Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call of Grand City Properties S.A. At our customers' request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press star key followed by 0 on your telephone for operator assistance. May I now hand you over to Ms. Claire Bessai, Manager of Corporate Communications, who will start the meeting today. Please go ahead. Thanks. Hello, good morning to everyone. Thanks for joining us today. In the name of GCP, I kindly welcome you to our results call for the first nine months of 2021. With me today are CEO and CFO Refael Zamir, Chairman of the Board of Directors Christian Windfuhr, COO Sebastian Remmert-Faltin, and Senior Financial Analyst Michael Bar-Yosef. Christian Windfuhr and Refael Zamir will guide you through the results presentation directly after this introduction. You will find the results presentation for this call on the company website in the section Investor Relations under Publications. The presentation of the results will be followed by a session with questions and answers. The management is available for questions. We have already asked you in advance to send us your questions by email. Please continue to send us your questions so that we can include them accordingly. Please send your questions to the following email address: info@grandcity.lu. I repeat, once again, the email address for your questions is info@grandcity.lu. With this, I will hand over to Christian Windfuhr to begin with the presentation. Thank you very much. Welcome to all of you from me also to our nine-month 2021 financial results presentation. Let us turn to slide two for an overview of the first three quarters. We continue to see strong operational performance and the stability and resilience of our portfolio and operational platform. In Q3, we have continued our strong letting performance and value creation on a consistent basis with our focus on increasing the quality of our portfolio through internal operational growth, combined with disposal of non-core properties and acquisition of quality assets during the first nine months of the year. That the success of these efforts is reflected in our strong CAGR value per square meter of 20% since December 2018. We are continuing our good letting momentum and have decreased our vacancy further to a historical low of 5.3% while increasing the in-place rent to EUR 8 per square meter. Quite lower revenue and net rental income, primarily due to our disposals and the recycling of capital over the last 12 months. Our adjusted EBITDA remains stable as compared to last year's results, while the FFO saw a slight increase of 3% or 4% on a per share basis. Furthermore, the EPRA NTA developed positively, growing by 5% per share to EUR 27.9 per share or a plus of 8% when adjusting for the dividend. We will go deeper into the operations results in the next slides. With this, let me hand you over to Refael Zamir for the following few slides. Thank you, Christian, good morning, everyone, and also for me a warm welcome to our nine-month results call. On slide three, you will note that net rents like-for-like growth amounted to 2.1%, of which 1.5% came from in-place rent growth and 0.6% from occupancy growth. With that, we have maintained our sustainable growth in net rental income on a like-for-like basis, supporting our operational profitability. Our operational profitability was further driven by consistent improvement in our operational efficiency, as well as by optimizing our cost structure as a result of our capital recycling, selling non-core and mature properties while acquiring higher quality properties in strong locations. Our flexible and efficient operating platform has been able to support our strong business efficiency, even during challenging times like last year and during 2021. We continued to digitalize our letting process, which started in the beginning of the pandemic. Currently, nearly all of our lease agreements are signed digitally. Adjusted EBITDA for the nine months of 2021 was EUR 222 million, stable in comparison to the comparable period, despite slightly lower net rental income, mainly due to those improved efficiencies. Property revaluation and capital gains during the current reporting period in 2021 amounted to EUR 326 million, higher than in the comparable period previous year. We evaluate so far about 60% of our portfolio and plan to evaluate the remaining portfolio mix quarter for the full year outlook. Our other financial expenses increased in comparison to the first nine months of 2020, were mainly affected by EUR 1 billion buyback of bonds. There are bond issuance in the past period and the change of fair value of derivatives and financial assets. On slide four, you can see our FFO. FFO 1 is EUR 140 million, 3% up against the previous year. Also the FFO 1 per share increased by 4% to EUR 0.84 during the nine-month period ending September 2021. FFO 1 per share was also supported by our aggressive share buyback program, whereby we reinvest into our portfolio at attractive pricing and which will have a full effect on our FFO 1 per share in the coming periods. The FFO 2 amounted to EUR 213 million. Disposal during the nine months of 2021 amount to over EUR 300 million, staying at 13% above book value and generated a profit margin over cost, including CapEx of 30%. On slide five, you can follow our EPRA NAV metrics. Due to the continued profit generation in the nine months of 2021, we were able to further increase our EPRA NAV per share metrics compared to December 2020. The EPRA NTA per share increased by 5% and on an absolute basis amounts to EUR 4.7 billion as at September 2021, compared to EUR 4.6 billion at the end of last year. EPRA NAV metrics were supported by profit generation and partially offset by the payment of the dividend and share buybacks, while on a per share level, the buyback supported growth of EPRA NAV per share. The decrease due to the dividend distribution was mostly offset by the fact that approximately 70% of the company's shareholders opt to receive their dividend in the form of scrip dividends. Adjusting for the EUR 0.82 per share dividend distribution, the EPRA NTA per share increased by 8%. On the same slide five, we also give you some more color on our approach regarding the EPRA NRV, EPRA NTA, and EPRA NDV, which remain unchanged. Let me now hand back to Christian for the portfolio overview on the next slide. Thank you, Refael. Now to our portfolio overview on slide six, where you can see that in spite of the disposals mentioned earlier, our investment property further increased by 11% to EUR 8.9 billion as compared to the end of last year. In total, we have around 65,000 units at the end of Q3 2021. In the one hand, we have sold some EUR 300 million worth of non-core and mature assets, mainly in secondary cities in Germany. On the other hand, the portfolio grew by approximately EUR 700 million, including 6,700 units at an average multiple of 18x. 2,000 of these units were located mainly in London, Berlin, Dresden, Munich, or other German cities, and 4,700 of these were in North Rhine-Westphalia. The full impact of these acquisitions will be seen in the next quarters, as the majority were acquired at the end of the quarter. Our annualized net rental income of EUR 380 million at the end of September 2021, has an upside potential of 22%, which amounts to over EUR 465 million net rental income once the full market potential is reached. This is driven by continued rent and occupancy growth. In our opinion, recent measures implemented, which increase the calculation period of the Mietspiegel, as well as potential further measures which have been proposed in the planning of the new government, do not reduce the upside potential of the portfolio itself. However, they would impact the time required to unlock the potential. We still need to see what changes the new government proposes in terms of rent regulations, if any. Following the general overview of our well-diversified portfolio on slide seven, let us quickly review our portfolio region by region as it stands today. On slide eight, you can see that Berlin makes up 24% of our portfolio value. 70% of our Berlin portfolio is located in top-tier locations, including Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Mitte, Friedrichshain, and others. The remainder is in affordable locations, primarily Reinickendorf, Treptow, Köpenick, Marzahn, Hellersdorf. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's largest metropolitan area, we have 21% of our portfolio with Cologne, the fourth largest city in Germany, being the strongest location with around 30%, and the rest distributed throughout the region's main cities. On slide nine, we show Dresden, Leipzig, Halle, Germany's dynamic eastern cities with strong fundamentals. Which make up our quality East portfolio with 12% of our portfolio, and a further 4% of our portfolio are in Hamburg and Bremen, Germany's largest northern cities. Also here, we have a resilient and defensive portfolio with upside potential. Our quality London portfolio on slide 10, makes up 20% of the portfolio and is well distributed in the suburbs of London, with around 85% of these properties situated within short walking distance to Underground or Overground stations. Total London portfolio consists of approximately 4,100 units, including pre-marketed units in the pre-let stage. Since acquisitions of our London portfolio, our strong letting performance has taken double-digit vacancy to a vacancy of 6% as of September 2021. We continue to see a strong letting momentum and expect to continue to reduce the vacancy further in the next period. Our low entry point into the London residential market is both embedding a high upside and is also very defensive on valuation and cash flow, gives us a strong buffer to market transactional levels. We have reached a sizable portfolio in London, enabling us to benefit from economies of scale, we feel comfortable going forward in maintaining a portfolio size in London of around one-quarter of our total portfolio. Our maintenance and repositioning CapEx on slide 11, was EUR 17.4 per average square meter during the nine-month period ending September 2021. The amount is about EUR 2 up compared to the same period last year. EUR 4.1 of this amount went to maintenance and the remaining EUR 13.3 to repositioning CapEx. Repositioning CapEx is directed towards improving the asset quality and supporting the letting activities. The repositioning CapEx also includes investment into the surroundings of our assets. Increase in CapEx per square meter is partially related to cost inflation carried out during the last periods, in addition to a general increase in the investment to support the attractiveness of our portfolio. As a result, the AFFO for the first three quarters of 2021 amounted to EUR 89 million compared to EUR 87 million during the same period in 2020. Now let me hand you back to Refael. Our financial policy presented on slide 12 remains unchanged. We keep significant headroom to our financial covenants and continue to maintain healthy relations with the banking sector. We are committed to maintain a conservative financial policy. Our dividend policy remains at 75% of our AFFO 1 per share. On slide 13, we review our capital structure, and you can see that our LTV is at 36%. Only 3% of our debt has variable interest rates. Our cost of debt stands at 1%, a record low of the company, and our average debt maturity is 6.2 years. We have been working continuously on optimizing our debt profile, among others, by repaying high interest bearing short-term financial debt, taking advantage of favorable market conditions, and replacing it with low interest rate debt with a longer maturity. We repaid over EUR 1 billion of debt over the last nine months, and last week we completed an additional bond buyback of approximately EUR 107 million. Excluding the convertible bonds for which we have sufficient liquidity to cover in case it is not covered, we have a very clear maturity schedule in the upcoming years. Debt coverage and credit rating on slide 14 shows that we maintain our very strong interest coverage ratio with 6.5. Our unencumbered asset ratio remains strong at 88% of value or approximately EUR 8 billion, and our liquidity position remains very strong with approximately EUR 1.3 billion. Our corporate credit rating remains strong with triple B plus by S&P, and our long-term goal remains to achieve a rating improvement to A minus. Back to Christian. Thank you. Before we move to our guidance, let me shed some light on our continuous strong efforts in respect of ESG and sustainability. While equally important as our financial reporting, we have summarized the respective slides in the top position of our appendix of our presentation, and they provide good insight into our ESG results, activities, and goals. Important here, of course, is that we have published on our website our 2021 financial report, which shows how we intend to manage material, environmental, social, and governance matters. Furthermore, we have presented 12 topics identified as material in Grand City's materiality assessment. These insights follow the guidelines developed by the Global Reporting Initiative, GRI, EPRA, and the disclosure requirements of the main investor-oriented ESG benchmarks that we participate in. More information regarding our ESG insights can be found on the sustainability section of our website. Needless to add here that the recognition of ESG and sustainability measures, i.e., our excellent scores from Sustainalytics, SAM, CSA, now part of S&P Global, et cetera, have remained as strong as in the past. On slide 15, we confirm our 2021 guidance. The results of the nine-month 2021 period puts us well on track to meeting the 2021 full-year guidance, which is FFO 1 between EUR 183 million and EUR 192 million. FFO 1 per share between EUR 1.08 to EUR 1.13. Dividend per share EUR 0.81 to EUR 0.85. Total net rent like-for-like growth between 2% and 3%, and LTV to remain below 45%. With that, I'm handing you back to Theresa for our Q&A. Thank you very much. We are now starting the Q&A session. We will answer the questions we have received by email so far. We have grouped them together for the reason of simplification. The answers to your questions have been prepared by the team. I will now start with the first question, and answer will be given by Christian Windfuhr. Can you provide an update on the German residential market? What are the implications for your portfolio and operations? Do you expect an impact from the increase in COVID cases in Germany? The German residential real estate market continues to benefit from strong underlying dynamics. While there seems to be a resurgence of COVID cases in Germany, we saw in the last one and a half years that the pandemic had no material impact on our German portfolio, nor on German residential in general. We do not expect that the current increase in cases will lead to any material negative impact for us. We remain watchful and do our utmost to ensure the safety of our employees, tenants, and prospective tenants. In recent months, we have seen the economy recovering, with Germany's GDP nearly recovering to pre-pandemic levels. Unemployment continues its downward trend in line with the growing employment levels and reductions of Kurzarbeit. We see the resilience of the German economy as one of the main drivers for demographic trends, such as migration into Germany and specifically into major German urban and economic centers, which continue to be strong driver for urbanization and demand for affordable housing. We see other major trends, such as the continuous decrease in household size, driving a further increase in the number of households as unbroken. Demand for affordable housing remains very strong, while supply continues to be unable to catch up, something which we do not expect will slow in the near future. We have seen a reduction in the pace of construction, especially during the lockdown period, resulting in further delays to incoming supply. At the same time, construction costs and costs for land plots have continued to increase. We also continue to see a lot of regulatory hurdles. While the recent election results do take some of the uncertainty off the table, it is still unclear how the new coalition will exactly plan to tackle the deep underlying issues of the housing market. The new government is expected to target higher investment and new construction to decrease the demand and supply gap. It is unclear how the current construction hurdles will be lifted and a spike in building activity will be achieved. Looking forward, we expect that rents and prices will continue to increase in the coming periods, with the current shortage not being resolved in the short to medium term. These underlying factors continue to seep through in our operations. With solid like-for-like rental growth of 2.1%, we continue to extract the large and continuously growing upside potential embedded in the portfolio. We have seen vacancies reduce further to 5.3% as of September, coming down from 6.2% at the end of December 2020. The transaction markets remain competitive, which is also reflected in our disposal activity and strong valuation results. In the nine-month period, we disposed over EUR 300 million worth of properties at 13% above book value and 30% over total cost, including CapEx. We were able to record valuation gain of over EUR 325 million, driven by 4% like-for-like revaluation gains. With no near-term changes to the underlying market factors, we expect to see continued strong operational environment also in the coming periods. Could you provide an update on the London portfolio and on the underlying fundamentals? We have seen a good momentum in the London market over the last month following the lifting of restrictions related to pandemic. The pandemic hit the London market harder than Germany due to a mix of a harder lockdown, as well as the structure of the market itself. In the last month, with the lifting of the restrictions, we have seen a very good pickup of demand, especially in London's middle-class boroughs, which benefit from the strong middle-class demand. We see this momentum continuing, assuming the market remains open with no major restrictions. In the longer term, we see strong demographic trends in London continuing, driving sustainable increasing demand. We expect to see increasing demand for rent compared to owning on the back of the relatively stronger increase in house prices, underlying the growing unaffordability of house ownership. The population is expected to continue the strong growth that was seen in recent years. With London, we have focused on diversifying across different boroughs, benefiting from a wider range of target groups and reducing dependencies on specific demographics. Our portfolio is well distributed across the various transportation zones in London, with the vast majority of our assets located in very short distance to underground and/or overground stations, which is highly valuable in a large urban center such as London. We continue to believe in the strong value proposition of our properties, and we see this reflected in the recent letting activity, resulting in a vacancy of 6% as compared to 8.4% during the lockdown period. We have also finished the final works on several pre-letting projects, which were brought to market and benefit from very strong demand, which increases our rents from the London portfolio, but temporarily weigh slightly on the total vacancy of the London portfolio. We expect that the recent momentum will continue and that we will reach pre-pandemic levels in the coming quarters. We continue to see London as very attractive. The strong underlying fundamentals in London, we see remaining intact. London is a very dynamic city and has its own unique set of value drivers and provides significant diversification benefits compared to the main cities in Germany. We took the opportunity that the market provided in recent years to build up a solid platform in the market and acquired a sufficient scale at very attractive prices. We feel that we have reached a comfortable size and expect that our London portfolio will remain roughly around the level that it is now. We would like to reiterate that our main portfolio focus continues to be Germany's main metropolitan areas. Can you provide some details regarding your acquisitions? Where did you acquire properties? During the nine-month period of 2021, we acquired properties in the amount of EUR 700 million across several transactions at the average factor of 18. EUR 400 million of the acquisitions include 2,000 units located mainly in Dresden, London, Berlin, and Vienna. In London, we acquired properties in the London Boroughs of Barking, Forest, Newham, Waltham, Wandsworth, Hammersmith, Merton, Lambeth, Haringey, Bromley, and Harrow. The properties are almost fully occupied and also include over 150 units in the pre-letting stage, which will start generating income in the upcoming period. Additionally, we acquired control in a German properties portfolio and consolidate more than 4,700 units in NRW, amounting to over EUR 280 million as of the end of September 2021. What is your acquisition pipeline? Will you change your strategy in the current competitive market? We continue to see pipeline of a couple hundred million EUR. However, due to the increasingly competitive nature of the transaction market in our preferred location, we see relatively fewer transaction opportunities that match our criteria that are accretive to our overall portfolio. Especially in times such as those, we believe that it is important to remain disciplined when it comes to acquisition. We therefore stick to our business model and acquire properties in fundamentally strong markets at discounted prices. While we have the capacity to acquire more portfolio, we feel that it is very important to focus on the deals that generate most long-term growth and value for the company. In the meantime, we have a significant internal value growth potential remaining with our portfolio, which we expect will drive strong performance in the coming years. We have also seen additional shareholder value creation through our share buyback program. We are on course to complete our currently running program, through which we have acquired close to EUR 270 million of our own shares here today, at a strong discount to our NAV. We continue to see acquisition of our own shares at a discount to NAV while disposing properties at a premium to NAV, as an attractive growth driver in addition to the regular property acquisition, and may do additional buyback in the near future. Could you provide an update on your disposal activity? What is your disposal pipeline? In the first quarter, we had only an immaterial amount of disposals. For the full nine-month period, we disposed property amounted to over EUR 300 million. The disposals were controlled through several transactions and totaled to around 8,000 units. The disposals were done at an average factor of 17 and generated a profit margin of 30% on the total cost, including CapEx, and were sold at 13% premium to the book value. The properties consist primarily of non-core assets, which were mostly located in eastern Germany cities in states such as Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, and in secondary cities in N.R.W. The disposals include around 5,700 units of investment properties and around 2,300 units from the held-for-sale portfolio. The disposals above book values allowed us to crystallize the value we generated so far and further enhance the quality of the portfolio as it frees up funds, which we can direct into acquisition of high-quality properties with a strong growth potential. The continuing disposals above book value also stand as a testament to the conservative nature of our valuation. In the coming period, we expect to continue to dispose our remaining held-for-sale properties and may also dispose further non-core and mature properties on an opportunistic basis when attractive opportunities arise. How do you see the impact of the results of the elections in Germany on your business? We believe the results of the elections reduced a large part of the regulatory uncertainty that was felt in the market. In the end, the results were roughly in line with polls. The current coalition negotiations around the so-called traffic light coalition, constituting the Social Democratic, SPD, the Greens, and the Liberal FDP, seem to be a balanced outcome that we expect won't pull the government too far in any direction. The main discussions regarding the residential real estate market seem to have shifted from rhetoric about strong intervention to a more nuanced approach, focused primarily around increasing supply while reviewing and, where needed, adjusting the existing rent controls. We welcome the more pragmatic approach the coalition parties made in their combined position paper, in which the increase of supply through higher volume of construction completions should be predominant. The new coalition intends to reduce the cost of housing construction through de-bureaucratization, standardization, digitalization, and serial construction. As we have mentioned in the past, we see the administrative hurdles and outdated bureaucratic processes as one of the main reasons for the lack of supply in the market, and therefore, welcome the intentions of the current negotiating parties. Currently, the completion target mentioned in the combined position paper should come to 400,000 units per annum, including 100,000 subsidized units, and is similar to the previous government's targets, which was not able to deliver anything close to these numbers. Another major focus area of the incoming government is likely to be climate change and CO2 reduction. As a result, we expect additional measures and subsidies for modernization. We believe this would be necessary as the majority of houses are either privately owned or owned by very small players who own only a few units. These parties often do not have the resources needed to undertake modernization programs on their own and will, thus, require governmental assistance if climate targets are to be achieved. Such subsidies would also reduce our reliance on the use of the modernization surcharge to tenants and, as a result, make more projects economically viable. Could you provide a breakdown of your valuation results? What are your expectations for the coming periods? During the first nine-month period of 2021, we recorded over EUR 325 million of revaluation and capital gains. Those gains mostly related to revaluation gains amounted to EUR 219 million, reflecting 4% on a like-for-like basis. Note that like-for-like result is net of CapEx and is calculated on the entire like-for-like portfolio, although the remaining part of the portfolio will be valuated in the next quarter. During the nine-month period, we evaluate around 60% of the portfolio, mainly in our NRW and Dresden life in our portfolio. We have seen a price yield compression of 0.1% in the first nine months of 2021, driven by improved position of our portfolio, as well as from the strong market dynamics in our locations. In addition to revaluation gains, we recorded EUR 35 million of capital gains in the period resulting from our strong disposals over book value. Could you provide some more details on your like-for-like rental growth? What were the main drivers? The portfolio's like-for-like net rental income growth amounted to 2.1% year-over-year. This increase came from 1.5% in-place rent increase and 0.6% from increase in occupancy. The portfolio's strong fundamentals remain intact and embed significant upside potential, which we expect will drive further like-for-like rental growth in the coming years. As we have managed to reduce the vacancy significantly in recent quarters, amounting to 5.3% as of September, occupancy increases are expected to have a smaller impact on the total like-for-like in the future. However, we expected the significant gap to market rent will continue to drive in-place rental growth. The 1.5% in-place rental growth was driven primarily by 0.7% reletting, and 0.8% came from indexation. In general, we have seen solid like-for-like performance across the portfolio. We saw particularly good performance in Germany, in NRW, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Mannheim, and Frankfurt. Furthermore, due to the recovery in the London residential market following the easing of the restrictions, we saw a strong swing in like-for-like contribution of the London portfolio, which amounted to a push of 1% in September, compared to negative of 1% during the height of the lockdown in March, related mostly to occupancy increase. Could you please provide an update on your share buyback? Are you planning to launch a new buyback once this is completed? As of today, we have nearly completed our share buyback program. As at the end of September, we bought back around 10 million shares, and year to date, we have bought back 12 million shares at an average price of EUR 22 per share, over 20% discount to our current NTA. We continue to see share buybacks as an attractive alternative value creation opportunity in addition to the regular property acquisitions. Depending on the amount of attractive opportunities we see going forward, we may decide to launch an additional buyback. We keep all our options open in order to maintain flexibility, maximize value creation, and keep our healthy financial ratio with sufficient headroom. Do you have any updates on the CO2 tax situation? How do you expect the coalition talks will impact it? What will be the impact on your business? Under the current system, the CO2 tax is carried in full by the tenant as the final consumer of the energy and thus the CO2. There is currently no direct impact on our business as a result of the CO2 tax from the consumption of our tenants. The impact of the CO2 tax on our own energy consumption is not material. The parties that are currently negotiating the formation of the new government seem to agree that CO2 taxes or prices are a good and appropriate way to stimulate demand for more climate-friendly solutions and to reduce carbon emissions. There are some disagreements on the most appropriate implementation and level of government control. All parties seem to agree that the CO2 prices have to be implemented in a social manner, but also here, there's disagreement how this should best be achieved. It's currently too early to assess what the plans of the new government will be regarding the CO2 tax for tenants. As the SPD in the previous government has proposed to split these taxes 50/50 between tenants and landlords, it is possible that this proposal will resurface during the current coalition talks. We deem it unlikely that the incoming government will propose that the full tax will be carried by landlords, and this would remove the incentive for the end consumer to adjust their consumption levels. Regarding what would be decided in the end, the full annual impact, assuming 100% of the tax, is rather insignificant to our portfolio, coming in at a total of around EUR 2 million-EUR 3 million. Could you provide an update on the situation in Berlin following the election as a result of the expropriation referendum? Following the election in Berlin, the composition of the new coalition will likely be similar to the previous coalition, with the SPD leading the coalition, although the influence of the left is somewhat lower due to the loss in votes they received. In the combined coalition paper, the SPD, Greens, and Left agreed to set up a commission of legal experts to assess whether it is possible under constitutional law to implement an expropriation as per the referendum result. This committee is expected to work on this over the next year. The consensus among the experts is clear that it will not pass legal scrutiny. The new mayor of Berlin, Mrs. Giffey of the SPD, was clear during the election campaign that she is against expropriation, a stance that we expect will be mirrored by the incoming Berlin government. The result of the referendum is not binding for the government to implement. In general, we stand by our viewpoint that the expropriation discussions and highly aggressive regulatory intervention in general are not beneficial to the community as a whole. Expropriation, if legally permissible, would be extremely expensive and a burden that the strained public finances of the city of Berlin cannot afford to carry, in our opinion. Expropriation would not serve to create any additional supply and benefit only a few households in the apartments that will be expropriated while significantly increasing the pressure on the rest of the market, harming the vast majority of inhabitants of Berlin. The expropriation discussion and legal review also takes up a lot of capacity within the Berlin government that would be better focused on finding practical solutions that will lead to additional supply and an easing of stress in the housing market. We continue to believe that the only solution to this problem is to build more apartments, which the city could support by providing additional building permits, removing bureaucracy hurdles, and in general, streamline the process involved with adding new supply. This would result in reduced levels of stress on the rental market and provide long-term rent stability with gradual rent increases, something which is a win-win for all parties involved. Inflation continues to remain high. Could you share the impact you see across your operations and your view on the main driver? How do you see the impact on interest rates? We have continued to see increased levels of inflation during 2021. We continue to see general inflationary pressure, mainly in personnel costs and external service providers. However, this level of inflation is more than offset by efficiency increases and internal growth, as well as through cost recovery from tenants. In more recent months, there has been an especially strong increase in energy prices, which we see as being the result of a variety of causes, most of which market experts believe are short-term in nature and a result of the low prices previous years and the effects of the recovery. In the end, energy prices are not a material cost for us, and therefore they do not impact our bottom line in a material way. Besides this, we are seeing mixed inflation pressures in material prices. After strong increases of lumber prices earlier in this year, the costs have been most normalized as expected now that supply and demand have rebalanced. Other material prices, such as steel, while not at record high anymore, may stay somewhat higher for longer, as they are more impacted by the currently high energy prices. In the end, those movements in prices have an impact on our refurbishment and construction costs. We do not expect this to be structural. Furthermore, material costs only form a relative small component of our CapEx, and therefore, we expect the impact to be rather insignificant. The ECB believes that increase in the inflation rate to be short-lived due to the base effect of the low prices last year and the supply shocks after lockdown have been lifted. Next year, the rate should normalize again. Current implies in inflation expectation, and though we see this reflected in an upward shift primarily in the medium term of the yield curve, whereas the long-term rate seems more stable. However, overall rates remain very low, and recent updates from the ECB do not indicate a major shift in strategy and continue to be focused on expansionary policy. Also, the spread of the rental yield to interest rates yield remain on record level, and we don't expect a potential increase in interest rates can be compensated without a large impact until average spread levels are reached. If and when the ECB decided to change policy, we expect this process to be controlled and in incremental steps. Additionally, our debt currently has a very low risk related to interest rates, as the vast majority of our debt is fixed or hedged, and we have no material refinancing needs in the next few years. Our cost of debt is historically low at 1%, locked in for a long maturity period. Thank you. I think those were the questions so far. We will now start the open Q&A part. If you have further questions, we kindly ask you to ask all your questions together right at the beginning. We are now looking forward to your questions, please. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question via the telephone, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question is answered before it is your turn to speak, you can dial zero and two to cancel your question. If you are using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment please, for the first question. The first question is from Ellis Acklin, First Berlin. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning, everyone. Thanks for the detailed presentation. Just one thing if you could follow up on for me. You mentioned at the beginning of the call that you had completed another bond buyback, I believe last week. If you could name the amount again and maybe tell me which one was paid down. That's it. Thank you. Hi. Thank you for your question. We completed last week, as I mentioned, 107 bond buybacks for E and W series. Thank you very much. The next question is from Manuel Martin, ODDO BHF. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Two questions from my side. The first question is on NRW. You mentioned that you increased your stake in a joint venture, thereby increasing your residential units in North Rhine-Westphalia, notably. Could you give some color on that? Who is your joint venture partner maybe, and why did you sell? Second question would be on the portfolio. The vacancy rate was reduced. In your opinion, what was the main factor driving the vacancy reduction? The acquisitions in your portfolio or the letting activity? Thank you. Hi, Manuel. Good morning. As your first question on our JV portfolio we consolidated into September. Recently, the JV partner decided to dispose this part, and we used our first right of refusal to acquire the stake. Since the portfolio has operationally outperformed and the macro environment remained very robust, therefore, we continued to see that position as accretive and value enhancing. Yeah. We still see potential in the asset, and we are very happy we were able to do this acquisition. The seller of the JV partner is a family office with experience in Germany. As for the second question regarding the vacancies, the combination we saw, as mentioned, we saw very strong leasing activities. However, the disposals of non-core portfolios with higher-than-average vacancy also supported the vacancy reduction towards 5.3%. The next question is from Andres Toome, Green Street Advisors. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning. I've just two questions. On page 11, the first one, you mentioned that the increase in CapEx was mainly coming from inflationary pressure. Could you just give us more details on why this was not affecting the maintenance spending and primarily CapEx? Secondly, could you indicate how many apartments or in percentage of the total portfolio saw a so-called energetic refurbishment during the nine months? Thank you. Good morning, [Kai]. Thank you for your questions. As to the CapEx inflation, we've seen some inflation. It wouldn't take a big amount, therefore it don't really tailor the maintenance because it's a lower basis. We're able to curb the inflation a bit more in maintenance because of the nature of the expenses. However, with CapEx, as it's related to material, it has a bigger impact. With the material, we start citing more inflation. We're not talking about a material difference. Looking forward, we don't expect this to change drastically. We hope to come back into a bit of a lower level. As to the second question regarding the energetic improvements, I'd say, this is an energetic improvement on a large scale number. I'd say at this stage, it's an insignificant amount of units. Thank you. The next question is from Andres Toome, Green Street Advisors. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. I was just curious about the vacancy figures in London. You talked about improvement in the market generally. I am just curious how much of the current vacancy is driven by new properties you have launched recently. I don't really have a breakdown now, I'm sorry. Generally, we bought out around EUR 130 million of properties out of the pre-let situation, so we were able to let. I'm afraid to sound a bit. Sorry. Our mistake. Yeah, I'm sorry. I cut off. Maybe start from the beginning. Yeah, I'll start from the beginning. I don't have the exact breakdown between like-for-like and acquisitions. The acquisitions we did during the period themselves were of relatively low vacancy. However, we bought out of the pre-let portfolio some EUR 130 million in this quarter alone, which had a bit of an impact on the vacancy. However, We see good improvements in vacancy, and we expect a like-for-like business to bring the vacancy down to below 4% the next few quarters. Thank you. The next question is from Paul May of Barclays. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hi, team. Just a couple of questions from me. First one, are you able to give just some more details, apologies for reiterating, on the JV consolidation? Just wondering what was your potential ownership? What is your potential ownership now? What's the net impact likely to be of the consolidation relative to, obviously, where you were previously including it as part of JVs and now going to be 100% including it, but obviously minus, well, I assume minus some minorities. Just wonder what the net impact is likely to be on that. The second question is, when do you think you're going to be in a position where the London portfolio starts performing as well as the German portfolio, and not necessarily acting as a bit of a drag on the total returns? Do you think that's coming, or do you think it will always be a slightly lower returning portfolio? Thank you. Thank you, Paul, for your questions. To the first question, we were at 49% before the consolidation, and reached 90%, so almost a full ownership. We had the right blocker. We paid around 3% for the book value, the book value, sorry. The impact will be much. We see the impact coming in the next quarters, where we start to extract the value from this acquisition. Regarding London, I disagree. I don't think that London is a drag, maybe in terms of vacancy, but the acquisitions of London were at very high vacancies or of new assets which we had to completely re-let them. Basically, effectively it was 100% vacant. We see a very good momentum there. We're able to create a lot of rent generation over there. In terms of vacancy, we see them very soon being close in line with average vacancy going forward. Thank you. The next question is from Mario Faccia of Société Générale. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hi there. Good morning. Thank you for the presentation. Just a few questions from my side. Firstly, just a bit of a follow-up on the stake in the JV. I understand this was only disposed of early last year, I just wanted to confirm that and the reason why this is being repurchased back fairly quickly, and then the reasons of the other JV partner there in terms of their disposal. Secondly, if I look at your half-year results, I believe the London and Berlin portfolios were both excluded from your portfolio revaluation. I just wanted to see if they have now been included and what the momentum is there. Thirdly, I believe the London portfolio generated a 1% increase in like-for-like, which was occupancy driven, I wanted to see if there's been any growth or momentum in the rent levels post the period end, and how you're seeing this market developing. Then, sorry, one last question. Finally, a bit more detail on the sale of the convertible bonds to your parent company, Aroundtown, out of treasury. The reasons for this, and any further details that can be provided there will be great. Thank you. Thank you, Mario. I'm happy with all your questions. I'll start from the end. There's a bit more question. Regarding the sale of the reissuance of the convertible bonds. As of the end of September, we reissued around EUR 170 million of our previous convertible bonds, which was held in treasury. We received an offer from our largest shareholder, Aroundtown, which acquired the bonds. The bonds were sold at prevailing market prices, which we deemed to be favorable for us, which resulted in a positive gain of a few EUR million over the acquisition price we had. The bond will mature in the first quarter of 2022. It essentially means it's our equity in total. We still have the funds to repay the bond Regarding London and the rent trends. The occupancy trend is pretty clear, and the rents remain quite stable. We believe the rent will start to pick up a bit more when we get to the higher occupancy levels that we saw. That said, we will focus more on getting higher rents on a like-for-like basis. As for valuations in London and Berlin, we have not revalued yet in the third quarter or the nine months so far, a substantial amount in our London portfolio, and we will do so in the fourth quarter. Your first question, I believe, was on the JV partner. Yeah. We increased our stake following a request from our JV partner, which asked to control its stake. We had first right. It was basically a reverse inquiry. We took the opportunity, we think it's a good opportunity to do so, with the consideration of the partner is not relevant. We see this as something good for us. We took this opportunity, which we think is good for us, and will create value for our shareholders. Thank you. And we don't have any further questions at this point. Back to the speakers for closing remarks. Thank you very much for your questions and for your participation on our call. All of us here around the table say, wish you all the best, hopefully meet face-to-face in not too long from now. Wishing you a good day and say bye-bye. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect.