Okay. Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the annual results presentation for Residential Secure Income plc for the financial year ending September 2022. I'm delighted to be accompanied by the fund management team of Ben Fry and Brandon Hollihan. 2022 has been another year of progress for ReSI plc. A return to full dividend cover in Q4 2022, improving retirement occupancy, strong like-for-like rental growth, full occupation of Shared Ownership portfolio, and accretive acquisitions, all underpinned by consistent rent collection. I'm now gonna hand over to Ben and Brandon to go through the results in more detail, could I encourage people to send in their questions in advance of the Q&A session at the end of the formal presentation, which will take about 20-25 minutes. Ben.
Thanks very much, Rupert, and good morning, everyone. Let's just start with an overview of the highlights for FY 2022 that we're gonna talk you through. First of all, we delivered that 18% growth in adjusted earnings, and that's been driven, as Rupert outlined, by the full impact of occupying our Shared Ownership portfolio last year, as well as that 4.5% like-for-like rental growth. That in turn enabled us to grow our dividend by 3.2% in the year whilst keeping dividend coverage at 97% and then returning back to 100% in Q4. As a reminder, that dropped from, down from 100% because of the effect of raising capital in February.
That February capital raise has now been fully deployed into GBP 31 million of accretive Shared Ownership acquisitions, which you've seen come through our Q3 and Q4 numbers. Meanwhile, kind of when you look forward, really important piece for us is that we've got this really long-dated leverage. An average debt maturity of 22 years with 90% of that debt fixed or hedged. Massively limiting the impact of interest rate rises for the next kind of two decades. If we move on, just to give a quick reminder of our portfolio. Because of that growth in Shared Ownership from the deployment we did earlier this year, Shared Ownership's now up to 36% of our portfolio with retirement, 57%. Shared Ownership being up kind of 7% compared to last year.
Just as a reminder, these are two massively underserved markets. To reiterate, with 97% inflation-linked income, subject to those 6% caps in retirement. This obviously puts us in a really great position going forwards. Now, I don't like to kind of comment on others, but given kind of recent news, re some of the specialist trusts, I just wanted to highlight that we've always focused on having direct leases with our customers and ensuring that these are good credit quality customers. What I mean by that is our shared owners own on average 37% stakes in their home that they would lose if they didn't pay rent to us. Our retirees are paying their rent out of private and state pensions, so incredibly secure sources of income.
Our local authority is leased to Luton Borough Council, who are kind of equivalent to double A-rated credit. If we move on then to look at the total returns and balance sheet. First of all, there's quite a lot on this slide, which includes the title, which we can thank our compliance team for their help in defining EPRA. Looking at the numbers. Total return for the year was GBP 3.4p. That's made up of two parts. On the income side, GBP 5p of income, 97% covering that GBP 5.2p dividend. Brandon's gonna talk you through the income in a couple of minutes. A net balance sheet loss of GBP 1.2p.
Primarily that is made up of our, of valuation, property valuations, where, as you can see here, we had 4.5% like-for-like on the rental growth, which had a big kind of upwards GBP 0.11 impact. That was offset by 35 basis points year-on-year increase in discount rates, which, as you can see here, took kind of almost GBP 0.09 off the return. Then within EPRA, there's a negative balance which reflects the indexation of our inflation-linked debt. As a reminder, we incorporated this for the first time in the interim, so there is a GBP 0.02 charge for this year, but there's also a carry-through of GBP 0.009 for last year.
As you can kind of see on this page, the idea behind our inflation-linked debt is that it supports us delivering inflation-linked equity returns while delivering that dividend as well through the low cost. Our general impact of inflation is about six times on property valuations what it is on debt. You know, the intention being NAV grows in excess of inflation. Worth noting, you've got 1.4p of one-offs from the share issue and acquisitions. If we were to ignore that, plus the indexation catch-up and the discount rate expansion, you'd be looking at around 11p total return. If we look forward to the future, we see near-term downwards pressure on net tangible assets.
That is primarily coming through discount rate rises. It is a little bit early days, but hypothetically, if we were to see similar movements across our kind of portfolio in discount rates, because that movement to date has been primarily in retirement, where we've seen 40 bips of movement. If we were to see the same in Shared Ownership, that would take our kind of net tangible assets down to around 100p. We are starting to see transactions now kind of happen in the final quarter of the year. We do believe that that's probably a likely landing point for discount rates in Shared Ownership. Hand over to Brandon now to kind of talk you through the numbers.
Great. Thanks, Ben. If we move on to the next slide here. There's a lot of information on this page, but there are a few key points that I really wanna highlight. First, as Ben mentioned, our adjusted earnings increased by 18% to GBP 0.05 per share. That adjusted earnings growth is driven by two main factors. First, the full year impact of occupying our Shared Ownership portfolio in 2021, second is 4.5% like-for-like rent growth across the portfolio, reflecting 97% inflation linkage in our rental income. That like-for-like rent growth accelerated during the year to 5.1% in the second half from 3.7% in the first half. We see the potential for further uplift in rent growth next year.
All of this income growth resulted in 97% dividend coverage for the year, including a return to full dividend coverage in Q4. If we move on to the next slide. The Shared Ownership acquisitions we made in 2021 and 2022 continue to drive earnings growth, and our rental operating profit increased 36% year-over-year in 2022. The chart on the left illustrates how our rental operating profit is generating long-term cash flows that should support and enhance our dividend coverage in the future. The chart on the right shows how the continued growth in our Shared Ownership portfolio, how that growth in our Shared Ownership investments, you know, continues to grow over time. Currently the Shared Ownership portfolio represents 36% of total portfolio value.
As a reminder, Shared Ownership provides that incredible 100 plus year rental income that increases annually at RPI plus a half %. If we move on to the next slide. The 4.5% like-for-like rent growth that I mentioned earlier, you know, it's worth highlighting that we achieved this rent growth while improving retirement occupancy to 94% for the year, which is now above pre-COVID levels, and while maintaining a robust rent collection rate of 99%. These improving performance metrics really demonstrate the security of ReSI's income and the benefits of our in-house property management team.
As I mentioned earlier, that like-for-like rental growth that we see for 2022 of 4.5% did accelerate during the year to 5.1% in the second half. Really all of this improving performance during the year really highlights again the security of ReSI's income and the benefits of our in-house property management team. If we move on to the next slide. I really like this slide because it highlights the strength of our leverage profile. ReSI has a weighted average term to maturity of 22 years, as Ben mentioned earlier, with 90% of our debt being fixed or hedged, which really limits our interest rate exposure for the next two decades.
All of that comes with low, low average debt coupon of 2.4%. Also, as a reminder, our portfolio is really valued at a discount to vacant possession value with a 12% reversionary surplus across the portfolio. Our reversionary LTV today is at 42%. This is really rare. This reversionary surplus is really rare in real estate and the opposite of specialist residential trusts. If we move on to the next slide. Our debt covenants across the portfolio remain healthy. There are a lot of numbers on this slide, but I just wanna point out two figures to highlight, really highlight the ample headroom that we have in our debt covenants. First, our interest coverage ratio are strong across the board.
For the retirement portfolio, income could drop by over 30% before breaching interest coverage covenants on our retirement debt. Second, values can drop 13% before breaching LTV covenants. As a reminder, our portfolio is valued on a DCF basis, and this drop would be equivalent to a further 100 basis points increase in discount rates on top of the 35 basis points already seen this year. That's before taking into account the benefit of the inflation-linked income that supports the valuations. That's it from me. I'll now hand it back over to Ben to talk about sustainability and impact.
Thanks very much, Brandon. Life this year is difficult for everyone, but comparatively less so for our residents as I'll walk you through. First of all, shared owners are in a much better position than both private renters and outright owners, as we've kind of illustrated in the top left-hand side of this page. They are having to take kind of about half of the additional cost of outright purchases and about 20% less than renters are having to take this year. That's talking all-in housing costs, so rent, mortgages, and energy bills. I also wanted to highlight some of the great work that's being done by our in-house property management team.
We've now got about 90% satisfaction levels, and over half of our retirees have experienced an improvement in their mental health on moving in. This is really important for what we're trying to do through our retirement portfolio. If you look on the right-hand side, you can see our properties are much more efficient than the market and getting better. You can see this through that 90% average EPC A to C that we have in our directly rented portfolio. That was last year. This year, we're up to 96%. That's ahead of our target to get to 100% by 2025. That's been upgrading these EPCD properties to EPCC, which generally saves residents about at least GBP 25 a month on their energy bills.
As well as the environment, it's a saving in people's pocket, which helps to keep our residents in our accommodation. Meanwhile, in Shared Ownership, the homes are even more efficient, so our average there is an EPC of B. Our shared owners are saving, on average GBP 100 a month compared to the average home on energy bills, which is big money. Clearly we're not stopping there. We continue to work with Calmar, our consultant, to develop our road to Net Zero, and that's something we'll be looking to give more detail on next year. We've also, as I kind of outlined at the top, we have a rent cap in our retirement of 6% on rent increases.
That is really important and delivers about the GBP 250K annual social dividend to our retirees, with further assistance to those most in need. We also continue to work with The Good Economy to validate kind of all of these pieces within here. We have our report that we've done now with the third time for them, will be available on the website today. If we move on to kind of talk about future and outlook, I just wanted to focus for a moment on why ReSI remains an incredibly attractive investment in the current environment. Firstly, on the left-hand side, residential is a very stable sector. It's delivered a yield, as you can see from the MSCI index, in that 3%-4% range over the past 20 years.
Importantly, over the past five years, it hasn't been much below the mid of that range. This is through very different gilt environments, as you can see, you know, around five in the noughties, to between that 1%-2% range in the teenies. Why is that the case? As you can see on the right-hand side, the incredible inflation protection residential offers and growth it offers over gilts. Generally, as illustrated by this graph, higher inflation means higher returns, obviously ignoring any one-off impact of discount rates widening.
What this means is that ReSI is a great investment in this higher inflation environment, as the higher inflation kind of is, the more attractive its kind of return is over inflation than gilts, be they fixed or inflation-linked, actually. For that reason, as you can illustrate on the right-hand side, in a kind of 6% inflation environment, you're looking at a kind of 12%-13% total return in ReSI. Incredibly attractive over inflation in gilts, where you'd just be getting that kind of 6%. If we kind of move on then to summarize and talk outlook.
Our portfolio is underpinned by an acute growing need for affordable, high-quality, safe housing, with us focused on two huge problems: growing an increasingly lonely elderly population and an inability to access homeownership. With the portfolio really fundamentally focused on long-term solutions to these problems, not sticking plasters. We've got a great portfolio of almost 3,300 homes, 97% inflation-linked income, as we mentioned. Seen in that 4.5% like-for-like rental growth last year, which is accelerating. A really long-dated 22-year average debt life, locking in those interest rates for a long period of time. All of this supports ReSI offering a superior yield versus inflation in gilts and underpinned, as I mentioned, by that low volatility in residential yields.
Meanwhile, what's going on in the wider market, there's a huge need for affordable housing. The British Property Federation estimates we need GBP 34 billion more investment in affordable housing each year. Meanwhile, the traditional players who've delivered this, housing associations, have got huge competing needs on their capital from investment in their own over 2 million homes, where they need to invest GBP 35 billion by 2030 on fire safety and energy efficiency. What does this mean for us?
It means that housing associations are looking at scale at selling off tenanted portfolios of Shared Ownership in order to fund this spend, giving us an incredibly attractive and low-risk entry point into Shared Ownership and allowing us to really scale up that proposition. If we look at the trust and the outlook for FY 2023, our focus is on maintaining dividend coverage on a consistent dividend at 5.16p and positioning for growth beyond. This target will allow us to manage some headrooms this year, so interest rate increases on that 10% floating rate debt and increasing energy costs in the communal areas of our retirement buildings which we pay for.
Also manage those kind of near-term downward pressures on MTA as I discussed, all while keeping a focus on protecting our residents, allowing them to kind of, you know, stay in their homes and maintain the income that we get from those residents, as well as investing in energy efficiency upgrades in our portfolio, which as well as being good for the environment, is a really important driver of returns as that becomes much more of a focus within the residential market, something we've started to see this year for the first time, whilst it's obviously kind of come through in commercial real estate a number of years earlier. Thanks. That's everything we wanted to cover on the presentation. Now I'm gonna hand back to Rupert to chair Q&A.
Ben, Brandon, thank you very much for that. Could I encourage people to send in any questions they want to ask the team? We've had one or two in so far. Let me kick off then. Probably one for you. We've now had three car crashes in this sector, SOHO, Civitas, and now Home REIT. Can you please explain how ReSI's business model differs from those three funds mentioned?
Yeah, sure. I think the best way to do that is to talk about our business model and how we differentiate from those trusts. We have always, from day one, been focused on having those direct leases with our customers and ensuring their good credit quality. Within our mandate, we do actually have the ability to invest in those type of propositions that they've invested in. We've reviewed a lot of those opportunities, but we've never seen one that meets our credit hurdles. We have always turned down those opportunities.
Just to give examples of what we see as good credit, so it is those 37% stakes in their homes that shared owners have, meaning, you know, you get incredibly low bad debts, around 0.1% in a normal operating environment, potentially 0.4% in a housing downturn. You've got retirees paying their rent out of pensions and that rent being set at a affordable level, meaning you've just got a really great source of private sector capital paying your rental income. Luton Borough Council, obviously who we have a relationship with in our local authority portfolio, again, double A-rated credit.
Thank you, Ben. Very clear. Okay, unsurprisingly, quite a few questions around discount rates and covenants. Let me start with one here. Can you please repeat the implied discount rate change on the covenant stats you gave? Brandon, probably one for you there.
Sure. What we said was effectively we've seen roughly 35 basis points of movement this year in discount rates and a further 100 basis points movement in discount rates could potentially cause us to trip an LTV covenant just based on the covenants as they're calculated today. Obviously we don't have a crystal ball, but generally I would say that we don't anticipate 100 basis points movement over the next year.
Thank you. On a similar theme, are you worried that interest rates continue to rise in 2023? Will the discount rate increase you've taken in FY 2022 and the expectation for current quarter be enough?
Yeah, happy to add on that one.
Sure.
Just a reminder that the discount rates are based on long-term rates rather than the shorter term rates. Whilst the Bank of England rate may be increasing, those long-term rates have generally kind of peaked and are coming down. That is something that we think is now starting to be priced in in terms of what's happening kind of post year-end in the market. As we kind of illustrate that's why we give our kind of, you know, hypothetical best guess on where the market is trading, and those shared ownership rates moving out in line with what we're seeing in retirement, taking about 6p potentially off our off our MTA.
Thank you, Ben. Does the better EPC rating allow you to charge a higher rent? Don't know which one of you'd like to take that.
happy to.
Ben, do you want to take that?
Go for it.
It is starting to now. Up to recently, no one focused on EPC ratings of properties when they moved into properties, but it did have an impact on churn, because, you know, when people were in, they'd see what the kind of energy bills they were paying were. We are just about starting to get questions now on EPC ratings of properties. Yes, there is starting to be, although it's, at the moment it's very tiny, a premium for those higher EPCs, and that's something we do expect to change through next year as people focus on this, focus on this much more. It's actually, It's always been for retirement one of the kind of...
Not the EPCs, but energy savings being one of the selling points of the proposition, being that people would move from, you know, a kind of drafty four-bed family house, into an apartment, in our buildings with the shared kind of communal areas. That would give them a dramatic saving on energy bills kind of even before kind of thinking about EPCs.
Okay, thank you. I think another one for you, Ben, here around on staircasing. Staircasing activity has declined. Do you expect this to pick back up now that mortgage rates have stabilized?
not at the moment. We anticipate staircasing rates dropping down to about kind of 1% a year. The long-term average is about 2.5%, and that was almost kind of, well, a little bit over 5%, as we came into that peak in the housing market in 2021 with a lot of people looking to kind of staircase or potentially move home post-COVID. We anticipate for the next two years that will stay relatively low, with people focused more on kind of knuckling down and also importantly, paying down their mortgage if they have excess capital.
Now that kind of average mortgage rates are around 5% compared to a Shared Ownership rent of 2.75%, it clearly saves you a lot more money on your pocket paying down the mortgage. That's before you think about the fact that mortgages are amortizing. Really people are probably paying 8% including amortization on the mortgages now. Yeah, it's probably unlikely to pick up for a couple of years.
Thank you, Ben. One here on dividend coverage. What are the expectations for dividend coverage in 2023? Good to see full cover back in Q4 2022. Brandon, do you wanna comment on dividend cover expectation?
Sure. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Rupert. I would generally say that we have a high degree of confidence in our ability to cover dividend in the range of 95%-100% in 2023. Obviously the aim is to fully cover the dividend, of course, 5.16p. There are risks to monitor and manage in 2023, and principally in terms of potential downside risk in interest rate rises and energy cost increases during the year. Look, we're monitoring the risks and managing them as we can. Again, the objective is to fully cover the dividend in 2023.
Thanks, Brandon. Next question. Are you impacted by the government rent caps on affordable housing? Ben, probably one for you, sir.
Shared Ownership sits outside of government controls on rents. That kind of 7% cap that you've seen is applicable only for social and general needs properties. We do wanna help our residents through a year, which promises to be extremely tough for households. Well, what we're intending to do is to be basically capping the kind of cash rent that we collected on Shared Ownership at a rise of 7% next year. Purely discretionary decision, likely through a kind of short-term rebate as seen you know, in the energy sector where we've had that GBP 400 rebate.
With the ability to catch back up over a period of years as inflation starts to come back down or real wage growth increases. Just to reemphasize, that is purely our decision that we are taking to protect the, the kind of long-term value in the portfolio and protect the residents.
Okay, next question is around Net Zero. You indicated previously you would set out a Net Zero strategy by FY 2022. Can you provide an update?
Happy to take that one. Yeah, we continue to work with our consultants, Comma. In terms of, you know, what we're looking at today is really whether it's possible to, you know, to reach Net Zero ahead of the grid decarbonizing, which is currently targeted for 2035. It's something we're very focused on. We are, you know, we are a bit behind schedule from what we initially announced in terms of timing. You know, just in line with Gresham House's expectations across the wider company, we really want to confirm our target only once we have all the data, you know, to really back it up. From our perspective, it is important that we get this one right.
Absolutely. Absolutely. One here on the local authority investments. I assume that's referring to Luton. What's going on with respect to potential sales here? I think it's been previously indicated that the company would be looking to exit these investments. Ben, have you got any comments on that?
Yes. Yeah, definitely. We've always said we would kind of consider a sale, but we've also always said we wanted to time that with reinvesting into income-generating Shared Ownership so that we don't have a kind of lag on income and a big impact on dividend cover. As I kind of outlined, that is something that is now starting to become possible now that we're seeing kind of a, you know, a big increase in the number of tenanted opportunities. That's something we are now kind of actively looking at. You know, looking at what the options are for doing that over the next kind of 12 months.
Thank you. Next question: Are you seeing increased or decreased investor interest in your target sectors?
Yeah. That one is a really good question. The fundamental piece is residential, particularly affordable housing as a whole, is massively underweight in most investors' portfolios. So you may have seen last week, AXA, so a big French and UK insurer, announced GBP 2 billion of investment they're going to be putting into this sector. So that's across Shared Ownership and affordable rent properties. And there's a number of other investors on that vein just really starting to increase their exposure to this sector. A lot of other insurance companies like that. So we're really seeing an increase. We're also seeing local government pension funds on the private side, increase their exposure to this sector. So it's definitely increasing.
We're in a, you know, an attractive position in that residential is underweight. Regardless of what's going on in the kind of wider environment, we do expect that to, that to increase. Fundamentally, why are people looking at the sector and kind of thinking what, you know, why should we be investing now given everything that's happened? It really touches back to that slide I showed you earlier about what residential can offer you in terms of, you know, stability of yield, plus that ability to deliver total return in excess of inflation. Providing a really attractive opportunity, out, you know, compared to, compared to gilts and fixed income, but with the ability to provide an impact while you're, while you're doing so.
A really great investment people.
Thank you, Ben. Well, that completes all the questions that we've received in. I think we'll draw things to a close there. Thank you to everyone who's dialed in this morning. Ben and Brandon, thank you for an excellent presentation, and we look forward to catching up with shareholders and answering any further questions people might have in due course. Thank you very much.