Joe Lister
CEO & Member of Board
Good morning, everybody, and thank you for taking the time to join the call. I’m joined here this morning by our CFO, Mike Burt; and COO, Karan Khanna. Hopefully, you’ve had time to read our announcement that was out this morning. And as an intro to this call, I just want to provide a bit more color on the following 3 areas: our reservations progress, our capital allocation framework and the launch of the share buyback program and the Q4 valuations. We’ll then open up for Q&A.
Before we get going, I think it is worth just stating that we’re only 6 weeks on since the investor event, and we are still early in the sales cycle. However, we are reiterating the guidance we set out at our investor event in November, and we will come back at our prelims in February, as usual, to provide detailed earnings guidance for 2026, and this will include the impact of Empiric.
So looking at reservations progress, reservations for the next academic year are currently at 64%. Whilst this is below the 67% at the same time last year, as I say, it is still very early in the sales cycle, and we remain on track to achieve the 93% to 96% occupancy and 2% to 3% rental growth that we provided 6 weeks ago. UCAS applications data will be out at the end of this month, and it is expected again to be positive based on demographic growth and continuing the
