Joe Lister
CEO & Member of Board
Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining the call. I’m going to take you through a few slides, and then we’ll open up for some Q&A. So if you have any questions for me and Mike, please drop them into the webcast.
Overall, we’re pleased with our progress against the priorities that we shared earlier this year. We’ve delivered a strong leasing performance in an evolving market, helped by the strength of our best-in-class platform. Our enhanced commercial approach has delivered reservations of 96% at the upper end of the range guided back in July. Whilst annual rents are down a little, this largely reflects a mix towards more undergraduates and resulting in shorter tenancy lengths.
We’re also especially pleased with the performance of Empiric with occupancy of 92%, meaningfully ahead of last year. Income growth is in our range, and our EPS guidance for ’26 is underpinned.
Our best assets are performing strongly, and we have confidence in the strongest universities that we are working with. Our portfolio of the future is outperforming the disposal portfolio. And we’re making solid progress on disposals. We’ve sold GBP 200 million so far this year and remain on track to get to our GBP 300 million to GBP 400 million target.
The transaction market is being impacted by the challenging macro backdrop but we continue to see good engagement and are working to the targets and time lines that we’ve previously set out. We remain disciplined to our capital allocation framework, managing leverage, funding our on-site pipeline. And as shown earlier this year, we will allocate