Management agenda for 2023
Economic value
Portfolio performance
We will continue with our strategy of investing in affordable and sustainable homes, offering above average value growth potential. We aim to balance our inflow and outflow and funding, while trading up the quality of our portfolio through active management. We will add value to selected assets in our portfolio where we can simultaneously improve the financial performance, quality, sustainability and mitigate possible regulatory risks. We will be highly selective with acquisitions in the short term 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 the upcoming 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. We recognise recurring higher cost levels for compliance and insurance, 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. And further portfolio growth can be realised by a more or less similar headcount.
Funding
As part of our funding strategy, we continue to diversify and improve our maturity profile. We actively use green and sustainable debt for the sustainable financing of our portfolio and acquisitions. We aim to use our increasing share of eligible assets that comply with these terms to increase this type of funding. An example is the second EIB facility, which we will use to build affordable homes. We will make use of short-term and floating rate funding solutions to optimize cost of debt. Furthermore, by substantially reducing our acquisitions in the short term, we limit the increase in interest expenses as well.
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. Key points of attention are the need of some participants to obtain liquidity and a growing need for more ESG-related information. Following the recent redemption requests, we are taking 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 increase our communications on ESG matters, resulting in more frequent disclosures about our initiatives and performance.
Social value
Environmental
We are implementing 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/sqm compared with 1990. We use BREEAM in-use certifications to determine improvements at asset level. We will continue with large-scale renovations to reduce energy demand and total cost over living and target to have 99% green energy labels by year-end 2024. Furthermore, we actively increase 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
We aim to improve tenant satisfaction by enhancing service levels and offering good-quality homes in our portfolio. A key strategic project to improve our services is the current revision of the repair request process. The changes that we are making will enable us to take more proactive action to increase the quality and speed of repairs. In addition, we will implement our mobility strategy (charging facilities, parking ratio, etc.) in new acquisitions and assess opportunities in our existing portfolio.
We want to make a positive impact on the total cost of living by investing in solar panels and other sustainability measures. By communicating about energy consumption and providing insights and advice, we enable our tenants to lower their total cost of living. To keep our homes affordable, the annual rent increase will be below actual inflation. Regulated leases are increased by a maximum of 3.1% and liberalised leases by a maximum of 4.1%.
Governance
While we are comfortable with the quality of our governance framework, we are improving our governance on a continuous basis to ensure sound business operations. Our objectives are to obtain 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 from regulators.
In the coming years, we will focus on establishing human resources policies on diversity, equality and integrity of our workforce. Furthermore, we will develop a code of conduct for our suppliers.
Organisation
To become an HPO organisation, we are improving the five main aspects that were identified in the recent survey: continuous improvement, best landlord strategy, project-based work, teamwork and connection, and employee of the future. 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 are following up on the reputation survey from 2022. In 2023, we will organise roundtable meetings with our stakeholders about two key topics: innovation and sustainability. We will use the outcomes of these meetings to draw up a plan to improve our reputation and positioning in the coming years.
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.