Great. Thank you very much, and welcome, everybody.

Good afternoon. Ben and I are going to be doing the presentation today.

The items we're going to cover are highlights of 2025, financial review that Ben will take, strategy moving forward, the outlook for the market this year, and then at the end, give you the opportunity to ask any questions you'd like to ask. Highlights, I guess, 2025 yet again a record year in a number of different parts of the business.

For those of you that don't know us, we are the UK's largest multi-brand property franchise business. We operate from 15 distinct brands, which is a 1,900 network of offices, both franchisees and licensees.

We have a large mortgage business with 350 financial advisors working within it, who last year had a record year and delivered 25,000 mortgage applications. We operate our Fine & Country brand both in the UK and in 19 distinct international territories.

Last year, we opened in Dubai, Uruguay, Dublin, Barbados, Sydney. That's a growing part of the business.

I guess if I take you back to 2024, 2024 was very much a transformational year for us. We bought our biggest competitor, Belvoir, who were a very similar business to TPFG, and then two months later, we bought The Guild of Property Professionals and the Fine & Country brands, and really have now created a business of scale.

Since 2013, we've done seven acquisitions and integrated those really successfully, and we'll show you the numbers from sort of 2014 a little bit later in the presentation that really demonstrates the sort of growth curve we've been on over the last few years. Big part of the business is recurring revenue.

We are predominantly a lettings business. 65%, 70% of our turnover comes from lettings, and 51% of that revenue is recurring, so that underpins the real quality in the business.

We're very capital-light and generate really good levels of cash generation, £22.1 million of free cash generation in 2025, and that equated to 116% of earnings, which we were delighted about. Then, a really strong dividend this year, moving it forward again to 22p, that was 22% uplift on 2024, and equates to, at current share prices, about a 5.5% yield, which, again, we're delighted to be able to announce.

One of the first things we did when we pushed all the businesses together and acquired the businesses in 2024 is we realized we needed to be clear about the three divisions that were in the business, and franchising is and will always be our biggest business, and Ben will take you through the numbers in terms of how that works across the group. As I touched on earlier, a really big financial services business that came with the Belvoir acquisition, and Michelle Brook runs that business, has built that business from one consultant many years ago to now the powerhouse that it is, and we're one of Mortgage Advice Bureau's largest introducers.

Then our new division, licensing, which is similar to franchising, but subtly different, we wanted to report differently on that, and that's our third division. Then I guess as the year has gone on, 2025, what we started to develop is this sort of platform model.

It's very much about providing services into the enlarged network, and this really demonstrates what scale brings to the party, I guess. Being able to do the research and development on behalf of our members to make sure that we picked the right products, the relevant products, the things that are going to assist our franchisees and licensees in growing their turnover over the future, and negotiate really good deals for our members to be able to implement a range of services.

We'll touch on some of those later in the presentation, Privilege being one of the big ones. Going forward, we've got tech services, we've got marketing, all of which will grow over the next 18 months and form part of that sort of growth strategy moving forward.

Touching on the highlights, the operational highlights from 2025, our managed portfolio now stands at 149,000 properties, slightly back on last year, but actually we're really happy with that, there's been talk in the press about an exodus of landlords, and for sure, some have left the space, but to only drop by 3% or 4% in the year, we were delighted with that. We are still the largest manager of properties in the UK, looking after 149,000.

I think Connells look after about 120, and then you've got LSL/Leaders Romans Group about 80, and then LSL about 40. Significantly bigger than most in the property management space.

Then we had a really good year in sales last year. We completed on 35,000 transactions.

That was a record year for us, and there's still more growth potential in that area as we bring more and more franchisees to the party and get them to become better at selling houses. We launched our first sort of platform service, which was Privilege, and we'll talk about Privilege a little bit later, but that was a set of specific lettings products to take into consideration the Renters' Rights Act and try and protect our landlords and our franchisees in the event of tenant arrears increasing.

Touched on financial services division, record year, 25,000 mortgage applications, largest contributor to the Mortgage Advice Bureau network, and you'll notice in January, we also acquired another business, Smart Financial Services, that has added 35 additional financial service consultants into that business. Very much committed to our buy-and-build strategy in the financial services space.

In licensing, Fine & Country had a really good year, 13 new licenses sold in the year, and eight of those, as I touched on earlier, were international licenses, and we've got a strategic plan over the next three years to really look at that international piece and look at how we can expand that out. We strengthened the leadership team during 2025.

I think the business that we now run is far greater than prior to the acquisitions, and making sure we have the right board and the right senior leadership team is critical in terms of the next 3 to 5 years' growth. We've made really good progress with the senior leadership team.

That frees Ben and I up to look at additional acquisitions, strategy, investor relations, and that's worked really well for us over the last 6 months. Then significant progress, and for those that were here last year, in the AI space.

We've built some products, we've got them in trial in some of our own offices, and we're making really good progress in terms of developing those products that will be fit for our licensees and our franchisees to adopt into their business. Again, we'll touch on a little bit more about that later in the presentation.

They're the operational highlights. I'm now delighted to hand you over to Ben, my CFO, who'll talk you through the financial highlights.

Ben.

Perfect. Thanks, Gareth.

In terms of financial highlights, starting off with revenue, we delivered in 2025 £84.3 million. That's up 25% year-over-year on a reported basis.

Clearly 2024, the comparative year, was when we did the acquisition, so that can mess with the year-over-year percentage. Looking at the pro forma growth, the real kind of underlying growth, that number for revenue was 9%, still kind of really positive.

Of that, as Gareth has already alluded to, 51% is recurring, very slight dip compared to 2024, which was 52%, and that's really just seeing the full 12 months of the significant financial services division that came along with Belvoir, which is less recurring in nature. In terms of adjusted profit before tax, we delivered £31 million, which year-over-year again on a reported basis is up 39%, but when you strip that out and you look at it on a pro forma basis for the real kind of underlying growth, it was 22%, which obviously is, fantastic and higher than the revenue really as a result of I suppose two factors: one is the cost synergies that we've been working on post-acquisition and the integration benefits that we've seen coming through, but also some of the revenue that we'll talk about today has kind of helped to-- just has dropped largely to the bottom line.

In terms of the overall adjusted profit before tax margin, we reported 33% back in 2024, and that's actually climbed to just under 37% as part of kind of our ongoing task challenge to try and move ourselves back to 40%, which is where we were prior to the Belvoir acquisition that had financial services, which is a historically lower margin. Dividend 22 pence, which is up 22% year-over-year.

From a cash perspective, ended the year with net debt of £2.3 million. Context of that, some of you will remember that we took out £20 million worth of debt to fund the second acquisition in 2024, the acquisition of GPEA, and already within that kind of 18-month period, we've been able to bring that net debt down to £2.3 million, which is a testament to the cash generation of the of the business.

Clearly also at that level of net debt, very lowly levered at 0.1 times. You can see the cash generated from operations during the year of £22.1 million, up significantly and what will have contributed to our ability to be able to do that.

The adjusted basic EPS again up to 40.3, up 27% year-over-year. In terms of certainly at the top level, really, really happy with the results, really proud of what we've been able to to achieve.

If you just drop down to a divisional level, and this slide is just giving you a bit of a feel for how our revenue and our profitability mix is made up between those three divisions that Gareth outlined earlier on. I think probably the two key messages to take away from this slide are franchising is still absolutely the core of what we do as a business.

It makes up over 60% of our revenue, but as you can see from those charts, makes up over 75% of our overall profitability, and that's at the core of what we do as a business. Also you can see with those underneath those charts in those pink numbers, which are demonstrating the pro forma growth in revenue, adjusted operating profit, and EBITDA across all of those three divisions, you can see real strong growth across certainly profitability across all three divisions, which again we're really happy with.

Licensing a little lower than we'd expected or what we'd have looked to achieve, and I'll talk a little bit more about that when we deep dive into that particular division. Just a quick slide on on each of the divisions just to give you a bit of a feel for how, as I say, how they've performed and what we've been looking at.

One of the key things I suppose I want to be able to give you as investors is understanding what operational KPIs are very much relevant to that particular division, what the mix of the revenue kind of looks like, and then actually how are we performing in the in the financials within that within within that division. In terms of key KPIs, Gareth has already referred to the number of managed lets, the number of sales, but also a key operational metric that we monitor is the average MSF per franchisee, which again is a demonstration of how successful our franchisees are being, and that's that's increased to just over £40,000 per franchisee on average in 2025, which is up compared to 2024, which was at £36,000.

Revenue mix within within franchising, and really it comes from four fundamental areas: it comes from lettings MSF, and you can see in those charts, that remains again very much core to the franchising division; you've then got sales MSF, the amount paid by franchisees on commissions that relate to sales activity, that's actually increased certainly in proportion to to the previous year, and I think that's really as a result of it being a strong sales year within 2025, but also some of the initiatives that we've put into place to improve the general sales proposition, particularly in the Belvoir business, which was perhaps a little bit behind where TPFG had been historically; and you've then got the income from the 11 owned offices that again we're just trying to build and go from strength to strength; and then the remaining, which is other, which is lots of other I suppose incremental income, partly of which is actually some of the platform elements that Gareth was alluding to earlier on. Overall profit margin for for this division is 59%, and recurring is 68%, a really kind of financially strong business.

Just jumping on to financial services, again, those key KPIs that we monitor, post the acquisition of Smart Advice Financial Solutions that we did in January, we're at 315 advisors, completed 25,000 mortgages during 2025. Again, another kind of key operational metric that we keep an eye on is the productivity, revenue per advisor, which was up from £70,000 last year to £83,000 per advisor, and is the result of really work that we've been doing both internally and also with Mortgage Advice Bureau in order to be able to improve the productivity of our consultants.

Mix, you've got the two elements, fairly similar businesses, but we've split them out, which is the employed advisors, commissions and revenue generated from employed advisors, and revenue generated from our business partners, who are a little bit more akin to franchisees, they're independent businesses that are using our status as an appointed representative of MAB in order to be able to trade compliantly. You can see that's swung a little bit more towards employed advisors, which I suppose demonstrates our focus around that particular area given our ability to be able to drive productivity much greater than we can in the in the business partner section.

Adjusted operating profit within this segment within this division is strictly 18% based on that kind of gross revenue number. I think what's worth understanding here is because of the way that we have to account for the commissions coming in, we have to account for them at a gross commission before any of the payaways that we have to do as part of the arrangement, and actually if you look at a net commissions number, which we think is almost more appropriate kind of revenue comparison, you've got you'd actually see an operating margin much closer to 63%, which is, again, fairly similar to kind of franchising, and I think much more realistic in terms of demonstrating the opportunity and the strength of the of the division.

Just jumping then on to to licensing, again, key KPIs that we monitor, number of licensees that we've got dropped a little bit overall in the in the year, predominantly as a result of The Guild seeing a little bit of of of a reduction. I'll talk about that in a in a little bit more in a second.

Secondly, also the average fee, the average license fee per per licensee. You'll remember that licensing is is slightly different to franchising in the respect that it's not dependent on the success of the licensee, it's not a percentage of their income, it is a flat price fee, which is then collected on a recurring basis.

Always getting that fee right, making sure that we're maximizing the value proposition, and therefore maximizing our ability to be able to price accordingly is strategically absolutely is absolutely key. You can see in terms of the split between Fine & Country and The Guild stayed very, very similar between 2024 and 2025.

In terms of the adjusted operating profit making about 28%, and recurring, again, because it's that recurring license fee, is 74% within this particular division, particularly high. We'll talk a little bit more about The Guild, I think, in a moment, but the key thing that we're trying to do around there is updating the value proposition, it's a little bit dated.

We've got the capability of the wider group now and the commercial deals that are available to it that we should be able to apply into that value proposition: a, to make it more attractive to to licensees, but also certainly gives the ability to be able to price accordingly. Moving out of the divisions and just talking a little bit more about cash, we've already said about the the level of net cash generated from operations, which was £22.1 million.

You just see the kind of the key movements from the starting bank balance to the final bank balance of £10.9 million in the table on the left-hand side. Nothing particularly exciting within there.

We had the remaining deferred consideration on GPEA that we paid back in May 2025, and actually that was reduced by £1.35 million after some negotiation with the original seller. We had payment down of loans, but we also drew some of the RCF in order to be able to fund some activity, and we paid £12 million worth of dividends as well as actually seeing a bit of cash inflow from the sale of some shares in the employee benefit trust.

Free cash flow per share landed then at 34.2p, again up compared to 2024, which was at 30p, again really kind of happy with that result. I suppose just to talk about the performance over over the kind of the last 11 years, and I think this is a really important slide for us because something that not necessarily unfairly, but we're we're generally kind of perceived to be because we're in the property industry and we operate within that sector, we must absolutely be at the whims of the property market and the macroeconomic impact of the ups and downs that that property market goes through, and therefore our earnings and our profitability being linked to that.

I think what we try and what we try to demonstrate really with this chart in particular is actually we aren't as cyclical as you might expect. In fact, we don't believe we're cyclical at all.

If you look at our dividend paid, our adjusted earnings per share, or adjusted profit before tax as metrics over the last 11 years since 2014, with the exception of the dividend being paid in the in the COVID year when it was kind of held back to retain cash for obvious reasons, every single one of those metrics has climbed every single year. You can see the CAGRs that have been achieved over those three metrics on the left-hand on the left-hand side as well: 17% dividend, 16% EPS, 28% on the adjusted PBT.

I think if you were to compare us to a more corporate property agency, estate agency business, you would see a lot more cyclicality, and the reason why you don't see it within our business is that franchise model, it's the lean towards the the lettings piece and that high level of recurring income, which gives us that strength year after year to be able to see out or or mitigate any of the property market fluctuations that, as I say, allows us to kind of continue on that pretty steady growth curve, which actually you can see over the last 5 years we've we've started to accelerate. The final number really on this slide, which will move me quite nicely into the next one, is is just trying to give you a bit of a feel for the potential cash generation of this business.

Mentioned a couple of times that we generated just over £22 million worth of cash in 2025. Even if I just took that number and and timesed it by 3 to demonstrate the next 3 years, that's £66 million worth of cash for us to for us to to play with and and deploy for the for the purposes of returning best values for for shareholders.

I think probably worth at that point talking about our capital allocation and what our thoughts are. Clearly, financial resilience of the business is absolutely first and and foremost.

We look to pay down debt as best as we can. You saw the net debt was down at 2.3, leverage really low, and we'll continue to continue to do that.

Organic growth investment, in reality this is an incredibly capital-light business, there isn't a huge amount to invest. Even with some of the the things that Gareth has mentioned around AI and and the Privilege program, the amount of investment that we've had to put in from certainly from a cash perspective has been quite minimal really in the in the grand scheme of things.

Dividend, this business has historically always paid a progressive dividend, it's something that we and the board are very keen to to continue going forward. Historically, on average, paid circa kind of 50%, over the last 2 years we've upped that to about 50%, 56%, and I think we'll see that kind of continuing going going forward.

Then really after that, it's it's down to our acquisition appetite, and I suppose there's been some debate as to whether there there needs to be other forms of returns to to shareholders, whether we were to do a special dividend or or a buyback. I think our view is that with the platform that we're generating and the ability to be able to sell these additional services into the franchisees for their benefit and also for ours, actually our money is much better placed at the moment to build on that platform, to build on our financial services buy-and-build strategy, and also to look at other potential opportunities in terms of lettings book into our owned offices.

That's really where our primary focus is is going to be certainly over the next kind of 12 months. I think with that, I will probably hand you back over to Gareth so he can talk you through strategy.

Great. Thanks, Ben.

We'll touch on the market first off. Obviously 2026, we were thinking was going to run very similarly to 2025.

If I look at the lettings market, the guidance we sort of gave back end of last year is UK rents expected to rise by 2% to 3%, rent inflation slightly lower than last year. Clearly we've got the Renters' Rights Act that comes into force on the 1st of May, we're doing an awful lot of work, well, we have been for the last 2 years, but the final bits of the work this year, we've got all the offices ready from a paperwork perspective, a changing process perspective, and that's worked really well for us.

What we do think is there will be a shift towards a more balanced tenant market going forward. Lettings, we think, will be nice and steady this year.

There's still good demand for property, there's still a shortage of good-quality rental properties, most of those fundamentals that we've seen over the last 5 years will remain. Financial services, we think we're in for another good year.

There is a massive remortgage book this year based on 2021 and 2022's sales market. If you remember back to COVID, coming out of COVID, everybody seemed like they wanted to move, and we did really, really well from a mortgage perspective in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

All of those mortgages are now coming up for renewals, all of those 5-year fixed mortgages are coming up. I think the estimate is £320 billion worth of remortgage activity in 2026 and 2027, and if I look at last year, that was about £250 billion, big uptick on that.

Sales market, we were predicting a very similar year, 1.1 million transactions, maybe 1.15, and we still see no reason today to change that, but we are obviously aware of what's going on in the Middle East, and the change in mortgage rates being pulled and mortgage rates starting to slightly increase. We've got a watching brief on that.

We've seen no downturn in activity over the last 3 weeks, but we need to be aware of it. It looks like it's going to go on longer than initially anticipated, and that may have some negative impacts on the sales market during the year.

That's a little bit about our first 10 weeks of the markets, generally positive. We've then got the Renters' Rights Act, and what is it?

It's the end of fixed-term tenancies, it removes no-fault evictions, and it brings in hefty fines for noncompliance, okay? We very much welcome regulation, I think it makes us as the professional managers of property more visible and more necessary, we're embracing the changes, don't agree with all of them, but we're embracing the changes, and we've spent a lot of time over the last 12 months training our franchisees, making sure they're ready, and that's gone incredibly well.

Some of the things we've put in place in the last 6 months to mitigate the potential pitfalls of the Renters' Rights Act, I'm going to talk about now. We've launched something called the Privilege scheme, and that has three elements to it.

First element is to try and protect all of our landlords and all of our franchisees for potentially an increase in rent arrears. This becomes one of those sort of platform products that we touched on earlier, rent guarantee is the ability to insure against rent arrears and for the insurance policy to pay out the rent to the landlords.

By doing that, that will ensure that the franchisee gets their management commission, and selfishly we will also get our MSF. We have sold in the last 6 months about 60,000 policies to our 150,000 landlords.

That policy guarantees their rent, guarantees to pay the court costs, the eviction costs to get that tenant out of that property, and also commits to pay for any damage that's done by that tenant during the eviction process, okay? That policy costs the landlord £300, the franchisee makes good money on that policy, but our biggest nervousness was court time.

If you take the average property in the UK, the average rent is about £1,300 a calendar month, to get a tenant into court once they've stopped paying their rent, we think will take between 9 and 15 months going forward, okay? Let's call that 10 months, that's £13,000 in lost rent.

To process the eviction court papers and to get to court costs somewhere between £4,000 and £6,000, that's £19,000, and there's a likelihood there'll be some damage in that property once you finally evict the tenant. We're saying for landlords, that's potentially a £20,000 liability, lost income.

Not many landlords could absorb a £20,000 loss in income and still pay the mortgage and still keep that portfolio running effectively. Something we've done the right thing, that it's been embraced really well by the franchisees, we've got really good uptake, it's been embraced really well by the landlords.

Still work to do, we've still got the next 10 weeks to sell into the remainder of the landlord database that hasn't taken it up yet, and we've also started to now launch that to our licensees. Really important part of that sort of platform range of services, and it's gone really, really well.

Second part of Privilege is a sort of compliant saver program for business owners, for our franchisees, and it's a range of products like PI, AML credits, audit, PropertyMark costs, PropertyMark One tickets, about £6,000 worth of value packaged up by us and PropertyMark and retailed back to the franchisee at about £1,500 an office, and we've had 97% of our offices take that product. That's worked really, really well, and that's driven savings at a franchisee level.

Then the final part is we have finally managed to get the TDS to develop a deposit product for our franchisees that will enable us to collect all of the deposits into one account as opposed to having 700 individual franchisee accounts, and start to earn interest off the back of that, and we will be able to share that interest earned between us and our franchisees. Three really relevant products that will either make the franchisee money or save the franchisee money, and, as I say, that's been received really, really well.

The other thing that we've done to combat the Renters' Rights Act is we've ran over the last 9 months about 80 landlord evenings. The private rented sector in the UK has about 4.5 million properties in it.

In terms of people like me, managing agents, 2.25 million, 50% of the 4.5 million properties are dealt with with property managers like me, and then 2.25 million are dealt with by self-managing landlords. We've taken it upon ourselves to get out there into the offices and to educate self-managing landlords about the Renters' Rights Act, and what's been really interesting is, one, most landlords' complete lack of knowledge about the Renters' Rights Act; after we've done our presentation about the changes and the fines, they are terrified of the Renters' Rights Act; and at every single event, we've had people at the end queuing to talk to us about taking on their properties, culminating the other week in Huddersfield with one landlord coming up and saying, "Look, I don't want to look after these anymore myself.

Can you look after them for me?" The franchisee said, "Yeah, absolutely, no problem at all.

How many properties have you got?" He said, "77."

A really big landlord doesn't want to deal with the compliance of 77 properties going forward. We see that very much as an opportunity.

I think what it's taught us is we need to be the voice of the sector, and we're working towards that, and we'll carry on with these evenings, but we will do podcasts and email shots to make sure that we continue to educate all landlords, but self-managing landlords, and we see that very much as a lead generation tool to increase our portfolio size. That's one area that we've learned over the last 12 months.

Second area we're going to focus on is how do we develop the next generation of buy-to-let investors. Everybody says, "Oh, it's not as good as it used to be," and that's absolutely correct, but if you look at the returns, it's like any asset class, be it shares, be it building society interest, Bitcoin, gold, ultimately it has its place for some people, but nobody's sort of championing the sort of next generation of buy-to-let investors.

We're going to take it upon ourselves to be the voice of the next generation of buy-to-let investors and really move that forward. That also then leads me into one of the growth opportunities that we're going to execute on in 2026, which is developing a landlord concierge specialist buy-to-let business, okay?

We're already big in financial services, not so big in buy-to-let. We've got 150,000 landlords, and we have no buy-to-let offering for them, and I think with the size we are, the biggest in the UK, we will be able to deal direct with lenders to drive exclusive mortgage products in either a company structure or an individual buy-to-let structure.

We're very committed to building that buy-to-let business going forward. We'll do a trial in 2026 and really launch that in 2027 along with a range of other landlord services that will be really useful for all of our landlords and help aid retention of that lettings book.

That's what we're doing in terms of the Renters' Rights Act. I think it's been a really useful year in terms of learning about what we can do to sort of drive the buy-to-let space forward over the next 5 years.

Really, really positive initiatives. If I then move on to our growth strategy generally, and some of this we've touched on before, some of it's new, if I look at lettings, obviously rent inflation has always played a reasonably sized part in our growth year-on-year.

In addition to that, we are encouraging our franchisees to continue to buy those portfolios from their competition, and first 10 weeks of the year are showing really positive signs, far more activity this year than last year. Ben, when he came into the business, has done a really good deal with Barclays to provide funding to the franchisees, which has been embraced really well, and the early signs in terms of the rates we're able to get our franchisees from Barclays is significantly cheaper than the funding sources they had prior to Ben doing his work with Barclays.

We expect to see an upturn in the number of portfolio acquisitions we will do over the next 3 years. We've set a sort of internal targets to 6,000 a year, which is punchy, but, as I say, I think that's fair now we've got the funding agreed.

Then obviously, big part is Privilege. Privilege will continue to drive our franchisees' income and our own income in terms of us taking that MSF with the increased income.

Good growth opportunity for lettings. In terms of sales, again, those of you who've joined me before, I've always said we've not ever punched our weight, if you like, in the sales arena.

Although last year was a record year, we can still grow even if the market contracts a bit in 2026. We can still do more because every single year we've got more offices embracing sales.

I think we will continue with that growth initiative to become better in the sales arena and to take more market share locally and drive income that way. Financial services, Ben's touched on, we will continue the buy-and-build strategy.

We bought Smart Financial in January, that's a really good business. If I could do two or three of them a year, I absolutely would.

We're out there looking for other businesses that would be suitable to come into the group. Criteria for me is they've got to be profitable and they've got to have at least 20 financial consultants working within them.

We will continue to have those conversations. Then looking at ways in which we can increase financial advisor productivity, so that's a really big measure, and some of the stuff we're doing in AI, which I'll come on to, we believe will dramatically improve individual financial consultant productivity over the next 18 months.

They're the growth initiatives within financial services. Then licensing, probably twofold: so modernizing the proposition within The Guild, bringing that out to the sort of modern day, launching Privilege into the licensees along with expanding Fine & Country internationally and filling in the gaps that we've got in the UK.

Really focused on that value proposition for licensees along with the products that we can offer at a reduced price to all of the licensees for software, for marketing services, for canvassing, for print, all of those things looking to drive those forward as well. Then we come onto the platform model, and the platform is, as I say, we've got insurance services, which is contained within Privilege; we're going to have tech services, which is all about AI, and we're really excited about that, and I'll touch on that now.

We've probably been working on AI for the last 12 months, and what our role within this sort of offering is to go out and do the R&D, the research and development, on the market. What we did at a very early stage is looked at where would this best fit the business, okay?

We're a lettings business, we thought property management. We have a lot of leads coming in because we've got 15 million data records, being able to deal with triaging lead activity, and then a virtual assistant in an office to be able to take calls and do data capture and be able to do fulfillment.

We've got trials in place at the moment in our owned offices. Our virtual assistant, we've called Steve.

Steve is taking phone calls, he's fulfilling customer requirements, being able to book viewings, able to book valuations, able to book mortgage appointments, and in the first sort of 8 to 10 weeks in the owned offices is currently producing a result that's 28% better than the humans, which is really interesting. That's one trial.

We're beginning to then roll that out to the franchisees. The second, and probably most important one, is property management.

Again, we identified really early that the property management is probably one of our franchisees' biggest costs and biggest jobs. Being a heavily focused lettings business, we focused on that from an AI perspective.

If you think about property management, it's quite predictable. My boiler's not working, I've got no hot water, I've lost my keys, I've smashed a window, my garden needs cutting, a variety of similar requests going in across the whole of the group.

If we can triage those initial inquiries by technology, that could save an enormous amount of money from a wage bill perspective for our franchisees. Very much looking at getting that launched probably in the next 6 to 8 weeks, understanding what the initial results are, and then really driving that forward across the franchisees and the licensees.

AI we see is a big part of '26 and an even bigger part of 2027. I guess the two things: can it save money?

Where are the efficiencies, where can the AI be used from an efficiency perspective, both for us as a franchisor and for our franchisees? Then lead generation: how can we develop more income-earning activity for our franchisees to drive their businesses forward?

They're the two criteria we're looking at. We're working with some incredible partners who are helping us build this technology, and then we'll take it out as part of the platform offering to be able to put that into our franchisees' and licensees' businesses.

The final part is acquisition, buy-and-build strategy in financial services, absolutely. In terms of franchised businesses, there's only two big ones: Winkworth, listed, not for sale; LSL, listed, not for sale.

Unlikely to do them. Then looking at where we could acquire businesses is in the services arena, and we're talking to a few businesses at the moment.

Where we can buy a profitable business that we can then promote across the 2,000-office network to increase the profits, we would absolutely look to do that in the right circumstances. The people we've talked to so far, we can buy those businesses at four to six times profit, and we believe we can put them into the network and drive a much better profitable result.

Absolutely we would look to do that, and we will update you over the next 6 months. Then the other side from an acquisitions perspective would be buying lettings portfolios into our owned offices.

We've got some really big owned offices in York and Manchester and Birmingham, Leicester, but we have the opportunity to buy portfolios and almost practice what we preach to our franchisees, really focused on trying to buy some of those portfolios into the lettings offices over '26 and 2027. Overall, lots of opportunity.

We've appointed a COO to help Ben and I develop and deliver some of these initiatives. As I say, we think, ultimately there's so much opportunity, the scale has provided the business that we can really start to drive that forward over the next 3 years.

Outlook, touched on this earlier, Q1 we're trading in line with expectations. Iran is on everybody's mind, is on the news every day, we'll keep a watching brief on that.

Boost the revenue synergies via the group scale and platform strength. As I say, I think, the biggest sort of plus in the last 12 months is understanding the power of this business, and Ben's consistent delivery slide earlier, we've built this business from a starting point of £5 million adjusted PBT back in 2020, and we delivered £31 million last year.

The exciting piece now is what can we deliver with £31 million worth of firepower, and that's really exciting in terms of the growth that we can push through over the next 3 to 5 years. We're actively pursuing acquisition opportunities and always will because of the cash generation we have, growth supported by diversified revenue streams and strengthened leadership, and I think we're really well positioned to take advantage of the market conditions in 2026.

Thanks for listening. We've gone through a lot there.

We're now going to open it up for questions, so.

I think we may have covered that in the presentation, but absolutely the platform model. Looking at services that we can spread across our 1,900 offices, the franchisees, the licensees, that really give them a competitive advantage at a price that's affordable, that's really important.

That will drive income into the franchisor, but also revenue at franchisee level, of which we'll take the MSF from. Organically, I think the numbers in the market that we've talked about on Monday or Tuesday is between 7% and 10%.

Acquisitions will play a part, I wouldn't call acquisitions organic, smaller acquisitions will bolt in, the financial services acquisitions will add to that organic piece along with the lettings book acquisitions in the owned offices adding to that organic piece. Our ambition is always to try and get organic growth at 10%, but that's what we'd like to deliver year-on-year.

I'm happy to take that one. I think at this point in time, and we go back to that platform model and the opportunity that we've already been able to demonstrate with just some examples, Privilege being one of them, AI about to kind of come through, that shows that actually we can create some really meaningful shareholder value through utilizing that platform, and we want to continue to do that really as the first priority.

Gareth talked about some of the acquisitions and the benefits that those acquisitions would have across all three divisions, and we believe that's certainly at this point the best way to be driving shareholder value. If we were to get to a point potentially in 12 months' time, 18 months' time where we've not done the acquisitions, we've not found those that kind of sit within the realms of what we'd want to transact on, and we've got an ever-growing cash balance, then yes, of course we will continue to assess whether or not buybacks are the better option.

Certainly right now, acquisitions are where our focus is.

Yeah. Again, we'll generate so much, it'll be one of the other if you think about it.

Hopefully we can do the acquisitions and see better growth, but if not, we are accruing cash every single month, and, I guess, a higher dividend or a buyback.

It's a pretty sizable increase, and, yes, there is an element of that which is the full-year effect of Belvoir coming through. I come back to what Gareth I think was saying in terms of what we're going to be looking for in terms of that kind of organic growth going forward, and that's what we'd be looking to normalize.

Still attractive levels of EPS growth, but clearly not the same kind of big jump that's been driven by really primarily an acquisition.

I'll take this one again. I suppose there's a couple of key elements that the board considers.

One is that kind of dividend yield. Clearly that's very much a moving feast depending on where the share price is at any one point in time, but we certainly want to be in a position where we've got a dividend yield of at least 4%, so that's something that we're monitoring.

Second one is obviously dividend cover and making sure that we're above that kind of 1.5 absolute baseline. Then I suppose thirdly, and something that probably drives it slightly more, is looking at it from a percentage of earnings ratio.

As I mentioned earlier on, historically we've been around kind of 50%, and the last kind of couple of years we've just upped that a little bit up to 56%. Those are the three kind of certainly elements of the discussion that we have at a board level and where we get to in terms of the final proposition.

There's only two, we touched on those, one may happen, it may not happen. I think the acquisitions we can do can build quite nicely.

If I can deliver £2 million worth of additional profit a year for £8 million to £10 million worth of cost, that's quite attractive coupled with our organic growth. I don't think we necessarily need a big acquisition, and if I look at Winkworth, it's not that big, it's £2 million to £2.5 million of adjusted profit before tax, and I think I can do that in a different way.

I think we can still be acquisitive, but it won't be like the Hunters deal or the Belvoir deal. Both those businesses are a few and far between.

Sorry, say that again?

Absolutely. I think when I look back towards 2025, from June to December 2025, we were a net beneficiary, for sure, of AIM.

We were one of the top 25 companies on AIM. We had a lot of IHT money came into the stock in the second half of last year.

It drove the share price really well towards that £6. It's been disappointing to see it drop off, but, yeah, we have no intention of moving to main market.

We are happy with AIM today. We need to see it perform, but there's been a lot going on recently.

We are very happy with AIM and believe we will be there for certainly the medium term, yeah.

I think probably the best way to answer this is actually say that we're already, I suppose, well-equipped to be able to deal with that type of environment. Those types of conditions are likely, if anything, to obviously impact perhaps house sale transactions within the UK.

Just to give you a bit of a feel for perhaps how maybe exposed we are in terms of the housing market from a sales perspective, an average number of transactions in any given year is 1.1 on average, good year 1.2, a poor year 1 1 million, that's a very kind of generous the kind of bookends. The reality is that with everything else staying equal in terms of our market share, if a market drops to 1 million transactions, because of the reasonably low proportion that we have in terms of sales business, because, as I mentioned earlier on, we're more focused certainly on lettings, the impact to our profitability is somewhere in the region of about three quarters of a million.

That's certainly from a franchising position. Even on the financial services side, which you might expect to be a little bit more susceptible to it, we also have the benefit of a fantastic back book, which enables us to be able to make sure we're continuing to drive income through the business even when you've got potentially new mortgages coming or softening a little bit because of a softening property market.

That will be even more the case within 2026, where we're anticipating a really big remortgage market because it's kind of circa 5 years after that 2021 big transaction year at that point in time. We're already pretty well-positioned for it, and as Gareth mentioned earlier on, think that in terms of 2026, it's a good outlook for us.

I think also is that long-term resilience. If you look at that slide and look at the years, you've had Brexit, you've had tenant fee ban, you've had COVID, you've had the Liz Truss moment, yeah, you've had Ukraine, and each and every one of those has had some impact on inflation, cost of living, Liz Truss the mortgage rates.

Again, demonstrating that resilience and that consistent delivery through that period, and, yeah, '26 has already got some challenges, but we're good at overcoming those challenges. I think that's the strength of having lots of small business owners as franchisees.

They have no choice. They've got to get on with today, they've got to deal with the market, and they've got to make a living.

I think that's the resilience of that franchise model.

it's an incredible brand. I don't know whether everybody saw the TV program, Britain's Most Expensive Houses, but we dominated that program.

It's upper quartile. We've got most of the UK, Scotland, Ireland filled in, there's a few gaps, but not much.

It's a really strong brand in the UK, and then we're looking at, how can we how can we build this internationally. I touched on where we've opened up last year, Uruguay, Barbados, Sydney, Dubai, they're they're big areas.

We're then looking at how can we take the UK model to other countries like France and Italy. In France, we say we've got France, but we've got Cannes.

That's not France. How can I have 20 or 30 in France Fine & Country licensees, and same with Italy, and the same with Spain?

Then had a conversation this week with interest from Australia, a region of Australia, Perth, from a franchise established franchise business that wants a a a meet-to-upper-market offering, and they're very interested and and they would take up to 40 licenses. I think I think there's definitely potential.

We've got a really good Fine & Country team that that that are passionate about the brand. They've got their conference next week at The Belfry, and that runs for 3 days, international franchise licensees come on the Friday, the UK on the, sorry, on the Thursday, the UK on the Friday, and then they've got an exhibition on the Saturday at the new Belfry Conference Centre.

Looking forward to attending that. It's a really good business, got a really good reputation, the the the TV program has definitely upped the profile and the interest in the brand.

I think that's got that's got real good growth opportunity over the next few years.

Absolutely. We're really excited about the next 3 years.

I think we've bought the businesses, we've understood them, we've got the growth opportunities, and now we're going to go and push forward and drive that growth. As always, I'd like to thank all of you for your time and taking an interest in our business.

As I say, we're really excited about the future, and hopefully that's come across today, but thanks for your time.