Okay, so thank you for standing by and Welcome to the Aspen Investor Update Web Conference. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question at the Q&A session, please click on the raise hand emoji, and I will present you to the speakers. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. David Dixon and Mr. John Carter, joint CEOs of Aspen, Mr. Patrick Maddern, Head of Asset Management, and Mr. Hamish Perks, Transaction Manager at Aspen. Please go ahead. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. We wanted to start with a bit of context. The first chart in our slide pack is the supply of housing in Australia for the last 40 years, and the green box represents the target that the government has set for the next five years of 1.2 million houses. In our opinion, that 1.2 is probably around the level that's required. It's not aspirational, as the government would say, considering the 1%-2% population growth, considering obsolescence, considering that current vacancy rates for most markets are less than 1%. So we think that's a reasonable target for the industry to aim at over the next five years, so we think that's a reasonable target for the industry to aim at over the next five years. The problem is it's about 60,000 completions per quarter, and Australia has been able to deliver that twice. That was delivered in the COVID era when governments were handing out AUD 50,000 grants that were stamped due to relief, and there were 0% cash rates. Going forward, if you notice the dark blue bars, the supply of housing is really flatlining, has been for the last 20 years because we're running out of land in good locations to have large housing lots. So the gap really needs to be made up by apartments in infill locations in metropolitan areas close to jobs. The problem with that is that it costs about twice as much to build apartment square meters, and it takes about three times as long. The market is much more reliant on investors funding it than homeowners. Second slide, it's a really good piece of work that the Centre for International Economics recently released for the New South Wales Treasury. We think it's a reasonable approximation for the cost of supplying apartments in average locations in metropolitan areas of average quality of about 100 square meters. It's a really good representation of the cost of supplying the mass market housing in Australia. I think we think they did quite a good job of it. As you can see, the problem is the gray bars, the average asking price for an apartment in these markets for every market is currently below cost of production. How do we solve it? There's a lot of commentary around about lower interest rates somehow resolving the problem. We don't think that's going to be enough. We think there needs to be improved productivity in the building industry. It's an industry that's had zero productivity gain for 30-40 years. We need governments to start approving construction quicker. We need quicker utility connections. But we also need real growth in household income because we think those grey bars are as much as sort of the mid-market can really afford. So I don't think we should sit back hoping that households want to push out the price of housing again. I think there needs to be a combination of lower production cost and a bit better affordability with real household incomes improving. The yellow dots is where Aspen's book values are at the moment for Aspen's product. We're not suggesting that we have 100 square meter apartments, but it really shows how protected our portfolio is. We just think there's no ability for anyone to supply our markets at these sorts of price points that we own real estate at. Over to the results. So the comprehensive income for the HAF is about AUD 0.21 annualized. That's another 20% return on book equity. That's been our average for the last five and a half years. The chart to the right shows the breakup of that total value creation between what we call underlying earnings, the dark blue bars, and the rest being increasing net asset value. Importantly, our definition of underlying earnings really relates to sort of FFO style concepts. It's really about cash generation. Importantly, we add a lot more value in our net asset value through refurbishing buildings, dwellings, and increasing the rent and value of those dwellings. So we just think it's important for investors to understand that a lot more of our value add, or a lot of our value add, is coming from NAV creation. So we'd just like to focus people's attention to comprehensive income, which is the total value creation. Splitting those two components up, EPS for the HAF was AUD 0.081 a share, up 18% on PCP. That's in line, roughly in line with the 20% per annum growth that we've achieved in EPS over the last five and a half years. Net asset value was up 7% on the HAF to AUD 2.39 pre-deferred tax liability. Again, pretty consistent with earnings growth, up 18% per annum. Our NAV growth has not been driven by any change in weighted average cap rates. It's all been about income creation and improving the value of the portfolio over time. We'll provide more detail in further slides, but the quick snapshot is the net rental income grew 13% in the HAF on PCP. The margin was up one percentage point, and that was despite about AUD 1 million of hits to net rental income that we believe are quite one-off in nature. It's not always a perfect science, but things like visa changes, sudden visa changes for students, the tomato virus outbreak in South Australia, and a project disruption for one of our corporate customers probably cost about AUD 1 million in the HAF. Development profit up a lot further, 68%, at a 6 percentage point improvement in margin. Corporate overheads are under control. So total EBITDA are up 33% and EPS up 18%. We provide this simplified balance sheet for people, and this is how we think of the business. We have two really parts of our business, one being rentals, one being development. The value of our rental portfolio is AUD 530 million at a 6.8% cap rate. It's only AUD 133,000 a dwelling/site. The development book, total value of the development book is AUD 63 million. That comprises land, any bit of spare land in the entire business that can be developed to create a development profit. It includes civil inventory and manufactured housing inventory. As you can see, the inventory for houses increased 62% in the HAF. That's really because we've been setting up the business to be able to sell more manufactured houses under our lifestyle model going forward. And this year, we're running at about 200, a production of 200, and a sales rate at the moment of about 100-110 per annum. So we've deliberately dialed up that development business. It looks like at the top line, the portfolio hasn't changed at all, the number of dwellings and sites, but a lot changed in the HAF. We sold AUD 51 million of assets, being our half of our Eureka stake, 14 Burleigh Heads townhouses, and six Perth houses with relatively high rents. And we acquired 36 units of Viveash at only AUD 60,000 each and a one-hectare block of land next to our Alexandrina Cove Lifestyle Village in Coorong Quays, which was scrip funded, and we created 30 new leased lifestyle sites. So a lot happened in the recycling part of our business, but the total number of widgets didn't change. And then again, a simplified balance sheet. Two big changes really with that frame up of AUD 51 million of cash. Our gearing reduced to 21%. Our interest cover ratio, which is a 12-month trailing number of four times, it's currently running above five times. So we think we put our balance sheet in a really strong position to be able to sort of fund our next phase of growth. Here's an example of our rental pool. So we rent high-rise buildings, two three-story walk-ups. We rent land underneath lifestyle houses, and we rent little cabins in caravan parks. At the end of the day, they're all dwellings. Importantly, we like to own the underlying land in great locations that are densifying and increase in value in real terms over time. And that's really what ties it all together. We have started really talking more about the rental pool in total because it's highly diversified. It all acts in a very similar way to each other rather than talking too much about the different property types because ultimately, over the long run, they're driven by the same fundamentals. So turning to the rental pool, the average number of units of either dwellings or sites rented over their HAF increased by 7%. Our average net rent was up 6% to drive total net income growth, net rental income growth of 13%. Importantly, we kept our gross rental growth on average at only 4%. For the last five years, our average gross rent per dwelling site has only increased at around inflation, so through this recycling and through acquisitions, we've managed to keep a really good lid on average rents to keep them competitive, so the great rental growth performance really hasn't been about pushing high rents onto customers. A lot of it's come through this value add, refurbishing units, and recycling and repositioning the portfolio, and then we show the different property types. I said over the long run, fundamentals are the same across all three property types. We want to own good blocks of land, but clearly over the short term, the markets perform very differently. We've been very well positioned in our residential business in three of the strongest markets, if you like. Perth and Brisbane, obviously being geographies, have been among the strongest cities, but the low rent points have grown faster than high rent points, and that's because of affordability issues. So we had 12% average increase in rent, but we had 22% more dwellings in that business to grow that part of the business by 36%. Our lifestyle business has underlying growth of about 15% per annum in net rent. 10% of that comes from developing new lifestyle sites or over 10% and about 3% to 4% rent bumps, and our rents, in our opinion, being so far below Commonwealth Rent Assistance, are sustainable even if we grow them in real terms over many years to come. The reason it's not quite 15% at the moment is that we're acquiring villages out of receiverships and distressed situations that are contributing or dragging down the total rental growth, but clearly setting us up for better growth in the future. We started the year believing that Parks would be a pretty flat return, and that's turned out to be the case. However, I would say that the two disruptions in Darwin and Highway One were unexpected. So it probably did perform better than we thought. The January period was good for our New South Wales holiday parks, so we're sort of feeling more confident now than we were. We were a bit cautious six months ago. I think the portfolio is holding together quite well. So for a total result, net rental income up 13% for the HAF. Next slide. So just going into the development business now. As we foreshadowed at the back end of last year, we were sort of ramping up production in order to do more sales both in this year and in following years. Just this picture here is showing the development that's going on at Highway 1, which is just north of Adelaide. The suburb immediately adjacent to this is Paralowie, where houses are selling for in the high AUD 600,000s to low AUD 700,000. We're proposing for these here to sell under AUD 400,000, and we'll have these available for sale towards the back end of this financial year. As you can see, we'll present once it's completed as a suburb and a lot like some of the other areas that we've got, both at Sweetwater, Strathalbyn, ACLV. This is just an example of how we're transforming some of the assets that we've got. Just having a look at the development metrics for the HAF, so across the board, the developments perform very well. Settlements are up, but probably most importantly, you can see that the dark blue represents the land leased to settlements, and they're more profitable, and they're also generating an annuity income for us going forward. That's had strong growth, and we expect to see that continue into the second half. The same can be said for the sales price, although the sales price we still think is very competitive at AUD 470,000. We think that that's across our markets below median pricing and that we think that we're working very hard to keep those prices down because we are committed to make sure that we are actually sort of providing affordable accommodation. On top of that as well, you can see that the development margin that we're making has increased significantly from the PCP. That's a little bit skewed as a result of the fact that there's more land lease in there, so the land sales have a lower dollar margin for us, but you can see that that's growing as well, and that's partly to do as well with the fact that we've seen cost stabilization in the building industry, and so what we're seeing is that when we're recontracting on the next stages, they're at or around where we did on the last stage, and then finally, going across to the actual profit, both of those two things have led to an increased profit of 68%. You can also see that the sort of mix now of development profit to our net rental income is we're not sort of staying so dogmatically to that 80-20 that we've spoken about previously. We're still not going wildly above that, but it is pushing up a little bit further. I guess across the portfolio as well, you can just see that even though we are dialing up the amount of development that we're doing, that the returns that we're producing are still excellent. The green line is the margin. The margins have increased from 27% to 33% for this HAF. We target around about 30%, and we think that we can continue to deliver that going forward. The ROIC on this or the return on invested capital, you can see is sitting at around about 20%, and that's what we target as well, even though we've increased, obviously, the number of assets under development. We're still managing to maintain that ROIC of around about 20%. And then this here is just a summary of basically what we've just gone through, but you can see here that we're skewing further to lifestyle sales than we had previously, and we'll continue to do that moving forward. Finally, I guess having a look here, you can see that the actual portfolio diversity across the rentals and also the development business is improving as we go along. So you can see for the half year, 2023 into 2024, we now have a greater spread and mix across the residential, lifestyle, and parks. We think that is improving our portfolio and reducing risk. And then on the development profit side, you can see that we obviously mentioned earlier that the 80-20 was something that we're working quite closely to. Here, we've gone away from that, but not a long way apart from that. Here, it's about 75-25. And we think that there's still growth in the development business, but we also think there's growth in the rental pool too. Just turning to Ravenswood, which we announced today. So we're really excited about this acquisition. It's a bit over 70 km from Perth to the south. It's close to our Mandurah Gardens village. So we think there'll be some synergies with the property and Mandurah. The area's population is growing quickly. There's land lots being developed adjacent to the site, which is selling around AUD 250,000. And there's also a mature retirement village adjoining us, which you can see here, which is in white. And those older houses, that's completed village. Those older houses are selling in the mid-400 range. So it's good scale. So there's about 26 hectares. It has an overlay over the site, which currently envisages 360 residential lots. Our plan with this property is to apply for a change so that we can increase the lots and develop part of it as a land lease and the rest of it as housing lots. And so that process, we're embarking on at the moment. The purchase price at AUD 12 million is about AUD 460,000 per hectare, and it's about AUD 30,000 per current site. So we think those metrics are really attractive. It fits in well with the portfolio, and we want to continue the rollout of assets, and we want to have a bigger pipeline of assets. We can also, as David mentioned, we can fund these acquisitions out of our current liquidity at the moment. Just turning to the updated guidance. So it's really pleasing today to be able to announce the increase in the underlying EPS to AUD 0.167 for the financial year. We've also tried to give a bit more information. So we've got an underlying EBITDA of AUD 41.5 million. The DPS is AUD 0.10. Just turning to the two parts of the business. In the rental side of the business, the residential rents are still expected to increase. The shorter stay is trading satisfactorily at the moment. We have a larger rental pool, which will start to develop in this half. We definitely have more land lease rentals, and we'll also have 24 more units at Viveash that should be completed in this half. We're expecting a net rental income of AUD 35 million in this FY. Turning to development, the lifestyle house sales, there's no doubt that they're both pricing and velocity. We're going well at the moment. Patrick's talked to the margins. We're very happy with them. We're getting the benefit of having a number of different projects now. We have ramped up the production so that we've now got 200 houses and land lots being created this year. We wanted to give a bit of guidance on the settlements. We've talked previously about 110 for this current year. We're giving some guidance to the market of 140 for FY 2026 and 170 for FY 2027. Pleasingly, we currently have already 101 settlements and contracts on hand. What does that mean? At the moment, it means looking at the amount that can be settled in this current financial year that we've got around 84% of the second half forecast. So we're forecasting a total of AUD 12.5 million in development profit for this financial year, which would be AUD 7 million in the second half. Just turning to the other assumption. So Eureka, we've had this out before, but we assume that it makes AUD 0.03 earnings. The result is out next week. We really have very limited net interest expense risk because most of our debt is hedged. We have a program, and we've talked about the recycling capital. We'll continue to do that when it makes sense. There are a number of opportunities to grow the business. We've talked about those opportunities are increasing. We're definitely seeing the opportunities out there. We think there's some really good opportunities. So we do think that we can scale up over time. So just to finish up, we believe we've got a massive opportunity to increase the scale to help more customers. So really excited about Aspen going forward. I'll hand it back for questions. Great. Thank you. We will now open the Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question, please click on the raise hand emoji, and then I will allow you to speak or talk or ask your question. First question comes from Murray Connellan from Moelis. Please go ahead. Hi. I just wanted to double-check that I'm off mute. You are. Hi. Afternoon, John, David, Patrick, Hamish. Congrats on the upgrade. Just wanted to double-check the run rate of builds that you're doing this year, the guidance there of 200. I was wondering whether you could just contextualize that against the sales rate guidance of 110, 140, 170? Would that sort of imply that we've got a bit of a one-off spike in new housing developments this year as far as your development planning is concerned and that then sort of tapers off into the next two years? Or is this sort of the start of a bit of a build-up of inventory? Yeah, good question. So we've proven to ourselves that we can easily produce 200 dwellings and land sites, and that production process is going really well. We set out, started this year thinking we'd want, for the first time ever, to have completed inventory that our customers could come and have a look at to buy. We've never had that in the last five and a half years. So we've deliberately set about trying to have more completed inventory, and that was always the plan. Clearly, as we produce 200 and don't aim to sell 200 because we want the completed inventory, we build up the development inventory. You see that in the result, manufactured housing industries go from like 12 to 98. We think that kind of stabilizes at around AUD 25 million. So we don't think there's actually that much more build-up to go. So you sort of see the peak in the amount of inventory we need for that business as we grow towards 200 sales. Clearly, our forecast is now 140 next year, 170 the year after. We'll see how we go. But if we get towards 200 sales, we'll put on more inventory. But the stock turn in that business has started to stabilize. So we'd like to turn over. We'd like to achieve a stock turn of about two times. So it does stabilize, I think, around the AUD 25 million in manufactured house inventory. Thanks. And then obviously, this acquisition that you've announced this morning helps replenish the land bank, but just having a look at where your gearing sits at the result, I was just wondering how you're thinking about portfolio curation going forward as far as the next couple of acquisitions, I guess, that you're likely to do and what you're predominantly looking at. Is it going to be more of this raw land product going forward, or is it possible that we see a bit of the refurbishment type stock that you've done in the past? It's again a good question. I think what we like about this is that it's in a good spot and the land price per hectare is really attractive and it's good scale, and we think we're a good chance of doing lifestyle on land lots, so we typically aren't going to buy things which are just residential land lot sales, so we really want to have we buy larger sites. We want to have the opportunity of doing lifestyle village as well. I think in terms of the things coming up, there's a mixture of things that have got improvements, which we might be able to add value, and there are also some land, so in us thinking about what we can do, we're obviously trying to plug these things into what we currently have and map out the growth going into future years. So we've discussed we're pretty well set up from our current development sites to grow the business. What we're looking at is that we need to replenish that stock, and so we need to have things throughout the years. There are some good opportunities of buying things where we can buy the improvements at a substantial discount to replacement costs. So just have to see how they play out. Generally, our sort of modus is to try and buy things that we can add a lot of value and get better entry prices. Got it. And then just one more from me, if you don't mind. Just looking at the uptick in development margin that got reported in the first half, pretty big uplift there. I was wondering what drove that. And you've obviously spoken to your longer-term target being 30%, whereas the first half's margin was closer to 33%. I guess, what is it that brings it back down to 30%, and what sort of time frame should we expect? I guess, what does the near-term look like? Yeah. So there's a few reasons for the uptick. One, I think I mentioned earlier, there's sort of the cost stabilization. And so the costs have stabilized, but the prices have probably risen at the same time. One thing that will drag it back a little bit is in the first half, we didn't have many sales from our two assets in WA at Sierra and Meadowbrook. And because we're repositioning those, the margins for those properties are lower because we need to make some sales to generate some confidence. So that will drag it back a little bit because we'll make some sales in the second half and going forward. And then eventually, they will get up to the 30-ish mark, but it maybe takes sort of 12 months or so, which is what we've seen in other assets. And that's probably the main thing which will occur again and again. Each time we sort of restart a new asset, the ones that are stabilized are probably above the 30, and the ones that are not are below. On average, they should be around about 30%. Got it. That's clear. Thanks very much. Your next question comes from Andy MacFarlane from Bell Potter. Hey, guys. Thanks for your time. It looks like you've got about 53 contracts on hand. Just interested in some color on, yeah, on the contracts on hand across land lease versus residential, kind of key projects within that and how much of that is in FY25 and what you're holding for FY26. Yeah. It's predominantly lifestyle in the second half. There is some land left, but not much at Coorong Quays in the residential business. At this stage, we haven't released the Mount Barker residential land. So I think at this stage, we'll release that in FY26. So it does skew even more to lifestyle in the second half. But as Patrick said, it's also skewing a bit more to those projects that we're repositioning, and therefore, they don't have the same margin as the other lifestyle at this stage. There's not a huge amount of contracts we currently hold that can't be settled in FY25 or don't expect to be able to be settled in FY25. There's about three or four of those contracts we're holding today that are definitely FY26 contracts. Yep. That's helpful. Just in terms of Mount Barker, talking to release in FY26, expecting settlements therefore for FY26 onwards. It'll be finished. We're just feeling at this stage, we'd rather title it 1 July so we don't get hit with land tax or more land tax. So that's our current plan. Yep. No, makes sense. Talked a little bit about the forward book for residential refurbishments. Just wondering if there's a bit of color on what you've got for refurbishments to finish in second half 2025 and then into FY26 as well. So we've got the 24 units at Viveash, which we're expecting those to be finished probably by May. And we've already got over 40 people on the waiting list to rent those. There's hardly any of the prefab apartments now to refurbish. There's probably only about five out of the 500 that we haven't. So on the residential side, there is very little. I think the other asset that we're working through, which is partly refurbishment and partly some structural workers, is UMG up in Brisbane. So we are expecting to start on some work to that property in FY26. But that shouldn't impact the ability to lease the units. Yeah. And the other one that there's some refurbishment works going on is some cabins at Darwin, Koala, and also Tweed. So we're not talking large numbers, but we're going through and just systematically upgrading the portfolio across those to get improved rate, but also just improve things like ratings and those sorts of things. Perfect. One last one for me. Just in terms of the tourism business, obviously notwithstanding some one-offs, just wondering, yeah, what you're expecting into second half and again, seeing that into FY26 as well. Yeah. The second half. So the real seasonal asset is clearly Darwin, which definitely contributes more in first half than second half. So it does about AUD 2 million in first half versus 1 the next half. The issue with Darwin is it makes a lot of that 1 million in the one month of June, late May. So that's still uncertain. But on the flip side of that, we have AKV, which continues to improve. There's no doubt that economic activity is still picking up in Karratha. There's still a massive shortage of rooms versus forward project work. So that to the extent Darwin's sort of weak in the second half, we think it gets more than covered by a stronger AKV. And then the other parks like the Highway 1 and ACP are pretty kind of stable. And the New South Wales parks are through January risk now, if you like, that we kind of know how they've performed given we've had a decent summer period. They do make money in Easter, of course, but so there's no real risk we feel in that business for the second half. Thank you, guys. And the final question comes from Scott Hudson from MST Financial. Afternoon, gentlemen. A couple of questions for me. David, could you just give a sense of what sort of passing rents are at the moment? Obviously, average rents through the first half were pretty solid. Sort of where's it sitting as we enter the second half? Yeah. Look, I think it's sort of getting closer to market nowadays. It's probably there might be 5% in it in the residential side. Clearly, the lifestyle is what it is. And parks depends on the market. But it's getting pretty close now to being able to multiply the 6.8 cap rate, which is based on market, if you like, times the property value to get a sense of where market income now is, which is about the AUD 36 million mark. Yeah. Thank you. I guess looking at your EBITDA guidance, sort of I think it implies about 4% sequential growth in EBITDA, but you're guiding to a 30% uplift in settlements, acknowledging, I guess, the margin impact from, I guess, a mix shift towards WA. Is there anything else that's sort of weighing on the EBITDA performance in the second half? Look, at this stage, we've assumed a bit of pickup in corporate overheads. A lot of that's really about thinking about paying people better for the performance internally. So a little bit of that assumption's really around whether we deliver the forecast we've just put out. Okay. Thank you. Maybe just on the Ravenswood, could you give us a sense of how the cost of that land compares to, say, Normanville or Coorong Quays? Yeah. So Normanville was AUD 250,000 a hectare, roughly. This is AUD 460,000. The difference here is it's got residential zoning. Normanville is sort of a tourism zoning. The other part about Normanville is that we think we're there now, but the connection of services will definitely require some payments at Normanville. So for residential land, which is what this is, in our opinion, it's quite hard to find decent scaled sites at even less than AUD 1 million. It's hard going around Australia. So pretty attractive, to be honest. And it's still relatively close to a major city, and there's heaps of population growth. We look for these all the time. There aren't that many that we can find. Again, it's about 30. It'll be about AUD 30,000 a site. Our book value at the moment's only AUD 40,000 a site across the whole portfolio in development. We pay this at a price because we think that after we add civils, that the value of a leased lifestyle site covers the total cost of a developed site. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. Just in terms of capital recycling, looks like you got about four left at Burleigh. Has that all been cleared as of today? It's sort of been a little bit slower. It's sort of been holding out for a better price. So the markets, the escapes definitely is flat, in our opinion. They're not flying out the door. The other part of the capital recycling is clearly the remaining Eureka stake. So there is the potential that it's sold this half. Understood. And then just lastly, on additional land opportunities, is the pipeline still looking reasonably robust? Yeah. It looks good. And where we've been surprised is that despite the very big increase in house prices in WA and South Australia, and the widening gap between what we can produce new and the existing house price or land price in those markets is getting more attractive to us. So we're surprisingly seeing more opportunities in those stronger markets than we're seeing on the east coast at this stage. Thanks very much, and congratulations once again. Thanks, Scott. If there are no further questions at this time, I'll now hand back to the Aspen Management Team for the closing remarks. All right. So look, thanks everyone for attending today. Obviously, very happy to catch up with people individually. We think the business is really well set up for this year and ongoing, so we'll close it off, and thanks for everyone attending. Thank you. Great. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your attendance and participation. You may now disconnect from the webinar.