Peabody announces its unaudited results for the year ended 31 March 2025

We have released our unaudited results ahead of our Annual Report for the year ended 31 March 2025, which will be published in the autumn.

Published: 30/06/2025

Our turnover for the year was £1,035m, up from £989m in the previous year. Net rental income from social housing properties increased to £805m with other income of £230m remaining at similar levels to last year. Our rent collection rate for the year was 99%, with average Peabody social rents at £147 per week. Our financial inclusion team continues to work closely with residents in financial difficulty, supporting them with flexible payment plans and helping to boost their income.

Despite ongoing cost pressures and a challenging operating environment, our core business continued to perform well in 24-25. Our social housing margin was 19% in the year. Our operating margin after impairments and provisions excluding sales was 23%.

Sales revenues from market sale and first tranche shared ownership sales were £104m (2024: £130m) and with a margin of £11m or 10.2% (2024: £15m or 11.5%). Some exchanged sales at Wornington Green in Kensington, totalling £73m in proceeds, were originally expected to complete in the year and are now expected to complete by the end of July 2025.

The surplus from disposals and staircasing was £75m. Staircasing during the year benefitted from a targeted marketing campaign, the learnings from which will feed into other Peabody non-core asset disposals. In November 2024 we completed the sale of a portfolio of non-core shared ownership properties which generated £44m of proceeds.

We expect our overall operating surplus for the year to be £220m (2024: £244m) with an operating margin of 21% (2024: 23%).

Financing costs increased by £6m to £182m. This reflects an increased level of borrowing during the year which funded our ongoing development programme, and the prevailing elevated Interest rates. We continue to remain compliant with all banking covenants, with our performance for the year maintaining substantial headroom over required levels of interest cover.

Peabody’s balance sheet remains strong with fixed assets of over £12bn and a low level of gearing at just over 40%.

Looking after residents’ homes

During the year we spent £430m looking after residents’ homes. This included £231m of capital expenditure, with £157m invested in improvements and cyclical work, £44m spent on building safety works as we continue our remediation programme, and £30m on energy efficiency measures, utilising £15m of funding from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund Wave 2 and matching it with our own funding. Over 80% of our homes are now rated EPC C or above. We spent a further £199m on maintenance and responsive repairs including on providing new local repairs teams on estates.

Performance, priorities and positive impact

Our half-year 24-25 Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) show a small improvement of around 1% across a range of areas when compared to the prior year. Satisfaction on the overall service provided by Peabody is up to 58.7%, satisfaction with Peabody making a positive contribution to the neighbourhood is at 60.6% and repairs satisfaction is up to 64%.

We continue to measure TSMs each month and hope to report further progress reflecting our commitment to improving services for residents. We recently introduced new contractual arrangements for repairs to support our locally focused approach to service delivery.

During the period we’ve published several reports on our performance, priorities and our positive impact. Our new Group Strategy sets out our plan for the next three years and is focused on improvement.

New homes, development and sales

We want to support the government in tackling the lack of housing in London and the South-East, providing new social homes where we can. We use our own balance sheet but are also seeking new and innovative ways to support the development of new homes and communities. We recognise that the solution cannot come just from funding new development from our own balance sheet.

We invested £333m in our new homes programme over the last 12 months, delivering 1,010 new homes. The tenure mix of these new homes was as follows:

Social Rent – 224
Affordable Rent – 87
London Affordable Rent – 315
London Living Rent – 34
Shared Ownership – 213
Open Market Sale - 137

We started on site with 302 new homes during the year, continuing to do what we can to tackle the affordable housing supply challenges in London and the South East. But we also have continued to carefully manage our development programme, maintaining an appropriate level of commitment when faced with a challenging financial environment. We currently have 6,145 homes on-site including joint ventures at various stages of construction.

Wherever possible when building homes for open market sale we seek to manage risk by selling in advance of the homes being completed. The level of completed homes for outright sale which have remained unsold for over three months is shown below:

	Reserved/Exchanged	Available	Total
Over six months	13	32	45
Between three to six months	6	51	57

The total sales income for unsold units over 6 months old is just over £9m.

Liquidity

We continue to retain strong access to liquidity with over £1.1bn of cash and undrawn facilities available. Our gearing continues to be relatively low when compared to peers and 73% of our borrowing is on a fixed rate basis. We have over 41,000 properties not currently utilised as loan security.

Ratings and certification

We are rated G1, V2 by the Regulator of Social Housing, and have yet to be allocated a consumer standard rating. We are rated A3 (stable outlook) by Moody’s and A- (negative outlook) by S&P, we secured an A (stable outlook) rating from Fitch during the year.

Ian McDermott, Peabody Chief Executive said “This has been another year of improvement and higher investment to support our top priority of looking after residents’ homes. We’re seeing positive change, but we know there is much more to do. We’re focused on delivering better services for residents, being better together for colleagues, and providing better homes and places for the long-term.

“Over the next three years, residents will see our services become more reliable – with fewer issues, quicker fixes, and clearer communication. We’ll equip our teams with better tools and training, simplify how we work and embed a local approach throughout the organisation.

“While we started fewer new homes this year, we’re acutely aware of the overcrowding and homelessness challenges in London. We want to do what we can to support the delivery of new homes and regeneration in and around the capital. We welcome the measures announced in the spending review which show strong backing and support for the sector from government. Pledges around long-term rents, remediation support and new funding are a positive and welcome change which will help build our capacity to invest.”