Rents and property values may be still heading north, but British Land (BLND) has resisted the temptation to boost its gearing, preferring as far as possible to fund its development arm through recycling its assets. So while expenditure on refurbishment and acquisitions in the first half swallowed up £489m, this was largely offset by £431m of disposals. As a result, net debt was barely changed at £3.6bn, while the loan-to-value ratio of debt as a percentage of the portfolio value, fell slightly to 34 per cent.
Headline profits were lower, but that is mostly because the valuation uplift on the portfolio at £397m was down from £511m a year earlier. Even so, adjusted net asset value grew by 7.5 per cent, while chief financial officer Lucinda Bell's preferred metric of total accounting return, which adds dividends paid onto adjusted NAV, rose by 9.1 per cent.