Management agenda for 2024
Economic value
Portfolio performance
We will continue with our strategy of investing in affordable mid-rental and sustainable homes in core regions in the Netherlands, offering a low-risk and high-quality portfolio with an above-average value growth potential. We will continue our active management strategy by investing in selected assets in our portfolio where we can simultaneously improve the financial performance, quality, sustainability and mitigate possible regulatory risks. By adopting this approach, we can enhance quality without raising the overall living costs for our tenants, thanks to the sustainability initiatives we have implemented and plan to continue. Furthermore, we will balance our inflow and outflow to limit our funding requirements and strengthen our long-term performance. We will be highly selective with acquisitions and sell non-strategic assets, while keeping an eye out for potential market opportunities. At the same time, we are preparing our portfolio and asset strategies for potential new regulations in the mid-rental segment.
Cost of management
We expect a moderate increase in the cost of management, mainly driven by general personnel and organisation cost increases, due to the indexation of salaries and inflation. We recognise recurring higher cost levels for compliance, due to the continuous increase in legislation and external requirements, and for our IT costs due to advanced digitalisation and data-related projects. In recent years, we were able to improve our processes in such a way that we can more or less keep the number of our FTEs stable.
Funding
Negative property valuations combined with higher cost of debt due to portfolio investments, inflow from our committed pipeline and higher interest rates is putting pressure on our leverage and other funding targets and rating ratios. To mitigate this we will actively strive to not exceed a leverage of 30%, by significantly reducing our soft pipeline, accelerating disposals, and additional block sales in 2024. In addition, we aim to refinance the revolving credit facility and refinance the bridge facility through the issuance of a new green bond.
Participants
Our goal is to provide our participants with an attractive risk-return, transparency and a high level of service. We want to maintain our participant satisfaction score by addressing the feedback from our participants. One key point of attention is the need of some participants to obtain liquidity. We will continue to take the lead in the search for new investors. In the meantime, the Redemption Available Cash (RAC) of €50 million per year will be paid out upon request. We will also continue to improve our periodic reports and other financial and ESG disclosures to improve our services to our participants.
Social value
Environmental
We are continuing to implement our CO2 Roadmap, in line with government targets, to become Paris Proof by 2050. Our goal for 2030 is to realise a 55% energy reduction in kWh/m2 compared with 1990. In addition to our CO2 roadmap, we use the BREEAM in-use certifications to identify improvements at asset level. We will continue with large-scale renovations to reduce energy demand and total cost of living and our target is to have 99% green energy labels by year-end 2024. Furthermore, we are actively increasing awareness and motivation among our tenants to reduce energy use. We are investing in new climate-proof buildings and we are taking measures to lower the physical climate risks of (very) high-risk assets. Finally, we are optimising the sustainability impact score of our new acquisitions and standing assets.
Social
One of our goals is to enhance tenant satisfaction by improving our service levels and providing high-quality homes in our portfolio. We plan to implement a social strategy and social score, improve the maintenance process by focusing on first-time fixes, and explore new ways to provide maintenance services. We aim to reduce the total cost of living by investing in sustainability measures and encouraging our tenants to reduce their energy consumption. We also plan to improve tenant communication and identify the most critical areas for improvement to enhance tenant satisfaction.
Governance
While we are comfortable with the quality of our governance framework, we are improving our governance on a continuous basis to ensure sound decision-making processes and business operations. Our objectives include obtaining an unqualified opinion on the audit of the annual financial statements included in the annual reports, an unqualified opinion on the annual ISAE 3402 audit, to resolve findings from internal audit reviews and receive no warnings or fines from regulators.
In the coming years, we will focus on establishing human resources policies on diversity, equality and integrity in our workforce. Furthermore, we will roll out our newly developed code of conduct for our suppliers.
Organisation
We will continue our journey to become a High Performance Organisation (HPO). We also want to create a clear and attractive employer proposition, translated into labour market communications to make us an employer of choice. To strengthen our external reputation and positioning as the best residential investor and landlord, we will improve our communications on our social role, innovation and sustainability via our corporate website.
Furthermore, we will use data science and digitalisation to improve core processes, focusing on organisation-wide steering information and making the re-letting process more data driven and automated. This will enable us to work more efficiently, reduce costs and increase tenant satisfaction.
Gertjan van der Baan will step down as Chief Executive Officer of Vesteda on 3 April 2024. The Supervisory Committee has nominated Astrid Schlüter for appointment as Vesteda's new CEO. Vesteda has started the recruitment and selection process to find a new COO to succeed Astrid Schlüter.