Foxtons Group PLC

LSE:FOXT

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Guy Gittins, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the Foxton's 2024 Half Year Results Presentation. I'm joined by Chris Hough, our Group CFO, and we look forward to answering any questions at the end of the call.

Before moving on to the body of the presentation, it's worth taking a minute to recap on the Foxtons journey over the last 24 months to really put these results into context. The group saw a multiyear period of underperformance from 2016 to 2022, including a significant market share loss. No organic growth in lettings and underinvestment in the business all while focusing on the wrong strategic priorities. Consequently, the business' financial performance suffered as reflected in the share price. Since then, the business has changed significantly, led by a refreshed executive team, Chairman and Board of Directors. And at the beginning of 2023, I presented and implemented an operational turnaround plan, including a new set of strategic priorities with a medium-term target to deliver GBP 25 million to GBP 30 million of adjusted operating profit.

Throughout 2023, we rebuilt the Foxtons operating platform, strengthening some areas and building entirely new capabilities in others. With the rebuilding stage complete, we are totally focused on delivering growth and accelerating performance to meet our profitability targets, and I firmly believe that they come through in our results today.

Moving now to the key highlights for H1. We delivered revenue and profit growth despite the London sales market remaining flat on the historically low levels that we saw last year. Growth has been driven internally by the operational improvements that we have implemented and as our leading position in London and U.K. estate agency supported significant market outperformance. Particularly pleasing was a substantial 30% increase in sales exchange market share and double-digit growth in lettings new business volumes. And we also grew productivity, improving revenue per fee earner by 6% and revenue per branch by 15%.

Productivity growth has been enabled through a laser focus on improving staff retention, best-in-class training and upskilling and generally rebuilding Foxtons' unique high-performance culture. We continue to improve the robustness of our business, with noncyclical and reoccurring activities generating nearly 70% of revenue in the period. And finally, although the rebuilding stage of our plan is complete, we have not stood still. We continue to deliver operational upgrades to strengthen Foxtons' operating platform and widen our competitive advantage over our competitors. In the half, we focused on upgrades to improve lead generation and drive service and productivity levels, all of which support further revenue and profit growth.

Turning now to Slide 7 and an update on the London lettings market. On the chart on the left-hand side, we have indexed tenant demand and property instruction levels to H1 2019, considered the last normal period before COVID-19. As you can also see on the graph, supply and demand dynamics have continued to normalize in 2024 with increased levels of rental stock and moderating tenant demand. Positively for our business, the increase in available stock on the market enables us to use our industry-leading technology and data to grow our share of the London lettings market.

Rental prices remain at the elevated levels we saw in 2023, and we expect this dynamic will continue to be underpinned by the long-term trend of high levels of demand and limited new supply of rental properties. We especially welcome the government's commitment to building 1.5 million new homes across the country. At the same time, the government must also ensure that there is a healthy and robust lettings market. Encouraging new landlord investment into the market will support improved levels of supply and better meet tenant demand levels. A strong and well-functioning private rental sector is vital to underpinning the country's economic ambitions over the coming years.

Turning now to Slide 8 and an update on the London sales market. The wider London market for exchanges remains flat versus the prior year and at historically low levels, 15% below the 10-year average. Pricing was broadly flat in the half, and our delivery of a 28% increase in exchange volumes is, therefore, highly impressive achievement against this backdrop. More pleasingly, the market is showing early signs of some recovery from these historically low levels. It's worth remembering the process for a property transaction. The property is first listed on the market and after completing a large number of viewings, a sale is agreed between a buyer and a seller. Following roughly 3 to 4 month due diligence process, the property ultimately exchanges and the transaction completes. And this entire process can take anywhere from 6 months upwards.

We've seen good growth in the early stages of the sales process with property listings and buyer activity both growing. And the output is new sales agreed in H1 were up 18% on the prior year. This growth is expected to drive year-on-year growth in exchange volumes in the second half. In my view, key drivers for this growth are signs of mortgage rates beginning to come down, but more importantly, it reflects the pent-up demand in the market. After a period of subdued activity, buyers are now weighing up higher rates in the medium term against their needs-based requirements as ultimately life must go on.

Turning now to Slide 10 and an update on progress against our strategic priorities. Upon my return to Foxtons, I laid out a medium-term target to deliver GBP 25 million to GBP 30 million of operating profit. Against a background of circa GBP 9 million operating profit the year before my arrival and with the sales market becoming considerably tougher, this was ambitious but I felt it was achievable and reflected the potential that I knew was locked within the business. These strategic priorities we set for each business reflects this ambition, and I'm pleased to report that we are on track.

In lettings, we've achieved a 6% annual organic growth since H1 2022. In H1, we delivered double-digit growth in new business volumes, including a doubling of deals and revenue in build to rent. This represents a fantastic performance in the typically highly repeat lettings business. Growth has been delivered through leveraging our data-driven lead-generating capabilities to win new property instructions and most importantly, letting them to tenants through our highly motivated sales force aided by best-in-class technology and process.

A key feature is our digital lettings platform introduced and developed last year. It has created a highly efficient digital journey, which allows us to lead score and prioritize inquiries to drive the productivity of our fee earners and is entirely proprietary. This growth in new business volumes has allowed us to offset an expected temporary reduction in tenancies retransacting this year following our strategy to increase average tenancy lengths since 2022. In fact, tenancy lengths have increased by 20% over this period and are key to improving client retention and growing our portfolio of reoccurring revenues.

On the acquisition side, we completed the integration of Ludlow Thompson in June. This is being completed ahead of schedule and reflects the great work of our technology and lettings teams. We are now well placed to really drive returns from this superb acquisition. Our prior acquisitions continue to perform well, delivering returns comfortably ahead of our expectations and through an increased focus on driving client retention and new business opportunities, I am pleased to report landlord retention rates and new business volumes through our more recent acquisitions are trending well above historical levels.

In sales, we delivered an impressive 30% growth in our market share of exchanged deals, allowing us to significantly outperform the market. Market share in H1 was 5.1% and going over this 5% is an important milestone for the company. We've achieved it ahead of schedule and is a testament to the power of the machine we've built. We're driving value from the largest database of London's property owners through our industry-leading data capabilities and through rebuilding fee earner headcount and our unique culture, we are selling these properties at a rate well ahead of the market.

I'm extremely confident we have more growth to come. We continue to grow our listings market share, the first stage in the process. And today, we have nearly 8,400 listings across London for sale. With good growth in our under-offer pipeline in June, we are well placed for the year ahead.

Finally, to Financial Services. Unsurprisingly, growth over the last two years has been significantly impacted by the turmoil in the mortgage market. However, operation upgrades meant that we were able to deliver a 7% year-on-year revenue increase in H1 despite the market remaining challenging.

And finally, to Slide 11, where the benefits of our strategy can clearly be seen. We've grown our portfolio of noncyclical reoccurring revenues, which has totally transformed the group's financial profile and resilience. In H1, this supported both revenue and operating profit growth despite the sales market remaining weak. And the level of transformation and robustness of the group today is illustrated by a comparison with 2019. We delivered over GBP 8 million of operating profit this half versus nearly a GBP 1 million loss in 2019 despite identical sales market volumes and a significant inflationary cost pressure over the past three years. These results show solid progress against our plan to deliver further profit growth and reduce the impact of sales market cyclicality.

I'll now pass over to Chris, who will run you through the financial review.

[Christopher Hough, executive]

Thank you, Guy, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to report that following a period of rebuilding the business, we are now firmly into the growth phase of our plan. And this can be seen on Slide 13, which provides an overview of financial performance. Revenue grew 11% to GBP 78.5 million, with sales and market outperformance being the main driver of growth. We delivered GBP 8.5 million of adjusted operating profit which is 24% higher than the prior year. Our adjusted operating profit margin grew by 120 basis points to 10.8%. This outsized profit growth versus revenue reflects the inherent operating leverage in the business.

Adjusted EBITDA, which is defined on the same basis used to calculate the group's RCF covenants grew by 25% to GBP 10.5 million. Statutory profit before tax was GBP 7.5 million, up 24% on the prior year. There was a GBP 0.9 million net free cash outflow in line with the expected seasonality of the business, which was an 80% uplift in net free cash generation compared to the prior year. Finally, the Board has declared an interim dividend of 0.22p per share, an increase of 10% versus last year. In terms of guidance, the full year outlook remains unchanged as continued sales market outperformance is expected to drive further year-on-year growth in the second half.

Turning now to Slide 14 and an overview of the income statement and an explanation of the key movements that drove 24% increase in adjusted operating profit. The group delivered GBP 7.6 million of revenue growth, driven by improved volumes and incremental year-on-year revenues from the 2023 acquisitions. I'll talk to the key revenue dynamics in each business over the next three slides. Direct costs were GBP 1 million higher, reflecting increased revenue linked staff commissions and a 5% year-on-year increase in fee earner headcounts.

Headcount has been rebuilt over the last two years, and is now broadly at the right levels to drive further growth. Overheads were GBP 4.1 million higher, reflecting a number of key items. Firstly, incremental operating costs from 2023 acquisitions primarily relating to Ludlow Thompson, which we acquired in November last year. Ludlow Thompson is now fully integrated into the Foxtons operating platform and approximately GBP 1 million of annualized synergies are expected to be realized over the next 12 months.

Secondly, we have made selected cost investments to support continued growth, mainly enhancing our performance marketing and lead generation capabilities. And thirdly, continued inflationary pressures, which we partly mitigated through cost savings as we identify ways to reduce costs without impacting the growth targets within our turnaround plan. Depreciation, amortization and share-based payments were GBP 0.7 million higher primarily driven by additional intangible amortization related to acquired lettings portfolios.

Turning now to Slide 15, our performance in lettings. Lettings revenue grew by GBP 2.6 million to GBP 52.4 million, driven by GBP 0.4 million or 1% of like-for-like revenue growth and GBP 2.2 million of incremental revenues from 2023 acquisitions. Like-for-like revenue growth was resilient in the period, underpinned by double-digit growth in new business volumes, reflecting a continuing focus on driving organic new business growth. This new business growth offset an expected temporary reduction in the volume of our existing tenancies and retransacting in H1 as a result of longer tenancy terms being signed across 2022 and 2023.

As Guy mentioned earlier, since 2022, tenancy lengths have increased by 20% and securing longer tenancies is part of the group's strategy to improve client retention and grow our portfolio of recurring revenues. As expected, rental prices for new deals were flat as year-on-year rental price growth moderated our supply and demand dynamics continue to normalize, but with prices remaining at elevated levels.

Like-for-like revenue growth also benefited from GBP 1.1 million of additional interest earned on client monies, which supports the operating costs of managing client accounting. Contribution grew 5% to GBP 39.3 million, reflecting revenue growth and a flat contribution margin of 75%. Adjusted operating profit reduced by GBP 1.2 million to GBP 12.9 million, reflecting an increase in allocated central costs primarily related to the selective cost investments and cost inflation I referred to on the previous slide.

Moving to Slide 16 and an update on the sales business. Sales revenue was 28% higher as we outperformed the market and delivered 30% growth in our market share of exchanges, taking our exchange market share for the period to 5.1% from 3.9% for the period last year. Key drivers were a 28% increase in deal volumes despite flat exchange volumes in the London market. Average sales prices were flat, in line with the wider market, and finally, our sales commission rates were robust at 2.16% versus 2.17% in 2023.

Our commission rates continue to represent a significant premium against our competitors as we have rebuilt market share of volumes without compromising our premium fee position. The adjusted operating loss in sales narrowed to GBP 3.7 million, an improvement of 41% reflecting the inherent operating leverage in the business. By continuing to deliver market share growth supported by some normalization of market volumes, the business is now set up to progress towards profitability.

Finally, the under-offer pipeline at the end of June was 21% higher than the prior year as by demand in the market improved in the half, supported by Foxtons' growth in the share of new sales agreed. The higher under-offer pipeline will support continued year-on-year revenue growth in the second half.

Moving on to Slide 17 and Financial Services. The mortgage market remains challenging as interest rates remain at elevated levels. Despite the market dynamics, Financial Services delivered 7% revenue growth, this was driven by an 8% increase in mortgage transaction volumes driven by good growth in new purchase mortgage units. Average revenue per transaction was flat as a 2% increase in average loan size was partially offset by an adverse product mix with the share of product transfers continuing to grow. In H1, 44% of revenue was generated from noncyclical refinance activity and 56% was generated in purchase activity and other ancillary revenue sources.

Moving now to Slide 18 and cash flow. There was a GBP 0.9 million net free cash outflow in the half, in line with the seasonality of the business which benefits from strong free cash generation lettings over the summer months. The operating cash to net free cash flow bridge on the left-hand side shows the items contributing to the GBP 0.9 million net free cash outflow. The key items to call out are GBP 16.6 million inflow from operating cash before working capital movements, a GBP 7.1 million working capital outflow, which represents more normalized levels versus 2023 as the impact of shorter landlord billing terms mentioned in the full year results eases.

As a reminder, shortening landlord billing terms is a strategic initiative to enhance our competitiveness and portfolio retention by offering shorter billing terms for those landlords opting to lock into longer tenancies. The group also paid GBP 2.8 million of corporation tax and made GBP 6.5 million of lease liability repayments in the period and GBP 1 million of cash was used in investing activities, primarily relating to branch fit-out CapEx and internally generated software development.

Looking at the opening to closing net cash bridge on the right-hand side. We started the year with GBP 6.8 million of net debt and ended the half with GBP 11.3 million of net debt. This reflects the GBP 0.9 million net free cash outflow, GBP 1.3 million of acquisition deferred consideration and GBP 2.1 million of dividends paid. In the half, we successfully increased the size of the RCF facility with our existing lender, increasing the committed facility from GBP 20 million to GBP 30 million and extended the term by 12 months to June 2027 with an option to renew for a further year.

The interest cover and leverage covenants have remained unchanged. And at the period end, the leverage covenant was 0.6x currently below our covenant limit of 1.75x. Finally, for the half, we have announced an interim dividend of 0.22p per share, this is a 10% increase on the prior year under the group's new progressive dividend policy announced in March this year.

I will now hand back to Guy, who will provide an operational update.

[Guy Gittins, executive]

Thank you, Chris. In the last results call in March, I explained the unique advantages of our totally reengineered operating platform brings to the business. We haven't stood still this year, continuing to forensically review the business and challenge ourselves to always improve. On this slide, I've summarized some of the key upgrades we've made over the last 6 months. Starting with technology. Property instructions are the lifeblood of a state agency, and many of the upgrades we've made to the platform are aimed at driving higher levels of lead opportunities and improving the conversion of these leads into sales and lettings instructions.

A new AI-driven lead scoring platform has been developed and deployed across the Foxtons branch network to drive lead generation levels from our estate agency staff. The platform complements lead scoring deployed in our customer prospecting center last year. By expanding the capability to generate high-quality leads more widely across the business, we are creating a highly powerful foundation to deliver continued growth in instruction levels and to drive continued growth in our market share.

We've also overhauled our website, completely rewriting the underlying code to both modernize it and ensure it is future fit. Our website is the most visited estate agency website in the U.K. by a significant margin against even national operators and is one of our largest sources of new customer leads. Early progress is promising with a 30% increase in user engagement on the website in June versus the prior year.

And finally, we've developed a new app from the ground up to streamline the tenant move-in process. In addition, we have aligned remuneration with the actual moving of the tenants. Together, these have significantly improved the tenant experience as part of our mission to always deliver best-in-class customer service.

It's worth reflecting on the great progress that we've made in our technology over the last two years. We have had a significant effort to rebuild our technology and overcome a significant level of tech debt. We are now fully caught up and have a best-in-class system and have a road map to deliver market-leading products to further cement our #1 position.

Moving now to data. As highlighted in March, we have built a whole new state-of-the-art data platform over the last 18 months. The platform brings together rich but previously inaccessible databases with the ability to ingest external sources and perform advanced data science and analytics. And this platform is creating a sea change in how we operate as we transition to becoming a totally data-led business, I'm incredibly impressed with how the business has adapted to this new way of thinking as we create an operating model that is genuinely unique in the industry.

As an example, in H1, we developed a comprehensive new marketing data and reporting suites to drive a forensic insight into our activities and reinforce our data-driven marketing approach. The new system will significantly improve customer targeting and drive improved returns on marketing spend. In addition, a new real-time productivity reporting system has been created and deployed across the business. This significantly improves the visibility of fee earner output and will drive productivity growth as we improve workforce transparency and motivation.

Moving now to brand. We've overhauled our customer-facing marketing, including a new program of marketing campaigns to drive customer engagement and reinforce the brand's value proposition. The campaigns are themed and refreshed regularly making a total departure from our previous marketing strategy and setting our brand apart in a highly competitive sector. And I'll provide more detail on the next slide. We continue to deliver upgrades to our leading hub and spoke model with a focus on driving productivity and customer service levels.

At the heart of our hub and spoke model is property management. Here, we have a vision of delivering a level of customer service excellence, not seen anywhere else in the industry, and I'm always challenging the business to create an ecosystem that delivers a 10 out of 10 level of service. Our new customer satisfaction software allows us to better understand service delivery and even align remuneration with service delivery. We're also overhauling selected processes in light of our customer feedback to ensure that we're always providing best-in-class service.

Finally, we continue to develop our out of London Property Management Center of Excellence with a structured transition process at a measured speed to ensure no impact on customer experience and service levels. This is a huge task, and we've made significant progress to date and ultimately, together, all of these will continue to drive landlord retention levels.

Finally, on to our people, culture and training, a highly important area of focus as estate agency remains at heart a people business. Fee earner headcount has been rebuilt to reflect the size of the opportunity and a 5% increase in the prior year. At the same time, we continue to drive retention rates, which is driving both fee earner tenure, experience and productivity. And this can be seen in the 6% increase in the average revenue per fee earner despite a challenging market backdrop. Fee earner headcount is now broadly at the right levels to continue to drive growth. And through our upskilling programs, I expect further productivity gains over time.

On to Slide 21, which highlights some of our new marketing campaigns. The brand campaigns reinforce our brand promise, we get it done and are a clear call to action for customers and leaning back into the latent Foxtons brand awareness of the agent that gets results. Campaigns are highly topical and most importantly, fun. They are run for limited periods of time and are constantly refreshed to ensure that we cut across to customers in a highly crowded sector.

And the campaigns are driving good levels of customer engagements, including a 27% increase in year-on-year brand preference in Q2 and a 30% increase in our web user engagements. And ultimately, this is about driving property instructions supported by improved operational capabilities, we have driven a 15% increase in Foxtons stock on the market in June versus the prior year and it is this stock of properties that will be the foundation for our future growth.

And finally, to Slide 23 and a look at July trading and the outlook for the rest of the year. Lettings is trading in line with expectations. Rents have remained stable as supply levels continue to recover, supporting our organic growth ambitions for the rest of the year and offsetting the expected reduction in existing tenancies retransacting as a result of longer tenancy lengths. In sales, the market recovery in new sales agreed, coupled with our continued market outperformance has driven a 21% increase in the value of our under-offer pipeline at the end of June against the prior year and to its highest level since the Brexit vote in 2016.

We've seen limited impact from the general election earlier this month, either in the run-up or immediately afterwards, with trading in July remaining robust. The increased under-offer pipeline continues to transact in exchanges and will support further growth in H2. Financial Services will remain resilient with a large portfolio of refinance activity, creating a solid repeat business. Through continued market outperformance, the group's expectations for the full year remain unchanged and is on track to deliver its medium-term target of GBP 25 million to GBP 30 million of adjusted operating profit.

That concludes the formal presentation today. Thank you all for joining us. Chris and I look forward to meeting with many of you in the coming weeks, and I will now pass over to the operator for any questions that you may have. Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question today is from Chris Millington from Deutsche Bank.

[Christopher Millington, analyst]

I've got a few if a may, please, Guy and Chris. I was wondering if you could firstly comment on market share in lettings. Obviously, you've made really good progress in sales. I'd just be curious to hear how are you faring there? That's number one. Number two is just about underlying cost pressures in the business, perhaps you can mention about wage inflation, various other cost inflation items. Next one is just about desire to do letting deals. And I've noticed, obviously, you've upped your RCF, so I suppose a question entailed in that is how high would you be willing to take leverage for the right sort of deal?

[Guy Gittins, executive]

It's Guy here, I will jump in and morning to everybody else on the call as well. Yes, market share for sales and lettings. As you know, last year, we grew our market at the fastest rate of any U.K. estate agency for both sales and lettings because we finally were able to drive this value out of the historic database going back over 20 years. We've added on to that process and that platform that we built to help us continue to grow market share this year. Market share for sales sits around -- sorry for lettings, sits around about 6%. That fluctuates month to month because, obviously, we only see the new listings coming to the market, and we only see the overall number of listings in the market within London.

We also see it for the U.K., but we only measure ourselves against London. We don't see the number of deals that are being let by an individual agent like we do see in the sales side. So yes, 6%, we continue to put a huge amount of effort and energy and as you may have read also, we've just finished off an AI-driven platform that helps us lead score the 4.5 million contact database that we have here at Foxtons that allows us to be able to produce an entirely new platform to drive that market share further. And we're embedding still a culture across the business of making sure that every single person understands their priority in this business, first and foremost, before anything else happens, is to help us build that market share.

Because we know through our leading platform of tech and data and process and also a culture that we can pull that market share of listings [ free ] to exchanges quicker and faster than our competition. It also might be interesting just to note, there's several points for the market share for sales as well, which we continue to grow this year as well, which is again circa 6% but we've made a big step forward in the exchange market share for sales just before I took over the 12-month rolling average sales exchange market share. That's when we recognize it as a sale and as revenue. That was at 3.1% before I took over. And actually, this year, as you've seen in the first half, we're already at 5.1%, which is an enormous step forward and actually for the last month alone, we were in the late 5s of that.

So we're really starting to be able to convert that pipeline of under-offer sales agreed through at a faster rate, I think. And ultimately, the aim is to continue to push both of them as far as we can. Now obviously recognizing the more we increase the market share, we're already the largest listing agent by a considerable margin today in London for both sales and lettings. Now each 0.5% or each 0.1% increase is harder for us to gain than it was to take those early strides forward, but it's an absolute priority for the business.

Talking about further lettings M&A, absolutely, it's core to our strategy to continue to focusing on driving our organic lettings growth and supplementing that organic lettings grow through M&A. And just as a reminder, we made two fantastic lettings acquisitions last year. The latter one being Ludlow Thompson in November '23. So we worked really hard to pull that acquisition forward to get it in last year. So we feel the benefit of that this year and because of our proprietary industry-leading CRM and data platform, we're able to integrate these businesses at a much, much, quicker rate than our competitors and drive additional value out of them.

So we will continue to grow that pipeline. We have a department here within Foxtons, who specialize purely on the M&A side of things. They're out talking to business owners across London as we know there's 3,600 independent agents across London, where we're trying to talk to as many as possible to analyze who we want to deal with and try to bring those businesses and integrate them into Foxtons in the next few years.

[Christopher Hough, executive]

It's Chris speaking here. A couple of questions you had on leverage and cost inflation. I think in terms of leverage, I'll think about that at around 1x EBITDA in terms of what we would look to take on there. And we've got a lot more confidence when you look at the balance of business, now 70% of revenues coming from lettings. Cost inflation for 2024, probably in the range of around 3% to 5% is where we had to put that for your modeling.

[Guy Gittins, executive]

I think we have a question from Greg here. Greg are you there? I've got the question here in case Greg is having trouble connecting, Greg from Singer Capital Markets. We've got a question here saying, can we have a feel for the instruction market share?

I touched on that briefly with Chris's question. We are over 5%, we're over 6% now in instruction market share, but even more pleasingly because the only bit that really matters is when we recognize it as revenue, and that's the exchanged market share and we've taken that huge stride forward to being now over 5% as we build that. And of course, there's that lag between listing a property, getting it under-offer and then only three or four months later, it being recognized as exchanged revenue.

So as we continue to grow our sales under-offer pipeline, that currently is at its record level since before the Brexit vote in 2016. I think we're in a really good place now to capitalize on, hopefully, an improving market for the second half of the year. And the moment, we see any additional rate drops, which we've got our fingers crossed for to come in the not-too-distant future. If that 0.25% or 0.5% happens I think we'll be in a very good place to capitalize on that additional confidence coming back in. So hopefully, that answers your question, Greg.

Next question. Where can sales exchange market share get to?

Well, actually, we're really driving that as much as we can, obviously, as mentioned before, over 5% already. But actually, if we just look at June in isolation, we were -- I'm going to pull these numbers live off our data system here. In June this year, we were actually at 5.8% market share for that month alone. Now obviously, we've got to drag that out across the rest of the year, but it's really encouraging to see that number up from, as I said before, a 3.1% exchange market share in London before my arrival.

How far can we push it? I think that's a difficult question to answer, but we're going to continue to push it as much as we can. I think there's still plenty left to go looking at what our front offices are doing. Hopefully, that answers your question.

Lettings M&A, how is the pipeline progressing?

Similar question to Chris's again, we really are out there talking to as many people as possible. A lot of these sales of the lettings businesses that we buy are a factor of circumstance. It's when a seller or quite often, there's more than one owner of these businesses are looking to exit because of retirement, and that's really been the story with our two great acquisitions last year. And ultimately, we try to fill that pipeline with the highest quality, most aligned businesses that we can find in the marketplace, and we will continue to do that with our internal team who are doing a great job.

Would we do a sales M&A?

Really, the value for us is growing that reoccurring lettings revenue, and that has to be a core focus for us. Of course, we have looked at businesses that have got a sales and lettings business sometimes in balance, and it really will depend upon the quality of the lettings book for the acquisition because that really is a core to the short-term strategy and the medium-term strategy, which we're busy delivering.

Next up, we have a question from Robin Savage at Zeus Capital. Robin, I don't know if you're on the line? No. I'll answer the question for you. Question is the details behind the success of Ludlow Thompson.

I think we really have to look at our entirely unique CRM platform, which is unlike anything in the industry. It's really difficult to put this into context, but our CRM system is enormously comprehensive. It covers every part of our business, and it is completely unique in the industry. 70% or 80% of our competition just simply use an off-the-shelf platform, which is very, very rudimentary and very limiting in the scope of what you can do with it.

One of the biggest and most exciting factors to me coming back to Foxtons was knowing the rate of product delivery and new innovation that we could deliver into the market. And I think we've really proven that, that platform enables us to not only use our data to identify and engage with the right businesses but it also allows us to, in very, very short space of time, sometimes over a weekend, we can integrate a huge business, sometimes 7 or 8 offices and implement that and create our own APIs using our in-house team. And when we start that work over a weekend, we go into the Friday without having that business integrated.

And by Monday morning at 9:00, when we turn the computers on or 8:00, all of those thousands of lettings -- live tenancies that we bought, plus all of the historic data and all of the transactional data that comes with it as well is already integrated perfectly into the machine and allows us to really continue that and drive extra value out of those acquisitions at a rate that's just unheard of in the industry. So that's one of the keys is that, that tech and data piece.

Also, I think the culture and the training aspect of Foxtons, we are renowned in the industry for delivering the best training. We have a fantastic team here who work for us -- who work in our L&D department. We're very, very good at helping people take the first steps to understanding how we operate at Foxtons and ultimately, retrain the new teams that we buy with these acquisitions and help them get up to speed with the Foxtons way of operating. So I think that's also been very positive.

And when I talk to many of the acquired staff who come across to Foxtons, they are making more money. They're enjoying their work more. They've had promotions, and they can see a real career progression with a much larger business, and that really is exciting for both them and for the business. So I think that's another key area. We've also been acquiring fantastic quality businesses with fantastic leadership and employees within it and earlier I touched on that retraining of the people.

But when we've already got great people, in fact, one of our flagship offices at Foxtons, one of the largest offices that we have in the entire group is today run by somebody that we made via an acquisition last year, and that individual is doing a fantastic job of really getting it under the skin. Has completely embraced the Foxtons way of operating, and has got a very, very exciting career ahead of that individual over the coming years. So I think that's a great example of acquiring the right businesses with the right people and then ultimately giving those new employees a platform to really be successful.

And then probably one of the final points is really looking at integrating the businesses into the Foxtons network and obviously, we can really add value both to the bottom line and also organically in those opportunities because of the way that we integrate the businesses that we've been buying. So yes, a huge exciting, continued core part of our strategy is this buy and build, and we continue to be out there talking to high-quality business owners that we feel is aligned with Foxtons.

Next question, I think we're probably through all of them now unless there's anybody else on the line, I'll hand over back to the operator. Thanks for your questions, everybody.

[Operator]

There are no further questions from the call. So this concludes our question-and-answer session, and I hand back to you for closing comments.

[Guy Gittins, executive]

Closing Comments, I very much appreciate everybody's time tuning in this morning. We're delighted to announce what I feel is a solid results against the half year and certainly is a very good demonstration that we are well on the way to deliver our medium-term target of GBP 25 million to GBP 30 million of adjusted operating profit with a 24% increase year-on-year in adjusted operating profit in the half. So we continue to work very hard with everybody else in the business to focus on that strategy, and we're well on the way to doing it. Thanks for everybody's time and look forward to meeting with many of you over the coming weeks.