW's strategy leads us to at the moment, those that are high yielding, those that we think are kind of trading below their long-term fundamentals, actually are showing even stronger value than we see across the general market.
When we look at our pipeline today, for the reasons that I've just set out, we see strong ability to buy sustainable yield, often at levels in excess of 9%. We see assets that we think represent significant value. Just to demonstrate to you here that that is still persisting through today. Now, we sometimes get asked the question if we would just look to sell out from significant parts of our portfolio in order to access that pipeline. Of course, though, with values being lower, it therefore isn't a general seller's market either. We look to, and as Henry's just demonstrated in the previous chart, make sales from our assets at opportune times where we think the value of those assets can be maximized in the current market.
That is why we will not look to make a kind of blanket sale from our portfolio in order to access this pipeline opportunity. Of course, the property sub-sectors move independently from each other, and there are certain sectors in which we might look to sell assets, and we have talked before about how we may look to be net sellers in retail warehousing. Henry's got an asset coming up where we have recently completed some significantly strong asset management. That could be a candidate for that. Handing back to Henry with more asset management.
Thank you, Laura, and here is that asset, Barnsley Retail Park. We've owned this for a while now. We bought it back in June 2018. We bought it at an 8.5% net initial yield. We liked it. It was fully let at sensible rents, with a decent unexpired lease term, attractive yield profile, and an established location. We tend to like retail warehousing because it is well-located on the edges of large urban areas, and they have typically low site densities, which means intensification of that use is a possibility, whether that be drive-through pods, EV charging, or actually if the use in its existing state is obsolete, you could redevelop for last-mile logistics, or they are typically quite good residential sites. We do like retail warehousing, and that sector is particularly buoyant at the moment.
Hence, one of the reasons why we are considering selling this asset alongside some of the most recent asset management activity. As you can see here, we've carried out three letting events. We did a new letting to Farmfoods, a new 15-year lease. We did a new 10-year lease to Wren. Actually, we considered selling this asset at the end of last year, but what it actually did, it acted as a catalyst for a lease regear with B&Q. We did that regear last quarter, so apologies if a lot of this information you've already heard. It's more for new listeners. We've successfully completed that deal with B&Q, and now we are considering selling this asset. Keep your eyes peeled for news over the next 3-6 months. This is our asset in Hitchin. We bought it, as I said, in March last year.
We've hit the ground running on asset management here. This quarter, we've reported that we've done a five-year lease renewal with Next, obviously a very well-known high street retailer, at GBP 150,000. Really good to secure one of those anchor tenants alongside with M&S here. It's positioned on Bancroft, which is the main retail section in Hitchin, which is an affluent commuter town, only 25 minutes from Central London on a train. Last quarter, we also reported that we sold off the vacant office, which sat at the back of this retail to a local investor. In doing so, we have driven that net initial yield. We bought it at an 8.3% net initial yield, and that running yield now is at 8.7%, having sold off that vacancy. Finally, I thought it was important to include a slide on York.
You will have seen that we announced earlier this month that NCP had gone into administration. PwC were appointed on the 16th of March, and then subsequent to that, on the 27th of March, NCP shut 22 sites permanently. Just wanted to let you all know that NCP continue to operate from Tanner Row in York, and they are paying rent monthly in arrears, rather than paying it quarterly. It's still operational, and we're still collecting rent. However, you understand that AEW is a very active asset manager, so we're considering all opportunities here. That is obviously, of course, working with PwC and NCP, but also considering that short to medium-term scenario alongside other asset management options, whether that be other operators or potential alternative uses. That alternative use being a particularly important point.
We acquired this asset at a good high yield, but also at a relatively low capital value per square foot , GBP 100 per square foot, we bought it at. That is very much a theme of AEW's investment style. When we're buying investments, we are also looking at vacant possession values and alternative use values, which means that in the event of something like this happening, a significant amount of value doesn't fall away. As you'll see, we only lost 7.94% of value this quarter following the announcement of the administration. That is because the asset was bought at a relatively low cap val per square foot , and therefore there are options that we can explore here. Finally, this slide here just touches on our industrial sector. The metrics here are probably more acute than they are portfolio-wide.
We have a smaller WAULT to break and to expiry in the industrial sector than across the portfolio. 2.53 years to break and 4.58 years to expiry. We have a stronger reversionary potential in the mid-9% from a lower net initial yield of around 6.75%. That means there's a lot of rental growth that the asset management team are looking to go and capture. We have a low passing rent of GBP 3.65 per square foot compared to GBP 4.87 per square foot. I think it's worth noting that that ERV is CBRE, our independent valuer's assessment of ERV. Quite typically, we are doing better than those ERVs. There's an argument that the reversion potential is stronger than what these metrics show here.
Just going back to that point about capital value per square foot, which I've just referred to on York, the industrial assets are held at a cap val per square foot of GBP 48 a square foot, which is relatively really cheap. If you compare that to what it costs to build industrial properties at GBP 120 a square foot, which excludes the value of land, we're in a really, really strong position here. There are three assets here. Much of these leasing events we have reported in previous quarters, but I've continued to keep them in because I think they illustrate the opportunity going forward. As you can see at Bradford, we significantly moved the rent on from GBP 3.50, when we bought the asset, to rent as high as GBP 5.75 today.
At Sarus Court Court, in the past year or so, we have actually carried out a number of refurbishments here.
We bought this asset off rents of GBP 5 a square foot, which was deemed rack rented at the time. More recently, we've achieved a letting at GBP 8.50. We have two more units which we are currently under offer on and looking to beat that rate per square foot of GBP 8.50. Hopefully, we can report good news on that, in due course. At Sheffield, we bought this large manufacturing unit, which produces reinforced steel for HS2, off a relatively really low rent of GBP 2.78. Last quarter or so, we increased the rent to GBP 4.25. Some really strong rental growth coming through, in more recent years. Handing back to Laura to conclude the presentation. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Henry. Thank you all for joining us today. Hopefully we've been able to demonstrate our confidence in the portfolio going forward. Clearly with these real assets, there are hurdles to manage over the course of time, as we've clearly faced this quarter with NCP. Because our strategy is based on strong fundamentals of location, as I set out at the start of the presentation, and just ensuring that even if these unexpected things or unwanted things happen during an assets business plan, we have other routes to securing value. Because of the strong location there in York and because of the low capital value at which we acquired that asset, we have a number of active business plans that we are working on at the moment, which we believe will show full, if not a very strong level of recovery, of the assets' capital value.
We have strong confidence in our portfolio. We believe it still represents a value proposition as at today. Hopefully you're all encouraged by the continuation of our market-leading level of dividend this quarter, as decided by the Board.
That's great. Laura, Henry, thank you very much indeed for updating investors. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. A full recording of today's presentation will be available via your investment company dashboard. Laura, Henry, you've had a number of questions from investors this morning. Thank you to everybody for your engagement. If I may just hand back to you, ask you to read the questions, and then I'll pick up from you at the end.
Yeah. Thanks, Mark. Just having a look through these. There's an interesting question been put forward by Steven R. Steven says, "In the recent update, there have been valuation declines, a rent-free period to secure a letting, and two new vacancies. Do we consider this to be a sign of growing weakness in our sector of the market or just a sort of coincidence of unfortunate events occurring at the same time?" I'll perhaps kind of just start to answer that, and then I'll kind of hand it over to you for your thoughts as well, Henry. I think it's probably important to point out that overall in this quarter, our portfolio has seen valuation uplift.
At an overall level, that's uplift of 0.5%, which might not sound very material, but I think against the backdrop of what's happened globally this quarter, and also considering what we've been through this quarter with NCP and seeing a significant down valuation of that asset alone, to still come out of this quarter with an overall valuation uplift, I actually think that is a signal of a strength in our portfolio. We pointed to it in the announcement that we put out last Friday, that a lot of that sort of valuation strength and valuation uplift is continuing to be delivered by or driven by ongoing progress in our asset management business plans. Henry's pointed to some of them there in his last slide. That's in Runcorn, with hopefully more rental growth being seen in lettings coming up.
That's a lot of work that we've been doing in Square in Bristol, which will lead to a significant letting, hopefully taking very soon there. I actually read a lot of positivity into our activity recently. Yeah, anything to add there, Henry? Sorry. I've probably waffled on for two hours.
Yeah, of course. No. I obviously agree with all of what Laura said. Just on the sort of the letting activity. It's very typical when you carry out a letting transaction or renewal or a lease regear, that there is going to be an incentive. That typically comes in the form of a rent-free period. But quite often it can come also in the form of a capital incentive. That CapEx which is put on the table is more typical when a incoming tenant has a significant fit-out. So it's very much a part of the property industry that these incentives are given. Just touching on the void periods. Laura. Refer to our vacancy rate at the beginning of the presentation, which is just shy of 10%. That vacancy rate tends to yo-yo between about 10% and 5%.
Actually, if you factor in business plan vacancies, i.e., assets which we potentially would like to demolish to create an IOS, which is an industrial open storage opportunity or residential, and the opportunity at Bristol, that vacancy rate is about as low as 5%. It really does sort of fluctuate quarter-over-quarter. I think the important thing, which sort of also points me in the direction of our lower weighted average unexpired lease term, is that having void periods and shorter lease lengths is not a bad thing. It's a point in time where you can move on value and grow rents. The Runcorn example is classically that. We unfortunately had a tenant vacate, two units came back. That tenant was paying GBP 6 per square foot. We're now doing lettings at GBP 8.50 per square foot, and we might go beyond that. It's not a bad thing.
It is an opportunity in the short to medium term.
Yeah. Agreed. I'd just point to as well, we've talked about how, and you will have seen our earnings were lower this quarter than they had been, I think, in the past two quarters. Specifically last quarter, the company's earnings were, off the top of my head, about GBP 0.023. While, yes, we have reported slightly lower earnings this quarter, and we're pointing to improvement in that hopefully in the future, yeah, let's be cognizant of the fact that our dividend was more than covered by earnings last quarter.
I'm going to turn to a question from Matt H., who is asking, "How much upside is there from leasing rent reviews or repositioning of the existing assets?" In order to answer that question, I think the best way that we can do that is to look at the difference between our initial yield and our reversionary yield, as determined by CBRE. That is our independent valuer. These are not our own numbers, and hopefully that brings, having also pointed to the fact during this presentation that CBRE are the U.K.'s largest valuer of commercial property, that hopefully that brings an element of kind of security to those numbers to our shareholders. That significant difference between the initial yield and reversionary yield being the amount of income upside that there is in the portfolio.
To what Henry's just said there, linking that with our shorter than average weighted unexpired lease term of around 3-4 years, rather than some competitors which have longer. That simply means that we are able to access that reversionary yield more quickly. Yes, in the last quarter, we have seen some rents come down, and those would have been estimated to drop for some time, though reversionary yields on those properties would have been lower. We were perhaps benefiting from excess yield on those assets, i.e., a significantly higher level of yield in the shorter term, because we had knowledge that that reversionary yield was going to come down. That kind of overall blended reversionary yield on the portfolio being significantly higher, hopefully provides you with a significant amount of comfort that we can capture rental growth in future periods.
I'm just going to pick up generally on the subject of possible mergers between AEW and another listed, or for that matter, private companies. Now, I said at the start of the presentation, of course, we are not able to comment on specifics here and, of course, activity of the past few weeks. Please do go and look at the announcements that were put out yesterday for more information on that. Now, others are asking, what would be the advantages to the company of trying to complete some M&A or a merger with another company, whether that's listed or otherwise? Of course, we can talk more generally about that.
To say that we would like to be able to access a greater capital pool, such that we could access those pipeline assets in the current market opportunity that we have described to you on that slide where we were talking about the strength of our pipeline at the moment. We would also like to achieve greater scale in the company. We believe that some of our competitors do have a lower operating cost ratio due to their size. Now, I absolutely don't believe that ours isn't favorable, but scale would assist in bringing that down, which is something that our board and AEW believe would be favorable to our shareholders. In addition to that, we would also look for any company which we would possibly merge with to bring accretion to our performance on a forward-looking basis.
Of course, if we were able to secure a transaction which achieved that, then that would be beneficial to our shareholders as well. We are not looking to, you would have heard our chairman, if you've heard him speak, say before, as he has said numerous times, and I think it's probably in our annual report, that we are not looking to grow for growth's sake. We are looking to grow where there is a strongly accretive or beneficial position for the shareholders. We believe that it wouldn't be right to do that if that wasn't the case. We have that motivation behind taking those actions. Paul W. has asked a question about the nightclub that we own in Cardiff and its trade. There was a recent update within the company about that. Do you want to answer that question?
Yeah. We re-did the lease a number of years ago. We signed the lease, actually, from the previous operator, who went into administration to a phoenix company, and since that nightclub has been trading pretty well. I think it's worth noting the nightclub industry, in general, has changed quite a lot and is having to sort of roll with the punches and try and think of new ideas to bring people into their nightclubs. We all know that Cardiff has a large student population. It's a buzzing city, particularly when the rugby's on. We've seen some good turnover rent come through on this asset on top of the base rent at around GBP 50,000 a year.
Worth noting that when we were doing that lease re-gear, the tenant is not going to agree to a level of turnover rent, which it feels is going to be financially punitive to them. They're going to agree to a sensible turnover rent, which obviously we assessed alongside previous turnover projections. It's good to be getting a turnover rent because there were potential projections that actually a turnover rent might not have been coming. It's good to see, and let's see what we get in the not-so-distant future.
I can just see that someone else has asked a question about whether or not we have some urgency behind trying to scale our strategy prior to a refinancing. I'm just going to state that those two events aren't linked. We know from conversations that we've had with lenders about refinancing, including our incumbent finance provider. There is no requirement to have scale there before that's completed. Those two things are not linked at all. I'm just going to take a final question from Alan T., who is asking the question. It seems to compare us to a competitor REIT and asking which one he should perhaps be buying. I'm not going to name which competitor he's mentioned there. I would simply point to perhaps our dividend level is higher.
I would urge anyone in that position, asking themselves that question, to have a look at the property total returns that respective companies are delivering here. Because ours, as Henry has demonstrated on these slides, has been consistently one of the strongest, if not the strongest, in the peer group, and has delivered that on an annualized basis over a good number of years now. Yeah, I think we'll leave that there. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining. It's very good to be able to update you again this quarter, and we look forward to doing so next quarter as well.
That's great. Henry, Laura, thank you very much indeed for updating investors. If I could please ask investors not to close this session, as we'll now automatically redirect you in order that you can provide your feedback. On behalf of the team from AEW UK REIT plc, thank you once again for your time, and enjoy the rest of your day.