Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the full year results for the 12 months ended 31st May 2026 for Springfield Properties plc.

My name is Innes Smith, Chief Executive, and this is Iain Logan, Chief Financial Officer. Okay.

Next slide. Two years ago, we had almost £100 million of debt, and we set a very clear strategy that we wanted to clear that debt.

We engaged in a selling of land, a tightening on the purse strings, and we're delighted today that we've got money in the bank at the end of the year. A marvelous achievement over the last two years to get us there.

Whilst we have done that, we've also managed to increase our private sales and increase our housing revenue on the year, and we've managed to hit all our analyst projections and forecasts for this year. We're delighted with the results.

In addition to clearing the debt, post year-end, we've also paid off McTaggart & Mickel, £20 million of deferred consideration now done, we've got considerably stronger balance sheet now. Our strategy also involves building some 300 houses for one of the infrastructure network providers, and that's some 300 homes which will house workers working on infrastructure projects, basically to upgrade the electricity network.

We will then, over four years, rent those houses out, and at the end of them, as we'll explain later, we will have a fantastic asset. We're uniquely placed to deliver this in the north of Scotland because we've got an excellent land holding that we've built up over many, many years, and we've got a local plan coming through over the next two years as well, which will also add to that.

Really good position. We have the logistics, we have the workforce, we have the know-how, we have the experience in that area, and we're very well placed to take advantage of that.

All of this gives us confidence to increase the dividend to 3p, up 50% from 2025. Post year-end, we announced a share buyback program as an effective means to create value for our shareholders.

Iain.

Morning, everyone. Again, delighted to be reporting another year of strong financial performance.

As Innes mentioned, the highlight: ending the year with positive cash compared to the external forecasts, which had £10 million of bank debt. Really pleased with that.

If we look at the first slide on private housing, really positive, given the current macro environment, that private revenue has increased from £156 million to £165 million—

The previous slide, Rachel. Thank you.

We've also seen an increase in average selling price. That's a result of housing mix and underlying pricing.

A very positive year for private housing. Affordable housing continues to be a really positive story for the group, with increased revenue, increased completions, increased average selling price, and again, robust gross margin.

We continue to sign contracts based on shorter time periods that gives us much more certainty over the costs. Given we've still got a housing emergency in Scotland, we see real opportunity in this sector going forward.

Just to finish with land sales, the prior year benefited from a significant one-off land sale that Innes talked about, but worth noting also the land sales in the current year, again, were at 1.2 times the book value, demonstrating the significant value of our landbank and the strength of our landbank. To the next slide?

You can see that revenue was £244 million versus £280 million. The £280 million, as we said, benefited from the one-off land sales.

Again, that evidences how strong the performance has been from private and affordable. Gross margin: 16.4% versus the prior year 18.6%.

However, if you remove the land sales in both years, the margin would have been 15.8% in 2026 versus 14.6% in 2025. Administrative expenses have reduced by 8%, from £27.6 million to £25.4 million, again a measure of our ongoing cost control and efficiency savings.

Profit before tax and exceptional items, which is one of our key metrics, was £13 million versus £20 million in the prior year. Again, if you remove the one-off land sales last year, the profit this year would have been ahead.

As highlighted at the start, we're really, really chuffed to have ended with positive cash in the bank at 31 May '26 versus a prior year when we had £21 million of debt. Again, to finish the slide, really pleased to have increased the dividend again from 2p to 3p.

Next slide. This is the usual slide that maps us going from a bank debt position of £21 million at May '25 to the positive cash at May '26.

As Innes said, we put a strategy in place a couple of years ago, and it's really pleasing to see that that's been delivered successfully. The main movements over the 12 months: we've got £20 million of cash coming in from land sales alongside £18 million of operating profit.

In terms of outflows, we've invested £11 million in new land purchases, and we've also spent £8 million on tax and bank interest. Again, worth highlighting that we had a year where we've finished with cash ahead of the external projections in the market.

To the next slide? The key thing here is that we continue to grow our net assets.

Our net assets at May '26 were £179 million. The fact that we've ended our year with cash has allowed us, as planned, to reduce our bank facilities from £80 million to £50 million.

As Innes mentioned, we had a final deferred consideration payment to make to McTaggart & Mickel that was sitting on the balance sheet at May '26 at £21 million. Repaying that again strengthens our balance sheet as we move forward.

Next slide. This is another really key positive metric.

You see that the significant growth in net asset value from £57 million on listing to today's £179 million. In that period, we've paid dividends of £26 million, and we've got a compound share growth rate of 16%.

Really really pleasing set of results this year. Just

as in other years, we've got very strong landbank, some 7,000 plots owned and contracted, and we also have about 6-7,000 coming through the latest local plans that are being approved over the next two to three years. The strengthening of the balance sheet, I guess one thing to touch on, has enabled us to complete the land sale program.

Where we were probably looking at winding down a bit in Central Belt and only having two or three sites, we actually have some sites that we are now going to develop ourselves as opposed to sell. The reason we're doing that is because it makes more efficient use of the overheads, we make more profit from the sites, we've got the cash to do this, and it also retains staff, which can also help us out with some of the projects in the north.

There is going to be a shortage of labor in the north with all of the work that's going on there, retaining architects and engineers, etc., is a very good thing. Moving on?

Capitalizing on the opportunities in the north: today we expect to sign the first main works agreement. It's been a long time coming.

We obviously had the initial work signed for the 300 houses. That's allowed us to put a lot of the infrastructure, a lot of the groundworks, and get started on the six or seven sites.

Now we'll have a main works agreement signed today, which means the houses which are now ready in one of our sites, some 39 houses, they've already got furniture in them, they're all kitted out, they're ready to move in, and that will be signed imminently. Obviously, we'll make a further announcement when that gets signed, so that'll be some further good news.

The actual project that we're looking at, if we can look at the next slide: so what we basically do is we basically identified six sites which were not in our current program, we had planning, we owned the sites, and we then basically signed a contract. We get an initial works agreement where we'll get 5% of the gross development value upfront and it pays for all the infrastructure and stuff to get started.

We will then sign a main works contract once we hand over the houses, and at that point, we pretty much get the construction costs all paid for. Over the next four years, we get a rental for 48 months, and that covers our service costs, and obviously we'll make a profit on that throughout those years.

Then at the end of the period, two things happen: half of the houses go back to the council for guaranteed, I think it's about £120,000 a house. Now obviously, the costs that have came upfront cover the discount that we have to offer there.

Then we have half of the homes left that we can sell, rent on, do with as we please. They're largely paid for, there'll be a huge cash generation at that point if we decide to sell.

There is also, I should say, an option for the providers to extend the lease by 18 months, which we would obviously be more than happy to do because it continues the profits for a further 18 months. The access projects, for those that don't know, the opportunities, if we go back to the previous slide, number 12: the opportunity is, as you can see, the UK currently uses some 50 GW of power at its peak, and that's estimated to go up to 100 GW over the next 10 years, we need more power.

Scotland has excellent wind because of the consistency, because of the depth of the ocean, and that wind basically needs to get shipped all across the UK. Some 97% of Scotland's energy currently comes from renewable, and it's 50% in England.

If you think England market is probably going to be 10 times the size of Scotland, then there's obviously huge requirement for more energy. The more energy is required because we have electric cars, because we have air source heat pumps, because of data centers.

All various things mean we need more power, and we need to be able to transmit that power. Because it is happening in the north, then all of the pylons need to be kind of upsized, the substations need to be upgraded, it's significant amounts of work.

SSEN alone are spending £20 billion on upgrading the network. Then you throw in hydro schemes and various other projects and offshore wind, and also the freeports—don't forget the freeports, there's four freeports there with significant investment going in there.

A lot of jobs being created, we've seen a very strong market in the private side, and obviously this will be a kind of anti-cyclical area of economic growth for the next foreseeable future. Moving forward to the next slide, and the next one, yeah.

Private housing: we offer timber kit houses, air source heat pumps, very energy-efficient houses. Customers get to choose their paint colors, they get to choose their kitchens, all of the things that separate us from our competition.

We do have a higher average sales price, as we'll see further on, than the Scotland average, it's higher-spec houses, slightly larger houses, some 1,200 foot for a four-bed, which is slightly larger than some of the competition. We're pleased to announce that we increased the revenue this year, and we've seen a strong market in the north.

It has been flat rest of Scotland, just in line with the other housebuilders, but because we've got the strength in the north, then that's obviously given us good results. Customer satisfaction, we're delighted to see that go up to 97%.

That's gone from 93% four years ago up to 97% now, very pleased to see that our hard work is ending up with an excellent product. Moving on to affordable housing: again, this has been a core part of our business for many years.

Slightly different model in Scotland than England. Scottish Government committed to building 110,000 houses over 10 years.

Are about halfway through that, and we're behind on the houses at the moment, but the government have announced, which was just recently voted in this year, £4.9 billion over four years to increase the housing delivery, and a record level of annual investment of almost a billion pounds this year. Strong fundamentals, next slide.

Strong fundamentals in the Scottish housing market: bottom right there, you can see the earnings to house price, and you can see Scotland on the far right. There's a lot more affordability in Scotland, round about 4, 4 to 5 times, whereas in England, it's between 5, 6, 7.

Obviously, there is some direction that the house price could go. Average price down the bottom left there, as I said, we're £348,000 against an average of £196,000.

The annual growth in Scotland has been 4.4%, house price inflation slightly higher than England, which is kind of covering the cost price inflation we're seeing, which has not been anywhere near as bad as we kind of expected with all the stuff that's going on with the war, etc. We've been covering that.

The north of Scotland dynamic, I've mentioned some 10.5 million beds are going to be required through to 2040, so that means more beds, effectively means more houses are required. The other thing, this is the final one, is we saw the government reduce the rent cap or remove the rent cap, which was a spectacular failure, to be quite honest, largely predicted by all.

We have been speaking to the likes of Octopus, Phoenix, Standard Life, all of these Legal & General, all these guys are coming back and looking at things, and we have been speaking to one of them about potential 80-house project in the north of Scotland. That looks quite exciting that we get back into the build-to-rent market.

Commitment to environment, for people: it's really important to us, especially with the north, that we continue with our apprentice programs. To the right there, you can see young Dean Murdoch, he won the apprentice surveyor in Scotland, fantastic achievement.

We've got lots and lots of good apprentices, and Dean's just Dean's one of many who probably could have won that award. It's important to invest in your people, it's important to have motivated staff, and it's important that we retain them.

We're slightly different from other housebuilders: we have plumbers, we have scaffolders, brickies, joiners, all of these guys are on the books. We stay away from the pure subbie model in the north because retaining staff is easier if you employ them as opposed to subbies when you can come and go.

Regarding the environment, I've mentioned it's really important for us that we build efficient houses, that we build good communities, because it all adds to the sales. I actually see these things as helping our sales: building an efficient house, building a good community, making sure you get on with your local community.

All of these things are very positive things for our sales. In conclusion, we have executed our strategy.

We are obviously taking advantage of all of the opportunities we can in the north of Scotland. We've strengthened our balance sheet.

We've grown the housebuilding both in the private and affordable, and we're looking at PRS. Our landbank is still of high quality, and we're looking at improving that over the next two to three years as the latest local plan goes through.

All of this is delivering shareholder value, we're able to increase the dividend and we're able to commence a share buyback program because we believe the shares are currently undervalued. I'd like to thank you, and I'd like to open up for questions now.

Two, three years ago, we we kind of decided that what was important for Springfield to do was to be a profitable company. Whilst we do have a strategy and we've said we've stopped selling land, obviously if someone comes up with a silly offer for a bit of land, then we'll consider it, and if it represents good value, then we well do it.

We'll concentrate We've got a number, certainly on the land-buying side, which is important. We're going through local plans.

All of Scotland is pretty much going through local plan approval over the next two to three years, and we've got significant land holdings that will represent in the north of Scotland. Our focus is on them.

We're also there's two sites which we're working with Highland Council on which are called masterplan consent area sites, and these are sites that fall outwith the local plan but can be promoted by the council. We we see it as very important that we continue to grow our landbank.

Just this week, we've actually bought two pieces of land. Sandy's been busy while So Sandy unfortunately not down in London.

He's he's stayed this week and he's bought two pieces of land while I've been away. We are very much wanting to use our cash to to continue to grow the company and to continue to to give us opportunities going forward.

I think Sandy touches on it in the annual report. We're fortunate we've got a good landbank with a lot of it with planning, but planning is absolutely hopeless.

The governments keep introducing new regulations and new rules, and it makes it really difficult. On one side, that creates a lot of value in our landbank, but on the other side, it makes it difficult getting stuff through.

That's why our relationships with landholders in the north and our long-term deals and our identifying of good sites and our knowledge of the area is going to prove very important over the next two to three years. It is extremely difficult to get planning.

We have a housing emergency in Scotland since 2024, and there's going to be a housing task agency, I forget what the title is, but it's going to be set up middle of next year. In that time, we've had two prime ministers, and that's them setting up a committee to look at housing.

I think we need to focus on what we're good at and get on with it and do it in spite of government, not with the help of government, is my own opinion.

The transient workforce is already there. All the project managers from Balfour Beatty, from BAM Nuttall, Murphy's for SSEN, a lot of the kind of infrastructure, the planning, and those guys are up there.

If you look for hotels, hotel rooms are up at £400 a night through the summer when you're looking for, which is really expensive for like a Holiday Inn or one of those kind of hotels, and that's extremely expensive. There's no properties for rent because there aren't enough beds.

The local government's looking at doing short-term let regulations. That's just shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic, to speak.

It's not creating more beds, it's just shuffling the beds you've got. There's a huge shortage.

Now the SSEN predict 5,000 transient workers will be going up. Freeport is predicting some 10-12,000 workers over the next 5 to 10 years, and those freeports are Ardersier, Nairn, Cromarty, and Inverness.

I've mentioned it before, the significant amount of investment. Sumitomo are just opening up a factory, a cable factory, over the next year, £350 million worth of investment.

Lots of jobs being created. We were unfortunate that the Labour government decided that the £1.5 billion Mingyang investment was a security risk.

I'm not sure what security risk a wind turbine is, all the electronics were going to be made in the UK, this seems to be a very strange decision, and John Swinney's questioning that decision, as are many people, saying why was that made? Now maybe with Keir Starmer, who knows, maybe we get a different decision, but they have signed a memorandum of understanding with another Chinese organization, we are hopeful to see some activity and increasing activity at Ardersier soon.

All of that creates jobs, and all of that creates economic growth. Now that's going to put demands on the workforce, but what it does is push wages up, which eventually ends up with house prices going up.

There is a lot of activity. The planning permissions for the substations and the pylons, as usual, everything's getting held up, everything's getting delayed.

That's not necessarily a bad thing for us because it gives us plenty of time then to build the houses and make sure that it's not everything at once. A bit of controlled delays maybe not a bad thing.

You came up to see us recently and you've seen the level of investment. You just need to look at the amount of these vans that are driving around with Balfour Beatty and BAM Nuttall on it, and our car park in Elgin's half full of these vans.

They are here, and there is a lot of economic activity going on.

Iain, do you want to?

I think it's performing really well. If we look at the post year-end house sales, that region is definitely seeing an impact from what Innes talked about.

There's no doubt that we're seeing better sales rates, and yeah, I think that there's an inevitability that the prices will start to increase. We talked about the affordability in Scotland and the metrics around that, it definitely helps.

I think in the rest of the sort of our sites in Central Scotland, they're steady. We've still got lots of very good sites, and yeah, we're certainly seeing good activity.

We just have to keep working hard, but the north of Scotland is definitely benefiting at the moment from what's going on.

Oh, it's undoubtedly we need additional investment to open up sites, we're going to need to continue training people. One of the advantages we have, and we've got two or three people I can think of immediately in the Central Belt that are now working for the north of Scotland, and so that's actually given us a resource.

You don't necessarily need to be located in the north of Scotland. Things like engineering and architects and planning can be done remotely, so that is something that gives us a bit of extra capacity.

There's going to be pressure on labor without a shadow of a doubt. When a gold rush happens, then people become really important.

Yes, I can see a lot of influx of not just on the people working on the infrastructure, but also looking at working for us and looking at working in even other areas. As people move up here, we're going to need more teachers, we're going to need more post people, more Tesco workers, etc., etc.

There really is a lot of people are going to be required, and I've no doubt that'll become a pressure point. That's where us employing our own joiners, plumbers, electricians, the scaffolders is really important.

We will have a factor company that will look after the cleaning and replacement of things, and there's an emergency line that the tenants will be able to phone to resolve things. When it comes to the ground maintenance, equally that will be subcontracted out, we're not looking at doing all of that ourselves.

That will be farmed out. We are also looking, just in addition to that, we're going to look at building some 40 houses per year, flats speculative, and we think they'll be snapped up by our existing people, but if not, then it's there for other organizations and businesses to do commercial rents from us on that.

If there isn't an interest, then we'll just sell them. There's no real risk for that, and we see that as a potential for increasing this.

Because what the rental properties do is give us an annuity going forward, that we have a constant income and constant profits, and we see that as a very sensible business model, albeit slightly different to the other housebuilders. Although Berkeley are looking at doing a similar thing, some are going in this direction, but yes, it means where you can't do the cutters just with the rest of the volume housebuilders.

To us, it's more about having a really good balance sheet and having good profits, and that's what's most important, and I'm sure there's investors out there who will like that.

The only housebuilder that most of the people on here would recognize is probably Barratt's. Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Cala, Bellway, none of those guys go north of Perth, to be honest.

We've kind of got a run of it there. There are some local housebuilders that we compete with, and there's plenty for everyone, but we've certainly got our fair share of it, and long may that continue.

We've been speaking to two companies that are doing the hydro schemes, where we're putting an agreement with some of the factories that are getting put up. There will be opportunities, and I mentioned the PRS, they're specifically building those 80 for this reason, that they see there's going to be a market that's going to be individual renters.

Now we don't want to go down the individual renters route, we want to go the commercial route. It's safer, it gives us more guaranteed occupancy, and just a little less hassle and a little less work required.

I think all of those aspects are important, Rachel. If we start with the existing business, over the next two or three years, we're starting a number of new sites in the north of Scotland, we're starting new sites in Central Scotland.

As Innes talked about, we've got strategic land that is going through the local plan in the north, and we're going to be acquiring a lot of that land over the next three years. We've got significant investment levels and external forecasts for land purchases.

That's what will fuel our business going forward. That's what will drive the increase in our profits over the coming two or three years that are out there in the market.

Absolutely, we see the importance of returns to shareholders, again, we've increased the dividend last year, we've increased the dividend this year. If you look at the external market forecasts again, we see increases in the dividend return to shareholders over the next three years.

We've introduced the buyback program. We're really looking to do all these things.

We want to fund the long-term growth of the business through acquiring the high-quality land that we see in the north. We want to continue increasing the dividend, we see that as really important, and we'll execute on the buyback program.

Acquisitions, again, we're a group that is very nimble. We'll, if we see an opportunity that we think we can make work, we would go for it.

As I say, there's not that many opportunities out there in Scotland at the moment, but again, we'll look at anything that we think can add to the return that we can make for the business and for shareholders. We've got clear plan over the next three years, and it's about just delivering on that plan as we have done in recent years.

I think the beauty of the build-and-lease model is that we do, on the handover of the homes, get this significant payment to cover our construction costs. That's great for us because it means that we have a period to fund the working capital, 6 to 9 months, but as soon as we handover those homes, we get a lot of that money reimbursed.

If you look at our forecast over the next two or three years from the equity development note, there is a bit of debt over the next two or three years, but that's for good reason. That's because we are increasing the profits, we're increasing the assets on the balance sheet.

That's a positive. The other thing, the beauty of the built-to-lease model is these are properties that we own and will be on our balance sheet for this four or five years, and come the end of that lease term, there's a significant amount of cash we can cash in on from sales of the homes to the councils, that Innes talked about, and the remaining homes selling on the private market.

Whilst we're going through a period over the next two or three years of investing heavily, we've got this big asset in our balance sheet to cash in for the future.

Again, if you look at the note that Equity Development put out, again we see an increase in the margin in the coming year for '27. Part of that is driven by the introduction of the rental model, and again if you look out the next couple of years, that's helping increase the profits.

We've had a really good year on private and affordable in terms of the sites we've had and the margins we've been able to generate, and yeah, we see that continuing over the coming years. We've got some great sites coming through in the north and in the Central Belt, and as I say, the SSEN model further helps increase our margin over coming years.

Absolutely. If you trail back to 2020, 2021, we'd sign some long-term contracts for two or three years for 120 homes.

We've dialed away from that over recent years, and we've successfully returned our margins to 14, 15%. A function of that has been instead of signing a contract for 120 homes, we'll sign one for 40 homes, then another 40, and another 40.

What that does is it allows us to get much more certainty over our costs. If we've got a 12 to 18-month delivery program for affordable, we can get a lot of those costs with subcontractors and materials largely fixed.

That's been another learning for us and something that we'll take forward, and it's something that we continue to apply to contracts today, very much on a shorter-term basis so that we've got much more certainty around our margin.

no. The opportunity in the north is still the opportunity in the north.

What we have in Central is we've a number of sites that we still own and we're going to be working those out as opposed to selling them, and that'll keep us going for certainly three to four, five years maybe. What we're saying is that if opportunities come up in Central, we can look at those and consider those because we're in a position we've got cash in the bank now and we've got a workforce there and we've got an overhead that's making a good return, maybe it's a £50 million business.

Absolutely not the former. Nothing to do with the north, it's just there's an opportunity in Central and we can take advantage of it.

My experience is, and I'm from Moray where we have two RAF bases and my dad was in the RAF there, is when people come up to the north of Scotland, they tend to settle and they'll buy a three, four-bed house, and then the relocation down south, you're paying 50% more, 75% more for the same house, people tend to stay there. Now, how long are we going to be upgrading the infrastructure?

There's a 5, 10, 15, 20-year program. There's a decommissioning that's still got to happen, which the freeports could also be involved in.

I think you're looking at economic growth of certainly the infrastructure a 10-year program. The original ASTI project we're looking at is a 5-year program, but we're aware that there's going to be an ASTI 2 and there's going to be an ASTI 3, ESTI that is.

I tend not to look too much further than 10 years out, nothing to do with being 56, but if I can get 10 years of very good growth, then that's pretty much a good thing for me.

I think it's slightly different our model to a normal sort of rental model because of the fact that we're giving the homes to the councils at the end. That means, as Innes outlined at the start, the rental's going to be higher to compensate for that discount.

Our model is slightly different compared to a normal model. It shouldn't be considered rents, it's more like serviced apartments, and it's more like when the energy providers are comparing our costs to other things, they're comparing it to hotels, they're comparing it to workers camp.

A workers camp is something like £200 a man a night, a hotel, I said the figures it could be. They're getting value for money compared to that.

It's not just a rental of flats and the rents don't go up and down over four years. It's set at the start and is maybe inflation-linked, but we know with a lot of certainty what the rentals are going to be for the four-year period, and hopefully 18 months on.

The government took away the rent cap. The rent freeze was spectacularly unsuccessful because people just stopped investing in properties.

If you can't get an increase in your return, nobody's going to build properties for rentals, so that's exactly what happened. The government has now put through a new bill and the rent cap's been removed.

I think it's a rent cap area and it's capped to 6% or CPI plus 1%, but there's various vetoes, or I forget the right word, but if you're a PRS provider of significance, then there's certain rules that don't apply to you. They've made it very much easier for them to invest, they are looking at investing again.

The fact that one of them's looking at the north and can see the opportunities with all of the work coming is a good thing. Again, because we've got the land and we've got some big long-term sites, then we can actually do something for them, and we're not really affecting either of our markets, so that could be a very good thing.

I'd just like to thank everyone that has watched this and does invest in us. We really do appreciate it, and hopefully this has given you a good picture of what we're about.

Thank you.

Thanks very much.