Right, I'm just checking. We've got everyone online as well. Thank you all for coming along today. As I say, for being so prompt, it's great to have so many of you in the room. I know that there's plenty of people joining us on the line as well. Thank you all for taking the time. I know it's a busy day after events of yesterday as well. Thank you for such a turnout, such a strong turnout today. I just want to start by reminding us that U.K. Higher Education is one of our leading sectors in the U.K. It's recognized globally as one of the best places to come and study from across the world, and we believe that it will remain so. Demand for university education is enduring, and the jobs market still needs highly trained young minds. Unite is a great business. We are a purpose-led organization with a 30-year track record. We have built relationships and partnerships with leading universities. Our operating platform enables us to deliver great service at sensible prices. We are lucky enough to be able to look after students at a really important part of their lives and help them get the most out of their time at university. We have a great team who are committed and invested to work through the challenges that we have in front of us. We are disappointed by the 2025-2026 sales cycle and the impact that it has had on FY 2026 numbers, with the guidance for a reduction in earnings next year. We have reflected on what we can do differently, and we will set out a plan today of how we can return to growth. It has been a tough few weeks, but over the years, we've faced challenges before, and we've built resilience. Through the global financial crisis, or the introduction of fees in 2012, and even through COVID, we've faced those challenges, and we've emerged stronger. We've done that by staying agile, focusing on what's in our control, and taking clear, decisive action. Today is no different. As an operational business, we can pivot and adapt. We'll take proactive actions on our sales, our costs, disposals, and capital allocation, which we'll talk through today, to position ourselves for success. This will get us back to growth. Before we get going, I just wanted you to hear from a couple of others in the sector about the condition of higher education and how we are playing into it. The short video I'll show you has got Professor Malcolm Press, who is Chair of Universities UK, the leading membership group for UK universities. Also, he's the Vice Chancellor of Manchester Met University. Also, Nick Hillman, who's the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute. I'm incredibly confident about the future of the higher education sector here in the U.K. We have a sector that is the envy of the world. The quality of the teaching and research that we do is, by any measure, world-class. If we look at what universities are here to do, deliver the skills and innovation that we need for the future, there's plenty of evidence to show how important graduates are going to be. By the time we get to the mid-2030s, three-quarters of new jobs will require students with a degree. If we look at the industrial strategy, the eight sectors that the government set out as being important for the future of the economy, each of those sectors needs graduates to succeed. The innovation that we deliver will also drive growth here in the U.K. When I speak to young people in schools and colleges, they are also very positive about the difference that a university education can make to their lives. Notwithstanding the fact that the sector is evolving, is adapting, and is changing, I remain incredibly positive about the bright future that lies ahead of us because I believe that there is no way we can go for national renewal without our universities being front and center stage. U.K. universities have all sorts of strengths that increase their resilience. I mean, one is quite obviously the level of student demand, both from home students, which goes up and down a bit, but is still running at unprecedented levels, and indeed from other countries. People are attracted, of course, to U.K. universities by their very strong standing in the global league tables and global reputation surveys. Every league table I've ever seen has U.K. universities right up there. They do still get enormous backing from government and taxpayers who value all the things that universities do, whether it's teaching and learning, research, civic engagement, and indeed many other things. I'm thoroughly delighted to be working with Unite Students on what is an incredibly exciting partnership to build a large number of student residencies right in the heart of Manchester. The thing that attracts us to Unite is the quality of the provision, the flexibility of the provision in that there are rooms which are affordable at every price point. It's also the wraparound, you know, the additional facilities that a partnership like this can provide, not just providing a bed, but providing an environment, a place where students can study, live, work, and I believe thrive. The housing market in Greater Manchester is incredibly tight. This type of partnership provides students with the assurance that they need such accommodation isn't a big worry for them. U.K. universities are typically very large, and they're very often only as good as the partnerships they build, whether that's with civic organizations, with private companies, and obviously including student accommodation providers. It's been absolutely critical to the way universities are run in this day and age. They don't typically provide lots of new accommodation of their own, but they do that in partnership with the experts. It allows capital to be freed up, and it allows people who really know how to deliver a good student experience to focus on that while the universities do as much as they can to make sure the academic experience, which the government is going to be linking directly to future increases in tuition fees, you know, so they can really focus on that and what goes on in the lecture halls, the seminar rooms, the libraries, and also in terms of rolling out new educational technologies. Partnerships such as the one that we're building with Unite, I think, have a really valuable role to play in ensuring and supporting student success. Students are not only looking for accommodation at the right price point, looking for accommodation that is safe, that is modern, that is up to date, and where they can share communal spaces with fellow students and make friends. University is about far more than just teaching and learning. It is about equipping students with the social capital that they need to thrive in the world of work. This type of accommodation, these types of partnerships have a great role to play in supporting that. Universities can do a lot by themselves, but we can do far more through working in partnership, where the contribution is far more than some of the parts. I'm very positive about these types of relationships, and I think this is just the beginning. Great. Hope you found that interesting. Very helpful to have partners like Malcolm seeing the value that we can bring and help the growth of their organization. I will just take you through the outline for the day. I will start with an overview of the sector. We will then move on to a look back to the Lettings performance in 2025-2026. Karan will share his thoughts and approach for the 2026-2027 sales cycle, which kicked off just three or four weeks ago. Mike will talk us through what this means for our financial performance and our capital allocation framework. I will come back to you at the end to pick up with where we are on Empiric and pull the rest of the presentation together before opening up for some Q&A. The structural drivers on which we have built our business remain intact. As you've heard, there are world-class universities in the U.K. and enduring demand from both U.K. and international students. That has been driven by the demographic growth, which keeps going for the next five years, and growing wealth globally. There is still a shortage of housing across the U.K. Whilst there are pockets of new supply in our sector, HMO regulation and development viability mean that this will continue to limit new supply. A number of headwinds that we have been tracking have come faster and stronger this year than we had expected. This means that the overall take-up of PBSA is down, and our occupancy has ended up two percentage points down at 95%. We know that we could have been more proactive in some places. However, the vast majority of our cities have performed very well. We're at 97% occupancy in 19 of our 22 cities on average. The shortfall has come down to a significant underperformance in three cities and a weaker lease-up on new buildings and major refurbishments, particularly where there's been new supply in those cities. What sits behind that is the fact that there are fewer domestic students who have booked with us this year, and that is particularly at low and mid-tariff universities. Whilst the international recovery has not been as fast as we had expected, actually, our international sales are flat year-over-year. We've learned from all of this, and we are going to take a different approach for this year's sales cycle. As I say, Karan will talk us through that shortly. We know that we need to be proactive, and we know that we need to change. As I say, we've been here before, and we are confident that we can do it again. We've got the best operating platform in the sector, and we can flex our offer. We will push harder into nominations agreements and rebookers, and we will use price in lower occupancy cities to grow total income. We will be ruthless on costs. We have already started the restructuring program underway, and we will use our new technology platform to drive and reduce costs further through 2026 and 2027. We will accelerate disposals, and we will also use our funds and third-party capital. We have optionality over much of our development pipeline, and this will be reviewed given our current cost of capital. Whilst our earnings will go backwards next year, we will plan to get back to growth for 2027 and beyond by repositioning our portfolio to make sure we are aligned to the strongest universities, getting back to 97% occupancy on our target portfolio and driving above inflation rental growth. We will use Empiric as a springboard to grow our share of the returners market, and we are delighted to have got the CMA clearance earlier today. We will focus our capital on university joint ventures and nominations, and we will be disciplined with our capital as we realize disposals, considering share buybacks whilst maintaining the strength of our balance sheet. We're confident that we can return to growth. We've got a best-in-class platform and a highly capable team who can deliver the change that we need. There are lots of questions about the HE sector right now, and as you heard from Malcolm and Nick, we believe that many of these are being overdone. The U.K. has a world-class and globally accessible higher education sector. It is renowned the world over with 17 of the top 100 universities, educating over 2 million young minds every year with world-class research and spinouts that drive growth. Higher education makes a huge contribution to the U.K. economy and is now the fourth or fifth largest export that we have. It generates soft power as well. There are 58 serving world leaders who are educated here in the U.K. Whilst the U.S., Canada, and Australia are all making it harder for international students, there is emerging competition from other nations, particularly in Asia. In the budget yesterday, it was confirmed that a levy of GBP 925 will be charged on international students, and this will be used to fund the reintroduction of maintenance grants for students from lowest income households. Given the global competition that I just talked about, universities in the main will seek to absorb these costs. Young people still want to go to university. 41% of 18-year-olds applied to go to university this year at or around record levels. 84% of parents and grandparents want their children to go to university, and the residential element is a core part of the experience of going to university for so many. Overall, a degree is estimated to be worth between GBP 200,000-GBP 300,000. 300,000. That is after tax and student loan repayments relative to what a graduate would have earned if they had not gone to university. These premiums are weighted towards the higher universities, and actually the average masks the fact that 20% of students do not generate a premium at all, and this is generally at those weaker universities. Graduate employment is soft at the moment, but this is in the context of a soft employment market overall. Yes, AI cannot be ignored, but AI will not replace all jobs. However, it is true that people who know how to use AI will replace people who do not. Universities are responding and changing the way that they educate. In a world where more skills are required, a high-quality university degree will be more valuable than ever. The government is supportive of higher education. They see it as a fundamental pillar of the industrial strategy, as Malcolm Press said. In the recent white paper, it is clear that they are looking for change from the sector. They are getting tougher on universities. They are tougher on their approach to quality, value for money, finances, and immigration. They are not looking to reduce the numbers of international students, but they want to ensure that they are of the right quality to come and study here and linking them particularly to better universities. They will continue to support teaching universities that do a great job educating and delivering skills and employment outcomes for young people. This is what has encouraged them for the first time since 2017 to allow tuition fees to grow with inflation, which clearly helps university finances, which have been under pressure for some time. Whilst universities may have been slow to respond to financial concerns, they're definitely doing so now, and they will continue to focus on efficiencies. We could well see more mergers like the one we saw with Kent and Greenwich earlier this year. It is clear that universities need capital, and this presents a huge opportunity for us, particularly as they see the value of high-quality, affordable accommodation. What does this all mean for us? I pull out three key factors here. One is that the strongest universities are outperforming, and they will continue to do so. The second is that U.K. and international students will keep going to university here, and they are being more discerning about seeking value for money from the investment they're making in their education. Thirdly, universities are getting their finances in order, but they are unlikely to be investing new capital into accommodation. That is why we center so much of our strategy around it. In a market where the gap between the winners and losers is growing faster than ever, we need to reorientate our growth. This means that we will further reposition our portfolio. We will remain focused on university relationships and joint ventures, and we will grow our share of second and third-year students who live with us. We have always believed that stronger universities and a tighter real estate market drive the best long-term performance, and the last 12 months have reaffirmed this view. We have disposed of nearly 15,000 beds over the last five years, exiting five cities, and you will see from the chart on the top right that these have been from some of those weaker cities. We need to go again. We need to reposition our portfolio further and align to those universities and cities that will underpin growth. We are targeting a portfolio that will now be in 18-20 cities and 80% aligned to high-tariff and the best teaching universities. We need to continue driving operational excellence from our platform, and that means adapting our sales approach, more nominations, and using Empiric to access second- and third-year students. We will right-size our overhead and drive further technology-driven savings. We will leverage our relationships with university partnerships, building on successes that we have had at Newcastle, Durham, and Manchester. With that focus on operational excellence, optimal capital allocation, and repositioning our portfolio, we see that as the way to return to growth. have set out our medium-term targets here, driving high-quality growing income, targeting 97% occupancy in our core cities with above-average inflation rental growth. We will take nomination agreements back to 60% of our portfolio post the Empiric transaction and disposals and through the joint ventures. We will deliver our business plan for Empiric, and that will see earnings accretion in 2027. We will increase our alignment of our portfolio to high-tariff universities, delivering one new joint venture each year. With our surplus capital from disposals and balancing reinvestment into new joint ventures, we will consider share buybacks whilst maintaining our core balance sheet metrics. I am now going to take you through a bit more detail looking back on the 2025-2026 sales cycle and then what we will do differently in 2026-2027. Looking back over what happened, we've delivered 95.2% occupancy at 4% rental growth against our target of 97%, a shortfall of around 1,200 beds to that target. High-tariff universities have performed well, recruitment up 8% at those universities, and they have taken share from low and mid-tariff universities, as I mentioned, and we've seen softer demand at lower-ranked universities, which has led to a 2% fall. Students still see the value of a residential degree, but as I said, are getting more discerning about their university and accommodation choices. We've seen increased bookings from universities with nominations up 2% year on year to 59%, with international sales stable at 28%. New supply had a bigger impact on occupancy than in previous years in a few cities, and we saw that particularly where we opened new buildings or refurbs, and the strongest cities continued to deliver with 4.3% rental growth in those cities with 97% occupancy. I will now take you through the key elements of these in a little bit more detail. That trend of higher tariff universities taking share has really accelerated since 2022, and I have to admit it has been faster than we had expected. Facing financial pressures, those high-quality universities have recruited hard for U.K. domestic students, taking share from weaker ones, and students understandably have traded up where they can. We have grown our occupancy this year at those universities off what was already a strong base, but we have seen falls at medium and low-tariff universities. We have just over 90% of our portfolio aligned to medium and high-tariff universities, but as I said, we need to do more. Historically, we have focused on high mid-tariff, but it is becoming clear that some mid-ranks are also getting caught out by these trends. We need to be even more forensic on which universities we are going to support and align ourselves to. Helpfully, the Empiric acquisition increases our high-tariff exposure by 3 percentage points. Our nominations have provided us with a strong underpin of our performance once again. We've grown the number of beds, working closely with our university partners, and we feel this demonstrates the real strength of those relationships and the quality of our offer mid-market price points. Following the acquisition of Liberty Living back in 2019, our nominations dropped to 51%, but we have since grown them back to their highest ever level this year. Following the acquisition of Empiric, Noms will again drop to around 53%, but we will rebuild that back to 60% over the medium term, primarily through those university partnerships. As I mentioned, overall international sales are stable, with 28% of the portfolio let to international students. Encouragingly, we have seen a recovery in international students this year, up 7% year to date after last year's fall, which was caused by the much talked about visa changes and the perceived welcome that students receive when they arrive. Some of this data was captured in today's migration data that was released, showing that drop in migration on student visas was up to June 2025. We have, however, continued to see a shift from international postgraduates to international undergraduate demand, and this was the principal cause behind the decline in our late cycle sales. We also lost a share of postgraduate demand to some of our competitors who are discounting heavily in this space, and we could have done more there. Higher education remains a major export for the U.K., and the government is balancing the continued support for international students going to those high-quality institutions while stopping perceived abuses of the student visa system. Overall, we expect international students to stabilize at or around current levels, really driven by that growing middle classes in the developing economies. The U.K. is attractive, given the much tougher stance being taken by the U.S., Canada, and Australia, where student visa numbers are down 20%, 50%, and 15% respectively. We do expect the better universities to be attracting more of those international students. This chart gives a really helpful overview of our performance by city and sets out a lot more granularity than we have traditionally given. You will see that the vast majority of our estate is performing, with an average of 97% across those top 19 cities. That has really been across nominations, rebookers, and internationals. This is what gives me confidence that repositioning of our portfolio will drive a recovery in our performance. Sheffield, Leicester, and Nottingham have performed very poorly. The void beds in these cities total about 1,200 beds, or 2% of our occupancy, and make up the bulk of the shortfall. That has been driven by poor recruitment at low and mid-tier universities in those cities. Sheffield and Leicester have already been or been fully supplied for a few years, and Nottingham has seen about 2,500 new beds delivered this year, feeding into that reduction in occupancy. We have also seen unexpected weakness in Edinburgh and Glasgow, well below historic levels. Edinburgh University did not recruit as hard in clearing as a number of other top universities, but we also did not help ourselves in Edinburgh. We delivered a building that was too close to term start date, and we overpriced a major refurbishment in the city. In Glasgow, we saw weaker recruitment at the lower-tier city centre universities, with more students commuting to those universities as well. There was also some additional supply in both of these markets. Boiling down, what's actually happened and the driver of the shortfall in our occupancy is a deterioration in the bottom three cities, where we have higher exposure to weaker universities. Secondly, some supply disruption led to lower occupancy in new openings and our major refurbishment projects. By repositioning the portfolio and driving our performance in these cities and better managing openings, we'll see us recover occupancy. Overall supply remains about 50% down compared to peak levels, and this has been driven mainly by viability challenges, but we have seen much of that new supply being concentrated into fewer cities. The biggest impact has been felt in those fully supplied cities and/or where demand has not grown. This therefore has impacted our occupancy in Nottingham, Leeds, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, and to a lesser extent, Liverpool. However, other cities like Bristol, Manchester, and London have been able to absorb this new supply. Students are being more selective. They are not booking into new and refurbished buildings where there is other choice, as they are wary about buildings not being finished on time. We have seen our new and refurbished buildings taking longer to stabilize, with 600 voids across eight buildings in this category. The outlook for new supply remains muted, and that is down to viability and building safety regulations, and that is making new starts increasingly rare. Where it is being delivered, we will be more focused on how we market and open our own stock, supported more to a greater extent by nominations agreements. We will also respond to other supply from other competitors and recognize the disruption that it can have. Students are increasingly focused on value for money. We're seeing students and parents looking for value, not necessarily affordability, from their investment into university. That means more focus on courses, outcomes, and employability. Students are going to university and choosing courses to get a better job these days, not just studying something that is interesting. With the graduate premium widening, this is feeding into their choices. However, students do still see the value in the residential experience, and there has been an overall growth in students seeking accommodation this year, up just under 2%. This has been concentrated in high tariff with the weakest demand at low tariff. It is important to note that this does differ significantly by university, and we need to get under the skin of that in determining where we will locate our buildings. It has driven the underperformance in cities where we have a higher exposure to low tariff universities and/or the high tariff universities not being able to grow its own demand. This theme is backed up by our demand at different price points. We offer a range of price points across our cities and continue to provide value for money, affordable accommodation. Interestingly, we've seen our strongest demand at our mid-price points and in London and the lowest demand in lowest price rooms. Our prices overall still screen well relative to the competition, including the HMO sector and the university beds, and occupancy is being driven by university quality more than price. We still see an encouraging outlook for rental growth in most cities, but we have seen a widening range across our portfolio. As you'd expect, the stronger cities have delivered the best rental growth at 4.3%, but that's been down to about 1% in the bottom three cities. This was underpinned by the strongest rental growth on nominations agreements this year. We expect both of those trends to continue into 2026-2027, and Mike will talk you through this shortly. Nominations continue to provide good income visibility and rental growth outlook for us, with an average unexpired term of just under six years and index linkage supporting rental growth of 3%-4% going forward. 12% of our beds expire this year. These are mainly single-year deals, but we've got a really good track record of renewing one-year deals with about 85%-90% of these renewing each year. Given their price point at around a 10% discount to open market rents, this helps to explain why universities are keen to renew. Rental growth has outperformed direct let this year. That is actually reversing the trend that we have seen over the last three cycles, where direct let growth has been much stronger. Enough from me, Karan. Over to you. Thanks, Joe. Building on what Joe just shared, I wanted to add a bit more color on our strategy for the upcoming sales cycle. These plans reflect the market trends that Joe talked about, but also the lessons that we have learned from last year. At the heart of our strategy are our norms. At Unite, we see nominations as the bedrock of our business, and we have always valued the income certainty they provide us. They give us real competitive advantage, which is extremely difficult for others to replicate at scale. As Joe shared, since the Liberty acquisition, we have steadily increased the percentage of rooms under nominations to 59% and converted more and more of those agreements to multi-year deals with inflation-linked rental reviews baked in. This year, we are being very proactive and have already started advanced discussions with our existing university partners, as well as with past partners and potential new accounts to further grow our share. Where we need to, we have been aligning start dates and tenancy lengths as well to ensure that we are best placed to deliver to their needs. Second, returners are becoming more important to us as we look to grow share. And to better meet their needs, we are revamping our offer. From the ability to choose the best rooms at the start of the cycle to an early-bird loyalty discount with a best price guarantee commitment, which means they will always get the best deal in the market. Soon, we will also have Empiric properties that offer a more independent living experience. This will further help us drive retention, but also gain back some of the market share that we lost in the international segment. Third, we're taking a more balanced approach in our lower occupancy cities. Here, we intend to remain positioned for value and have lowered some prices where we felt it would drive occupancy and total income. In addition, we are exploring a range of other options as well. This includes securing more nominations where we can, but also reviewing the incentives we offer to exploring tenancies with a start date in January, which will coincide with the new intake that some of our universities have started offering now as well. On both price and incentives, we are seeing the market stay very balanced at the start of this sales cycle. We do have the ability, though, to react to changing behavior if required. Next, we are revamping our sales and marketing approach for new as well as refurbished properties. As Joe shared earlier, this is an area that we know we need to get better at, as it accounts for nearly one point of the occupancy miss from last year. We are looking at several improvements from how we market these newer assets on our channels to how we develop both physical and virtual showrooms to showcase the full experience that students will have living here to the introductory offer we give them to drive up leasing in that first year of operations. By improving our performance here, we will also address some of the shortfalls that we had in the international segment. We have one major opening in 2026. This is Hawthorne House in London, 50% of which is nominated. We are also focused on our 2025 openings, Avon and Burnett Points, as well as our major refurbs in Bristol, in London, and in Edinburgh as well. Finally, in early 2026, we will start to be in a position to leverage several new commercial capabilities from our new property management and booking engine. We will launch a new web booking journey. We will improve our ability to do attribute-based pricing, and we will be able to execute better our marketing campaigns to both rebookers as well as new students. We expect this investment to help lower our cost of acquisition, improve conversion of web traffic into sales, into bookings, and drive up higher sales overall. How is this landing in terms of sales performance this year? As of earlier this week, we were at 62% sold, which is pretty much in line with last year. I do want to say it is very, very early in the sales cycle. It has just been four weeks since we launched, and we are in the midst of several nomination conversations, which do not conclude for a few more weeks. Our existing first-year students are still deciding what they want to do next year. There is plenty to play for. Like I said, it is very early days. In fact, it is just worth looking at how the sales cycle actually develops through the year and how we market ourselves through each of those key milestones. Without going into each element, it basically breaks up into four phases. Phase one is all about winning rebookers and returners. This usually starts at the end of October and goes through to the end of December, but this year we expect it to extend into the new year as returners work out exactly what they want to do next year. Phase two is when students submit their UCAS applications and universities know what their intake is going to be for the next year. This is when we secure the bulk of our single-year nominations, and some agents and students start to make early bookings as well. This goes on from late January, which is the UCAS deadline, through to the end of March. The third phase is the main new student acquisition phase. Universities send out their conditional offers by May, so we start to really see U.K. students look to book, and also universities start to confirm with us if they want more beds based on the intake that they think they will get. For international students, they usually wait for their visa, and they start to book more July onwards through into August. Phase four is the world of clearing. Over 60,000 students normally go through clearing, of which nearly 20,000 are new applications, with the rest basically changing universities based on their final grades. Usually, we would tend to do anywhere between 4% and 7% of our sales here, and last year we actually did three times as many sales as we did the year before. After an exceptionally strong build-up to clearing, as well as its first two to three weeks, we were surprised by just how quickly it did tail off mid-September, as the demand from Chinese, international Chinese post-grad students did not materialize in the expected volume. Now, in each of these phases, as you can see, we adapt our marketing messages and channels from exclusive offers sold through our on-site teams for rebookers to leveraging our international agent network, as well as our in-market China team to drive up international sales. During clearing, it's all hands on deck as we help students find their home. This year, we are doing several things differently across these touch points. As I mentioned before, we have revamped our rebookers offer and our returners offer, and it will run for longer to reflect the slightly longer booking cycle that they're going through. We've also simplified our room classification, and the feedback from agents as well as students alike has been that it's made it easier for them to choose the room that they want and also decide what to pay extra for. We're also adapting our marketing programs to reflect the growth in AI-based search. This means that we are spending more time and effort on making sure our content is best in class, and we're also driving reviews to various channels. Finally, we're holding enough marketing firepower to drive sales through clearing and aligning our incentives to ensure that we capture a greater proportion of the international market before the end of clearing. It is the sum of all these actions that I believe will help us navigate these changing times, and we do have a track record of doing just that. Take Leeds as an example, one of the largest student cities in the country with multiple universities, including University of Leeds, which is in the top 100 globally, and where historically we as Unite have done very well across a large portfolio. Over 2023 and 2024, the city did face several challenges. From a demand point of view, it had reduced student numbers due to falling international demand, as well as more students commuting at the lower tariff universities. At the same time, there was a lot of new supply entering the market, and to add to it, we had major refurbishment projects at two of our properties. Our occupancy fell to just over 90%, and rental growth went backwards. As a result, we've had a total reset in the market. We've sold out our less well-located assets. We focused our efforts on driving nominations with the University of Leeds, where we have a very strong relationship. We've also adjusted prices down in a couple of properties to drive up occupancy and income, and we've invested in our teams and our properties to drive significant improvements in net promoter score as well. The net impact is that we've started to improve occupancy, and we're forecasting a return to rental growth this year. Our university partners here have already reached out to us to see if we can support them with more rooms as they continue to see strong undergraduate demand this sales cycle, just like they did last year. On that note, I'm going to hand over to Mike. Afternoon, everyone. I'll now take us through our financial outlook based on our operational indicators and planned investment activity. I'll start with our income guidance for the year ahead. Hopefully, the pages just presented by Joe and Karan provide helpful background to the following guidance for the 2026-2027 academic year and beyond. Our overarching assumption is that student housing demand will be broadly stable for the next academic year. This is based on a larger U.K. 18-year-old population and our expectations for broadly stable international demand and a further increase in students choosing to live at home at medium and low tariff universities. Our rental growth guidance reflects different dynamics for our nominations and direct let channels, as well as a tailored approach to driving income at a city level depending on the occupancy. As you'll see on this slide, we're targeting occupancy of 93%-96% and rental growth of 2%-3% for the academic year. Breaking that down, nomination agreements covering almost 60% of our beds will continue to deliver real benefit through annual inflation-linked uplifts on the majority of those agreements, which will result in rental growth of 3%-4%. The direct let beds, as you've heard from Joe, our higher occupancy cities representing around 25% of our beds are in good health, and we expect them to deliver rental growth of 2%-3%. As you've also heard, we'll adapt our approach in markets with higher vacancy to drive improved income. Pricing will be up in some of these markets and down in others where there's more pronounced vacancy. These markets represent the remaining 17% of our beds, and we see their pricing broadly flat. Taken together, our guidance for occupancy and rental growth results in like-for-like income growth of 0%-4% for the next academic year. The range in our guidance reflects the fact that it's early days in the sales cycle and we'll look to narrow this guidance over the coming months. As we come to our earnings guidance, it's also worth remembering that only one-third of this income falls into the 2026 financial year. In response to our lower occupancy, we've been proactive in reducing costs and improving the efficiency of our platform. Today, our operating expenses at property level account for 30% of our rental income. Our overheads then account for another 6% of rent. These overheads are substantially offset by the management fees we earn from USAF and our LSAV joint venture, which offer a highly valuable source of recurring income. We pride ourselves on this overhead efficiency, but also recognize we need to do more. This is either by reducing costs or generating new management fees, such as those that will come from our university partnerships. We've already taken action to reduce central costs and are targeting a 20% reduction in our head office staff costs before the end of 2025. This change is expected to mitigate the impact of inflationary increases in our operating costs from wages and utilities and higher marketing costs in 2026. As a reminder, we typically look to hedge out our utility costs 18-24 months in advance to provide cost certainty. As a result of all of these actions, we expect to see costs in 2026 flat versus 2025. Next, we turn to earnings and the factors driving our performance in 2025 and 2026. For 2025, we continue to see adjusted earnings in line with existing guidance of 47.5%-48.25% p. This reflects income modestly above expectations for the 2024-2025 academic year and costs slightly below budget in the year to date. We also expect to realize the benefit of a non-recurring fee of around 1% p. on formation of our new Newcastle University joint venture. Together, these factors offset the impact of lower than expected occupancy for the first term of the current academic year, meaning our guidance remains unchanged. As we look ahead to 2026, we expect a high single-digit percentage reduction in our adjusted earnings per share from a combination of factors. We expect like-for-like rental growth to have a broadly neutral impact on earnings in the year. This reflects an income reduction from shorter tenancies for the 2025-2026 academic year, the impact of which will fall into the first half of 2026. We then expect this to be offset by growth in income for the first term of the 2026-2027 academic year. Our development completions will have an initial drag on earnings as they take longer to achieve stabilized occupancy and rents. For our two new buildings and one reopening in 2025, we achieved 65% of our target income in year one, which reflected the challenges Joe noted in leasing off-plan in a more competitive market. The combination of reduced income and higher interest expenses on completed projects will reduce earnings by around 2% in 2026, albeit we see this being recovered over time as occupancy reaches target levels. Our university joint ventures will deliver us two sources of fees in the future: larger fees at the formation of joint ventures, followed by recurring management fees once those properties are operational. We expect to realize lower non-recurring development fees in 2026 based on the contractual milestones we expect to deliver during the year. Capital recycling is also expected to have a modest drag on earnings due to increased disposal activity. This reflects the disposals already delivered in 2025 and the GBP 300 million-GBP 400 million of planned asset sales in 2026. As previously guided, higher interest costs will reduce earnings in 2026. This reflects an increase in our cost of debt to around 4.5% due to refinancing activity, as well as higher marginal borrowing costs on new debt. Our EPS range for 2026 reflects the spread in occupancy and rental growth guidance for the next academic year. How we deliver will determine where our earnings come in within this range. Looking beyond 2026, our focus is on delivering a return to earnings growth. This slide sets out the building blocks on the path to growth from 2027, and it starts with delivering operational excellence. We will grow our like-for-like income by achieving occupancy of 97% or higher in our target portfolio. As you've heard, this will be delivered by stabilizing occupancy in our new developments and positioning the portfolio towards high-tariff universities in our strongest markets. Over the long term, our business has delivered rental growth averaging 70 basis points above CPI inflation, and we expect to continue to deliver above inflation growth in our core markets. This will be supported by index rental growth in our nominations agreements and growing housing demand at the strongest universities. We will also take bold action on costs to ensure we recover our margins over time. This has already started, and as Karan mentioned, our investment in our next-generation technology platforms will unlock material efficiencies in both our cost of sale and overheads over the next one to two years. Joe will come on to discuss the strategic opportunity provided by our acquisition of Empiric. In the near term, our focus is on delivering our business plan. We are confident in delivering our cost energy target for the combined business and see significant opportunity to drive improved occupancy through our larger platform. Together, this activity supports earnings accretion from the acquisition from 2027. Optimal capital allocation is also key to ensuring a return to growth, which I will come on to discuss in more detail. We will deliver over 5,000 beds in university partnerships and developments between 2027 and 2030 at a target yield on cost of 7.3%. Around 80% of these beds are in university partnerships, which provides significant visibility over future income. Our capital recycling will also help drive earnings and NTA growth as we reinvest our disposal proceeds into accretive new investment. However, this will be partially offset by the ongoing adjustment in our borrowing costs to higher market interest rates. As we execute on this plan, we see a pathway for returning to earnings growth from 2027. Delivering on these elements also supports total accounting returns of 8%-10% through a combination of recurring income, rental growth, and profitable investment activity. I'm now going to move on to discuss our approach to capital allocation, following on from the priorities set out by Joe earlier. Our capital allocation decisions are framed around three key goals: increasing our alignment to the strongest universities, driving growth in earnings and attractive total accounting returns, and maintaining a robust and flexible balance sheet. However, our capital allocation decisions need to reflect the fact that market conditions have changed. Our cost of capital has increased, and occupancy and rental growth have softened. This changes both how and where we will invest in the current market. A revised approach to capital allocation centers on four key areas. Firstly, we'll focus on our development activity around university partnerships, delivering on-campus accommodation at affordable rents. This is an area where we have significant opportunity for growth by leveraging our strong university relationships. Secondly, we'll be highly disciplined over new development commitments off-campus. This will see us reduce CapEx and look to extract best value from our uncommitted schemes. Next, we will accelerate our disposal activity to increase our focus on the strongest universities and most supply-constrained markets, which offer the strongest prospects for future rental growth. Lastly, we'll show flexibility in our investment approach. We will not compromise the quality of our balance sheet, but where we have surplus capital, it will be deployed towards those opportunities offering the strongest risk-adjusted returns. University partnerships are the key strategic growth opportunity for our business in the next five to ten years. This reflects the enduring appeal of the residential experience at the strongest universities and the vital role high-quality accommodation plays in attracting students. University partnerships will enhance the quality of our income by delivering accommodation in the best on-campus locations at affordable rents. We will also benefit from significant income visibility thanks to our joint venture partners' financial interest in filling the rooms. Our two existing joint venture partnerships are progressing well, and we expect to be in a position to formalize the joint ventures with Newcastle University and Manchester Metropolitan in the coming months. This will enable the delivery of 4,300 new beds over the course of 2028-2030 at yields on costs superior to those we can deliver off-campus. We see a significant opportunity for further partnerships, and we're in discussions with a number of high-quality universities. Our target is to deliver one new partnership deal per year. This isn't easy, but we're confident that our platform and university relationships give us a significant competitive advantage. Our off-campus development pipeline now totals GBP 1.2 billion and over 5,000 beds in the U.K.'s strongest university cities, and 90% of this pipeline has planning approval. We are committed to two on-site projects in London and Glasgow for delivery in 2026 and 2027, which have GBP 110 million of cost to complete. Beyond that, we have flexibility over all future development commitments. For us to commit to any new development start, development yields would need to improve and be substantially de-risked by nomination agreements. For us to do more than that, we will also need to recognize the risk to development programs from the new Building Safety Act regulation. This has led to delays in construction starts and also poses risks to the scheduled occupation of buildings as the new regulations become established. As a result, we expect to see CapEx on our off-campus pipeline reduce materially over the next two to three years. Our focus now is on optimizing the value from our land bank, of which 75% by value is in London. We will explore a range of options for doing this, including joint ventures with third-party capital, as well as forward funds and outright land sales. For those schemes where we have option agreements, such as our Travis Perkins site in Paddington, we have the ability to exit schemes where they are not viable. As Joe mentioned earlier, we've been a regular seller of assets, but we'll now accelerate the pace of our disposals as we position ourselves for a more focused portfolio with increased exposure to high-tariff universities. We will target an increase in disposals to GBP 300 million-GBP 400 million per annum, which is roughly a doubling of our recent run rate, and that will come from a combination of different sources. Firstly, we'll accelerate our exit from some cities and dispose of assets in core markets where we see low returns based on their university alignment. Secondly, we'll also look to realize value opportunistically from disposals of core assets at the right price. We will consider doing this via sales to existing or new joint ventures, which bring the benefit of new recurring management fees. We will also consider outright disposals where we can achieve fair value and see stronger returns from reinvestment. The final pool of disposals includes non-strategic assets and development sites which are low-yielding or not viable for future development. We expect these disposals to be modestly earnings dilutive in the near term as we initially repay debt. This becomes earnings accretive over time as these proceeds are redeployed into new investment opportunities. We've continued to see investor appetite from the PBSA sector from a range of institutional private equity and trade buyers, with student accommodation forming part of their growing allocations to the living sector. Around GBP 3 billion of assets have transacted this year, which is slightly below the long-term average. We have seen sellers holding off on bringing portfolios to market ahead of the end of the 2025-2026 sales cycle, as well as in anticipation of the recent U.K. budget, but we now expect to see more stock come to market in 2026. We've been active sellers over a number of years and see two main buyer types in the market. Firstly, core investors seeking modern assets in London and prime regional cities, and secondly, value-add investors seeking higher returns through income upside, cost reduction, and CapEx initiatives. Over the long term, valuations of student accommodation have been underpinned and driven by rental growth, which remains fundamental to investors' pricing for the sector. There are a number of transactions currently in the market which will dictate the trend in valuations over the coming six to twelve months. We benefit from a strong balance sheet, which provides the business with flexibility around its capital allocation decisions. This is absolutely appropriate for a business with operational intensity and ongoing investment through development. We continue to target a net debt/equity ratio of 6x-7 on a built-out basis, and we're currently in the middle of this range after adjusting for the acquisition of Empiric and remaining committed CapEx for our university partnerships and developments. Our appetite for leverage also reflects our current and marginal borrowing costs. We expect our cost of debt to rise steadily as we refinance existing in-place debt and deliver our committed development pipeline. We will also explore the opportunity to use third-party capital as a source of cost-effective funding. We have a long and successful track record with our USAF and LSAV funds and see opportunities to access new capital seeking a best-in-class operating partner. Bringing this together, the increase in our planned disposal activity and reduction in development CapEx means we expect to move from a net investor to a net seller over the near term. Successfully delivering on this plan would result in surplus capital of around GBP 100 million-GBP 200 million per annum. We will deploy this capital where we see the strongest risk-adjusted returns, which today means investment in university partnerships and share buybacks. Our investment decisions between the two will depend on our opportunity set for university partnerships, as well as the returns implied from a share buyback. Share buybacks provide an opportunity to reinvest in a high-quality portfolio at returns today that are superior to direct investment. We would commit to them where we have surplus capital and we can demonstrate clear accretion to both earnings and NAV, but this will not be at the expense of maintaining a robust balance sheet. With that, I will hand you back to Joe. Thank you, Mike. Our conviction on the rationale for the acquisition of Empiric remains strong. Over time, we will be in fewer cities, but we will serve more students and customers who live in those cities. There are one million students living in HMO today, and this market continues to be under pressure from regulation and further increases in the tax burden announced yesterday. Empiric gives us the scale and the platform to go after that market in a meaningful way. The PBSA sector is growing up, and it is growing up as a sector. We as Unite started out as a NOMS-only business back in Bristol some 35 years ago, and really have then extended and pushed the boundaries of the sector, pushing into a direct-let business, but still very much focused on first-years and internationals. Student demands and choices are evolving. Whilst we of a certain age may scoff at the thought that customers are telling us that they, or I am ready for something different in my second year, I'm done with the halls of residence experience. I want more independence. I want it to feel different. Empiric provides us with a chance to provide that difference. We feel that we can extend our customer lifecycle by retaining more second and third years by offering that different experience. In our building in Edinburgh we opened this year, it supports that view. We delivered 100 new beds in one, two, and three-bedroom flats in separate blocks. That was 100% sold this year in a market with occupancy of 88%. The quality of the portfolio is high. I was up in Edinburgh and Glasgow last month, and I saw it firsthand. The quality is excellent. Across the portfolio, the buildings are well located, and it supports our shift to high-tariff universities and will help us to reach our 80% target. The buildings are small and characterful, and they are a different product that allows us to play in that return of space and grow our share of second and third-year students. We will sell around 10% of the portfolio in those cities where the alignment to high is not good enough. We are also comforted by the fact that we are buying the assets 20% below replacement cost. At the heart of this deal, we see an opportunity to improve the performance of the portfolio over the next two to three years using our platform, targeting occupancy of 95% + over the next two sales cycles in line with our underwrite. Just to put that into context, the Unite portfolio has 35,000 first-year students living within it and about 18,000 internationals. We currently retain around 20% of our first-year customers through rebooking, and then 80% of those who do not rebook with us tell us it is because they want a different product. The Empiric portfolio is 8,000 beds, and they are 89% sold this year. We will need to sell another 500 rooms to get them to 95% occupancy. We sold 800 rooms per week in the three weeks following clearing this year. We are confident that we can drive a better performance from the portfolio, selling to our existing customer base, those rebookers who are looking for a different experience, using our sales techniques, our data, and our tech platform. We speak to all of our customers. We understand what they are looking for, and we can now follow up with a different product. We do this with our sales inquiries as well. Using the scale that we have with international agents, offering those agents more rooms, again at different price points, with our scale gives us greater reach into the agency market and that channel that Empiric never had. Finally, we have around 15-20 properties that we can convert to the Empiric model, and we see revenue opportunities here as well. We were delighted to get the CMA clearance today. That was confirmed with no disposals of that portfolio, and that means that we will be able to get our hands on the business in January. Whilst we've missed the start of the rebookers campaign, it gives us much of the sales cycle to go after rebuilding their occupancy and also gives us a great run at the synergy delivery through 2026. We've talked publicly about the synergies a lot already, and we aim to deliver that GBP 14 million target by rationalizing in-city and regional management costs across the operation, by the removal of duplicate costs such as offices, IT platform, and PLC costs, and the benefit of bringing activities such as finance, marketing, HR, and IT onto our scalable platform. With the Liberty acquisition, we outperformed our public target by 20%, and we are looking at best value, looking at opportunities right now to extract best value from synergies in 2026 to offset their lower year-one occupancy, as every 1% of occupancy shortfall equates to around GBP 1 million. We have a fully kitted-out integration plan, which will be phased over 2026, and we will see the transfer in phases of the sales and marketing teams, city teams, the technology transfer, and also their back office functions. We have shared a lot with you today, very conscious of that, and I will try and bring that all together now about how and where we are taking the business. As I touched on earlier, our priorities centre around delivering operational excellence and optimal capital allocation with that focus on high quality, growing income, and a strong balance sheet. We've set out our medium-term targets around 97% core occupancy, with 60% of that through nominations agreements, delivering above inflation rental growth, repositioning the portfolio to 80% aligned to high-tariff and the best teaching universities, delivering our revenue and cost plan for Empiric, delivering earnings accretion from 2027, and continuing to see a real opportunity amongst our university on-campus joint ventures, targeting one a year, and considering share buybacks as part of our capital allocation options with surplus capital while sticking to our leverage targets. The fundamentals of our sector remain intact. It is a great higher education sector. The demand for university education will continue, and the jobs market will still need highly trained young minds. Unite is a great business, and we support young people at a time of their growth through those great relationships and partnerships that we have with universities, through our best-in-class operating platform, the high-quality portfolio that we have, and our highly capable team. We have been surprised by the pace of change and the impact this year, and we have learned lessons, but we will be proactive, as you've heard today, around sales, costs, disposals, and capital allocation. We will grow our share of second and third-year students whilst maintaining our focus on universities, nominations, and joint ventures, and this will see us returning to a position of earnings growth. Once again, thank you all for coming and listening so intently. We'll now open up to some questions, and we'll start with some questions in the room. Put your hands up. We've got a mic. It's coming. Thanks for the presentation. It's Sam King from BNP Exane. Three questions, please, guys. One on strategy and two on guidance. Just to start on strategy and maybe challenge the alignment to high-tariff point, which might sound counterintuitive, but does that actually solve the occupancy issue? Because if we look at performance this year, Nottingham and Sheffield are both high-tariff and had occupancy issues. I see Leeds and Edinburgh also had lower occupancy than average. If you look at Portsmouth, for example, that's not high-tariff and has traded very well, and that's a market where actually rental growth has been quite soft recently. Is the decision actually not a bit more nuanced here, and it needs to be pivoting the portfolio to focus on markets where, say, rents are sustainable or there's undersupply? Just any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it is dangerous to oversimplify and just do pure groupings on tariff groups, you're right. I think you need to understand. In Sheffield and Nottingham, which are two underperforming cities, both of those high-tariff universities have seen broadly flat numbers, slightly down actually, but it's been in the low-tariff universities in those cities where we've seen the weakest level of demand. It is having to think about in which cities there is that blend of high and low-tariff universities. Those three cities also suffer from slightly weaker housing markets, I guess, of weaker local economies. It's not as simple as focusing on high and low-tariff, you're right. In terms of our analysis and that we do of where we will be located, we believe that's the best shorthand for us to be pointing to to talk about where we will be aligning our portfolio. Okay, thanks. The second one on occupancy guidance, which might be for Karan. The low end of your guidance at 93% implies you get to just 81% for the direct-let portion of your portfolio, which is a slowdown versus this year, despite the fact that student numbers will be up next year. Comment around that. What are the specific markets that you're concerned about looking into the next academic year? Sure. That sort of the lower end of the range reflects the uncertainty that we continue to see in the properties where we're aligned to the lower tariff university. That is your Leicesters, it is parts of your Sheffield. Even in some of the other cities, to Joe's point, we have even in Glasgow some properties that are more aligned in the city centre to those properties. I think, and also those are also the cities where we tend to have more direct-let rather than nominations because those lower tariff universities do not tend to underwrite the deals at the same level. That is kind of why we are guiding to that lower occupancy level at that stage. Okay, thanks. Final one for Mike on earnings. You can see that guidance is down 7%-10%, but I understand that excludes the impact of Empiric, which on my numbers is 1% dilutive next year. Should we think about the actual downgrade for earnings being 8%-11%? Yeah, as Joe said, Sam, we will acquire the Empiric business at the end of January. We will be able to give you guidance incorporating Empiric at the time of the full year results. The guidance and the transaction is that it will be broadly earnings neutral in 2026 with the view that it becomes accretive from FY 2027. What's the level of occupancy you need for Empiric for it to be earnings neutral? To get back to earnings neutrality, we need to get to occupancy of 95% on a stabilised basis. Okay, got it. Thank you. Hi, it's Veronique from Vlaams Rotkempe. For me, one question on the nomination agreements. Obviously, it's a bit hard that de risks the portfolio. You have the target to increase it. I just want to get a feeling on the feasibility of actually increasing it. You mentioned that for these universities, obviously they've also had some tough years on the financial side. Is there anything changing in your discussions to maybe moving a little bit towards the continental way of agreements with universities that do not have actual guarantees but are just more soft agreements? Are you seeing any changes in those discussions? Maybe I'll start, and Karan, if you pick up if I miss anything. Yeah, first up is the delivery of our development pipeline and university partnerships, which gives a strong underpin to that growth back in terms of nominations over the medium term. I think the second thing that we are doing is using price in some of those markets, particularly in weaker assets, to approach universities now and secure nominations agreements with those universities. The one-year deals generally do not have income guarantees beyond, well, they do not have a guarantee beyond year one. That gives the universities the flexibility to sort of flex up their requirements over the shorter term. We have got a good level of renewals on those agreements that we see. Ultimately, it is down to us to be able to demonstrate that we are offering value for money for students and the highest level of customer service because they are intently focused on that. I think that is one of the things that gives us real customer and competitor differentiation through those nominations. I do not know, Karan, missed anything on that? Yeah, I mean, a couple of other points. I think the one big trend that we see this year is the affordability points. Universities, especially for their first-year undergrad product, are really looking for affordable rents. There are several properties where we have sort of historically direct-let them. They have not wanted them, but actually on the affordability level, they are actually keen to talk to us about that. This is key universities in Bristol, Edinburgh as well. On your point around soft norms, what we actually tend to do is we often, towards the end of January, agree a certain volume with the university that they will feel comfortable to underwrite. As they start to see their demand firm up, that number does tend to tick up. You will see that reflected in the different trading updates that we do as well. There are a couple of accounts where we will have just a recommendation on their accommodation portal, which is important as well because parents do trust that approach as well. Over the last three or four years, we have pushed for more income security because that is something that does then help us financially plan the rest of our year. Thank you. Maybe one follow-up on that. You indeed mentioned affordability, but at the same time, for those nominations agreements, you'd still target 3%-4%. I appreciate you mentioned like it's 10% under-rented, but isn't that still something that then comes up in those discussions? It does come up, but I think this is where I think I was talking to somebody earlier. We do have a lot of credit in the bank with universities. I think they look at us as a long-term partner. They know the things that we did during COVID to support them. They know over the last three or four cycles when some of the direct lets in cities were going double digits, where we were much more balanced in our approach. They know there are good years and bad years, and the rental clauses that we have in there are reflective of those gaps and sort of ceilings as well. So far, we have had no real challenge from the universities. At the end of a 10-year agreement, we might reset that rent to be, again, market ±5% depending on the assets. I think the key thing for us is, and which is why I say it's such a competitive advantage for us and difficult for others to replicate, is it's built on multiple years of performance, not just a transaction. Hi, Rebecca Parker from Goldman Sachs. I'm just wondering if you could talk to more how you're thinking around capital deployment, just given you've released some yields that you've got for your development and for your JVs, and how you're thinking about it in context of where the shares are trading and share buybacks and whether you'll need to execute upon these disposals to then consider that capital deployment. Yeah, I think we've set out a revised capital allocation framework today, as you've heard us talk about, and we do see that as a medium-term framework. I think the principle of not increasing leverage to buy back shares is kind of firmly felt and firmly established, and therefore we will need to generate surplus capital from our disposal activity to then consider whether we allocate that into buying back shares or not. I think given where the shares are trading at today, it certainly makes it a more attractive cost of capital than deploying into straight off-campus development. I think that's sort of something that we are very clear on. With on-campus development JVs, we still see the IRRs as very attractive, and we still see the opportunity to deploy capital into that space. As we release capital, we will be looking at that through a very firm lens as to whether we can deploy capital. As Mike's chart sort of set out, if we're able to sell that GBP 300 million-GBP 400 million of disposals, then that creates quite a meaningful chunk of capital that we've got the ability to make decisions on. Thank you. Hi, thank you. It's Tom Musson at Berenberg. I'm just following up slightly on Sam's question about the 93% occupancy at the bottom end of the range for next year. You mentioned wanting to, I think, focus harder on occupancy. If the 93% occupancy was to transpire, would it not sort of mean the sales cycle has got increasingly competitive? How does that align with still delivering 2% rent growth? I think in the Leeds case study that you showed, in the years where occupancy was 92% and 93%, rent growth was either -4 or zero. Yeah, I'm happy to take that, Tom. Yeah, I mean, we talked about the conditions we see in the market for next year. We think actually overall housing need will probably be flat to slightly up. We've clearly given a guidance range that is slightly below in the midpoint where we were this year. If market conditions are the same, and if we execute better, we can be at the top end of that range. At the bottom end of the range, we're arguably being slightly cautious now, but we're still very early in the sales cycle, as Karan said, and we'll need to work through that. Hopefully, we'll be able to tighten that range for you over time. I think in terms of price, it's important to say that you do have a significant underpin in the rental growth from the nominations agreements. That is 3%-4%, and it's across around 60% of the beds. As much as in that scenario you pointed out where we might be at 93% occupancy, there would, yes, I think it's fair to say probably be more discounting and we'd be using price to drive occupancy. We still think there will be a number of strong and undersupplied markets where we'll be able to grow rents for those direct lets. Thank you. Hi, can you hear me? No. Hi, Aakanksha Anand from Citi. Two questions from my side. I'll go one by one. The first one is on the returns that you're expecting, the IRR returns that Mike briefly mentioned on the university partnership JVs. How have those returns changed given that now we are forecasting 2%-3% rental growth compared to the 3%-3.5% we were forecasting before? Yeah, hi, Aakanksha. On those university partnerships, we've been targeting IRRs, including the fees we generate, in the mid-teens. Generally speaking, there is a rental growth mechanism within those agreements that has been contractually agreed at the outset of those discussions. It is an inflation plus rental growth mechanism over the long term, and the university will contract to take the beds on an annual basis. As much as, yes, the wider market is probably seeing rental growth soften somewhat, in the case of these university partnerships, we have real visibility over the future income growth, which also protects our return. In addition to that, the starting rents within those university partnerships are below the market rate on day one. It does give them flexibility and some protection around that rental growth over time. Understood. The second one, just long term, what thoughts do you have on the split between direct lets and nominations? Is it still expected to be a 60/40, or can we expect it longer term to get closer to like an 80/20 split? Yeah, we've always liked nominations agreements, and I think they provide a good foil to the sort of direct lets, which tend to move more with markets. I guess in the very strong years, you see better rental growth on direct lets. In softer years, you see better rental growth on nominations. Obviously, you get the income guarantee as well. Having that balance is important. I think as we've talked about today, we see that opportunity to take more second and third years in our portfolio. I think that will kind of, those won't be covered by nominations agreements. Whilst occasionally we talk to universities about whether they would nominate second and third years and international students, I don't see that they will do that going forward. We may see a stretch above 60%, particularly if we're able to secure those at what we see are sensible rents and sensible terms. We don't see that as an upper limit. I think we're setting that out as a target to build back to post-Empiric acquisition. We will kind of see whether we can go beyond that at some stage. Thank you. Callum Marley from Kolytics. Two questions. First one on occupancy. Part of your path to growth, you're targeting 97% occupancy again. If I just look on page 13, most of those yellow bars are below the 2024, 2025 levels. Why should investors believe that 2027 is an inflection point rather than the beginning of a structurally lower growth or occupancy environment? Yeah, I think that within those cities where we've seen the shortfall in demand, it has been the shortage of recruitment at the lower tariff universities. As we talked about briefly around Sheffield and Leeds, they have two universities. Where we've seen the shortfall and the drop-off in occupancy has principally been at those lower and mid-tariff universities. The repositioning of the portfolio, setting out a target of GBP 300 million-GBP 400 million each year over a few years, means that we will be reducing exposure at those, maintaining exposure at the better universities where we expect to continue to see growth. I think it is that repositioning the portfolio, which is fundamental to allowing us to reposition and get back to that 97% underpin that we've historically had. On the second one, what makes you confident that high-tariff universities will not experience a similar behavioral shift from domestic students living at home as affordability concerns remain high? I think it comes down to the graduate premium and the difference in graduate premium between the better quality and the weaker universities. It is higher at those better universities. I think the employability data, the customer's choice data that we are seeing through polling from UCAS, and that intention to stay at home has actually held up very well across those high-tariff universities. From a student behavior perspective, I think provided we continue to see that decent employment market for graduates of those high-quality universities, we believe that students and parents will continue to make that investment to go away and study at those and see it as part of the overall university experience. I think there is lots of kind of evidence anecdotally as well that university is much more than just about getting a degree. If you want to succeed, then having that residential experience is part of that experience. Hi, it is Paul May from Barclays. Got three questions. Can we go one by one? You keep mentioning increasing disposals, but as you have highlighted, the market has suffered. It is not just suffered for you, it has suffered for everyone. I just wonder what confidence do you have that you can sell those assets for the prices you want? Should we expect those assets to be written down quite materially in the next coming results for you ahead of selling those? Maybe I'll start, Mike, and you can chip in. We've long been a seller of assets, Paul, and we've sold assets coming out of the financial crisis. We sold assets coming out of COVID, and we have generally sold assets in our weaker performing cities. There are buyers for these assets. The average price per bed in those bottom three cities or value per bed is GBP 65,000. That compares per bed, not per building, GBP 65,000 per bed. That would compare to about GBP 150,000 to build in those markets. There is real value still to be had there. We've sold assets which aren't full historically. I'm not saying it's easy. It does take time to sell these assets, particularly if they are not performing or are not full. Things generally are taking longer to sell because of the fire safety investigations that are required at the moment as well. I do not think this will be come Q1. You will see GBP 300 million of disposals from those bottom markets, but we will work hard to deliver them. We have got the skills in our team. As Mike said on his slide, we will supplement that with sales of lower yielding assets, which are full as well. I think that we see that if you can sell an asset in London in the fours, and you can redeploy that capital somewhere in the sevens, that still makes sense for us to do. That GBP 300 million- GBP 400 million of disposal program will be a combination of assets. As we say, it's going to be a multi-year program to finalize that repositioning to the quality and the 80% target that we want. It is something that we will need to execute on, and we will need to execute on over the next couple of years. M ike, are you without anything to add to that? No, I think the only other thing to say is, sort of pulling on from Joe, the market will decide what these assets are worth. We think they are marked in the right place based on the disposal activity we've done and this kind of value-add asset historically. The question for us will be, based on where the market sees pricing, what are the returns to Unite of holding those assets? Could we do better if we cashed out and reinvested elsewhere? That is how we will think about it. I suppose the difficulty is looking back over history, the market was different, as you say. It's changed pretty much in about a month. If you look at your September confidence of hitting your guidance, then the October of not hitting that, it changed very, very quickly. That's going to have a material impact on people's decision-making, surely. When would we get some clarity over where the market is sat, do you think? Yeah, there's still quite a few transactions in the market. I don't think anything's really traded or valued since the closeout of the sales cycle. We would expect to see in the next few months a few of those transactions start to trade. I think the valuers at the year-end will hopefully have something that they can look to from a transaction. If not, I'd expect some of those transactions may have repriced even if they haven't closed out. I think we really need to wait and see what those transactions point to, both sort of the back end of this year and into the start of next year. That will be the first time we'll get that visibility. Whether there'll be a sentiment-driven value, who knows? That's sort of the art of valuation, isn't it? From a transactional perspective, I think that we should see something reprice sort of around the year-end. Thanks. Just following on from the question of the medium term and looking into FY 2027, I appreciate you're not providing guidance for that, but looking at the sales you expect for the academic year 2026-2027, which have an impact, greater impact on 2027, is there a risk we see another year of earnings decline in 2027 versus 2026 or a flattish sort of outlook? Is that a fair way to think about it? Yeah, it's fair to say, Paul, clearly income is a big driver of our earnings growth in the medium term. How we perform and how we deliver on that 0-4% like flat rental growth guidance for the 2026-2027 academic year will have a big influence on our ability to grow earnings. Clearly, we want to execute and be towards the top end of that range. I think if we're towards the weaker end of that range, we will have to go harder in some of the things we do. That will be sort of we've talked about being ruthless on costs, going harder at the cost base. It will also mean slightly different decisions potentially around capital allocation. We will have to adapt based on our income, but the target is very much to get back to that earnings growth in 2027. Thank you. We got any more in the room? Thank you. Mr. Toome. Hello? Yeah. Give it a sec. Andres Toome from Green Street. Just a few follow-ups on capital allocation mostly. You sort of mentioned disposals and it's in the bridge for EPS as well. It does not sound like there's maybe anything in negotiations or in the process. I'm just wondering, why do you already have it as a negative drag on your earnings this year or sorry, 2026? Secondly on that, you make the case for share buybacks as well. Considering that, would not that effect in any case be neutral at worst if you deploy that money into share buybacks? Yeah. Andres, in terms of the impact of capital recycling in the 2026 guidance, we've obviously made some disposals this year. It is around GBP 150 million of disposals, and they were pretty much weighted to the end of August. You do get the full 12 months impact of that. We think the GBP 300 million-GBP 400 million disposals that we're talking to next year will be slightly H2 weighted. We are also already having conversations about bringing a portfolio to market. That's more the sort of value-add stock we've talked about. We are also having conversations around core assets that we can sell maybe slightly sooner than that. Sorry, the second part of your question was around reallocating that capital. Reallocating. This guidance does not assume a reallocation of that capital into reinvestment at a positive spread. Clearly, if we make good progress in good time on those disposals, it will give us scope to invest via, as we'd said, university partnerships or also potentially share buybacks. The mix of how we deploy that capital when it's available will depend on the opportunities we see in front of us. We are looking to do more on university partnerships. When we have that capital, it will depend on the opportunities we see in front of us. Secondly on developments and development yields, you sort of think 7%+ is good capital allocation, but I guess your shares are trading at an implied yield, which is above 7% on an unlevered basis. Why would not that target be more like 8%-9% perhaps? I think, Anders, within 7% + there are numbers bigger than the 7% that we would be pushing for. There is a long way to go to go from development yields in the mid-sixes to something that is 7%, 8%, 9%. Clearly, that will mean that some of those schemes would likely be unviable. The discipline for us is to say that we will not build schemes where they do not hit the kind of returns we need. I think the other point we drew out there is that nomination agreements need to back those income returns. Your point is a very good one. We need to think about how long it takes us to get to that development yield. We need to think about the risk involved in delivering it. If there are better alternative uses of capital through share buybacks, when we have that capital available, we will think very hard about them. Finally, how do you see the opportunity perhaps to tilt your product from student housing to other types of living, perhaps in micro-living, co-living, sort of niches where the product fits the other side of that angle? Is there any impediments around that, or is that even a consideration? Yeah, I think what we've seen in the sector is a number of the recent consents that have been gained are more open and more varied. Willing to either include co-living or a blend of co-living and PBSA. It feels like that sort of combination and merging of use classes is happening. With our Manchester Met scheme, we've actually got four very different product types within the 2,300 beds that we will be delivering. Now, they are all focused on students, but we're starting to see that blend of different product types and blocking of buildings into different products becoming more normal. I think as we look forward to and we get back onto the track of developing, I think wider uses and wider kind of consents will be something that we will be pushing for. Because I think, as I say, we've seen success from other players in the marketplace of being able to do that and to be able to manage them more effectively than I think would have been historically. I think students are more comfortable living in kind of non-purpose-built blocks as well and a range of different tenants, particularly for those second and third years. We see Empiric as a great sort of stepping stone into that space to just start to learn and understand that market better. I think as we think forward to new schemes, then that wider sort of sense of uses will be something that we do consider. Thank you. Sorry. Hi, John Heijning, ABN AMRO. One question maybe on the developments because you mentioned that the 2025 deliveries are basically running below budget. What's today's occupancy rate for those developments? You also mentioned that students are sort of hesitant to sign up for new developments because they are worried on the delivery date. Is that fear basically actual fear? Are you running behind schedule on some of these developments? Is there something that you can mitigate there if this fear is basically not a real fear that you do deliver on time? I'll do a question after that. I 'll take the one on occupancy maybe to start with in the development. As I said, in terms of the buildings that we open new or reopen this year, we achieved 65% of our target income. On occupancy, we're actually slightly higher. What we did when we realized that the conditions were tough around leasing up new buildings is we took decisions to, in some cases, shorten tenancies. We went from maybe a 51-week sale that was targeted at international students. When we saw that market was harder, we moved it down to maybe more of a 40-week tenancy in the first year to try and stabilize that income. There is a bit of a gap to go to recover, both in terms of selling out in terms of all beds, but also in terms of stepping up the length of those contracts to where we originally budgeted. Karan, do you want to pick up the point around student behavior and choosing student buildings which are under construction or nearing completion? What we have found is that as there has been more supply in certain cities where students have had choice, they've not wanted to take the risk. The agents who often advise these students have preferred to go with assets that have been open and stabilized. Especially in that first year where there is a risk that it might be delayed by two to three weeks, they've just opted for more stable sort of solutions. We saw that last year as well with our property that we opened in Nottingham. It was about two weeks delayed. In the end, it kind of ran at about half. This year, it is almost full as well. As students have come back, realized the quality, realized the experience, we have not only been able to keep a lot of the rebookers from the original 50%, we have also been able to attract and reposition the asset completely. The product quality of what we are delivering is actually really good. The overall service provision is really good. They just do not want to take the risk when there are other options available. For us, that means that we have to try and deliver those properties a bit earlier. We have to do a better job of marketing them so people understand the overall experience and have contingencies in place if things do get delayed. I think with the building safety regulations now, you need to get a sign-off once the building has been completed. It's called a gateway three that could take between 8-12 weeks. That will mean that student schemes have to be delivered significantly earlier than they have been beforehand. You will see that gap emerging. I think that does put further pressure on the ability to build new schemes. Thank you. On the shorter lease terms, it is also mentioned in the press release that students are taking a little bit shorter leases. What is the trend? Do you think this is a trend? Can you quantify that? Yeah, on the leasing, what we find is that when you're a U.K. domestic customer, you're really looking for a 40-44 week tenancy, which really mirrors the academic year that they're going through as well. Where historically we may have preferred a 51-week, if you're pivoting to a U.K. undergraduate or even an international undergraduate customer, that lease length needs to change. The other thing that we've also found is that some students are looking at actually, could we take one semester? They do not want to commit for all three semesters at the same go. Where we've got a bit of availability, we have offered that semester, and then we do a pretty good job of then retaining them and backfilling it if we need to as well. I think this is a function of, one, alignment to the academic year, and secondly, just being a little bit more cautious about what if I do not like the university, what if I do not like the course, I want a little bit of flexibility in how I could make some changes. Oh, sorry, one follow-up question on that. Sorry if you are anything from Philosopher's Camp. You mentioned indeed you offered shorter leases, but what is the actual rental growth that you saw in October versus September? In other words, did you have to give a discount to get to the 95% in occupancy? If so, how confident are you that that does not impact your next leasing cycle? Yeah, do you want to go first or? Yeah, I am happy to. Yeah, Veronique, where we were at sort of July when we had our interim results, we were about 85% sold at that stage. On the bookings to date, we were running at about 5% rental growth. That is sort of annual rental growth in the way we calculate it. That was really pretty consistent across our direct letts and our nomination agreements. However, as you say, we ended up the sales cycle at 95% occupancy with 4% rental growth. Really, the reason we saw that dilution in the last 10 percentage points of occupancy was because we were selling beds either on shorter tenancies than we planned or in some cases on first semester letts. Around one and a half percentage points of the occupancy we saw in the year was a first semester tenancy. That drags down the overall rental growth. To put that in some historical context, we generally sell about half as many beds for a first semester. That did have an impact in terms of where the rental growth ended up. We've got about 10 minutes of questions. Mike, is there anything on the webcast that we need to pull out that we haven't covered? We do have a few on the webcast, so I'll counter through these quickly. First is from Ian Richards, a private investor. Why are you targeting 80% exposure to high-tariff universities and not 100%? I think that we do see that there are good universities who aren't in that high-tariff group. The government is very supportive of, and we're seeing strong demand from students to go to universities which have very good employability outcomes. Manchester Met is a good example of that. They've got one of the highest employment rates of all universities right across the U.K. They've been growing their student numbers by between 5% and 6% per year over the last four or five years. They've got low international exposure. That is a university which has forged excellent relationships with industry. It does a lot of placements for their students, and it is meeting a need and a requirement for students to go and study there. It doesn't meet the category of a high-tariff university, which is generally research-heavy and focused on different types of products and different types of education. That is why I talked about being even more forensic about which universities and which markets that we want to generate in. There will always be an element of buildings and universities that we want to work with. Next one is from Guillaume Langellier at Columbia Threadneedle. As part of the Empiric transaction, were you surprised that international post-grad take-up was below its prior levels? I guess the short answer is yes. I think that we were surprised on our own portfolio that that postgraduate take-up was lower than we were anticipating. We saw the visa data was very supportive throughout the sales cycle, up 7%. We were expecting to see a recovery in postgraduate sales as well. Through the Empiric process, we did reduce our occupancy assumptions in year one because they were tracking behind where they had been historically. They ended up being short of that underwrite as well. I think it was a similar level to our shortfall. It really does come down to that shift of internationals from post-grad to undergrad. The next one on the webcast is from Daniela Lungu at First Sentier. It sounds like your disposal program targets the weakest assets in the weakest cities. What is the likelihood that there are buyers for those assets, and what kind of discounts might you have to accept? I think we've probably covered that one, Mike, so. Moving on. Next one, Nick Baker at MFS. What share of nomination agreements are effectively linked to inflation, and what share are a function of local market r ents? Longer term, should we think about nomination agreements growing at a similar rate to the direct let market? I can take that. Yeah. All of our multi-year agreements have a rental clause in them that has a cap and a collar based on either CPI or RPI. We sort of normally use November, December data to set those. The single-year norms, which are about 11%, so of the 59%, 48% are multi-year, 11% are single-year. Those will get repriced every single year based on current market conditions. On the second point around, do we see them coming together? I think once we start to go through the disposal program and we sort of have a comparable portfolio, DL, and nominations in a city and where we are targeting to drive rental growth sort of 50-100 basis points ahead of inflation, I think you will start to see some more commonality in the rental growth. Right now, the portfolios are quite different. Sometimes it becomes difficult to compare DL versus nomination rents because they are different cities, different properties, different product. I think it is one of the features of having a multi-asset, multi-tenant portfolio that we do see different levels of performance in cities and in assets every year. It is probably something which you have not seen because we have always sort of delivered at the upper end of our occupancy numbers, and we have not seen that sort of slight movement you see in differences in rental growth between noms and direct let within cities. It generally is that where you have that very strong demand, you can drive your prices dynamically through the sales cycle, and that is what delivers your stronger rental growth from direct lets when you have very strong demand and squeezed supply in those markets. As we have seen this year, when you have some softness, that is when your nominations performance, and you may need to do a bit more price activity. That is sort of an element of dynamic pricing when you are selling 65,000 rooms every year across 22 different cities. That will be something and is a feature of having an operational business with dynamic pricing across our estate. That's it for the webcast. Melissa, you got one more then? Two more then? We'll probably have time for two more, and then we'll look to wrap up. Hello. Yeah, Nitesh from Barclays here. A quick one on your credit profile. Do you see a risk of negative rating action from S&P on the back of this operational weakness or any potential valuation to decline? Hi, Nitesh. We're in a good place in terms of our rating in general, and we've generally been sort of closer to the better end than the worst end. Clearly, we want to keep our leverage in a conservative place, and I think that's what we set out in terms of our capital allocation strategy. We're not going to stretch the balance sheet. We'll keep our net debt, EBITDA, and interest cover at what we think are appropriate levels. It's really all about how we can get back to growing our income, growing our earnings. Ultimately, that's the underpinning of a good credit rate. Thank you. Paul, finish us off. Sorry, one just quick follow-up on the shorter tenancies you mentioned. I think in the past, the 97% occupancy that you've delivered has been on the academic leasing. If it was all for 51 weeks, it was for the full year. Obviously, there's a mix of that. I assume the 95% is on a similar basis. Actually, then if you think about it through the whole year, it's a much greater decline. Is that the best way to think about it? Where we've always disclosed occupancy, Paul, is on beds sold. Historically, it's always been the same, whether it's been sold for a semester or for the entire academic year. Where you get the impact of selling shorter tenancies or longer tenancies is in the rental growth. Our rental growth figure is an annual rental growth figure. Where you would see it in last year's numbers, for example, is in that dilution of rental growth I talked about earlier, as opposed to in the occupancy. There is not an additional impact because it's let for 10 weeks less than it would have been if it was on a post. If something should have been let for 51 weeks and it's been let for 40 weeks, it will be 100% occupied in the numbers. But you're saying the rent would be lower or how's best? Sorry, just to understand. I think this goes back to the point I made around how the rental outturn we deliver for 2025-2026 impacts the guidance for FY 2026. To your point, where we have shorter tenancies or more semester letts, you are getting that income through the back end of 2025. However, you may not be receiving it on all of those beds. As I said, semesters are about one and a half percentage points of occupancy through 2026 and maybe not through the summer of 2026. Where we've seen that dilution in rental growth, that impacts FY 2026 as opposed to FY 2025. Great. Thank you all for coming along and bearing with us as we took you through lots of information and lots of detail. I really appreciate you coming, listening intently. We are around if you want to chat, otherwise, we will catch up with you all soon.