Morning, everyone. Welcome to our full year results presentation for 2025.

Delighted to be joined today by our finance director, Tim Lawlor, and our chief executive of partnerships, Stephen Teagle. The agenda.

I will do a very quick introduction. Tim will follow up with the financial review.

Stephen will talk about the markets, and then I will go into quite a few slides on strategy and operational update, finishing off with a outlook. Then of course we'll have the Q&A, which we all can't wait for.

The 2025 headlines. So 2025 profit before tax in line with expectations, which included a very, very strong 2025.

Just on that, a thank you to our team, because there were a lot of sceptics around following the issues we had at the end of 2024 that didn't think we would get to the numbers, particularly when we said it would be dramatically second half weighted. We did.

The important thing there is showing the resilience of the business and the model is we had absolutely no help whatsoever from the market. I've been around for 45 years, and quite often you see a housebuilder get into trouble, and the following year it's boom time, and they get out of jail because the market's been quite good.

We had no help whatsoever last year from markets. We're all very proud of the fact that we are producing one in seven, that's 15% of the total affordable homes being constructed in the country.

The group, following massive reorganisation, is lean, efficient, and incredibly stable. We were, probably along with Persimmon I would suggest, the only active housebuilders in the land market last year, which was incredibly soft.

We've bought some great land last year, taking advantage of those soft markets, which will help the company dramatically over the next few years. Net debt reduced down to £144 million at the end of '25.

Stephen Teagle and I would both say, we're very delighted that during the year, and it was not coming through at the end of this year, the £39 billion Affordable Homes Programme '26 to '36, Stephen and I, who've been around, as I say, a long time, have never seen an injection of capital in affordable housing of that nature, ever. We're positioned for growth.

Just going off script slightly, there were two announcements this morning. The first, obviously, about our results; the second announcing my retirement.

I'm told by Tim that some of the feedback is people were surprised. I'm not sure why people are surprised.

It's all planned. The board have been expecting it.

I've done 45 years. I'm 62 in June.

My wife is older than me, and she's very lucky, of course. She is older than me, and I just want to enjoy myself.

As some of you will know, I've got one or two spare sets of clothes, I'm in a pretty good place, and there's nothing more to it than absolutely that. I will be around, and so it's very much business as usual.

That's the message within the group for quite some time to come. No issues, no nothing, no second-guessing.

It's just me, coming up to that sort of time. The business is in good shape.

There's a new social housing programme coming forward. It's the right time for all concerned.

As I say, where are we? The business is stabilised.

The new organisation structure with the executive chairs that we've got is working exceptionally well. We are differentiated from our housebuilding peer group, and we're completely aligned with the government.

We'll keep coming back to that, Stephen and I, during the presentation. We've got some great long-term relationships with the largest housing associations and Homes England.

These relationships aren't over the last 2 or 3 years. These are relationships that, kind of Stephen and I have had since before 2000, years and years and years of doing affordable housing.

Don't forget, your average housing association is generally wary about your average housebuilder, because they know they only really want to deal with them when the markets are poor. When the markets are good, they drop them like a stone.

We're positioned ideally to capture the social grant programme that's coming up now, 2026 to '36, and we've started the bidding process. This last point not to be underestimated, and I'll come back to this time and time again, we are very vertically integrated with our Vistry Works operation.

Which has got three factories, incredibly good, the product that they're producing is excellent. What I would say, timber frame is more expensive than building traditionally.

Where you gain is speed, reduction in prelims. I'm not sure timber frame works for pure housebuilders.

It does when they're going hell for leather and they're building quickly. When they're not building quickly, as is the case at the moment, you're not getting that speed because what's the point of building when you can't sell as quick as you want?

Timber frame works very, very well for a partnerships business where you've got the visibility, not so well for a housebuilder. Just a little quip on that, Cala Homes, private equity, are pulling out of timber frame because it's more expensive, because they're not selling quick enough, and they're fed up with the prelim overruns without that coming through.

Just something to bear in mind. It is vital with a partnerships business, and the government and housing associations also like the MMC, it really, really works well for us.

Looking ahead, we're absolutely set to benefit from the partner-funded growth. Now rent convergence and rent settlement have both now been announced, which is great.

I'll just remind some of you that at least one housing association in London has said that rent convergence is as important to their balance sheet and building going forward as the 2026-36 £39 billion. Rent convergence for housing associations, it repairs their balance sheet, is huge.

Also don't underestimate the 10-year rent settlement. We're 15% of the market.

You just need to look and do the numbers. We'll obviously be looking to increase our market share, but even maintaining our market share at 15% shows that we've got a fantastic opportunity ahead of us, and that opportunity is now coming at the end of this year.

Are we disappointed with the delay since it's been announced? Yes, but the process is happening.

It'll all be announced in September. We'll have visibility before that.

It's coming. Open market growth, in the end, is inevitable.

It's highly cyclical. I just don't see it anytime soon.

What's going on at the present moment in time in Iran is making that even more uncertain, because not only will we potentially see prices going up, which we've made a little line in our forward projections, which we're talking to analysts about, but early days. It could all end tomorrow.

The longer it goes on, the more those prices will start to come through. Don't underestimate consumer confidence also being hit by what's going over there as well.

We're reducing our inventory, and that will give us more options with capital allocation. We absolutely, with our 25 business units and our Vistry Works operation, which is capable of doing 10,000 units a year just from the three factories, we are very, very able and willing to respond to the opportunities that are ahead of us.

On that, I'll hand over to Tim, and I'm just dying to see what Tim's joke is going to be with this. Oh, he's changed it.

Can't change that.

Oh, I'm looking at my screen. Sorry.

Something's gone wrong there, hasn't it? It's probably me, but.

There we go.

There we are. Yeah.

We're back.

I'm very much looking forward to the joke that inevitably has got to come from that photo.

You can have some help up the steps.

Every dog has his day.

I hope they show good to go. Sort of got here.

We've got a picture of we've got a picture of our site in Tottenham, the Meridian site, and in the foreground there we've got members of the Vistry management team watering the green shoots of recovery. There we go.

Pretty poor, isn't it? All right.

Let's move on from from that. The year-end numbers are old news.

We went through most of these numbers with you back at the trading update in the middle of January. No surprises really within here.

As Greg said, profit before tax came in in line with our guidance. We had a strong second half of the year, where we saw a tick-up in op margin and a a strong proportion of the full year growth in in '25.

Revenue-wise, we were down 4% despite being down 8 9% on completions. We had a slight increase on ASP, which I'll come to in a in a second.

It's worth noting that EPS growth is greater than the APBT growth, because we're starting to see some of the benefits of the share buyback programme coming through there. That's the principal reason why EPS grew at 6% while PBT at 2%.

In terms of net debt, we've reduced it during the course of the year. We did see a tick-up in average net debt, we went from 698 of average daily net debt, and it's important that it's, it's daily net debt rather than what most people talk about, which is month-end net debt.

Average daily debt of 698 to 734 during the course of during the course of the year. ROCE is obviously still someway away from where we want it to be.

We want to be a a high-ROCE business, and hence some of the actions that we're taking this year to try and release capital from the balance sheet. Okay.

On to revenue. As we've talked about, total units were down 9% year-on-year, hit by a couple of market forces.

In the first half of the year, there was a fair degree of uncertainty in the partner market, particularly in anticipation or the uncertainty around what was going to get announced in June with the £39 billion programme that was eventually announced. We saw some pick-up in the second half of the year, particularly around affordable, albeit the PRS the PRS market remained pretty moribund during the course of the year.

A lot of the PRS providers were going out for funding or were reaching the end of their funding allocations. There are some signs that that might pick up this year, but we still expect more growth to come from the affordable side of partner-funded rather than the PRS side.

Then open market completions, this is largely driven by having fewer sales outlets as we've migrated away from the former housebuilding sites, fewer sales outlets. There are clearly some self-help self-help measures that will help us improve the sales rate, but it'd be nice to have a market some market tailwind as well to push up open market completions.

There's no really underlying theme, I think, around average selling prices. I think most of our movements are related to mix factors.

In the partner world, we sold more in London and the Southeast where the average cost of a unit is higher than in the North. In open market, we had more large large products being sold during the course of the year, which again was a higher ASP.

The underlying theme was that generally house prices were pretty flat during the course of the year. We did have higher land sales in the year as we've mentioned back in January.

Our land sales were about £180 million of revenue. We'll continue to have land sales as part a core part of our strategy.

When we buy a a site, we will identify parcels of land, particularly for large sites, where part of our capital strategy is to sell those parcels. That's in the main what happened last year.

The margin that we take on those is is not exceptional margin. We just take the blended site margins of the rest of the site, you can assume that it's around sort of 20% gross margin on those land sales.

It's not the exceptional driver that some thought it might be of the profit growth in the year. Not a lot to say on tenure mix year-on-year.

Pretty similar to '24, and we saw a mix within the within affordable, as I mentioned before, from PRS to additionality. I think during FY '26, we'll probably see a similar overall mix between partner-funded and open market.

There are two forces there. One is the push that we'll talk about during the course of the presentation on open market, which will push up open market volumes, and then the arrival of the Affordable Housing Programme will push up on the partner-funded side.

At the moment, we're expecting that'll be roughly equal. Obviously, the timing of both how long how long the open market push goes for and when the affordable housing finds its way through will impact the the mix, but at this stage, we'd say it's probably about the same for '26 as it was for '25.

Okay. Into operating profit.

The margin went up in the second half of the year. We had overall for the year 100 basis point improvement in gross margin.

What we're seeing is the new sites are coming on at higher margin. We're buying sites on on a higher margin and a higher ROCE.

As we had the tail-off, particularly of the Southern the South Division issues from '24, we're seeing some margin improvement coming from that. Overheads up a little bit year-on-year.

In light of the South Division issues of '24, we invested more money in assurance activities, so that contributed to additional overhead. There was also more a return to some variable pay again with all bonuses ceased in '24 in light of the issues we experienced.

What about '26 margin? The underlying margin of the of the business will continue to tick up as we get efficiencies and we get operation we'll get economies of scale and operating leverage.

There will be some reduction as a result of the sales push activity. Covering that briefly, at the start of the year, straight after after the trading statement, we we gathered together to say, "Look, the sales at the end of last year weren't good enough.

Also the capital in the balance sheet is proving to be too sticky, and we recognise that we need to give some push into sales in advance of the spring selling season." There was a feeling that there are some constraints on our selling within the business, because people don't want to they love the value they love the houses.

They think there's intrinsic value there, and it's quite hard for a salesperson to offer the discount if they think they're going to sell it later at a at a higher price. The other thing is that there was some constraint in people's minds about not touching the margin.

What we've done is say, "Look, we need to get the sales going. We recognise that that may have some margin implications, but it will give us good momentum, and crucially, it will generate cash and reduce our WIP."

That was the driver behind the change. Far so good.

We've seen this 40% year-on-year improvement in sales rates in the year-to-date. That's really encouraging.

We'll start to see the cash come through from that in the second quarter. What it does mean is that there's going to be some margin tightening, particularly in the first half of the year, as we see the impacts of that on those sites.

I think the other thing we'd say in terms of margin for the year is we keep being hit, as we all are, by international surprises, international events. We don't know exactly how they'll play out.

I think this time last week, we might have been slightly more bullish, and we're perhaps slightly more cautious this week given what's happened in the last week in in the Middle East. We don't know yet know what impact that's going to have, if any.

Is it going to impact our build costs? Is it going to impact cost inflation?

Is it going to impact customer confidence? It's too early to call it, but we're probably slightly tempering our expectations for '26 in light of the uncertainty that that brings.

That's operating profit. In terms of build costs, continue to get the benefit of the scale of operations and the fact that we keep building.

Our build costs came in in '25 about 2.5% up year-on-year, which is pretty much as we guided throughout last year. We have framework arrangements with all of our materials suppliers or 90% of our material suppliers, and we contract in advance, which gives us some protection against short-term volatility in pricing.

Subject to whatever happens coming out of the Middle East, then we're expecting minimal material cost increases during the course of the year. Just in terms of what's the impact of the higher fuel costs are and the higher gas prices are, the direct in terms of the direct impact, it's not that significant, but it's obviously what happens with our suppliers and the the supply chain and what they do, particularly those suppliers that are heavily reliant on on gas.

I'm sure there'll be some discussions at some point if this price increase is sustained about our our material costs. The labour supply is good.

The fact that others aren't building helps us, makes puts us in a stronger negotiating position, and our subcontractors continue to like the certainty that our business model offers to them. That enables us to hold prices pretty flat.

In some places, in some parts of the country, we are seeing some reductions in subcontractor costs during '26. Overall, minimal impact on build costs subject to whatever happens as we go down the go through the year.

On Vistry Works, Greg mentioned this before, really good progress in terms of production. Up 60% year-on-year in terms of the timber frame units, and the roof trusses, it was the first year of production, and we did over 3,000 units in 2025.

We're expecting further growth in '26. As we say on the slide here, 6,000 timber frame units in 2026, and we've still got capacity for more for more.

We can probably find a way to deliver up to 10,000 units without having to buy or or take a new factory on. We've got a couple of years to see how things develop before we expand our factory footprint.

Working through the rest of the P&L. Overall net finance costs were down by 9.7 year-on-year.

In terms of bank interest, although the average debt went up, the impact on interest costs of the increase in average debt was offset by better daily management of cash balances. We've got these new mid-month facilities, which are slightly cheaper, and enable enable us to be give us more levers to pull in terms of making drawings.

That's offset the daily debt increase. Then the average cost of debt reduction from 7% to 3% to 6.3% is the driver of the reduction in net bank interest.

The land creditor discount unwind was flat year-on-year, but you'll may have spotted that land creditors has gone up during the course of the year, and that was largely due to land being bought towards the end of 2025. As a result of that, there will be higher land creditor discount unwind in '26.

We expect finance costs overall will go up slightly with the land creditor impact, probably slightly higher than the benefits we've got from the reduction in average net debt. The net JV interest is down there.

There's lower average cost of debt and lower average cost of borrowing as well, finally gets its way through to us as well. Tax.

Our effective tax rate was 27.9 compared to 28.3% last year as we just found some more benefits coming through in terms of claims and reliefs. So 27.9 is probably the number to put in the models going forward.

Then in terms of the exceptionals, we talked before about the £12.8 settlement with CMA. Unfortunately, there were also some eye-watering fees, legal fees and IT fees, that went alongside that as we had to stop deleting everything, store everything off-site, and spend a lot of time with lawyers.

That contributed a bit to the restructuring costs as well. Exceptionals were down significantly year-on-year, because last year we had £100 million hit on the building safety provision that went through exceptionals.

That's why the reported profit for the year has jumped significantly, because we haven't got that big exceptional. Turning to building safety then.

We're making good progress. We've worked our way through 21 buildings, spent £46 million on those buildings in the year.

I think it's fair to say the progress still isn't quite at the pace we would like it to be. We know that Building Safety Regulator are taking steps to improve the sign-off process and get us out on-site faster.

We are expecting a pick-up in '26, albeit it's still not at the full sort of rate of efficiency that we would like. We've identified a few more buildings, or probably it's better to say we had a few more buildings identified to us, principally sites that we worked as the contractor on years ago that came up through claims that we weren't aware of.

We're expecting So that's 11 buildings, and we added £14 million to the provision for those 11. We expect that those will tail off.

I think it's with each year that goes by, less likely that buildings come out of the woodwork to to add to the add to the provision. Then against that, we've had recoveries.

Recoveries are ahead of where we expected it to be. We've got £17 million of recoveries identified, £13 million of which we got the cash for in-year.

The other movement on here is discounting, where we have to discount our provision and unwind that discount each year, and move the discount rate each year. That was an £11 million charge, and non-cash really, to the to the exceptionals during the course of the year.

In terms of next year, to say at the bottom there, the ramp-up in spending, I have said in the past it's one that I've got consistently wrong and overestimated how much money we spend on we're going to spend on building safety. I think we're always expecting that it's going to speed up.

I'd say now it's going to be roughly £70 million of of gross spend next year, probably around £60 million of net spend in '26 on building safety. In terms of land activity, we secured over 11,000 plots in the period.

A lot were towards the end of the year. We were opportunistic in the build-up to the Autumn Statement when there were a few nervy landowners who wanted to sell quickly, and we had some good deals that we could take there.

That's good. The overall size of the landbank coming down.

We probably expect a similar sort of level next year, we'll continue to wind down to have a landbank of somewhere around 3.5 years of of coverage in the landbank. In terms of strategic land, that continues to be a good source.

It's probably not provided as much into the business over the last couple of years as we'd like. Planning is getting planning is still slow.

From the time of planning application to actually getting full planning is still 18 to 24 months, which is longer than we would like. That still feels that like the right source a good source of 25% of our land, particularly with some of the NPPF announcements that are going to make it easier to free up that strategic land.

Right. In terms of cash flow.

Overall, during the course of the year, our cash flow was about £130 million better than the previous year. An inflow this year of 36 compared to an outflow last year of 92.

Walking through this bridge from left to right, from the opening to the closing, obviously we made £270 million of profit. The there was a net decrease in inventories.

This has got some constituent parts, which I'll come to on the balance sheet in a second. Net outflow on payables and receivables.

The big bit was probably in receivables, where the receivables balances picked up during the course of the year. We had we've got land sale debtors that's gone up by £55 million year-on-year.

Again, land sales were towards the end of the year. We've also had a pick-up in partner-funded receivables, again really from year-end activity not coming in, and most of that cash will be received in the first quarter.

The other side is on on payables. At the end of last at the end of '24, we had a higher deferred income balance.

In other words, we'd had cash in advance, which we'd not yet recognised in the P&L at the end of '24, which was unwound slightly and reduced that balance down during 20 2025. Not much to say on net investment in JVs.

Building safety we've covered. Restructuring and others were those the the costs of the reorganisation.

Some of that cost was taken in '24, the reorganisation following the South Division issues. We've also got in there some capex, particularly around Vistry Works, where we've added some more machinery in into the factories during the course of the year.

In terms of capital employed, this is not where we want it to be yet. We We've said a couple of years ago, our our rough target is to get to capital employed of around £2 billion, and we're significantly above that.

The principal area is WIP. We know that we knew this time last year that WIP was higher than we wanted.

We set an expectation that we'd try and reduce WIP by £200 million. For some of the reasons I mentioned earlier, it's proved to be stickier.

I think particularly in London. London has had a very poor sales year.

I think that's widely known. WIP can be lumpier in in London, because we're building apartment blocks, you can't sort of stop halfway through and step and sell and start selling flats.

You've got to build the whole lot if you're going to sell anything. You end up with lumpier WIP there.

We've also had WIP impacted by the end-of-year deals. There were some build-outs which we expected to sell at the end of the year, and the deals slipped into '26, we'll get the money for that in '26.

There are probably a few sites where the infrastructure is higher than we would like it to be. Some of the build programmes will have been from quite a while ago, and we've had to and even before the partnership strategy change, you end up building out some infrastructure.

You've got a build programme that relies on putting infrastructure in place for the private and the partner-funded at the same time. While the partner-funded is selling, we've got infrastructure embedded that will only recover when the the private houses are sold.

Finally, on a more positive note, it wasn't that the action we took last year didn't reap some benefits. Our heavy focus on unsold stock did reduce the unsold stock balance by more than half outside London, £50 million of unsold stock reduction during the course of 2025.

On the JV side, the JV overall hasn't moved particularly much year-on-year. Within that, there is just like on our own fully owned balance sheet, there's more WIP than we would like.

We're working closely with our joint venture partners to try and find ways to accelerate some of the slow-moving stock in our joint venture sites to release capital for both us and our partners. Finally, I think I've I've covered the other asset movement, which is around the rise in partner receivables and the land debtors.

Finally for me, in terms of capital allocation, we've got £30 million to go on our share buyback programme that we announced back in September '24. We'll continue to plug away at that, and we'll complete that in the year.

I think previously we've said we'd complete it by the AGM. It may now be slightly slower than that.

Then come the half year, we will as a board look at where we are, where the progress we've made on sales, the progress we've made on debt reduction, and determine if there will be an interim distribution announcement. If there isn't, then, we'll continue to consider that during the second half of the year.

I think that does it for me. Over to you, Stephen.

Thanks, Tim. Good morning, everyone.

Good to see everyone. That's a great picture there of our scheme at Ledbury.

That's a some Section 106 plots with a small rural housing association, or local regional housing association called Connexus. Just exemplifying our diversity of partners that we that we work with.

We've just been looking back over 2025. What I'm going to do is look at how we drive value going forward through the market conditions that we've got, and we leverage our strategic assets of our long-term relationships with our partners, and our vertical integration, as Greg mentioned, and importantly, our ability to work closely with government on the on applying grant.

Let's just look at the opportunity at the moment. It is very much undoubtedly a strengthening opportunity.

We see our position within the market and our long-term engagement with partners really encouraging partners to engage with us as they build their programmes and as we go forward with delivery. The government has done what the government is going to do on the demand side for affordable housing, we now have visibility of all those changes, and we'll touch on those in a moment, feeding through.

Those government commitments are now writ large. We can see all of them.

That's resulted in a step change in partners' ambitions, and in a moment I'll refer to that as an inflection in the market. It is undoubtedly a time that we have not seen before, as Greg mentioned.

This is a moment when we can really start to work with our partners and deliver on the homes that they're trying to invest in. We've seen early part of the spring season, although it's rained a lot, we've actually seen some very positive movement in the open market in terms of what's happening at our outlets, we'll touch on that.

First, though, our alignment with the government strategy, which we've mentioned before, is both strengthening us and also very profound. Greg said 15% of affordable housing market last year, 15% of the delivery of new build homes was via Vistry.

The total expenditure annually is around the £15 billion mark in terms of investment in new affordable homes, and that covers Section 106 and grant-funded. We've been very successful in moving our Section 106 homes partly because we engage with partners early, we haven't had the problems that others have had, but also partly because we're able to align that with our grant-funded delivery, what we call additionality, which has allowed us to work with our partners on delivering that.

That has not been a problem for us. We've been able to therefore deliver an increase in the grant award over the last year, we saw 37% increase in our grant award from Homes England last year.

That's not just because of 1 year's delivery. That's because we've delivered consistently across the 5 years.

That delivery performance is one of the things that gives us confidence in our bidding under the SAHP. We've been able to also do additional schemes where we've captured funding from partners who have needed to finish off their programme commitments or where there's been slippage, so that's allowed us to deliver more.

Our total grant level has risen to £252 million. Now the reason that's important is we'll be talking about a new programme in a moment.

Over the life of that 5 years of this programme, we've seen a threefold increase in our allocation to 252. Again, that demonstrates our ability to deliver with partners, and the fact that we've deployed those funds very quickly.

It comes no surprise that we anticipate the National Housing Strategy, therefore, to focus on mixed-tenure and the partnerships model as one of the ways that the industry should be evolving towards delivering the government ambition. What do we see in our customer and partner markets at the moment?

On the open market, we've had a mixture of external and internal factors. Externally, we've seen an increase in the availability of higher loan-to-value mortgages, and we've seen rate reductions and some more positive customer sentiment before the events of last week.

That's resulted through our contact centre we've been able to see higher levels of enquiries, and interestingly, higher levels of appointments than any week in 2025. Not only are people digitally looking at what we've got offering, they're prepared to come and meet with us in our sales outlets as well.

That's resulted in a very positive start to the spring selling season. We our sales are 40% up year-to-date on where we were in 2025.

That's a stat that's extremely important. Now we've been focused on targeted discounting, and also using tactical use of enablers in order to get people into that into our marketing, but that is really giving us momentum.

On the PRS side, and Tim described it as moribund, I think there's a structural weakness in the PRS side. We've certainly seen the transition to more single-family homes from multifamily.

That's an interesting occurrence over the last 12 months. There remain a paucity of players who have got the ability to commit volume consistently and engage with us, where they've got both the funding and the operational platforms aligned.

The people that we've worked with most frequently over the last 2 or 3 years have been refinancing. That's caused the pause in that market last year, and it is a market that needs to mature before it will really deliver on what the government's ambitions are for it.

Of course, working with Vistry is a great opportunity because we give standardised product. We can optimise yields by giving forward visibility to partners.

Affordable housing, where partners now sighted on that improved financial capacity, now sighted on the ability to bid for funds, a really important moment for affordable housing. I'll just remind you of our three sub-markets that we operate in.

Those traditional registered providers, the ones that had a lot of the headwinds and have had stock liabilities, interestingly, the regulator described there then receiving robust investment for new homes over the last quarter. So £4 billion raised by traditional registered providers to go into investing in new homes.

Local authorities. This is an interesting fact.

'24-'25, there was the highest level of local authority delivery of affordable housing for 40 years. 16% of all the affordable homes was local authorities.

It's interesting today to think back 40 years ago in a field somewhere in a place called Newton Abbot somebody did a deal with the town council about delivering on some public land there some affordable housing. There you go, 40 years ago.

For-profit registered providers who we refer to increasingly as institutionally backed registered providers, and we have one of those within our group called Linden First. We're at the final stages of confirming who we're going to work with as a partner to capitalise Linden First, and we see entering a framework with Linden First as a way of us our routes to market amplifying, not displacing, but amplifying the work that we already do with registered providers and bringing capacity into the sector.

Those three markets, the wheels are turning. It's beginning to come through, which is great.

Now we've added this slide because we thought it would be helpful at this point in time to give you some idea of how grant enters the ecosystem. Three things here.

Firstly, you can see on the left-hand side there, grant accessing grant funding from the government, we are able to bid for that directly as Vistry, or our partners obtain the funding. Either way, we'll be delivering homes, whether we get the grant direct or whether our partners get it.

That allows us to both bid for for grant from Homes England, and that bidding is now open. On the right-hand side, on one level, we can be agnostic who gets the grant, whether it's our partners or whether it's Vistry, because the P&L effect is the same.

The P&L takes valuations and and we take that through on regular, hopefully monthly, or sectional completion valuations throughout the life of the scheme. There's no difference in the P&L.

Where there is a difference is in terms of the cash. When we get the grant directly under the new SAHP, the proposals are that you would receive 40% of the grant when you buy the site and 35% when you start on-site.

On the basis that we obtain the grant for schemes that we've already got, you can see how that would benefit our cash flow in terms of accessing that grant at that stage. The third thing, which isn't on this slide, but is really important for our business as a mixed-tenure platform, but also extremely important for the government, is the leverage that grant provides across the whole market.

If you've got a presold model, and you're preselling and you're using grant funding to deliver affordable housing, you're more likely to open that site and deliver on the PRS. You're more likely to open that site and deliver on the open market.

One of the things, and I don't think that government measures this and captures it, the leverage from that grant funding across all tenures is really significant. I think you'll see that flowing through as the grant funding dynamics in the future.

I said it's an inflection from funding policy to delivery, and that's what we've seen. The government, I think very quickly, has stepped up and delivered on its came out with its policy.

Translating that to funding has taken a bit longer than we would have liked, but the reality is now the the SAHP is open. Bids need to be in by April.

Homes England has already received bids through an alternative route for funding. The wheels are turning, people are beginning to receive funds and get sighting on allocation.

I suspect allocations announcements will be in the late summer, but we'll have an indication of how successful we are with our bidding then. Really importantly, though, partners are not waiting to receive allocations.

They're talking to us now. They're pricing schemes for us at the moment.

They're wanting to talk to us about having frameworks in place that give them visibility of forward delivery. They're looking for what land opportunities they can come in with us on.

People are building their programmes, and I expect that to really be a consistent theme over the next 6 months. What does the net effect of those reinforced demand-side elements have?

It's improved capacity. I think there will be an absolute focus on early delivery, we know that grant awards measure they will be weighted towards early delivery, I expect an uptick in the first 3 years in that.

Obviously, that will be one of the things that informs our bid. If you take together collectively those policy changes by government, the rent settlement, rent convergence, £39 billion, and a Section 106 environment which is encouraging higher levels of affordable housing, even with an increase in social rent, I would expect to see the average long-term affordable housing move from around 55,000 new build, this is new build per year, to around 70,000.

That's a 30% increase in volumes. We've already got 15% of a market.

That market is growing, and we have a platform and an operation that allows us to respond to the opportunity. What are we doing with that opportunity?

We're bringing together two elements. Our that mixed-tenure platform is what we think will drive value for the business, and also in terms of the growth.

We're taking those elements on partnering, the ability to have frameworks that give visibility to us and our partners, bidding for direct grant awards, we know how beneficial that is. We've been receiving direct grant in different forms since 2008.

We were a very early player in that particular space. Doing more work with local authorities.

We've got precedents to work with local authorities both in joint venture and directly commissioning. We are focusing on being best-in-class as a partner.

Really important elements when you're looking at long-term relationships with partners. Then fusing that with that developer ethos of being able to offer successful open market sales.

Self-help there around our branding, and our use of the contact centre, which has definitely driven a more successful engagement with prospective purchasers earlier. Focused on sales excellence, and I'm really pleased to see we've that's been reflected in some improvement in our Trustpilot scores.

Bringing that mixed-tenure offering of open market sales along with presales is really important. Put that together in that delivery Venn diagram, that allows us to increase our platform of work in joint ventures with local authorities and RPs.

Really pleased to see us up and running with Placepoint, our joint venture with Homes England, the bid, and Linden First, and our position in terms of public sector land, which is extremely strong, and we intend to focus on more of that in our engagement with local authorities and combined authorities. Right.

I'm going to pass over to somebody who was in the field in Newton Abbot. Greg.

Thanks, Stephen. Thanks very much, Stephen.

Great presentation, and a good presentation from Tim as well. Good to see him talking about roof trusses.

If you close your eyes or as I did, you can nearly believe that he actually knows what one is. Great to see.

Our strategy and our competitive advantage. Strategy on land and planning, a 3.5-year or thereabouts landbank, and we've got more than that at the present moment in time.

We are exceptionally competitive in the land market with our strategy, particularly on larger sites. As far as I'm concerned, if we're bidding for a large site, we would be favourites to win it with our strategy.

End of. From an actual competitive advantage perspective, we have a great relationship with our partners.

Our partners have land. The government have land.

We are very, very good on bidding for public land where it's not just price that counts. Land 3.5 years in a strong place on public land, and our model makes us very, very competitive.

On build, frankly, nobody is building cheaper than Vistry. I would put my reputation on the line on that by some distance.

Just look at over the last 2 to 3 years what the others have been talking about with regards to build inflation and what we've been talking about. Subcontractors absolutely love our model.

They treat us as paying the mortgage. They work for the other housebuilders on the back of that might pay for a holiday.

They need the visibility. They do not want to get the phone calls as they're getting at the present moment in time on a Friday afternoon, "I only need two guys next week, Fred, because we're slowing right down because we're just not building quick enough."

The vertical integration that Vistry Works gives us is absolutely essential to the model. If you have visibility, you know you're going to build 2, 3, 4, 500 units on a site, that's when Vistry Works comes into itself.

If you've got a timber frame manufacturing facility and you know you've got lots of sites, but you don't know how quickly you're going to build, that whole benefit goes out of the window. Vistry Works works incredibly well from a build perspective as a partnerships business.

If you look at sales, when we start on-site, we basically market test up to 75% of what we're going to do, because as you've seen from the stats that Tim put up there, 75% of our model is either Section 106 or presold. It's only 25 or thereabouts percent that we're actually taking a risk on, which is the private sales within the market.

Our competitive advantage, if as I'm sure they are and we know they're all looking into it, it's not straightforward to get in with Homes England. As Stephen touched on a number of times there, to get into and get a really strong position in the '26-'36 programme, you've got to have a track record, and we're the only housebuilder, Persimmon to a little bit and maybe McCarthy Stone, but that's a different model, that has got a track record for the last 20 years on dealing with a programme.

If you look at the '21-'26 programme, the best-performing partner, strategic partner within Homes England, and there's 32 of them, is Vistry. Hence we're very confident with the outturn what we'll get from the '36 '26-'36 programme.

Housing associations, been around for a long time. They know how cyclical housebuilding is.

They know housebuilders come a-calling sometimes, and then they drop them for dead. I was recently at a big meeting with the government, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Housing Secretary, Housing Minister, Chief Secretary to the Treasury in a room with some contractors and some large housebuilders and the chief exec of the National Federation of Housing, which is the body that deals with housing associations.

Rather embarrassingly, they just came out in the room and said, "The problem, sir," talking to the Secretary of State for Housing, "is there's only one company that treats housing associations as they want to be tread with, and that's with respect, ongoing relationships." She said, "And that's Vistry."

I got over it quite quickly. I was sat next to David Thomas, and he didn't enjoy that so much as I did.

These things are built on years and years and years of experience. It's a real barrier to entry.

I've got three case studies. Last year in November, we bought a very large site, 2,200 units in Worcester.

We took massive advantage of the fact that we completed the day before the government's budget, as Tim talked about, last year, and did very, very well out of it, I have to say. We were about to enter into a JV with a top-five housing association, because the housing associations, they're not just waiting for the grant to come through.

They know the grant's coming. They've got the rent settlement, they've got the convergence.

They are now active, as I'll come onto in two or three slides' time. Housing associations are now talking to us again with vigour about entering into JVs and what opportunities have we got.

This particular housing association, in the next 6 weeks, will enter into a JV on part of this site. Also to enable us to get the return on capital plus 40%, in fact, it's way over 40% on this site, we've also built in some land sales.

These are planned land sales that we will do during the course of this year going into next year. Land sales are a part of the everyday operation, not a firesale to get to a half or full year position.

45% will be partner-funded, and I'm not sure whether we'll use two brands, Bovis and Linden. We might even use a third brand on that.

A great example of what we've done last year, and a great example of one being competitive in the land market. That is a prime site, by the way.

That is a prime, prime, prime housebuilding site. We're the ones who have bought it.

It's not a site that no housebuilder would want. That's prime.

Strategy case number two, innovation. On top of Vistry Works, timber frame and all the rest of it, we've got the Mauer brick cladding system.

This is 3D computer generated, built a lot quicker. Now again, would we be doing that at the present moment in time on a new build house that we're going to sell to Mr and Mrs Smith?

Probably not. That's a bit of a risk for the minute.

We'll work with our housing association. Places for People, this is a site we've got with Places for People, one of, again, top-five housing association, up in Bradford.

"What do you think about this?" "Yeah, we'll work with you, and we're doing it on their site."

It'll be their risk. I don't think there is any risk with regards to selling the units, but the housing associations and Homes England love this kind of stuff.

We're going to roll that out to 10 sites during the course of this year. If the government want to build 300,000 homes a year, guys, this is how things are going to have to be done, because it's just ain't enough tradesmen out there in the industry.

The average age of a bricklayer is 54. We'll do well to replace the number of bricklayers, let alone get more into the game.

Our timber frame apprentice programme is going incredibly well. Standardisation, again, we've now got 50 standard homes, future homes house types, which have been designed specifically with timber frame in mind to reduce that cost time and time again.

That's a great photograph there. Some comedian in the business has put down a bit of career development for me.

I didn't fix all of the panels there. I just fixed that one, and I have to own up immediately I fixed it, it was taken off and put into the skip as a very, very poor job.

Strategy case number three. Partner journey, this was introduced in the summer of 2025.

Would you believe we're the only housebuilder that goes out to our housing associations and asks, "How are we doing?" on a proper, standard format, and the housing associations love it.

We all do it through the HBF, we're a five-star housebuilder on the HBF, and we're also a five-star housebuilder with regards to, and this was done independently, a five-star housebuilding with our housing association, local authority customers. We have a simple framework of 16 steps to ensure the highest level of service.

21 of our 25 businesses are five-star. The other four are four-star.

And 97.5% of our partners responding indicated that they would like to work with Vistry again. Again, long, long-term relationships, we're always trying to improve, and it's bizarre that we're the only people out there that actually canvas and get their opinion on how we're doing.

We do get some comments as well about how we can improve, which we obviously take on board. Current trading and outlook.

Headline here is we have started the year exceptionally well. Tim talked about what we're doing with regards to sales.

We announced the snapshot of our results, I think it was on January the 14th. A week or so later, I'm about to start doing business unit reviews where I sit down with all the individual business unit boards and go through state of the nation on a quarterly basis and what we're looking for.

As you get older, you lose a yard of pace, but I know where the ball's going. I actually, in all of those meetings, and this is from week five onwards, and we're in week 10 now, I didn't ask, I demanded that each business unit go forth and double their sales rate, because I am concerned about what might happen to the private market during the course of this year with regards to housebuilders just not building enough units, and that will start hitting them at some point.

Like to get one step ahead. The business units, I've said to them, "You tell me on your individual prices you're going to double.

You tell me what you need to do to get those sales through." That initiative has gone exceptionally well.

The fact that we're 40% ahead hides the fact that after week four, we were nine units ahead of 2025. That 40% has come from 5 weeks basically over a 10-week period, if I'm making sort of sense.

That is really, really, really worked well. With what's going on in Iran at the moment, which I obviously didn't know was going to happen, we're very, very pleased with what we're doing.

The current order book stands at £4.5 billion, and again, at the end of a programme, that is when you're going to have the lowest order book. At the start of the new programme is when you have the highest.

It's great to see that our order book is 4.5 billion. That is up on 4.4 3 weeks earlier than when we announced our results last year.

And 67% of this year's units are in hand against 65% in 2026, again, 3 weeks earlier. We're in a great place on that.

Reflecting the phasing of sales in early 2026, as I've said, we've introduced this tactical On some sites, there's no discount. We're doing very, very well, but I just wanted to make sure on every site we absolutely get the desired sales rate.

If you look now at our sales rate, overall sales rate, 1.42. Last year, 0.59.

This is private sales and deals we're doing with housing associations and the like. Housing associations have woken up.

They woke up towards the end of last year. They know what's coming.

They love the rent convergence, they love the 10-year rent settlement, and they want to get ahead of the game. The other thing that we're benefiting from in the first 10 weeks, and will continue for the next few weeks, is a lot of housing associations also want to go into the bidding round for the '26-'36 programme with a good record on the '21-'26 programme.

There's a lot of running around at the present moment in time, and we're getting lots of calls from housing associations over the last 4 weeks. Actually, what we thought was going to happen by the end of March, their year-end, and the end of the '21-'26 programme hasn't happened.

Can we do a quick deal with you, Vistry? A lot of that is happening.

Hence we've got a 1.42 sales rate, which we've not seen since announcing the strategy back in 2023 in September. That includes a 40%, as I say, increase in the private sales rate.

We expect to deliver, even with all of the discounting, we expect to deliver an increased profit on 2026. The margin will be lowered because of the sales incentives, as we've said.

The big news is we're now targeting and confident and have bottom-up budgets from the 25 business units, we're targeting in excess of £100 million of cash at the end of the year. Those initiatives that we've put in place are working exceptionally well.

Our priorities then. First one, cash generation, we're absolutely 100% laser-focused on that.

Can I say that since asking the business units to double their sales rate, on average I'm doing five calls a week with a managing director and a sales director of a business unit who hasn't done what I've asked them to do. It's a very, very uncomfortable meeting for the managing director and sales director.

They don't want to do it two or three times. We're absolutely laser-focused, very hands-on on making sure that happens.

We're positioned for growth. We've got 25 business units that are capable of doing with their same geography in excess of 20,000 units.

Vistry Works, with the three factories that we've got, is capable of doing up to 10,000 units, and probably in excess of 5,000 units for roof trusses, and I do know what a roof truss is. Maintaining our operational excellence.

Again, when I joined Bovis, which in 2017, which was a 2-year gig, they'd had some financial issues. What happens normally when you have financial issues is everything else goes Excuse my French, to ratshit.

At the time I joined, their star rating was zero. The NHBC were about to kick them off because their build quality was absolutely hopeless.

Everything followed on. The business last year has maintained all of our KPIs.

We're a very good builder. Customer satisfaction five-star, everything is good.

We're in a great position to actually move this business forward with this wave of affordable housing grant that is coming through. We're on track to get to our margin progression targets of 12% and return on capital of 40%.

In summary then, I would've loved to have come up with this quote, but I have to put this one down to Stephen. "Vistry, a partnerships business aligned to the scale of the opportunity."

You'll all have your own idea of what the opportunity scale is. We would say it's huge, and it's about to come through in the latter half of this year as that programme gets announced and housing associations get busy with spending.

On that, we will take any questions. Go on, Jade.

Whoever you want to go.

Hi. Rebecca Parker from Goldman Sachs.

Just wondering on your guidance for a year-on-year improvement in volumes and revenue. Are you still expecting that 17,000 units that we talked to at the trading update?

Yeah.

Yeah. Then also in terms of the incentive levels that you're offering, can you provide us some quantum on what those are, and also what types of incentives that you're offering in the market?

There's been no real change to the incentives with regards to carpets, turfing, bit of landscaping in a garden. We were doing that anyway.

The incentives that I'm talking about over and above that, which we announced, or which we asked the business units to get into on week four, would be to do pretty much with with pricing. I can't give you a number because, as I say, it is on some sites, it's nothing; on some sites, it's it's more.

What I can tell you is the numbers that we are guiding include for that level of discount, whichever it is, and it's different on each individual business unit as well. That that guidance has come from the individual business units absolutely knowing that they've got to double their sales rate, and they're absolutely have put into their forecast the price they need to do that at.

There isn't a simple I'd love to say it's x%, it's just not as simple as that, I'm afraid.

Yeah. Last one as well.

I think I saw in the presentation that you've become a strategic plus partner as you talked to in the trading update. Can you just remind us of how much increase that allows you to apply for direct funding?

We haven't. I don't know where that's come from.

We're bidding, and we'd like to become a strategic plus partner, but we're not yet. We're hopeful.

From what I understand, a strategic plus partner would get around £700 million. If you go back to what Stephen said, our first bid for the '21-'26 programme was about 85, and we ended up over 250.

If we are successful with being a strategic plus partner, the initial bid would be, Stephen, I've got this right, about £700 million.

They've increased the ability to fund an individual partner to a ceiling of £700 million, £700 million, although in practice more funds become available. Greg's quite right, the bids are in for April.

It would be preemptive to think that we're a strategic plus partner.

We are the top partner on the '21-'26 programme, if that's helpful.

Yeah. Thank you.

I'm just letting Jade put it wherever you want.

Morning, Greg. Three questions from my side, if I may.

First, because you mentioned several times on the Middle East, can I ask if there's going to be a impact, what kind of impact should we be expecting? Is the labour, raw material, or energy price?

All if you take our groundworkers, they are heavily into into into into diesel. There will be, every time there is increases in fuel prices, groundworkers will come a-knocking and look for increases.

Plastic comes directly from it. If this was to continue, and that's an if, none of us none of us actually know, we've got a line within the forecast that we've or the guidance that we've put out there this morning.

We We think there will be an impact, but that impact will have to be seen as we go forward. You could easily, this these sorts of things could be a 5% increase on your build costs.

Now you've already spent some money, you're in fixed-price contracts, but these sorts of things can come through. We will just have to wait and see.

At the moment, we are confident in what we're saying, but we will watch with interest, as I'm sure everyone will, how long this goes on for and what are their pits out there. It'll be I What I can be confident of is, I think we're building cheaper.

I think if there's an increase, we'll still be building cheaper. It might we might be building more than building at a greater cost than we are at the moment.

Got it. Clear.

Right. Maybe I can just add one thing to that.

That's the supply side.

There's also consumer confidence as well.

That's the supply side. Just to be clear, nothing's come up yet.

This is just a recognition that things are changing fast, we need to put something in there and be cautious. On the demand side, we've been encouraged that there's been probably greater customer confidence.

Much of our open market demand comes down to customer confidence. It does feel like that's moving in the right direction.

Of course, it's fragile, and there could be a knock-on impact just on customer confidence whether it's cost of living, people having to pay more for their fuel at the pump, or whether it's potentially mortgage rates or rates not coming down as fast as we expect. We don't know really, but it could be a demand-side as well as a supply-side impact.

All right. Clear.

The flip side to all of that as well, which would be a positive to us, if those sorts of things happened, that means that housebuilders will be building less. We're already in contract.

We would expect to get some benefits from that as well, because a lot of what we're doing is already in contract. We should benefit from that to an extent.

Okay.

Thank you. Second question is on the land sales, because I think Tim just mentioned it will remain to be a core part of sales.

What kind of level should we be expecting this year versus last year? It's going to be higher, lower?

We're not entirely sure whether it's going to be higher or lower. We'd expect it to be three digits again this year, but whether it's as much as 180, we don't know yet.

It'll partly depend on where we are with planning processes and how quickly sites go through planning.

I don't expect the land market to be anything other than soft, and that will come into it as well.

Okay. Last one from is, I think you also mentioned on this inventory reduction effort, you will be working together with the JV.

I wonder, does that mean your JV partners is also happy with the strategy that probably the margin will be lower, but

Yeah. Because we've discussed it with them, and they were a valued partner and we're saying we need to sell quicker than we currently are, and they absolutely get that.

They're on board. We would obviously have to get approval to do that while we're on a JV.

I'm looking around the room, Adam. No, I don't think we've had any pushback from any of our housing association partners.

Hi.

Thanks. Aynsley Lammin from Investec.

Just two from me, please. Maybe just coming back to the question on the kind of average hit to or reduction in prices, average hit to margin, however you want to look at it.

If you look at the full year and your guidance, kind of what's acceptable in terms of the margin hit in terms of your discounting on pricing? What do you expect the margin to be versus that 8.5% as we kind of sit today?

What's acceptable is whatever the answer is. The answer is from the 25 business units is a profit greater than 2025.

We want to sell units, and we want to sell units at pace, and get a step ahead of what I believe how the housebuilders will follow, and you can see that already around about the place if you study the websites. We want to get ahead of the game, and that's what we're doing.

The actual discount level, again, it's how long is a piece of string? In some places, in some businesses, it's very little; in other places, it's more.

Okay. Then I guess because the other housebuilders are talking about kind of improving sales rates.

You yourself seem to also be saying that the private open market's actually been quite good. The motivation for that increase or discounting, is it more kind of balance sheet and cash, or is it because you believe the market's about to fall over and the other housebuilders will be chasing sales?

Not quite clear on that.

It's balance sheet and cash, but I also believe that, on the basis of no Help to Buy coming in during the course of this year, I've been around for a long time. If you're a public housebuilder and you're selling at 0.5, 0.6, that doesn't really work.

Your prelims, stop, start. I think there will be pressure on the housebuilders.

Again, if you look at the housebuilders, their balance sheets, it wasn't that long ago they're all operating, or a lot of them, with £1 billion in the bank. Those days have gone.

Most of them are borrowing money now from banks at various times of the year, maybe not at period ends. At some point, I think they will have to look at things and go, "We're hanging around for Help to Buy.

Is it going to come in? Yes.

No. Maybe it will in due course, but I don't think it's anytime soon."

I think that will drive pressure for them to actually sell units quicker. That's what I'm paid to do.

That's what I think. Rightly or wrongly, that might turn out to be the case.

It's twofold: what's going to happen and balance sheet.

Morning. Emily Biddulph from Barclays.

I've got two, please. Firstly, you talked about margins on newer sites coming through being stronger.

Can we just understand the price assumptions you have built into those margins? Do they assume that the current discounting that you're doing is the ongoing spot price for the duration of projects, or are you assuming that current pricing is a sort of short period of discounting that unwinds to support the margin?

It's the latter. We're assuming we've been very prudent with the prices that we've put in.

We generally start a site at a higher price than what we allowed at the time of the land acquisition, so that's the first thing I would say. Yes, we are assuming that, over a period of time, we will push prices back up, but that will be sometime during the course of this year and certainly not in the next 2 or 3 months.

I think it's also worth pointing out that the incentive impact is more likely to be on more mature sites, sites that are nearing the end rather than sites that we've just started. That tends to be where we've got the slower moving stock that we particularly want to focus on, so that's where the more margin impact will come.

Okay. Just to be clear, the discounting is mostly focused on particular sites with slower moving stock and Therefore, you're sort of Oh, definitely.

Yeah. Where they're selling quickly, there's no concern.

Then

secondly, if the outlook for this year is worse and the market is weaker here, sort of what are the levers that you can pull on cash? Is there more that you can do on WIP?

Because if you're doing that already, can you go lower on WIP? Or is there anything else that can come out?

If affordable funding does start to flow, will the business consume working capital? Does the current debt position constrain growth into a slightly better affordable market?

No, because the affordable housing market is forward-funded. It would affect growth if we were a pure housebuilder, because obviously that's where you put your money.

With housing associations, we would like to think we are paid when we buy the land, and we're paid more than we've actually done during the course of the month, which helps then offset some of the private stuff on the same site where that's an investment. As Stephen just said earlier, we would expect to do well on the '26-'36 Affordable Housing Programme.

I think Stephen's just said, when we buy the site, we would get 40% of the grant up front and then 35% when we actually start on-site. That is cash-helpful.

Okay.

Those sites you talked about where you currently have infrastructure that's sort of tied up where you've had to sort of fund the private infrastructure

During the course of last year, I wanted to bring, Tim's made the point and I'm very happy to say, we wanted to bring WIP down last year, but it didn't dramatically go up, but we certainly didn't bring it down, because the private selling market just was not that good for anybody, including Vistry. Of course, we were hoping to get a much more injection from housing associations, because we thought there was going to be some really good numbers on the '26-'36 programme, but which there has been, but the delay in announcing it and the delay in it coming through has been slightly disappointed.

Yes, they did bring forward £2 billion of the £39 million as a bridge to add to the 26-36 sorry, '21-'26 programme, and we've got some money due, but they're not giving any of that £2 billion out until April. We will get and be able to draw down a decent sum of money in April from stuff we've already spent, because that bridge funding, it's there and it's going to be paid for us.

We've got that acknowledged. We would have liked to have had that during the course of last year.

We'll actually get it April and May onwards.

Thanks, guys.

One more thing. Addressing your point, Emily, about cash levers in the downturn.

Obviously, we can choose how long we go with the discounting side of things. One of the levers that we've got that housebuilders don't have is that we can flip from private selling into more affordable selling, and that's actually cash-advantageous because they give us the cash up front.

There may be a profit impact, but I think, it's more likely we're probably putting more emphasis on the impact being on profit rather than on cash, because we've got those levers on cash that we can pull in either scenario.

The other The other thing I can say to to everyone about being practical about this, when I said I want to increase the sales rate, the actual words I used to the individual business units is, if you go back to 2024 and 2025, week one, we didn't sell as many units on the private side as we wanted to. Not because they're not very good, it's because of the market.

Week two, we didn't sell as many. Week three, we didn't sell as many.

Week, it's a bit too late, we still haven't sold as many. I know what we'll do, let's do a bulk sale.

We'll sell a bulk sale to a PRS provider or to a housing association. What I can assure you is what we're doing at the present moment in time, whatever the discount we're giving away will be a lot less than we would have inevitably got to by doing a bulk sale at some point down the year with all the pressure that comes from that to half and full years.

This is, using experience, let's crack on and deal with it now rather than kidding ourselves, kidding the kicking the can down the road, as other housebuilders are. Be in no doubt, we're getting calls all the time from our partners saying, "Oh, I've just said so-and-so on.

They're doing a Vistry." "What What do you mean?"

"Well, I've never heard from them and they they just want to do a bulk sale. They want to sell their showhomes.

They want to do this." Everyone's at it.

I'm just trying to beat that. Whatever we sell to Mr and Mrs Smith will be advantageous to doing a deal with a long-term partner or a PRS provider.

What happened to the screen? Goblins.

Glynis Johnson, Jefferies. Three if I may.

The first one, just in terms of land, your owned land as a percentage of your landbank has actually gone up slightly, and you've obviously referenced some of these bigger sites. Can you maybe just talk us through, you gave us an example of one of the big sites, when does the return on capital employed start getting to the 40%?

You talked about being very confident of getting above, it's a 10, 15-year site,

when We haven't put a time to it, Glynis, but it'll be, if you're asking me, I would say 29, 30.

Okay. Second one, just in terms of oversight on the incentives.

You talked a lot about wanting to double the sales rate, but what is the oversight on the discount? When does it come across your desk, across Tim's desk?

Does it get tied into margins?

It doesn't come across my desk. We've got three executive chairs, and they will sign off everything.

I guess what I'm looking for is some reassurance that it's not going to impact the site margins, and therefore previously accounted profits.

No, and we've just gone through an audit accordingly.

Okay.

Just to be clear, the site margins would be impacted if the expectation of the overall revenues from that site are going to drop. Now that's all reflected prospectively, and that's how our accounting works.

You don't go back and review what's happened before. You're constantly changing the site margin up or down depending on your expectations of revenues and costs.

This is why there will be a slight reduction in the margin this year, because the absolute revenues on those sites will drop as a result of the discounting.

Have you, for example, taken land sales on those sites previously at a margin which is not going to match the revised view of site margin?

I would suggest on 95%, no. The land sales were predominantly on planned new sites as we bought them.

Then the last one, 50 standard housing types seems like quite a lot, but you have a whole range of brands. Can you maybe just give us a little bit of context about why 50 is the right number, why that works from an efficiency standpoint when you kind of got a Ford Model T need in a factory of just repeatability?

You're right, Glynis. It is more than I would have liked, but you've got different housing associations, we've discussed it with housing associations, they have different requirements amongst themselves.

We've got two brands, Bovis, Linden, and Countryside, which adds to it, and then on top of that, you've also got Future Homes Standards coming through, and you've got different local authorities from a planning perspective interpreting that in different ways. It's 50.

I would very much hope that, and I'm looking over there, I'd like to think that less than 20 will make up 80% of everything we do going forward, so that would be our assumption. But 50 is there.

Will.

Thanks. Will Jones at Rothschild & Co Redburn.

First, just a returning to the flexibility around price and margin. Is this just limited to open market, or are you being flexible

No, limited to open market.

Yeah. Okay.

Partly links to that, but when we think about the difference in gross margin between PRS and of additional affordable, as you shift your mix, how would you frame that to us?

I would say that PRS providers are buying a product that they will eventually, and in not too distant future, sell, and they are very commercial people. A housing association or local authority is buying a product that they will never sell.

I'm pretty happy with being diplomatic, doing more with housing associations than PRS providers, but we'll continue to work with both, obviously.

Thanks. Second, just around cash flow and the moving parts for this year.

Whether you'd call out anything, Tim, to us on that front? I know from the back, I think there's £250 million more land creditor obligations this year than last, so that's obviously one negative start.

Presumably WIP and others,

Not necessarily an active start, because on the land creditors, it's our strategy to defer payments. We will continue to defer payments this year.

We'll pay for last year's land, but we won't pay for this year's land. I think probably the land creditor balance will come down slightly during the year, there will be a slight headwind in terms of cash generation from land creditors, maybe £100 million, something that sort of level.

Then, obviously in cash, we've just sort of broad bridge, we've got the profit coming in, we've got the WIP reduction coming down, and then we've got, against that, we've got the tax, we've got the share buybacks, we've got the fire safety, and we've got that land creditor. Overall, to get to Greg's target of £100 million, that's a £250 million reduction in WIP and land to deliver that.

Thanks. Just to check, as we think about this modest shift in strategy maybe today against the balance sheet, is there any signal here that your comfort levels around the balance sheet and what you want average net debt to be have changed at all, and are you happy that the operational focus and the lack of distributions can get you there?

I think no change. We've said before that we want to bring down average net debt steadily over time.

I think what these actions signal that we're not satisfied that we're making enough progress. The end game is still the same.

We just want to get there quicker, and cognizant that we didn't make as much progress last year as we wanted to. Okay.

Yeah. Chris.

Morning. Chris Millington at Deutsche.

Firstly, just got to ask really about succession planning and kind of what's in tow at the moment, what's the expectation of timetable for both the chair and the CEO role? I'll go one at a time.

Okay. The CEO role, will be definitely here till March next year.

If it goes on a bit longer than that, I would, of course, be flexible on that. The process has started, we've been discussing it for quite some time.

This is not a shock to the board. This has been on the cards for sometime.

That process is well on, started, and moving in the right direction, and we're very confident we'll be able to do it in those timescales. I've said I like to do things orderly.

A chairman should stand down at an AGM. The AGM is in May.

The next AGM then will obviously be March May 2027, which by then I will be a special advisor as opposed to being on board full time. That's the expectation.

On the chairman succession, we have a number of options, and we just wanted to give ourselves another week or two to get that right. Again, it's all in hand.

Nothing to see here.

Got you. Very clear.

Next one's just about affordable housing funding. It's kind of slipped like a lot of things with this government.

Do you think there's much of a danger it doesn't land in Q3? What could happen to kind of slow the progress there?

The bidding opened at the end of February, and there are two routes that people can bid for funding. You can bid to be a strategic partner and a strategic partner plus, a second category that's just been introduced this year.

The outcome of that, there'll be a process of discussion, all bids having to be in by the second week of April. This is where you're going for this sort of £700 million to would be the maximum anybody would be awarded.

That will then prompt some discussions with those bidders, and I would expect in July June and July, we'll get some sighting, and there'll be an announcement in late summer. We move forward with confidence, I think it's fair to say.

The second aspect of looking for funds is you're not a strategic partner, you go for individual what's called continuous market engagement grant awards. That's essentially you can knock on the door and say, "I'd like you to fund this scheme, please."

That process takes 6 to 8 weeks. Homes England have already received bids under continuous market engagement at the end of April, you can work out the chronology of that.

At the end of February, people will be getting funds during March and April under that continuous market engagement route, and looking to commit them. My view is it will all wash through over the next 4 or 5 months, and everybody will be able to share the visibility of what they've been awarded and that will start to be implemented.

The interesting thing for me is, and my point with the slide of inflection, we are past the point of that dampening progress. Yeah?

Whilst the visibility of what everybody is going to be awarded as funds is not yet there, housing associations have reworked their business plans, introducing the assumptions following the government's policy decisions. They're already now out there looking to trade, looking to commission.

That process is underway.

That's helpful. Thanks, Stephen.

I suppose it relates to previous questions, and I may get a similar answer, but what's the right capital employed, and kind of what do you think the right WIP balance is? Last year, you were talking about a 200 release.

It went up a bit. Where do you think you could get to there?

Over time, our direction is to get to 40% ROCE, and so really to get to that in the time period that we're talking about, the next 5 years or so, we need to get capital employed down sub-2 billion, right? How are we going to get there?

We're going to keep acquiring new sites with that 40% being a minimum hurdle rate for new acquisitions, and others will work their way out. We'll start to leverage some of these economies of scale as the volume builds up.

That's the sort of level. The areas we've got to try and take it out of is WIP, land, and joint venture investment.

Great.

Clyde.

Thanks.

Clyde Lewis at Peel Hunt. I think I've got three, if I may.

Stephen, you put up or I think maybe Greg did, the sort of mix for affordable homes. Obviously, your share went up with PRS going down.

What happened within local authorities within that partners, as opposed to housing associations? Are you working now with more local authorities, and is that starting to ramp up as a share of the total?

Do you want that part? Yeah.

Local authorities, we are engaging with more. We are doing more work.

We have sustained a pretty good platform over the years, particularly our footprint in London has been nearly all with local authorities, a hugely beneficial long-term relationships for delivery with local authorities in London. Outside of London, we're working with local authorities in Cornwall, we're working with local authorities in Manchester, we're working with local authorities in Gateshead.

The geographic distribution is good. Those local authorities, of course, benefit from the policy changes the government has made.

Rent convergence, 10-year rent settlement, ability to bid for grant, those are all benefits that local authorities will have within their business plans for their own stock and their own commissioning. I do expect local authorities to play an increasing role going forward because they've got the additional capacity within their business plans to do that.

Okay. Thank you.

Greg, the 40% uplift that you're talking about for sort of year-on-year for the sales rate, how is that built? Is that still very much got more momentum in it?

Is that 40% going to continue to increase, or do you think that's Sales? Yeah.

No,

I think 40% is about what we are looking for, there or thereabouts. It was 35% 2 weeks ago, it's building momentum because obviously marketing and everything takes a little bit of time, but 40% will be about the level that I'm happy with and the level I would expect to go forward.

It doesn't need to get to 50 or 45. 40 is absolutely fine.

We're selling at, and we don't give private sales rates, and we're not. We've said it's up, but we're selling at sales rates I've not seen in the 9 years I've been at Bovis Vistry.

Okay. Are you expecting to see a competitive response that might dull that 40%?

I'm expecting to see it, and we've allowed for that. Because if we're Vistry East Anglia, and we're doing what we're doing, that might affect a few sites in East Anglia, but we are Vistry and we're everywhere.

Yes, I would expect to see some increases in competition.

Okay.

There's no different than GT back in 2008-9. We're selling aggressively, others weren't.

In the end, they do.

Adrian

Kirby, Panmure Liberum. A few from me.

In terms of the £39 billion, the Affordable Homes Grant, we're getting clarity for September. What proportion of that £39 billion will it be allocated?

Will there be presumably a proportion sort of left floating for later allocation?

Continuous engagement, yeah.

Yeah. We don't know, put simply.

That's a conversation that Homes England will be having with the Treasury in terms of the rate at which that is deployed. Certainly, they will be making allocations across the 10-year programme.

Yeah? How that's then structured and how that's pulled down and how that's annualised is a conversation that each of the bidders will have with Homes England, and then Homes England have a corresponding conversation with Treasury.

We are not aware of that yet. We do know that the weighting in the bids, there are several things weighted: are you using MMC, are you able to deliver quickly, are you supported by local authorities, there's a range of things that contribute to non-financial appraisal of your bid.

One of them is the ability to deliver within the lifetime of this parliament, i.e., over the first 3 years of the programme. That is given a positive weighting.

With Vistry, with our landbank, with our relationship with RPs, with our frameworks and that forward visibility, as you'd expect, we will score highly on that. I would expect a significant amount of what we bid for and receive will be deployed within 3 years.

To link to that ability to deliver, when you look in terms of the number of your average sites that you're going to be building on this year, next, can you perhaps sort of give some guidance in terms of the number of individual sites? I'm thinking of triangulating it back to that 1.42 unit sales rate that you currently

got. In terms of outlets, we're about 180 outlets at the moment.

So

Yeah. In

terms of build units, we're about 300.

300, yeah. Over 300, yeah.

Okay.

It's build units significantly above sales outlets, obviously, because we are building after we've finished selling, and building before we've started selling, and there're also sites where we don't sell because they're fully partner-funded.

Okay.

I have two follow-ups for me.

Sorry, I can't hear that.

Sorry. Ami Galla from Citi, a few follow-ups from me.

The first one was on the discounts. Can you give us some color regionally if that is concentrated in few locations, or is it across most of the sites across the country?

It's concentrated, I would suggest, in a few places.

Can you talk regionally about where should we look at in terms of the sort of reach points?

London, Southeast would be the biggest areas.

That's helpful. The second one was on the landbank margin.

Can you comment a bit about where does the current landbank gross margins sit, and how has that shifted over the last year?

Tim, you got that?

The landbank margin is slightly above the overall group margin, still lower than we would like it to be, because we've still got the impact of some of the legacy sites working its way through. It's sort of mid-teens.

Maybe just a technical one on the forward sales position. Assuming that step-up that you've seen from December is largely driven by the open market sales,

No. No, it's not.

It's helped by open market sales, but it's also housing association entering into the market again for two reasons. One, three reasons, actually.

Rent convergence, rent settlements is reason one. Reason two is housing associations can see and they're talking to Homes England, the GLA, and they know what kind of money they're going to be getting, and the government are putting a huge pressure on them to actually start building.

Three, shortfalls in their programmes. They've actually now gone, and March is their year-end, that happens every year, obviously.

This isn't not only a year-end, it's the end of the '21-'26 programme, and Homes England have been specific saying the people that will do the best in the '26-'36 programme are those that deliver well in the '21-'26 programme. A number of housing associations out there are a little bit short, and that's caused a huge amount of activity for us over the last 6 or 7 weeks.

Three areas, but it's not just private.

Maybe in terms of the technicality, is that largely tiered for 2026, or is there a tail into 2027?

No, that's mainly targeted for '26, yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah. I'm getting told to do that by Kate, unless it's just me.

No. Okay.

Thank you very much. Have a good day, and thanks for coming.

Cheers.