Good afternoon and welcome to The Property Franchise Group PLC Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tabs situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself; however, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I would now like to hand you over to CEO Gareth Samples. Good afternoon to you. Good afternoon, Alex, and thanks for that. Good afternoon, everybody. Delighted to be able to present to you today our full year results for 2023 and give a little bit more color about our recent merger with the Belvoir Group PLC, which I'm sure everybody's interested in. Just for some sort of context, the Property Franchise Group is the U.K.'s largest multi-brand property franchisor, and we're going to touch on some of the sort of key components of the group during this presentation. In terms of the size of the business, there's some numbers down the left-hand side that David will cover off a little bit later. But TPFG, as I've said, is the U.K.'s largest property franchisor. Most of our income comes from lettings. About two-thirds of our MSF comes from lettings. We also do estate agency, financial services, and conveyancing. The business was established in 1986, and it's grown both organically and through acquisition. It's now a national business throughout the U.K. We operate now through 15 unique property brands with over 910 franchise outlets. In terms of our income streams, they're resilient. They're occurring. I think the numbers for 2023 really demonstrate that, with, as I say, lettings at the core of our business. But we also believe there's some really strong organic growth drivers that we're really focused on. We've got the market drivers in terms of rental increases, rental inflation. We've got franchisee recruitment, new people coming into the business. We've got our assisted acquisitions program for franchisees. And we've got big acquisitions at a franchisor level that, obviously, we've demonstrated in the first quarter of this year. The business is highly cash-generative and debt-free, and we're really focused on a sustainable growth in our dividend policy, and that's grown by 23.3% each year over the last 11 years. In terms of 2023, and this is the Property Franchise Group before the Belvoir merger, full year 2023 was another year of record performance. In what was a challenging market, 2023's sales market was probably the most challenging I've experienced in my tenure with the group, excluding COVID lockdown. So 2023, only 1 million transactions took place in the year set against 2021, when there was 1.5 million sales transactions. So tough year, and I think to deliver the results we have been absolutely incredible. I think the business model has proven its strength and resilience. A lot of people ask us about the cyclical nature of the property market, and with us being a franchise, it's a much more stable income stream. I think we've demonstrated that in 2023. The franchise model, with huge focus on lettings and diversification of income, is improving network resilience, which I think is a really important point. Then, of course, there's the transformational merger that took place on March the 7th with Belvoir, which creates the U.K.'s largest multi-brand lettings and estate agency business within what is now a very large financial services business run by Michelle Brook. The combined group will benefit from increased scale and geographical reach. I think in the early days of ownership, the last 4 weeks, we've been incredibly positive about the opportunities that exist with that wider group and the discussions and the meetings we've already had, which will be great for the future. In terms of just giving some context about the new group, we now, as I said earlier, operate out of 15 property brands. There's national brands: Martin & Co, Hunters, EweMove, Belvoir, Northwood, and Nicholas Humphreys. So there's 6 national brands, sorry, and Mr and Mrs Clarke, 7 national brands, and then we've got 8 regional brands: Whitegates, Parkers, CJ Hole, Ellis & Co, Country Properties, Mullucks, Lovelle, and Newton Fallowell. And actually, they're all dotted around the country, so that gives us strength within most parts, most regions across the U.K. We're also representing Scotland and Wales and, for the first time, Northern Ireland. In terms of financials, I'm now going to hand you over to my CFO, David Raggett, who's going to talk you through some of the numbers. David. Good afternoon, everybody. This next slide, you're going to see, is a bit busy, busy for all of us, but I need to set a scene on how we came into 2023. In fact, I'm going to step back a bit further and just talk about 2021 because 2021 was a fantastic sales year, and we started to see lettings growth mainly driven by rental inflation. Come 2022, the sales market was starting to dip away, and rental inflation was taking hold in the marketplace. 2023, we've got about as far as we think we're going to go in terms of reductions in sales completions. So, the U.K. market now, 2023, just over 1 million transactions completed, sales transactions, and we are seeing about 8%-10% increase in rents on new lets and an in-tenancy rental inflation running at about 5%. We came into 2023 expecting the drop in the sales market, expecting 5% in-tenancy increases in rents and 8%-10% on new lets. We ended up with a result of GBP 27.3 million of turnover against GBP 27.2 million for the same time prior year, same year. The difference is small, but the quality is quite different in terms of where the revenue came from, with an increase in lettings revenues both across our network and in our own offices and a natural reduction in sales MSF and sales income across our offices. The net result of a good lettings market and a poorer sales market was that the growth in lettings MSF offset the reduction in sales MSF, and we reported a result of GBP 16.1 million for MSF overall, up GBP 100,000. But within that, the quality is different. 60% of all our MSF came from lettings in 2023, up from 55% the prior year. That's important to us because that's our recurring income within that number. Our recurring income from lettings alone across the group was 53% of all turnover. One of the things that we've held onto right throughout my 11 years here in the business is operating margins. So when I say hold onto, we've always had a view, "Well, I have that should be over 40%," and we always work on that to make sure that we are between 40%-45%. We had the one year in 2020 because of COVID was a bit unique, but otherwise, we're within those bands, up a little bit in 2023 to 42%. And then profit before tax moved on again a little bit from GBP 8.8 million to GBP 9 million, just GBP 200,000. During that time, of course, the corporation tax rates changed, so we've gone from a 19% environment to a 25% environment, which naturally will come off of those numbers when you get to earnings per share. So earnings per share was 28.4P, fully diluted in 2023, the same as 2022. And it stood still in the main because the tax rate's gone up at this moment in time. But it's something we do need to drive forward, and to drive that forward, we need to drive revenue whilst holding our costs as constant as we can. So that's the P&L. And then balance sheet-wise, in 2023, we had GBP 5.1 million of net cash in TPFG of old. Just a comparative, Belvoir had GBP 1.7 million. And so between us, we had GBP 6.8 million when we came into this year. And at the moment, at the end of March, we had GBP 4.7 million net cash between us, a little bit more of the acquisition costs to go through, about GBP 1 million. So really, that's a GBP 3.7 million number. But that's probably about as low as we're going to go at the end of the day. Now it's all about generating cash again and building that back up and what we do with it. Free cash flow per share, 27p this year, 27p last year, 27p in 2021. That's two factors there. One, clearly profit growth, but two, tax rates changing. And unless we need to contribute more to the Treasury in order to progress the plans of either party coming into this year, then we should start to move that forward. And we do. We need to move that to 35p, 36p, 37p. And there's a reason for that because the next slide, dividend. Dividend per share in 2023 was 14p. Gareth and I Gareth and I have been talking about this. We'd like to see that at 25p. So if we're to move that on, we need to move our free cash flow on. If we're to move the free cash flow on, we need to move revenue on to generate greater profits. And then two metrics that we just keep a good eye on: return on capital employed. We are in the cycle at the moment. We're building up from a low of the acquisition of Hunters, so we're at over 20% from return on capital employed, and that will head towards 25% unless we have a further acquisition, which we'll see. Then it will go through a similar climb again from a low, building back up to 25%. The return on capital invested, which if we continue on that trend, will end up about 30% for 2024. So good returns off of capital employed and return on capital invested. If you were to look at our growth rate, whether it's revenue, profits, dividends, if you look at any of those and you look at the last 7 years since we've been on the market, you'll find cumulative annualized growth rate or compound annualized growth rate, sorry, running around about 22%-23% right the way across the period. Next slide, please, Gareth. For those who don't know us, we do have a mix of revenue like most businesses. So roughly 60% of our revenue is coming from management service fees, royalties we charge our franchisees, 18%-19% from owned offices. We own 9 offices in the Hunters brand in the Midlands and the north of the country. So naturally, we try to drive those forward, and that's where that income comes from. Financial services running about the same year-on-year, but it's around 6% of total revenue. There was a time when we said if it was 5% of total revenue, we'd be happy. But now, in the new environment, 6%'s nowhere near enough, and we need to move that on. Franchise sales, a small part of our business every year. We do have franchisees who retire or choose to do something else and sell their franchise, and we take some fees from them for doing so. We also charge new entrants, mainly into EweMove, a fee for joining, and that's where the franchise sales income comes from. And then other is a combination of two things. It's assisting franchisees in the management of their portfolios of tenancy properties, which we do centrally in a number of locations. And it's from the licenses that we hold for the operating systems. So we're the main licensee, and then we sub-license down to the franchisees. That's our sources of income. Gareth. Group MSF split, I've touched on this. We're up from 55% of all MSF coming from lettings to 60% now. And as a consequence of that and the sales market being where it is, that's slipped away. When we bring Belvoir into this chart because it's predominantly a lettings business when it comes to the franchise network, this whole metric will change again, and we will sit somewhere between 70%-75% of all our MSF coming from lettings. Cash in the year. So we started off GBP 6.7 million. We generated from operations GBP 9 million. We paid back half of our RCF to Barclays, so it was GBP 2.5 million that went out. Paid dividends of GBP 4.3 million. We had a few other movements and financing and investing, and we ended up with cash at the end of the year of GBP 7.6 million. And if you take the 2.5 off what you still owe Barclays and pay them back in January 2024, we ourselves had net cash of GBP 5.1 million. We've grown our cash generated from operations. As you can see, there's a step change, and now we're looking for that next step change up. That's what will take us from that GBP 9 million. We know the combined number with Belvoir would be GBP 18 million. What takes us to GBP 20 million, all that bit further, that's the challenge for us. Consequently, as we move that on, we'll see our free cash flow per share move on again. Okay. Thanks, David. So we're going to talk about period of significant growth. I think if you look at 2023, and again, this is just TPFG's result and nothing to do with Belvoir, you can see each month last year on lettings that they outperformed the year before. And the really good news is 2024 has started exactly the same. So every month so far in 2024 has been ahead of the same month last year. Sales MSF, you can see the flip of that story. The 2021, obviously, stamp duty holiday peaks, 1.5 million transactions. 2022, a little bit flatter but 1.25 million transactions. And then 2023, a million transactions, well below 2023 sorry, 2022 and 2021. Good news, and I'll touch on this later, is first three months of 2024 are ahead of last year. It's looking like the transaction market will be around 1.1 million, which is back to a sort of normalized market from 2012 to 2019. So 1.1 million transactions will be about a 10% lift year-on-year. So market update, really, really strong market for lettings in 2023. Demand for every property coming to the market, 10, 12, 15 people looking to view every letting property that came to the market, outstripping supply for the 10th year on the chart, and rising rental rates, increasing cost for landlords. So landlords were actually quite sympathetic during COVID and during a low-interest rate environment and actually rent lagged behind a little bit because landlords didn't need any more money. I think what's happened since the interest rates started to rise and landlords' costs started to increase is they now need that income. So over the last 18 months, 2 years, we've seen landlords getting much keener to address their rents and to increase their rents for tenants. And I think there's just an element of catch-up. And we think that will go this year and probably into next year. As we said at the beginning, we look after 78,000 properties as old TPFG, 152,000 in the combined group. And it takes a long time to wash rental increases on every property through that portfolio. So there's still work to do on that at a local level, and that will be that will come through in terms of a more positive result on rental inflation for 2024's results. Touched on this, subdued sales market in 2023, really challenging market. It did improve in the second half year as the interest rate started to not go up so much. But the good news from a TPFG perspective is, although the market was down 19%, we were only down 16% and therefore slightly outperformed the market. And there's reasons for that that I'll go into later when we start talking about the growth initiatives that we've got. And then 2024 so far, improving sales market, lettings continuing to grow at high single digits, and we're expecting 1.1 million completions in 2024. So that gives you some color in terms of the market and the fast start to the year. Back in September 2020, six months after joining the group and coming out of lockdown, we set in place the growth initiatives, the strategy that's seen us through over the last couple of years. And I want to give you an update on that. And it's very likely that we'll implement this into the Belvoir group as well. We've just gone into our new five-year growth strategy with the objective within TPFG of increasing profits organically by GBP 1 million a year. Our intention is to do exactly the same in the Belvoir group. So GBP 1 million in TPFG, GBP 1 million in Belvoir, so GBP 2 million for the enlarged group. And the big question is how are we going to do that? So we see the opportunity still within lettings. We think inflation will continue to impact on the result over the next two or three years. We had double-digit growth last year, and 53% of our total revenue came from lettings. And we ended the year with 78,000 managed properties. Sales, we've touched on, we outperformed the market in 2023. There's still an incredible opportunity across both groups to sell more houses. So within TPFG, we do about 22,000 exchanges a year. Within Belvoir, 8,000-10,000. But we still have a number of offices that don't do any house sales. So our operations team and our managing directors are working very hard to improve those results. And we see that very much as an opportunity for the future. Financial services, Belvoir had a really, really strong financial services business headed up by Michelle Brook. TPFG had a small mortgage business, and we acquired Mortgage Genie in 2021. So the combination of bringing those two businesses together, I think, still creates a huge opportunity. If I look at the penetration into those 30,000 house sales units the group does, we still only do at franchise level about 3,000 mortgages. If I looked at that into a corporate environment, they'd expect to do about 15,000 mortgages from those house sales. So still a lot of work to do. Delighted to have Michelle's expertise within the group. We will start to execute on those plans to drive a better result out of financial services within the franchise businesses over the next 18 months. Recruitment, really, really important part of the group's long-term strategy. We recruited 46 new franchise owners in 2023, 15 as traditional agents, and 31 in our hybrid estate agency business, EweMove. We extended the EweMove footprint territories to 182, which was a small increase on the previous year, but last year was a very tough year. Pleased to say that 2024 started really briskly. I think we've got 15 new territories sold already this year. We did 21 resales, which is becoming a really important component of both businesses. We have an aging population of franchisees, and it's really important that we bring new blood into the group when people want to exit and retire and spend less time in the business. So going forward, both across the Belvoir network and the TPFG network, it's really important that we bring this new blood in who hopefully have that motivation to take those businesses further forward. Acquisitions, and I always talk about acquisitions in sort of two stages. There's the franchisee acquisitions across both businesses where our franchisees buy local lettings books off of their competition, and we support that from an implementation perspective and a financial perspective. And last year, TPFG did just short of 2,000 units, 1,879, and Belvoir did just over 2,000 units. So across the group, about 4,000 new portfolio units brought into the group. Our intention is to continue that and hopefully try and move it forward. And then there's the acquisition piece at a franchisor level, of which, obviously, we've done the Belvoir merger. Michelle Brook's bought two financial services businesses last year that added about GBP 600,000 to Belvoir's profit before tax. And we're committed to continue to support Michelle in growing that business, along with looking at any other acquisitions that are profitable and are accretive to shareholders. So if we could pull off another acquisition in 2024 that was accretive and profitable, we would look to do that. And then the big piece is the digital marketing strategy. We now, as an enlarged group, look after 9 million data records, which is huge, okay? We've invested significantly in technology to become best-in-class digital marketeers across the estate agency and financial services space. Quite a lot of investment went into TPFG last year in terms of getting that digital platform built. There's still some work to do in Belvoir, but again, they're quite a way down that road as well. Our intention is to understand the customers that we have, communicate them at relevant times, offering relevant services, and become almost the lead generation system for our franchisees. We want to be able to pass valuation leads, lettings leads, insurance leads, financial services leads back to our franchisees to drive their income and their profitability by utilizing the data that we now hold in a centralized way. That talks to you about the six growth strategies that we're really focused on, that we're investing in across the group, that will drive that GBP 1 million worth of growth out of each side of the business over the next five years. In terms of taking that a step further, the growth drivers, so how are we going to do this in the next five years? So we want to increase our market penetration and keep lettings at our core. So we've talked about lettings acquisitions, lettings inflation. But there's also more regulation coming into the letting side of the business. And we very much see that as an opportunity with the Renters Reform Bill as opposed to a sort of barrier. And what we're doing across the group is running landlord seminars to inform private landlords about the changes and the impact of the Renters Reform Bill. And having run 10, 12 of those over the last four or five months, what's become really clear is that landlords that self-manage are a little bit in the dark, and they're very, very grateful for the sessions that we've run. All of the sessions that we've run have resulted in landlords who would normally manage their own properties deciding to use an agent. We see that very much as an opportunity. Now, we can't just run seminars. We've got to do webinars. We've got to do digital marketing. There's a strategy to become, if you like, the expert in the lettings market to inform private landlords about the changes that the Renters Reform Bill will drive out. That's an important opportunity. Sales, touched on this already, we are underperforming in the sales market as a business in the main. We've got some very good sales offices, but we are underperforming from a market share perspective across the whole network. We've got a management team that will work with our franchisees to drive that side of the business. That's going on at the moment. Some of the results you could see through the results I talked about earlier, we've seen market share gains in 2023. Financial services, it's about building Michelle's business, supporting her in her acquisitions, but more importantly, increasing the productivity of each of the 308 financial advisors that we've got employed. Last year was really, really tough. Most of the mortgage activity came from product transfers and remortgages as opposed to new transactions. And of course, product transfers and remortgages earn you less money. So you've got to run harder to deliver the results that the financial services business did last year, which actually were astounding given the sort of landscape that Michelle was navigating through last year. But our intention is looking at increasing that transactional business that will increase the productivity of each of those 308 financial advisors. That's where the growth's going to come from the financial services business. In terms of recruitment, big piece on attracting new franchisees to increase our U.K. coverage, develop the brands further, and enable the resale of existing franchise territories. I touched on earlier that the aging population of both networks means bringing this fresh blood we perceive as a real opportunity. They'll embrace all the new income streams, and they'll do it, if you like, in a modern way. Really important part of our strategy going forward, the recruitment of new franchisees. Acquisitions, we're really acquisitive. We'd do another deal this year if the right business came up. I guess the metric for us is, as I've discussed, profitability and earnings accretive for shareholders with no dilution. Then digital marketing, nine million customers. We've invested in the technology. We've got the websites. We've got the lead generation tools. We've got the referral system in place so we can spot the opportunities and serve them up to our franchisees to close. And the amazing piece is this is before AI plays its part. And I'm seeing demos of technology at the moment that is nothing like I've seen before. AI will play a massive part in this dealing with the 9 million customers, understanding where the opportunities exist, and maximizing the revenue that's driven from that digital marketing strategy. So we're really excited about the future and the growth drivers that we're going to focus on in 2024. In terms of the Belvoir Group, talking specifically about Belvoir, merger creates the U.K.'s largest mortgage brand property franchisor, which is great news for us. It's a great business. We said at the time that it had a certain inevitability that the two businesses at some point would come together. And 2023, the stars aligned to enable that to happen. But both TPFG and Belvoir have sort of tracked each other since being founded, really, in 1995. They listed at a similar time. They've both done acquisitions. Since they listed, those acquisitions have been integrated really, really well. Dorian and Louise did an incredible job for a long period of time. David's been here 11 years. Again, did an incredible job with Ian Wilson, my predecessor. And we've grown again since I came on board. So two really well-run businesses, two profitable businesses, two resilient businesses. And our belief is that two and two can equal five or six, yeah? The opportunity this larger group has to really drive forward now is really exciting. We're looking forward to the next 12 months working with Dorian and Louise and then beyond, identifying those opportunities and starting to really drive value to our shareholders to make sure that everybody gets the return they deserve. In terms of what do they give us? Enhanced scale and geographical reach. We've already identified some really interesting opportunities that we'll be working on in the second half of the year. We operate out of 910 locations. We'll look after 153,000 properties on behalf of landlords, which is the biggest in the country. We're expected to sell more than 28,000 properties. I think they'll go over 30,000 this year, actually. I think what it enables us to do is that the enlarged group can enhance its value proposition to franchisees and consumers. We've got great reach. We've got great technology. We've got a huge database. The customer-for-life journey that we can do through our data marketing and the leads that we can pass back to our franchisees is going to be significant. Earnings accretion and annual synergies. I think the earnings accretion piece is certainly the bit that we're most interested in. The annual synergies will come, but both businesses are actually well-run, so it's not like loads of fat that we're going to cut out. I think investing in that opportunity is where we see our focus over the next six months. We want to accelerate the financial services strategy. Michelle, as I say, runs a really good business. We do 20,000 mortgages, or we did 20,000 mortgages in 2023 from the 308 advisors. And if we can continue on that acquisition trail and increase the productivity of each of those advisors, then that puts that business in really good shape from a profitability perspective. And then great news, we've got a strengthened management team. Michelle's joined the board as Executive Director with responsibility for all things financial services. Belvoir's ex-chairman, John DiStefano, has joined us as a non-exec. And Paul George has joined us and will head up the audit committee, replacing Phil Crooks, who had come to the end of his time. So really good board. Met with him a couple of times. Really, really supportive and really excited about the future. I'm now going to hand you back to David, who's going to talk you through some of the Belvoir financial numbers for 2023. Yeah. The overriding not the impression. The overriding memory I want you to take away from this is that the start of the year, Belvoir 2023, Belvoir faced the struggle of financial services and quite what impact that would have on revenue and profitability. And come the end of the year, they managed to come out with a result which reflected where they thought they would be at the start of the year, which is quite something. And it all really hinged on financial services. There were two acquisitions, small ones during the year, which added some revenue and profitability. And then Belvoir worked quite hard. So well done to Michelle because that made up the difference. And we need to understand more about that Belvoir, but we will do in time. So Belvoir's turnover was just turnover, like ourselves, just up slightly, GBP 34.2 million in 2023. Headline PBT, same as the prior year, adjusted PBT, GBP 500,000. That's important because that's telling you what's happening and the underlying business and the potential that's there on adjusted EBITDA and adjusted PBT. So you're seeing good growth there, and that will come through. That should be sustained in future years. Basic adjusted EPS up slightly to GBP 22.6 million. I mentioned the net cash today, GBP 1.7 million. And then other side of the coin, how do they compare to us? Well, the old TPFG as was, it was 331 offices at the end of 2023. The old TPFG would be about 580. Average MSF per franchise office, almost GBP 36,000 offices. It's higher than the old TPFG. And the reason for that is we've got a reasonably young brand in EweMove, which is growing quite well. And then by the very nature of it, that dilutes our own averages. Number of managed properties, very similar. They ended up at 75,000, just over, and old TPFG at 78,000. Where they've always done well Belvoir compared to the old TPFG is on MSF from assisted acquisitions. And GBP 400,000 would be considerably different to that being achieved in TPFG at this moment in time. So we've got something to learn there and something to build upon. Number of advisors, well, old TPFG had about eight. There's 308 there. So it's a completely different scale of operation. And clearly, we need as much as we understand financial services at the moment in time. Michelle will drive that forward and bring our knowledge up to speed. And the number of mortgages have ranged, well, just under 20,000. To put that in scale, if you added in what TPFG as was achieved in 2023, you'd be up just over about 21,000. So you can see how much bigger that operation is than the operation we had. Next slide, please, Kath. Revenue-wise, if you well, let's think about this. If you think about it on a network scale, the whole network generated on a pro forma basis, GBP 261 million worth of revenue in 2023. It's not that long ago that TPFG was showing network revenue of GBP 90 million. And from that, I mean, that's the main drive at the end of the day for the revenue that you see on a pro forma basis here alongside the financial services business. We see just over GBP 61 million worth of combined revenue in 2023, gross profit at just over GBP 42 million, adjusted EBITDA at just over GBP 23 million. If you were to take 25% off that, roughly as the tax rate, you'll come down to very close to what the free cash flow was. That was GBP 18 million. And lo and behold, PBT in 2023 for the combined group was GBP 18 million. But just to the left-hand side, that's an important result for me. Belvoir came in, as you can see, almost bang on the same numbers as the prior year and hit all its expectations in 2023. And against the background that it had to work with, that was a far we thought we were challenged, but clearly, they were more challenged. And that really does underline how good that result was and just how resilient that business is. Over to you, Gareth. Thanks, David. So now looking towards 2024 and the outlook, quarter one's ahead of management expectations across both businesses in terms of both revenue and profitability. So look back last year when sort of the impact of the Liz Truss budget and the interest rate rises were starting to kick in, and that worried us all about 2023. 2024 is in a much more positive environment, ahead on revenue, ahead on profitability, really, really pleased how the year started. In terms of lettings, every month up on the same period last year, so still ticking along really, really nicely, improving sales market, and we've focused on that. But an improving sales market will mean an improving financial services market. So each of the three major income streams, lettings, sales, financial services, are all ahead of 2023 so far, and that's driven our profitability up as well. But there's a general election, and we don't know when that's going to be called, but we believe it will be called in 2024. And it normally goes a bit quieter for four or five weeks leading up to the election. So that's the only sort of bit on the horizon that gives us some concern. All I would say is if it is going to be November and it's looking more and more likely that it's going to be November and it's called in October, then actually, our sales market and our financial services pipeline has already been established for 2024. So it won't actually affect 2024's result. It might have some impact in 2025's early result. And with the merger and the size of Belvoir, we have a transformational year ahead of us. We're really excited about the opportunity. We're really pleased to have brought those two businesses together. The commitment is we will work as hard as we need to in 2024 to get the business in real shape to move into 2025 as a combined group. That's the outlook. Now over to you. Thanks for listening. We'll now take questions. Perfect, Gareth, David. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via our invested dashboard. Gareth, David, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. If I may start the Q&A session with the first question, which reads as follows: Do you plan to franchise the company-owned branches at some point? Yes, in the main. I think we'll always have a few, if the truth be known. I think David and I are of the same opinion. If we could reduce the number of owned offices down and we've got just to context, I think 12, 13 at the moment. I think we'll always have 5, but if we could franchise the other 8, we would do. Perfect. Thank you, Gareth. Turning to the next question: What are your return hurdles for acquisitions? I think it depends whether you're talking about our acquisitions or you're talking about those that franchisees undertake. Our acquisitions, well, they're quite unique, aren't they, in the ones that we've done so far? So there's no set criteria apart from the fact that first year, I'd like it to be earnings accretive, at least into early double digits. That's important. I'm conditioned a little bit to try to get to a point where there's a in cash terms, there's a 5-year payback, but clearly, that has to be appropriate to the business that we're buying at the end of the day. Well, in time gone by, we'd have probably accepted less recurring revenue, but now we'd like businesses with recurring revenue even more. So they're the ones that we would be more focused on right now in our journey. And certainly, we can see over 50% recurring revenue. That would be what we'd be looking for. When it comes to franchisees, there's some set metrics in a market as to what is paid for a portfolio, and that runs anything from, depending on its quality, from 1.4x the annual revenue to 2.2x or 2.3x, depending where it is. So the market kind of dictates the price. But what we do look for when we're advising our franchisees is payback and, again, 5-7 years in cash terms. That's where we would sit at the end of the day. Certainly, if we thought, I mean, most acquisitions add a lot of profitability to a franchise business just by the very nature of it. You're going to have to increase the back office too much. But we still go through that process and advise our franchisees on the quality of the return. Just as we've talked about return on capital employed invested, we go through that same process with them just to make them aware of it before they make the decision to proceed or not. Thank you, David. The next question is on the Belvoir merger, which I will break into 4 different questions. First part of the question: Any unforeseen setbacks in the Belvoir integration? What is going well, and where are the challenges? So no unforeseen setbacks apart from not being able to go home that often. But it's a huge, huge business. And getting to understand the business has obviously taken all of the last sort of 3-4 weeks along with getting ready for these presentations. So Dorian and Louise are very much involved still in the day-to-day running of the group. The integration is more project-based at the moment in terms of identifying what that integration and what those opportunities look like. I think what's going well is the teams are working really, really well together. We're learning an awful lot of good stuff about the Belvoir business and what they do well and what we do well, and bringing that together is really, really exciting. The challenge, I guess, is the scale and the amount of opportunity. We've identified probably three or four big projects that we need to undertake over the next couple of months that financially could be really productive for the group overall. What we've got to make sure we've got the correct resource to be able to understand that opportunity and turn that opportunity into cash for the group. In terms of synergies, again, we're looking at them. Of course, there will be synergies, but I take everybody back to what I said in the presentation. They are well-run groups. There wasn't a lot of fat in Belvoir. There wasn't a lot of fat in TPFG. Bringing departments together may indeed create synergies. But what we've also got then is the opportunity, and how do we resource those opportunities? And I think 3, 4 weeks in is too early to say. Group marketing services, digital marketing that I talked about, AI, will that mean that we do more marketing and need more people, or will AI mean that we need less people? There are lots of questions that haven't got necessarily definitive answers yet. So I think we'll keep working away. We've got September results update that I think will have a lot more clarity on both the projects, the opportunity, the types of money those opportunities could drive out, and the synergies that have been realized ready for 2025. So work in progress. So that's the first two parts of the question. I think the third part of the question is probably for David. Sorry, can we just repeat the question then, the third part? Yes, of course. So the third part of the question is: Do you expect to change your capital allocation strategy following the Belvoir merger? I can imagine that it's hard to do further acquisitions in the next 12-18 months as we integrate Belvoir. So could you shift more cash flows towards dividends and share buybacks given that you're also net cash? Can I answer the first part, David? So we will definitely do more acquisitions in the next 12-18 months. We are keen to do another accretive, profitable acquisition in 2024. So we will do that, but then David will answer the rest of the question. Once we get through that, then we won't speculate as moment in time. But say we achieve that, well, whether we do or we don't, the fact of the matter is that we are going to generate more free cash flow in future years than we have in the past, and therefore, we've got to think about what to do with it. It's always we can continue the track record of investing in businesses that earnings accretive and continuing our 20+ cumulative growth rates in profits and dividends more than immense. Of course, we will. But if we can't, then we have two choices. We either, in my way, send that money back to you as shareholders by way of dividends. We can buy back shares. We probably won't change the amount of money we invest organically in the business. So I think it's one of those two: increase the dividends or start a share buyback program. And I wouldn't want to get ahead of ourselves on that, but we would need to sit down on share buybacks and just look at what's really worked effectively for other businesses that've been engaged in the U.K. market as U.K.-accretive businesses in doing that before we set out on that journey. But we certainly would look to buybacks in the future, assuming I mean, it could well be our share price starts to really move forward, and we think that's not a sensible use of our cash. But where we are today and where we see the value of the business, there is a mismatch, and so we'd certainly look to do it. Thank you, David. And the last part of the question is: What is your target leverage, net debt to EBITDA? I don't think we've ever been beyond about 1.2 x EBITDA. You can probably safely go to 2 x, but our appetite has been around the 1 time. So they are. It'll sit somewhere between 1x and 2x depending on the acquisition. Perfect. Moving on. Congratulations on the good results. Love the consistency in return on capital employed while quite many acquisitions are happening. The question is: Please, could you provide us with numbers over the past few years if we exclude acquisitions' effect, especially for the lettings MSF part of the business? Thank you. I think that was a hard question to answer in this session. But let me if we had a look at this when we were thinking about the Belvoir merger and starting to put together the documents and what have you, an organic growth to us has been about a third of our overall growth rates over the last 5 years. But if you step back a bit further on sort of I don't want to give you a history lesson on this, but if I look at the businesses we have acquired, when we acquired the brands from Legal & General, we trebled their at least trebled their earnings after tax in the first 2 years. When we bought EweMove, it was just breaking even. So that makes between GBP 1.5 million and GBP 2 million before tax. So GBP 1.2 million-GBP 1.5 million after tax at the moment in time. Hunters, we bought it in 2021. I mean, 2020 wasn't a great year for them for good reason. It was COVID. 2021 was a fantastic year for them, and that generated a lot of cash for us. That result hasn't actually changed too much year-over-year, which against the backdrop of it being a sales-dominated brand and where the market's gone, where the market's dropped a third in terms of the number of transactions completed, you'd be surprised and I'm sure to learn that we've managed to maintain the return to EBITDA off that business at almost the same number through synergies. So we bought businesses at different times, and we've gone through different cycles, but we've always organically grown them from where they are. And as I say, if you were to look at the piece up until the pre-merger with Belvoir, about a third of our growth's come organically. Thank you, David. Turning to the next question: What impact do you foresee from the new regulations in the lettings industry? I mean, they keep getting watered down, so the impact sort of gets less and less. But I think the Renters Reform Bill we see very much as an opportunity. Those landlords that have 1 to sort of 6, 10 properties, I think will really question whether the time is right to employ a specialist as opposed to try and do it themselves. The fines that the Renters Reform Bill drive for getting stuff wrong 5,000, I think they start at, and then if you make the same mistake, it doubles. So it's a heavy price to pay for getting it wrong. You can pay a letting agent GBP 80 a month to look after your property. So I think we see that as an opportunity. I think I touched on in the presentation, we've been running these landlord evenings. What's really apparent is they are desperate for help. They're desperate to understand, and they're really grateful for us putting on those events. What we've got to do is ramp them up. I think we're going to do them a sort of webinar series that people can join. I think that will create a good band of business. I think we'll win business as a result of educating, taking that place as the expert letting agent in that locality to help landlords. So definitely see regulation as an opportunity. But again, if you look at BBC News today, Michael Gove is now saying he doesn't think he'll get no fault evictions through till the election. So it's changed quite a lot over the last year, 18 months, and it's been watered down significantly. Thank you, David. Perhaps one last question here: Are there big segments of the market where you should be more active? Okay, segments of the market. So I'll take this as opportunity, and I may not be answering the question here, Alex. So apologies if I'm not. But are there areas that we can underperform in? So I think lettings insurances. I think big opportunity that we've seen across the group now is so big. Are there a range of services that our franchisees use different companies for that actually we could get involved with, probably do it slightly cheaper and still make sort of a margin. So I think that's part of this analysis: where could we do better? I think the other bit that probably is a segment is buy-to-let mortgages. So throughout the group, we've got 155,000 landlords looking towards us managing their property, plus all of the tenant-find-only landlords, which is probably a similar number. So 300,000 landlords across the group, at least half of which will have finance on their portfolio and currently need a business does anything from a buy-to-let mortgage perspective. So we've been talking about some really, really clever technology that enables, through an app or through a laptop, to manage your portfolio and have that updated in value terms and yield terms in real time so you can carry about your portfolio on your phone, which is quite nice, and see what the current value is. And we're going to develop that app in terms of having a sales site so that if a landlord wants to sell, we'd much prefer they sell to another landlord as opposed to a first-time buyer. So encouraging selling a buy-to-let property with a tenant in situ to another landlord, offering the finance to be able to do that both from an individual perspective and a company vehicle perspective, because that's slightly different, and being able to fire out headline rates as the buy-to-let market changes. So the last 12 months has been pretty tough for buy-to-let financing. There's much more choice available in 2024 with lower fees because the fees just spiked incredibly in 2023. So we see that as a massive opportunity and something that I want to work with Michelle in terms of understanding and then building for our landlords. It's not just about FS, this sort of landlord concierge service, because there are a number of things that we can offer. Wealth management. We can offer buy-to-let mortgages, insurances, but not in a way where they feel like we're just selling stuff to them. I want to be able to provide them with a service, with an app, which is informative but offers them products that they're going to need. And the size of that opportunity, I think, is significant, which is one of the projects, which is going to take some time to really sort of percolate and get that proposition defined before we can launch. That's great, Gareth. David, that concludes the Q&A session for today. And of course, any further questions that come through, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we will publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. But before we direct investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Gareth, could I please ask you for a few closing comments? Absolutely. Thank you for taking an interest. We're delighted that you're interested in our results, and we look forward to updating you again in September. Thank you very much. Gareth, David, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the board can better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of The Property Franchise Group PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.