Good morning, and welcome to the AEW UK REIT plc Investor update. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions can be submitted and the company will respond to questions where appropriate to do so post the meeting. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to Portfolio Manager, Laura Elkin. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us. I am Laura Elkin. I am the Portfolio Manager for AEW UK REIT plc. Hi, everyone. I am Henry Butt. I am Assistant Portfolio Manager and Lead Asset Manager on the portfolio. This quarter we have had to pre-record our quarterly update to you. I am afraid that there won't be chance for any Q&A today. If you do have any questions following today's presentation, please get in touch with us, either through our Investor Relations department or via the question- and- answer section of the Investor Meet Company website, and we will endeavor to respond to those questions where appropriate. We believe that next quarter, we will be joining you as normal live and with the Q&A function fully up and running. We recently put out our NAV announcement, and we will come on to talk about some really strong updates that we have had for the company during the quarter. We have had some really strong letting activity that we are excited to be able to talk to you about. But just coming back to the overall strategy and talking about that at high level on these first few slides. The strategy that we run at AEWU is the strategy that we have always run here for the past 11 years. To describe that strategy in a sentence, we are sector-agnostic value investors. That really means that we look across the whole of the commercial property market to find value across different market cycles. We look to maximize income, so that is important to us for our delivery of our dividend of GBP 0.02 per share per quarter, which we have paid out now very consistently since our IPO. Income is very important to us to seek that on our purchases. We very closely analyze the income stream of the purchases that we make to make sure that that income is sustainable. And hopefully that is demonstrated to you in the consistency of the payment of that dividend. Once we own our assets, we very actively manage them to unlock capital upside, again, demonstrated in our strong total return where we have outperformed the MSCI benchmark, over each time period since our IPO. We have some of our investment criteria just noted here on the right-hand side of the page. For me, the number one point that sticks out here is a focus for our buying in strong commercial locations. This is something we look for in everything that we are buying. I have mentioned the income that we are looking for, but the location is really, really important. It is going to ensure that our properties can perform well over the long term and can continue to be let and deliver that income stream. And hopefully with some of the examples of asset management that we have got to talk about this quarter, we can demonstrate that to you, in the healthy level of tenant demand that we have recently seen. We have noted at the bottom of the page here some awards that we have run during the course of the past 10 years. Most notably the Citywire Award, which we have won for six consecutive years, which is based upon the calculation of our three-year net asset valued return. Just picking up on this slide, at a glance as at 1st of June 2026, very much a bird's-eye view of the company as at that date. GBP 215.7 million valuation with 34 assets. Worth noting that, prior to the quarter end, we exchanged on the disposal of a nightclub in Cardiff, and we have completed that acquisition on the 23rd of July, and we have got a slide coming up on that. So actually, as at this point of this recording, we actually have 33 properties, but it was 34 as at the end of the quarter. I want to draw your attention to the net initial yield and reversionary yield. You can see there is a substantial difference, 7.28% net initial yield, in comparison to 8.87% reversionary yield. That shows the income rental growth potential embedded within the portfolio. I think it is worth saying as well that actually that net initial yield for this quarter has come off a little bit. That is partly because we have some rent frees, for example, at an industrial asset in St Helens. We have got a slide on that later on in the presentation. We have had a rent-free period kick in at Next in Bromley, where Next were entitled to a rent-free period having completed a refurbishment of their unit. We have also recently completed two lettings actually at Runcorn, where they are rent-free. Despite that vacancy rate of 6.43% coming down from about 10% in the March quarter, the net initial yield is a little bit suppressed because there are these current rent- frees which tenants are benefiting from, and they should burn off over the next six months to 12 months. You would expect to see that net initial yield creep up with all other things in the portfolio being equal. Cash and debt, we continue to have a GBP 60 million debt facility, which expires in July next year at a fixed rate of 2.96%. You will see that we have got a fair bit of cash at the moment. Quite a lot of that is attributed to asset management opportunities we see today within the portfolio, and we typically have a GBP 5 million buffer. As Laura says, we have continued to pay out our GBP 0.02 p er quarter dividend, and that is something that we are very proud of doing. Then finally, just touching on these pie charts on the right-hand side, very little change in the sector weighting. We are sector agnostic, but where we find ourselves today, our highest sector weighting is in industrials and in retail, which is split between the high street and retail warehousing with those two sectors really diverging in the post-COVID era. As you can see, properties dotted out throughout the country. Laura made the point earlier on that location is very important, but that is a very specific location rather than us typically trying to buy in certain regions of the U.K. Handing back to Laura to cover a NAV performance slide. Thanks, Henry. Here we are showing you our NAV total return performance since our IPO and versus our AIC peer group. AEWU delivering a close to 9.5% 10-year annualized NAV total return. So significantly stronger than the rest of that peer group. You will see AEWU's performance start to pull away in 2019. That is really after four years of running this strategy. The two main reasons for that is that at the time, AEWU had about a 50% weighting to industrials, and that market started to see a lot of growth at that time, around the inception of the pandemic. At this time also, though, we started to see a lot of our business plans within AEWU reaching maturity, and we started to make our first strategic disposals. And those of you who know us well know that we like to buy short to mid-length income so that we can have those very real conversations with our tenants in order to move rents on and to see our business plans through to fruition. It is no surprise to me that around that time, we started to see our performance diverge because of how active our strategy is, in both property level, as in buying and selling and knowing when to buy and sell, but also at tenant level, of course, in our occupation. The following slide shows our property-level total return versus the MSCI benchmark over various time frames. For me, it is really the consistency of our outperformance over the last 10 years. And over, I think all but one of these time frames, AEWU's property-level total return is more than double that of the wider MSCI benchmark. Henry will talk to you on the next slide, and really point out the reasons how we can attribute that outperformance to various decisions we have made at portfolio level and parts of our strategy. Thanks, Laura. This slide very much covering the life cycle of the strategy. You can see where the performance has been coming from. The blue bar, which runs right through the middle here, very much the meat in the sandwich, and that is the income that the property has been throwing off, with the red bars being capital performance. The performance of the strategy has very much been attributed to a number of things. First, obviously, income. We are very much not a strategy which is trying to board the right train at the right time and hoping for yield compression. We will obviously look to add value through asset management, and through cycles. But income is very much the bedrock of what we do. As you can see, that blue bar runs consistently right through this chart. It dips off a little bit around 2022 when we were actually looking to achieve maximized values in two assets, one in Glasgow and one in Oxford, where we had to take on a higher percentage of vacancy. But as you can see, it is pretty consistent around the 8% mark. Not surprising given kind of where our share price is trading and where our dividend is at GBP 0.08 per annum. Two other main themes here really is diversification. We have the ability, because we are sector agnostic, to roll with the punches and pick and choose where we feel that there is value opportunities. Countercyclical buying. We were buying secondary industrials kind of in 2017, 2018. We were selling out of longer-let offices pre-COVID, when you could argue that actually the office sector was probably at its most mature with obviously the more recent disruption it has had with the return to the office in the post-COVID era. Following COVID, we were selling industrials where we had done quite a lot of asset management, selling out at low 6% net initial yields, and then reinvesting that into retail, which obviously had very much gone through a storm with COVID, high streets closing, and the growth of e-commerce. We felt there was really good value there. And actually more recently, we have seen very much a renaissance on the high street and in particular, high street retail to sectors which are, they have got a bit of wind in their sails at the moment. We are seeing some performance there. I think the final theme on this chart is really knowing when to cash in your chips. We have business plans at the point that we acquire assets. We like to hit the ground running. We really like to get under the bonnet of our assets and add value. But having done that and grown income, if we see opportunities which excite us in our pipeline, we will look typically to dispose of assets in the 6%, 7% net initial yields and reinvest that into high yielding assets with asset management opportunities. This chart here just tracks all our sales throughout the life cycle of the company. A 41% average sale-to-purchase-price premium. Oxford sticks out like a sore thumb in the middle there. We sold that at around 250% premium to its acquisition price. That was an alternative use play where we took on a high-up center vacancy, but more recently, on the right-hand side of this graph, we have been selling out of industrials in the low sixes. We sold an industrial asset with vacant possession in Deeside rather than actually take on a rather capital-intensive refurbishment project and then crystallize value there. We actually sort of leapfrogged that asset management initiative and actually sold to an owner-occupier for a price similar to what the investment value would have been had we done a letting. And obviously there is the Coventry Central Six asset. We grew the net operating income about 50% there. That was lots of asset management, bringing in a wider variety of tenants. I think it would probably be wrong of me not to touch on the red bars. I think it is fair to say, in the case of Portsmouth and Blackpool, they were both retail assets, high street retail assets. And despite what I have just said about there being a renaissance on the high street, I think that is true, but it really has to be the sort of the best-in-class properties. The high street has shortened in recent years and these assets, which we bought a while ago, were in slightly more peripheral retail areas. In Blackpool, for example, the council, which owns the shopping center there, was trying to pinch a lot of our tenants and take them into the shopping center. In those instances were a case of actually filling those assets, trying to maximize income, and then actually deciding to, well, throw in the towel, not necessarily, but decide to sell them at the right point of time and move on for opportunities elsewhere. Henry, I am just touching here on this slide on the current market opportunity, which we think is very strong, and we see a lot of very attractive buying opportunity in our pipeline, which we continuously track using our investment team. I am showing you here CBRE's value index as a proxy for capital values across the commercial property market. We can see that they have been quite suppressed since late 2022. That is, of course, because of what we have seen in interest rates. It is also true that over that time frame, we have seen significantly lower volumes than we would normally see coming through the commercial property market. Far fewer properties reaching the market and far fewer buyers for them. That makes for quite an interesting time for a value investor, because we tend to see that at times in the market of low volumes, we see less pricing transparency and more propensity for mispricing in the market. As a value investor, that is of course what we are looking for. What we are showing you here is what we think is the strongest buying opportunity that we have seen since our IPO, and we are tracking currently about GBP 200 million worth of buying opportunities, cross sector, with a weighting in single let industrials, in high street retail, in leisure, and very much representative of what we have bought in the portfolio to date, yielding 8.5%+, and with some prospects for rental growth as well. A very strong buying opportunity that we are exploring routes with our board to try and access at the moment. Henry touched on one of the previous slides about making sales and knowing when to sell. We pride ourselves on sort of knowing when to buy and when to sell in different assets, in different sectors, quite often countercyclically within AEWU's strategy. Often we would of course like that to be maximizing our receipts. But here, unfortunately, this is not quite such a success story. We have made a sale that completed just post the quarter end, that we have recently announced, in order to move on from losses related to this asset. This nightclub in Cardiff was acquired, apologies, the purchase date up there is showing incorrectly. We bought this in late 2021 for GBP 3.6 million, and we have sold it for GBP 1.5 million, but at a significant premium to the asset's current valuation. The asset was bought, really aiming to benefit from a kind of post-COVID recovery in this sector, which due to kind of social change and the cost of living crisis that we've seen in this country over the past few years, isn't something that materialized. I guess being fairly upfront about that, of course, we're disappointed about the performance of this asset, but we consider it to be more important to make the sale that's profitable to current book value and move on when we see very attractive buying opportunities in our pipeline that I've just set out. On to the asset management section of this presentation. This is our industrial single-let unit in St Helens, in the North West. It is let to a tenant called Kverneland Group, and they essentially sell large agricultural machinery and parts. This is their U.K. HQ, with their group headquarters over in Norway. I believe it is owned by a large Japanese conglomerate. It's a 94,000 sq ft unit. We bought it for GBP 3.45 million, GBP 37/sq f t, so very low capital value per square foot if you compare that to what it would cost to rebuild this, which would be probably a price at about GBP 120/sq f t. That's obviously excluding the price of the land. Of a net initial yield of 8.2%. Throwing off some really good day-one income, exactly what we want. Yeah, an attractive yield and low capital value. There was about nine years left to the tenant when we bought it. With it being a very well-located asset close to major motorway links, we obviously were anticipating some really strong rental growth for this asset. We have just now captured that through a 10-year lease renewal and moving on the rent by 42%. That's moving it on from the level of rent that it was previously paying, which was GBP 389,000, and which was set about five years ago when there was an open market rent review. We've moved on that rent to GBP 6.50 a square foot, a 48% increase. Over the past two quarters, given that this completed very close to quarter end, we've really seen some strong valuation performance on this asset, with the value increasing by GBP 1 million over the March and the June quarter collectively. We have previously mentioned Runcorn, having done a new letting a couple of quarters ago, but this quarter we completed two more new lettings. You may all recall, about a year or so ago, we got three units back from CJ Services who were paying a rent of GBP 6.50. It's never a great thing having more vacancy within your portfolio, but there's always a silver lining because it's an opportunity to move rents on and crystallize rental growth, and that was very much the case here. The units were also a little bit tired, so we had the ability to improve them through refurbishments and improve their environmental performance. The EPCs of these three units are now at B, where previously they were at a D rating. As you will see in this slide, we have done two new lettings, one at GBP 9.50 and one at GBP 9.55. Two good tenants taking 10-year leases. Moving on those rents significantly and getting two new really good tenants. So it has been a very good kind of asset management story. It is really good to actually to follow through with your business plans and see that value enhancement. This chart really here is looking at the opportunity within the industrial portfolio. I have included some bullet points here, which quite a lot of you will be familiar with because we have reported these statistics, obviously updated for this quarter and previous presentations. The statistics for the industrial sector tend to be more acute than portfolio-wide. So we have a smaller wall to break and to expiry for the industrial assets than we do for the rest of the portfolio at 2.48 years and 4.84 respectively. Which means that the asset management opportunities are closer to where we are today than they would be elsewhere in the portfolio. We have a stronger reversionary potential, so a reversionary yield of 9.56% in comparison to a lower net initial yield of 6.12%, which kind of makes sense because industrials are valued more keenly than other sectors currently. A very low average passing rent of GBP 3.48/sq ft in comparison to a rent of GBP 4.86 /sq f t. I think it is fair to say that based on some of the examples that we have given over the past few quarters, that ERV actually could be stronger. That is CBRE's assessment of ERV, and we tend to be beating those assessments. Do bear that in mind when you are thinking about the opportunity within the industrial sector within the portfolio. I touched on this earlier on about the capital value per square foot of the St Helens asset, but our industrial book value is at GBP 48/sq ft, which is relatively very low when you think about the cost of replacing these industrial assets, as I said, GBP 120/sq ft. Just touching on this bar chart here. The dashed lines are essentially showing the cumulative rental growth between now and 2030. We believe that there is 18.2% cumulative rental growth within our industrial assets between now and that point in time. In comparison to Knight Frank's forecast, which is just shy of 14%. So our assets are outperforming Knight Frank's rental growth forecast. I think it is probably worth noting as well that this rental growth, this 18.2%, is attributed to lease events and ERVs which CBRE have put on those assets, when those lease events come up. The Knight Frank estimate of rental growth, that is not factored into our rental growth forecast. I think looking at this graph, it is quite obvious that there is a lot to go after in this year, 2026 and 2027, where there is as much rental growth as higher than 10% to 2027. But then we have a number of quieter years in 2028, 2029, 2030. That might initially look quite strange, but you will all appreciate that, typically in the U.K., lease cycles tend to be on a five-year basis. So if we are capturing rental growth through rent reviews and lease renewals in 2026 and 2027, it would mean that the next lease event would be in 2031 and 2032, which obviously falls off this graph, with it only going out to 2030. So I think it's just fair to say that, we've got a very busy next couple of, well, this year and next year. We then might have a bit of a quieter period over 2028, 2029, 2030. But do bear in mind that the rents that we are agreeing in 2026 and 2027 will then subsequently be grown by these rental growth forecasts. And then in 2030 and 2031, we will start to look to push on those rents again. So, it's not like saying the asset management opportunity is falling off a cliff in 2028. It certainly isn't. This rental growth story will very much continue, but we will just go through a quieter two-year period. And we could also possibly consider some sales from that portfolio in that period of time, where the rental growth is coming through a bit less. Yeah. If we think that's advantageous for the portfolio. Yeah. Which we have done on a number of occasions over the past couple of years, going back to that chart that I showed earlier on in the presentation. Thanks. I am just going to talk about a letting that we undertook during the quarter and was recently announced at our asset at 40 Queen Square in Bristol. Again, apologies, the purchase price on a number of these slides is wrong. This asset was acquired in 2016. This has been quite a long-term hold for us, and we have seen some really strong rental performance coming from this asset. Just looking back to 2016, we bought the asset with around 50% vacancy and with average passing rent of about GBP 17 /sq ft. Within about 18 months of owning the asset, we had it fully let and with rents up to about GBP 20 /sq f t. Over the course of the last eight years, we have continued to move those rents up. We have seen really strong performance from this asset, and it really just goes to show, touching on my comment on going back to the very first slide of this presentation, on how a focus on well-located assets really can future-proof strategies. Because, from 2017 to today, we have seen the overall rent on let space from this asset increase from GBP 20 /sq ft up to about GBP 35/sq ft. Of course, during that time frame, we have seen office rents across the rest of the market struggle very significantly. This asset has really bucked the trend that we have seen in the wider sector because of how well located it is, because of the quality of the building, because of the surrounding amenity, because of the refurbishments that we have done on a piecemeal basis to this building. During the quarter, we completed a letting to IWG, who took occupation of the building during June. IWG being the overall company name for some of the serviced office brands, including Regus, and they are in this building now, operating under their Signature brand. They had been operating nearby but had to move from their previous space, so have brought with them a number of tenants who they had in their previous space. We have kind of hit the ground running here in this location. I think it is really representative, this letting, of kind of changes that we are seeing across the office market. At AEWU, we have always strongly said that we very much believe in office occupation, where it is well located, where it has strong surrounding amenity, where it has good ESG credentials. Tenants now are often requiring increased flexibility, hence the need for, the growing need, really, for this serviced office requirement. The building is now fully let, and IWG are in the process of ramping up their occupancy and bringing it to maturity, having taken occupation in June. On this next slide, it is really just a kind of graphical representation, showing you both rent per square foot on let space in this building and the overall income level that we are expecting to receive. As you can see, our estimates for the full year 2026 and 2027 are increasing significantly and showing further growth coming in the income stream from this building. Actually, in 2027, we are still projecting, well, some upcoming vacancy on smaller suites in the building, such that in 2028, we are actually projecting even more growth from the overall income stream from this building and further growth also on the IWG income stream, as that also reaches a greater level of maturity. Whilst we may have a more flexible occupation style in place with IWG, in actual fact, once their business plan here reaches maturity, the level of income that we are projecting to receive from them, even at an occupational level less than 100%, exceeds the level of ERV as projected by our valuers. We believe that this is a very positive letting for this building that we have completed during the quarter. The final asset management slide is on Tanner Row, York. We updated this, I think, back in March, when administrators were appointed. It was PwC. Obviously, since that time, for us in York, very little has changed. The lights are on, the car park is operating, and PwC have continued to pay rent, albeit not on a quarterly basis, but on a monthly basis in arrears, also paying service charge and insurance. That is very good news, bearing in mind that obviously about 30 sites were closed. We have included this slide here just to kind of give you an update. We have had a fair bit of communication with PwC and understand, and I am sure this has been alluded to in the press as well, that the business will be sold. I am sure there will be announcements on that in the national press in the coming weeks. For the time being, it is just a case of sort of sitting tight and seeing what happens. We suspect when the business is acquired that the lease, which is in administration, will be assigned from the administrators to the new company. We very much actually see this as an opportunity. I mentioned earlier on how administrations possibly can have silver linings, and we would hope that is the case here. Just finally to point out, we bought this asset off a low capital value per square foot, very much kind of the investment philosophy of AEW U. If the doomsday scenario was that the tenant were to go, we are holding off a low capital value per square foot, which lends itself to alternative uses. Throughout this process, we have actually had alternative use developers interested in this site. You will appreciate that York is a very well-known at U.K. city with a strong university, fantastic rail links, and this is actually located within York city walls, so a very land-constrained city. There is a plan B and plan C, but it looks like plan A, to keep this building income-producing, is very much on the cards, and we look forward to providing you with updates in due course. I think it is fair to say we feel quite positive about the concept of the NCP business being sold with this lease in place. We know what we have here is a very profitably trading car park, and we are hopeful that ultimately that business will end up in the hands of someone who is better capitalized than the previous business, which will, of course, hopefully lead to more positives coming through to the asset itself. Well, thank you all for joining us today. We hope that you have read our shareholder update this quarter. We hope that you have heard today the positive news that we have on lettings during the quarter. We certainly feel very pleased about what we have achieved. Of course, that feeds through to our dividend, which continues to be paid very consistently. Also consistently, the delivery of our NAV total returns outperforming the MSCI benchmark over numerous time frames and in the most recent time frames as well. Looking at the portfolio, we still believe it represents a value proposition with low book values, low passing rents, opportunities for rental growth coming forward, and a really strong pipeline as well. Thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to hopefully seeing you again next quarter and in future periods when we do hope that we can re-engage with you on a live question- and- answer session as well. Thank you. Thank you very much.
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