Good morning, everybody, and hopefully, if you're listening in and not present, you can hear okay. On behalf of Sun Communities and all of us here in the U.K. to do a little touring and a little discussion on our Park Holidays acquisition, welcome. We couldn't be more pleased that you took the time out from your schedules to join us today. We're especially pleased with the fact that you have the opportunity to meet management. Management is a big part of the decision that we made along with the quality assets and the other things that you're gonna hear about today with regard to Park Holidays. I'd like to start out by asking you, how many of you traveled from the U.S. to be here today by show of hands? Okay. Any of you have any delays?
Anyone delays? One delay, two delays. Exactly why you should be going on an RV trip, one of the wonderful Sun Outdoors resorts. Stay close to home, don't spend so much money on fuel, and have a terrific time. Think about that. You can book on 1-800-Outdoors, I think, Sun Outdoors.
.com.
There you go. Starting out, just a deep appreciation for being here today and taking the time. I think they talk about a picture worth many, many words. In this case, we have an exciting tour planned for you. That's what it's all about. We thought long and hard with regard to the entry into a foreign market, the U.K. market. Obviously, the fact that there's a common language here speaks strong to our ability to, I think, step over seamlessly and perform and grow a part of our most valued segment of business, as we view at the manufactured housing segment, with all the characteristics that manufactured housing is noted for. I think, aside from welcoming everybody, I'd start out just talking about that exceptional opportunity.
It's not an opportunity just to be larger, it's an opportunity to create long, medium, term and short-term growth for our shareholders, and I think that we're gonna emphasize the similarities between what you're gonna see today in the Park Holidays business and our manufactured housing business on the U.S. side, and in particular, to our snowbird business, where so many of our manufactured housing owners are in our communities with a second home, if you will. We reference them as our snowbirds. They come down to have their winter holiday when it's cold up north to the south, to places like Arizona, Florida, Texas, California. Their typical holiday season is November, December to March, mid-April. Park Holidays is the same.
While the majority of Park Holidays communities are open ten and a half months a year, they're most used during the summer season. Anywhere from when it begins turning warm here, they open up March to September, October, with the heaviest usage July, August, September season when school's out. Very similar characteristics. Our snowbirds then leave and go back to the north for that same period of time, and as they're vacationing here in the U.K. A bit of history for everybody who's wondering, you know, how we began looking at Park Holidays. Over 10 years ago, Sun was introduced to a company called Bourne Leisure in the U.K., and we spent a great deal of time in due diligence.
I personally, and the head of our acquisitions, toured all of the Bourne Leisure properties, and it resulted in a very serious offer made to the company, at which ownership accepted that offer, only after which to receive from management an offer to match Sun's offer, and they actually acquired it. It was a management buyout. I don't like to think that we were used as a stalking horse, but in essence, that's what turned out. Bourne Holidays grew from there. The important thing is that from that period on, we continued to study and watch the U.K. market because there were so many similarities to what it is we do in the U.S. There are six companies we've maintained contact with.
One of them was not Park Holidays until we got an introduction where Park Holidays was going to enter a process marketed by. Who were the bankers?
HSBC.
Okay. Much, I suppose, to the chagrin of the investment banks and like Sun likes to do, we put our foot right in the door, reached right out to management, broke the process, spent a good deal of time over here getting to meet them, touring the properties. John and I, on my second trip over here, just had our eyes open to the quality, the nature of the properties. If it weren't for Bourne Leisure and all that time we spent studying the market here, we would not have acquired the platform. Of course, it goes without saying, I'll discuss management and the quality of management before I turn it over to them. Just one note. I'll talk very briefly up here.
What I'm excited about and what Sun's U.S. team is excited about is the opportunity for all of you to meet directly, to talk to ask questions of the management team, to hear directly from them and their tenure and seasoning, and the business speaks for itself. The history started with Bourne Leisure and brought us all the way to where we are today. In April. Let's see here. Up to go forward, down to go forward. It's kinda like your elevator floors here. Okay. In April, we acquired Park Holidays U.K., 40 communities + 2 communities that are managed as a third party, just about 16,000 sites.
I think I would describe them, and I hope you find them this way, as John and I did, as just irreplaceable high-quality assets in incredible locations, predominantly seaside communities throughout what's referenced as the affluent south of England. We've shared many of the similarities that we feel are identical to Sun's manufactured housing communities, with some of the noteworthy points that I would reference here. In order to buy a home or become a homeowner in a Park Holidays community, you must, by law and regulation, own a primary residence. You have to have a primary residence. 78% of the home buyers who are acquiring a home are paying cash for that home to the Park Holidays group.
Approximately 80% of the home buyers pay cash directly, and about 78% of the home buyers are 50 years or older. I think what this translates into is a higher credit quality. As you'll hear from management, as they look back through COVID, and as they look back through the great financial crisis, there's the same kind of stickiness and continued demand in the Park Holidays resorts as there are in the Sun manufactured housing communities. I think the interest of the platform is the fundamental dynamic that we talk about in all three of our platforms. High demand, very limited supply, and huge barriers to entry. The scarcity of land that can be approved here in the U.K., very similar to what we have in the U.S.
Typically, almost every other usage you can think of would be approved before a Park Holidays community would get it. What they have found is through their experience over 15 years is that it's much easier to expand right next to an existing community, much better chance of success to get the land approved by the local councils to expand. There are 2,900 expansion sites that came with the portfolio. Since the acquisition, about 700 expansion sites have been built out and are just completed or almost nearly completed. Great growth opportunity through expansions. We've demonstrated this for a long period of time at our MH communities in the U.S. The highest margins or the greatest margin of operations drops to the bottom line because all the fixed prices are in place.
It's similar over here, only there's even a more interesting thing to point out over in Park Holidays. It costs about $22,000 to develop an expansion site, and the average margin on selling a home would be what? Pardon me. $30,000. One thing that's different over here is the capital basis, if you will, of building that site gets returned upon the sale of the home plus some. Then the coupon, as we like to refer to it, the recurring rent from the license on the site continues. For an average license period of 20 years, licenses can be 20-30 years, so when you buy a home, you sign a license for 20-30 years.
The average stay of a resident is seven years, and then that home is either sold in place, bought by Park Holidays, resold, moved to another site, sold to a different third party, and then typically an upsized home will be sold onto that site. In those cases, Jeff and management will take you through it. The selling of a home, especially a larger lodge home, can lead from an average GBP 3,500 a year all the way up to GBP 5,500-GBP 5,600 a year. As there's progression on that site, and you'll hear more about it today, the rental license or the renewed license that takes place.
As the resident gets closer to the license period, the license runs with the home, and if it's resold, the license is still good for the new resident as long as they meet the qualifications of the community. That being said, the closer you get towards the end of the license, the more ability Park Holidays has to either buy that home or reissue a new license or upsell a larger home, bringing in more and more rent. One of the things the management will talk about what we're seeing in the larger and larger home sales, where they tend to be increasing now into lodges. The average rent increases on average from around $3,500 a site to $5,500-$5,600 a site on those upgrades.
When we talk about internal and external growth, why the attraction? The fundamentals we've talked about, the high demand, low scarcity of sites. One of the things that we point to is the increased demand for vacationing domestically in the U.K., particularly through Brexit, where owning a vacation home outside the U.K. is much more difficult, and the cost is much more difficult, and the regulatory issues are much more difficult, some of which I'm sure management will go into. There is this increased demand to vacation domestically and own your vacation home domestically, and it's really been a little bit of wind at the back, even through COVID, as growth takes place in Park Holidays. Let's see here. Over 2,900 expansion sites came with the portfolio, so great internal growth opportunity.
I mentioned 700 are now developed out. Park Holidays sales team is getting busy for the holiday season to sell those homes. We have another 700 homes behind it that are actually now approved and getting ready for development. One of the big growth opportunities that Sun in the U.S. and the MH business has been through expansion. I think it can be even accelerated here. As John and I and the ops team work with the Park Holidays management team, we're really focused on acquiring contiguous land where we can expand the site count. You're gonna hear there's a glossary at the end for the words they reference sites here as pitches.
As I said, our leases are licenses, and they're very focused on the word license because a lease here gives certain legal privileges to the lessor that don't exist in the U.S. They're just licenses to occupy the land, but they can't touch land, and they don't own the land. Fragmentation outside of Park Holidays, I don't know if it's seven or ten of the largest holiday park owners own less than 7% of the total stock of over 3,000 mom-and-pop holiday parks that are out there. Great opportunity.
I guess I would suggest the vast majority of those have a lot of the very appealing low-hanging fruit of a really qualified and experienced team like Park Holidays to be able to extract market rent, reconfiguring the sites, upgrading through capital investment, and it all translates into higher rental opportunity and growth for Sun stakeholders as we go forward. Great internal growth, organic growth. Growth also through upgrading from the standard home to the large home, again, creeping up the rent, building on new sites, selling the homes, and bringing rental out the other side as well as the external growth opportunities.
I think that I'll stop there because really more than anything I wanted to get the opportunity to introduce management and you have an opportunity to meet them. We'll have question time reserved at the end for questions. On each one, we'll break down into three buses and travel. Today and tomorrow, you'll have Park Holidays management team on the buses where they can address any questions. I think here's where a picture is worth a thousand words, and then visiting a site will be worth even more. One of the things we were thinking of doing was to have a little fun and block out the sun and the Park Holidays name.
As you'll see from the pictures and some will just see virtually, you can't tell the difference between the type of communities over there and over here. A little bit more. I've touched on most of this. I would suggest that for those of you who aren't aware, part of the holiday business, I wanna say roughly 10%-12% of the sites are occupied by fleet holiday. 13%-15% are rentals similar to what we have in the U.S., park model rentals and other type of rentals where you can test drive a stay at one of the holiday parks and then buy a home. 80% of all the home buyers have stayed first in a holiday vacation or fleet home, as they call it.
In particular, almost a third of the buyers at Park Holidays have stayed in a Park Holiday vacation rental or fleet home. Really strong feeder to the business. Those homes are turned over every 5 years and actually sold. The average age of the fleet rental is 2.5 Years. I think that speaks to why they get such a big portion of the 80% choosing to stay in a Park Holiday instead of one of the other Park Holiday properties, just because of the newness, the freshness of the stock, and the fact that they pay attention to turning it over. I think that the last thing I'll close with is the ability to pass on inflationary expenses.
We talk a lot about it, both in the MH and the RV and the marina industry back in the U.S. Very similar here. These licenses provide for a pass-through or an annual rent increase that can be CPI or greater. So strong ability to pass on inflationary costs even in this environment. Then, interesting point, and we talk about this a lot in the U.S., is that the vast majority of the homeowners live within two and a half hour ride?
Yep.
Two and a half hour ride to the communities. Even in these times of high gas prices, it's not seen as a complete negative. In fact, probably causes some of the residents to spend more time in their vacation homes instead of going back and forth. No indication whatsoever that gas is having any impact on sales velocity. I got to sit in yesterday in a meeting where the sales deposit numbers came in for the day of the week last week?
Like.
They were pleasingly strong. They made us all feel very good, and you'll have an opportunity to ask those questions as we go further. In the interest of time, I'd like to ask Jeff Sills to come up here for a moment, CEO of the company. He's been here since its founding.
No, no.
No?
No, no. I'm not that old.
Oh, no. How long you been here?
16 years.
16 years. I'm fact-checking. Okay. Through the sale three times process, and hopefully you'll have nice things to say about Sun, but I think that it goes without saying the opportunity to be affiliated with a company that has longer than a 3-5 year timeline caused every time I say management to roll $25,000 of their equity, and he corrects me, GBP 25,000.
Maybe.
Also talk about a small deal is I think $180 million, so I'm getting my numbers. Could be the jet lag, but Jeff and his team are one of the principal reasons that John and I and the rest of the management team and Sun's board of directors, who weighed in heavily, okay, as we thought through this acquisition and this step into the market. I remind everybody, Karen has agreed, in the transition from Fernando taking over role as CFO of the company, Karen is in charge of oversight of strategic activity and currently very, very focused on transitioning all the accounting, the financial reporting, so that it can be properly integrated to American GAAP accounting and to our filings. That was very, very important to the board and the company.
I can't think of anybody else who could do a better job than Karen, who's been with us for 25 years. Great opportunity there. John stepped in in an active role to get things rolling and started. A wonderful start, and I can share with you that performance has outpaced underwriting, so we're very, very pleased at this time. I'll turn it over to Jeff to introduce the rest of the team and to take you through the rest of the presentation. Thanks.
Thank you, Gary. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for such kind words, Gary. I'm Jeff Sills, I'm the Chief Exec of Park Holidays. Been with the business 16 years. This is my 17th season. But prior to that, my career, as it says up there, was with Grand Metropolitan. Some of you may remember, if you're old enough, that ultimately spun out into InterContinental, Burger King, Wimpy's, God knows what else is in the licensed trade, bars and restaurants, and then came across Park Holidays some 16, 17 years ago. I'll just briefly introduce the rest of the board that are listed there. I've got Richard Ullman just to my right. Richard, you can stand up.
Doesn't make much difference.
Richard is our Chief Operating Officer. Been with the business for the last nine years. Myself and Richard worked together for six years at a previous life in Magic Pub Company and Greene King. Next to Richard is Danny, who isn't actually listed on here because Danny's on our exec. He's the ops director for the company. He's joining us on the tour this afternoon. Next to Danny is Tony, who is our stalwart of the sector. Is it you and I have been together for sixteen, seventeen years, and you've done thirty-seven, is it? Yeah. Since God was a child. Then finally, Chris, who is our CFO, who has been with us nearly three years and has brought COVID and acquisitions and all sorts with you.
Just moving on, I appreciate this is quite a busy slide. As Gary said earlier, we're the second-largest operator in the U.K. by number of parks or properties. We would be number three by number of sites. The two larger operators are Haven, which is part of the Bourne Leisure Group that Gary was referencing earlier. They also own Butlin's and Warner Hotels. PDR, Parkdean Resorts, which was a merger of Parkdean and Park Resorts about five years ago. 42 holiday parks, which I'm pleased to announce has just increased this morning by another 11. We have just acquired a group called the Park Leisure Group, which Richard will cover in a bit more detail as we go through the presentation.
Just short of 16,000 sites at the end of March of this year. Again, as Gary mentioned earlier, expansion of potentially 2,900 to add. Just in terms of our history, the business was founded in 1985 by two entrepreneurial individuals who built the business over a period of time and got it to sort of 19 or so sites or parks. Myself and Tony got involved in late 2005 through a private equity house, which was Graphite Capital. It was effectively a BIMBO, a buy and management buyout of the two partners who founded the business, one took all his money off the table and one rolled into the new business. It was originally called Cinque Ports, from the old French for five.
We changed the name quite quickly, 'cause Cinque Ports, believe it or not, doesn't do very well on search engine optimization. It is a real nightmare, and it goes back to the time of Edward the Confessor. We did eight years with Graphite, right through the GFC, where we still managed to maintain our profits and EBITDA. We then sold in 2013 to Caledonia. It's a FTSE-listed business with a private equity arm. We thought it would be a longer term capital play, but because we've been a bit capital starved for a few years, we actually had a remarkable uptick in trading, and Caledonia decided to exit after a short period of time into a company called ICG. That used to be a mezzanine finance house, again, publicly listed with a private equity arm.
We spent the last five years with them until we completed the deal. I think it was mid-November, Gary, of last year. We have had to wait for FCA approval. The deal was actually only completed eighth of April. We're only some 10 weeks with Sun. It feels a lot longer for all the right reasons. A handful of operators of our size and scale. Operators with more than 10 parks have about 7% of total stock. There are 2-10 parks for another 12%. By far the largest is the mum and pop operators, lifestyle businesses and inherited because of their background and location, probably came from farming land, where licenses have been granted over the years for them to trade as holiday parks.
That is the sweet spot where we can nip into those businesses, pay good money to buy them out, but when they've got massive accretive value for us. Just talking through the four segments of our business. Site rentals are our sticky site fees that some years, and people are committing more and more money, they are committing to stay for even longer. This is a real big cash generator for us. We work with a negative working capital. We will invoice in about September. Another 30% will be committed on direct debit. We get a lot of money up front that pays for our capital expansion and upgrades over the winter period. Holiday home sales, which make up 37% of our GP, very capital by through the manufacturers.
It sits on our park, on our show grounds, and we typically only pay for it after either 180 days or when we sell it. We make big margins and make no apologies for it on our holiday homes. It's largely driven because of the quality of our assets and the quality of the locations that we trade in. We have maintained those robust margins right through the economic cycles, whether that be the GFC or Brexit or Covid or anything else. Holiday rentals are very important to us. This is the feeder of people holidaying with us that today's holidaymaker is tomorrow's buyer. They are typically younger people with families. They use much more of the ancillary facilities that we have, the amenities that we have on the parks.
Actually, that's what drives the character and the liveliness on some of the parks as well. Then in terms of our site fees, as I mentioned earlier, reliable and recurring. You can see there, our ownership numbers are increasing at a very steady rate over the last five or six years with a CAGR 11.6% in terms of number of owners of holiday homes at each year-end. And again, as Gary mentioned, we have a track record of increasing those site fees at a higher than inflationary rate. You also see there that our ownership mix, down in the bottom right, is continuing to increase for larger units and lodges. I'll come on to that in a sec in terms of what they look like. And again, they tend to be the more expensive units.
The more that people are spending, the more committed they are, the longer they typically stay with us. Just to give you an idea of the units, and you'll see all of these later on today. We refer to a standard unit as being anything up to 12 ft wide. When it goes from 12 ft to 14 ft, we call it a large. When it goes to 20 ft, anything above 16, but typically 20 ft, we call it a lodge. Those lodges are, those of you from the U.K. would have seen them in two halves going down motorways with one side sheeted up. They're actually delivered in two sections and put together on-site. The site fees that we generate on those rise proportionately as the units get larger and larger. With that, I'll hand over to you, Richard.
Morning, everyone. I couldn't help the irony of the poster over there where it says, "Go by train," but anyway. I'm Richard Ullman, I'm the Chief Operating Officer. I've been with the business for about 10 years, and I just wanna share with you a little bit more detail about a couple of aspects of the business, and then look a little bit more forward to where we are with acquisitions and how we develop out our sites. Both Gary and Jeff have touched on this already, but holiday homes, for us, it is a fundamental part of what we do. It's an incredibly resilient part of the business. All through every economic cycle we've been through, it's carried on growing and incredibly resilient to it. The primary purpose of it is it drives pitch fees.
The reason why it drives pitch fees is it fills. Whether that's through expansion or through natural turnover of our owners moving on. This is the key driver in terms of getting those pitch fees to move forward for us. We get sales from two sources. One is new business. That is our marketing team is bringing people into the parks. And we sell on and we fill a vacant pitch, or people are enjoying themselves so much with us, they part exchange with us, so they're looking to upgrade to a newer unit. Or what Jeff was touching on a minute ago, we're increasingly building larger pitches, more large pitches, more lodge pitches, so people then aspire to have a bigger unit. Yeah, it's the old neighbor next door. What have they got? I want to move up to that.
That's what drives our caravan sales there. Typically, our owners stay with us 7-9 years. Seven years for an ordinary holiday home, nine years if you're a lodge owner. We have increasingly led the way within the market in terms of making standard larger and lodges, which you see over there. We love that because the bigger the pitch we get, the greater the site fee is. Gary touched on it earlier. It's GBP 3.7K for a standard average caravan pitch. It's GBP 5.5K for a lodge pitch. One of the benefits of being now with Sun is we can increase our upgrade program, drive in more larger and lodge pitches, which will further drive caravan sales for us. Holiday home rentals. In its own right, holiday home rentals for us is a fantastic profit contributor.
As Gary touched on, the primary reason we do holiday rentals, it is our shop window to the consumer of tomorrow, to the caravan owner of tomorrow. If I just take you there. 80% of home buyers have holidayed on a U.K. holiday park. Really one of the important things I want to get across here, in the U.K., going on a short holiday vacation in a holiday park is part of our DNA. Chris, our CFO, he was holidaying there with his family this weekend. Last year, I holidayed there with my family. Yeah, it's what we do. Most importantly, this stat here, last year, 33% of people who bought with us had holidayed on a Park Holidays park, yeah? It's a fantastic shop window, brilliant piece of marketing for us.
The reason why we invested very heavily in our fleet over the last 10 years is that we wanna bring that standard up. People who are new to the market, they don't understand how far the quality of a holiday home has come on, and you'll get to see that when we go to Rye Harbour. We put them in the very best units. They understand the quality of them, give them a great experience. We get great Tripadvisor reviews and other social media reviews. When people are researching whether or not they wanna buy on the park, they're looking up at all this stuff. They've had a great experience. It leads them to be the buyers of the future. That might be in a year or two's time, that might be in 10 years' time when their kids have grown up, they've got more disposable income.
What's been crucial is that all feeds through to the site fees. Sticky site fees really. You can see across here, although the quantum of our fleet has grown over the years with the business, the percentage of our sites which are occupied by fleet does not change. It fluctuates between 13% and 15%. That's 'cause we deploy our fleet strategically. When we make an acquisition, we typically are buying that park because either we can build loads of expansion pitches or it's got lots of vacant pitches. We'll drive fleet in there in the early days for holiday rentals. Those go through, it helps market the park. As the park then grows and matures and more owners are coming through and more site fee revenues coming through, we'll reduce that fleet back.
Again, we'll go to a couple of parks on the tours where you can see where that fleet has come right back from where it used to be. In terms of robust organic growth and how we acquire the business, we're quite unique. We have our own planning department, which no other business in the sector has, and we have our own property department. Between that is what's driven the robust pipeline of 2,900 sites that we still have to build and expand. The way we go and expand our businesses, we either get planning on land we already own. We love to convert the touring business, which is RV business in the U.S. That's quite easy to convert across in terms of additional sites. We love to buy bolt-on land or bolt-on parks beside our existing parks.
It's a much easier way to grow in terms of planning. We like to acquire standalone parks or even ground-up parks. One of the real attractions for us with partnering up with Sun is you can see in the light blue column here, on the back of the investment coming in and the encouragement from the team at Sun, we've put more sites into the ground than we've ever done before this winter. We're flying away with that, and we're gonna put another 700 in next year. The other really exciting part is we're now in a position that we can go ahead and buy ground-up sites, so we can build from the ground up, which is a position we've never been in before.
Most of our competitors who are currently backed by private equity, their returns need much more patient and long-term vision, and they're not in a position to do it. It gives us a unique advantage in the acquisition market. Once we've built the parks out, it's absolutely fantastic. We've got that very strong site fee revenue coming through, but then the maintenance CapEx becomes very low. The great news is, as Jeff touched on, we closed on Park Leisure today. It's a fantastic acquisition for us. 11 parks, primarily across the north of England and down in Cornwall. It dovetails brilliantly with the Bridge Leisure acquisition we made just over a year ago, which then just strengthens our footprint further up the country. These are premium parks, really premium parks.
We get immediate cost reduction from closing the head office, but we've got all the usual advantages of being able to drive fleet in there for rental growth. We've got expansion growth in there. A key point down here is that already this is a heavily established owner-occupied business. You can see where the average unit margin is at GBP 35K, so that's a premium on what we make. The site fees are actually at suboptimal level at the moment. We got a fantastic opportunity to drive the site fees much harder here. Strengthens our position geographically, multiple avenues of growth, and it gives us a broader range of parks, premium parks, all the way down to then the sort of more holiday-driven parks. These are just a couple of pictures to give you an idea of the quality of the stay.
Over on the right-hand side, that's Cadnant, which is up on Anglesey, which is North Wales. Then you've got Ribble Valley in Yorkshire there, and Oyster Bay down here in Cornwall. Really, really fantastic top quality parks. Just one more slide for me. Just wanted to touch on our ESG credentials. We're super proud. We work with Veolia, a waste recycling firm in the U.K. None of our waste goes to landfill. It all goes to their recycling centers. We're working hard in terms of other recycling programs and energy efficiency savings. Working very hard with the manufacturers who are primarily based in Hull about more sustainable use of solar energy, wind energy, because we're out by the coast, should be achievable.
We do a lot of work around the community, and we've been working very hard with the guys already over at Sun in terms of sharing ideas. In particular, we support Give Us Time, which supports military families in the U.K. Every park will also have their own preferred community programs and charities which they support. All in all, we're very excited to be now part of the Sun family and working forward with Sun. Gary.
That concludes our formal presentation. Do we have anything else that you wanted to cover before we open up to Q&A? We got slides?
A few more.
A few more slides. Okay. We covered, I think, most of this. In closing, we talked about the size and scale of the acquisition, the similarities of how we're viewing the cash flow and how over a period of time we expect to expand, develop, acquire, sell homes, very much like our MH model for those that have followed us for the expansion, under that rate that we're paying for the cash flow that existed. We talked a bit about operating through the difficult cycles, increased demand right now brought by Brexit, and the whole concept of staying closer to home. Oh my, there are slides there. Total market value in 2021, this is on a per location site for the parks.
Per location. Per location, yeah.
We talked about the close proximity. 75% of the current market is within 90 mi drive of Park Holidays community. Excellent opportunity. The increase in geographic footprint also with the transaction with the Bridge Leisure before we bought the portfolio and then Park Leisure now allows the scalability of the branding, if you will. Staying at a Park Holidays let home for a short vacation leads into a better opportunity to buy a home and for us to sell one. The domestic holidays, Brexit we touched on, and we just talked a little about ESG. That does take us to the end. You brought me up here to just summarize, huh, before we turn it over to you. Again, someone had asked a question before about Stamp Duty.
One of the unique things about the classification of the second home holiday business is there is no Stamp Duty on these homes. A bit of favorable taxation, if you will, in an otherwise taxable society. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to management and myself. John, you have something to add?
Sorry. Next slide.
Absolutely.
I think one of the things you see today in terms of the quality of the assets that you see across these six properties and why consumers make those decisions. The other thing I wanted to just emphasize a little bit was on the upgrades, which is, you know, very similar to what we have in the United States. There's a life cycle with the consumer and sort of how they graduate through within the holiday parks. A consumer might start with, you know, a smaller home, like Jeff was talking about, a 12-wide house that would be more of an entry-level holiday home that a holiday homeowner would purchase. Then after time, they would upgrade to a bigger home or a lodge.
When you're looking at that seven years that we were talking about, that figure is actually longer if you actually go through the life cycle, how they stay in the community and how they upgrade. What's better, or what's on top of that, I should say, is that we resell that home again to somebody else, setting up another recurring revenue stream that happens within the community. That's one of the ways. That's one of the reasons why, you know, we've gone further as a team in terms of the acceleration of development sites that we're gonna do, and expansions within the communities themselves.
Again, I think for many of you'll find, hopefully you're already hearing that much of the story that we're telling about how it works here sounds very familiar to what we shared with you in terms of the United States and how our business runs there. That's like Gary said, when I got here with Gary, I got to my first park, it took me about 10 minutes to recognize a couple of things which you'll see today. One, which hopefully you all will say by the end of these two days is exactly what you saw as well. Anyway, I will step away from podium.
Okay. Great time for Q&A. What's our schedule from here? 1:05? Okay. I would open it up at this time, and feel free, anyone from the management team, if you wanna address any question that gets asked to step up here. I'll leave the mic up here.
How the economics work as we sell the home. How the economics work of the resale of the home. If it's a 20-year license, is the home basically depreciating at least 5% per year?
Right. Depreciation upfront. Baseline depreciation. It actually plays into our hands when we're recycling our used fleet, as Richard said earlier. All of our fleet is no more than five years old, so we average two and a half years, as Gary mentioned as well. Five-year-old fleet vans being available to us as sales stock, they've had a massive chunk of the depreciation in them, and we can therefore retail them at sensible retail price, but still make a very good margin on it. Does that help?
How do you make the margin?
Because we're actually still retailing it for more than we paid for that unit in the first place.
I'm just wondering why that second home buyer would pay, you know, a high home price if there's only, you know, X amount of years remaining.
Just the market. Just in terms of the. You know, we make very strong margins on something that comes into us new from factory. We can reduce that retail price to match the depreciation of a used unit, but still make good margin.
Very strong barriers to entry. If you've got a premium park, you get onto that park, and so it's very difficult for people winning premium in terms of the margin to get onto the park.
that the demand for the site, for the pitch, is what allows for the profit above and beyond the basic pitch.
Also single-family home as well. It's quite a very big home.
What happens if someone buys a home with five years remaining on the license?
Sorry, what?
If there's five years remaining on the license as an example, what happens to that home buyer?
What we typically do is grant a 20-year license on a caravan, which are the 12 and 14 ft units you saw there, and a 30-year license if it's on a lodge. If somebody's getting close to the end of that license period, or if we're selling something that's
Close to the end of the license period in terms of the age of the unit, we will always grant a minimum of five years and be very upfront with people in terms of when their license actually expires. As Gary mentioned earlier, and as Richard has mentioned, what quite often happens is people can see well in advance what's likely to happen, and therefore upgrade before they get to the end, anywhere near the end of that term.
Within five years, they have to buy a new home on that lot?
Where do these homes go when they're sold off-site? Like, are other parks?
We can move homes within our own parks because we've got more premium parks and, you know, obviously then it moves up and down the scale. You'll see that on the tours. When they go to what's known as caravan traders, and then they can typically be traded off to be put in farmers' fields to be used for seasonal employees. Quite a lot get shipped off to the continent and then recycled and refurbished.
For the license holder, like someone who moves it, I mean, to our company? Or can they go to, like, a dealer and buy?
They can only buy through us, or they can privately buy through a private sale, which we take a commission on, which is they're already buying, you know, somebody's unit, which is already sited.
Is that part of what keeps, like, the pricing elevated? Like, for the sale?
Yes, sir.
Is your license expiration schedule pretty consistent over the next couple of years? Is it lumpy? Do you have any outsized expirations?
No, it's fairly linear. Yeah.
Do you expect the pace of upgrades to be consistent as well, or is that increasing in frequency given what's going on with the economy or the market in general?
Gary, how are you thinking about allocating capital to Park Holidays versus the other verticals, especially if it becomes more scarce?
Well, certainly, it already is more scarce with the marketplace weighing in. I think, you know, for those of you who have followed the company and for those of you who are new, I think with a very sharp pencil, I think we've always had a sharp pencil. We've had to sharpen it even further. We got out of a day of meetings yesterday carefully talking about that discussion and within our platforms and within what we've discussed before. I mean, we look at our free cash flow, we look at the unused equity that we have to take down on a forward. We look at our availability of debt. We look at our recirculation of potential capital.
All those opportunities as a company as a whole. From within there, we're very cautious about how we think of things. I think right now we're going to be very focused over here on the opportunity growth through expansion and development. It has the highest returns. In the U.S., those returns have always been in the 12%-14% range. Again, fixed prices are in place, the amenities are in place, the so forth. I think it'll be the greatest return for our shareholders. I think with the Park Leisure opportunity of really being I think we underscored it really the highest grade holiday resorts that exist today, holiday communities from north to south, there's a great footprint, great ability to scale that.
Obviously the management team here will absorb a lot of the G&A that exists over there at the properties. For the foreseeable future, you know, onesies and twosies. Mostly, everything that we looked at yesterday was scalability of expanding existing properties. It's mostly what we're thinking of here. I emphasize again, we have no mind whatsoever to be anywhere but the U.K. There is not any intention of moving outside the U.K and really focusing on the platform we have here as it was described today, so well within our capital means.
From a geographics perspective, I guess, you know, how does your portfolio compare to your larger peer group? You know, given that the Park Leisure acquisition, it seems like you now have some more exposure in the North. Is that primarily gonna be focused on the premium assets, or is there appetite to kind of just grow there?
We primarily, we've always been southern based and particularly around sort of London and the Southeast, which has been very economically strong. As we expand further north, it is primarily driven at high quality assets. The Park Leisure estate is right in the top quality. We're looking at some other bits and pieces. All of that is top quality and, you know, very much focused on, you know, an owner-driven business. Yeah, very much higher quality the further north you go. Very strong demographics in the Southeast.
The point everyone's been mentioning, the cross-selling of ownership towards like holidaymakers, we didn't have the locations to be able to do that in the North. Now we do. That cross-selling becomes a stronger part of the business going forward, de-risks and increases the proportion of sticky pitch fees as we move forward.
Could you guys talk a bit about the zoning and the planning process involved in getting a greenfield to what it is?
Yeah. Yeah. As a zoning planning process, it's you know, similarly to the U.S. It's not a straightforward exercise in terms of every local planning authority, you know, works within a five-year framework. They set a framework, and that will ultimately set out how far they wanna expand with holiday market and how far they don't, and so on. The reason why we have our planning team in-house is they work very closely. They've built up long relationships with all the planning authorities around us. They understand what is and isn't feasible. If we're looking at a piece of land or an acquisition, then you know, we've got a full analysis done on it before we even make an offer about what our prospects are of expanding that.
We tend to work with the friendlier local authorities where we know we're gonna find good growth and a good response to tourism. You just go through a process. Ultimately, we'll usually put a pre-application in which takes six weeks to get an initial response. You then go through a 12-week planning process, and then if that is unsuccessful, you then have an opportunity to appeal that if that isn't. That should all be driven by framework, and the appeal process is all absolutely driven by framework. You can get a little bit of NIMBYism in the local areas, but you always have the fallback of an appeal process.
On average, what would you say?
Matt, who's our planning director, he's got an 85% success rate in terms of our planning applications. You know, that's probably against an average which we picked up from a number of the agents, which is about 73%. You know, we have a distinct advantage having this in-house planning team. You know, it's really won us some great rewards.
How does the pricing work on the annual license fees? Is that explicitly RPI or CPI linked? Is the spots kind of license annual fees growing in excess of RPI or CPI over time?
There's no regulation. It's not capped at all. That's residential.
Okay.
We can put it up by what we can justify. Investments in the parks, wage inflation, all of those things we can pass through CPI plus. There's no regulation even planned or coming that we can see on that on the holiday side.
Do you think you can still really do CPI plus this year, even with CPI, where it's gonna be in kind of tightening budget?
Our cost inflation will be less than CPI, and we'll be able to recover that.
In terms of Park Leisure, what's the demographic mix of that customer relative to the traditional holiday park customers? It seems like they're a bit more higher end, but maybe if you can give us some more details, it'd be great.
I don't think we've got any specific statistics, but it's definitely coming. You know, it's definitely a very affluent demographic it's pulling from.
They're older and more affluent, hence the segment of the holidaymaker base and the fact that they're able to pay with cash, you know, goes to that higher demographic.
Right. Can you cross-sell eventually? Can you sell upgrades from, you know, your traditional, you know, customer base to their customer base? How will it work over time?
Yeah, absolutely. There's that demographic changes as they get older. They the demographic suits the ownership model.
Right. Maybe just one more in terms of, I guess, the availability of homes. If there's a shortage of MH homes in the U.S., are there a lot of caravan homes available for purchase here in the U.K., or is it still limited like we see other types of approaches?
It's been lumpy. COVID has impacted the manufacturing process. You know, at different times there have been shortage of doors, windows, soft furnishings. We work very closely with manufacturers to take a long-term view and make sure we've got orders in place. Yes, at times there have been more customers than we've had product to sell. Thankfully, that is now easing through, and our go-forward look on stock is something we're happy with.
Are there any implications of Parkdean halting its sale process on the business? Or how should we think about, you know, the implications of that on the sector as a whole?
Thank you. How much of this is recorded? I don't think there is any implication in terms of the future, particularly sort of the short to medium term. Just reading sort of Bloomberg yesterday in terms of, you know, CPI, RPI in the U.K. may hit 3%. Myself and Chris were just having the conversation this morning that 3% is well below the average if you go back enough years that I can certainly remember. So I don't think we're looking at inflation at sort of, you know, Black Monday that we had when it hit 15% in the eighties or whatever. I think clearly the fact that there is increasing inflation and the fact that there's all this talk about recession has maybe had an impact on the Parkdean Resorts process.
I think the Parkdean Resorts business model is materially different to ours. They focus very much more on a fleet-driven operation with a high secondary spend, which is much more akin to the old Haven model, and still is what Haven do day in, day out to this day. We are far more oriented towards the owner model, and we can operate in smaller parks because we haven't got that massive amenity overhead in terms of, you know, lifeguards and entertainers and all the rest that goes with it. We are actually able to be more nimble in terms of what we can purchase, when it becomes available, and we're not constrained by a brand in terms of what it represents either. Our parks are very diverse.
They're not cookie cutter, and they appeal to different sectors of the market. Whereas Haven in particular, and Parkdean Resorts increasingly are targeting just one sector of the market that is a very much more discretionary spend, in my view.
To add, it's been easier for us to premiumize our product because we're not in that demographic. For us, it's about quality, not just quantity. You know, without wanting to rubbish another's business model, their model is more about quantity. We have surpassed them in terms of quality over recent years.
A follow-up question on the licenses. Could you give us a sense for the last two or three years, what was the rate of the annual increases and what you expect over the next two or three years?
About 4.5.
Okay.
The last two to three years. I would expect it's gonna be just because of you know, the headlines around RPI and CPI. As Chris mentioned earlier, we don't suffer the full effects of that headline inflationary rate, so we will more than recover any increase in cost in our G&A.
Final one from me. The proportion of the total profit from home sales, I think high 30s% today, where do you expect that to be five years from now?
I think as we increasingly expand the portfolio, the site fee element will inevitably increase. The ancillary spend from amenities will probably stay much the same as a fixed figure, but will decrease as a percentage. I think the holiday home margin contribution, if you like, will decrease a bit as well. It'll be all in favor within that 100% sort of full amount. It will all be in favor of the site fees going forward.
Right. Could you give me a sense for how much it'll shrink? The 37 or 38? Are we still talking 35, 30, 25, 10?
It'd be 30.
30? Yeah. Thank you.
Sorry.
Yeah. Like, if we looked at the map of the U.K., most of your properties are in the southeast. Is that kinda just your footprint, or could you expand, like, around the whole country? Just what does the industry look like?
That's our footprint. If you looked at the pitch map of Parkdean Resorts or Haven, it's very broadly spread across the country, and primarily coastal, though.
The distribution is lumpy. That goes to the history of planning in the sector. It's difficult to get planning consent now, so it's quirky where parks were developed in the fifties and sixties. There are certain areas which are lumpy. Skegness and Lincolnshire, for example. Part of the North Wales coast where we're not there at the moment. There is a higher supply there. We've tried to focus on areas where a relatively low supply, where we can work the premiumized model.
Sun talks about one of the defining characteristics of its businesses being low new supply. How much is new supply these days or recent history as a percentage of stock, and why should new supply be low over time?
Chris, do you wanna answer that?
Yeah, sure. It's less than 1% increase in pitches, and if you took a view since the 1970s, there's actually fewer pitches today than there were then, and part of that is the redevelopment of parks for larger homes with small numbers on the site. This goes to what's been said about planning. Zoning, as it would be described in the U.S., it is very, very difficult when you see some of the sites today. They're in beautiful locations, and if you had farmland and said the local authority would like to develop a caravan park with these beautiful views out to sea, the answer would be no. You know, what is developed today is pretty much what's gonna exist forever.
There are opportunities on adjoining land, et cetera, and the change of use of some low use assets such as touring pitches, but new parks are virtually impossible, hence the premium value.
Thank you very much for joining. We have now just finished the presentation and Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's teleconference. You may now disconnect.