Primary Health Properties (PHP) has reported strong rental growth in Q1 on top of “excellent progress” following its £1.79bn Assura takeover, with results that represent 30 years of fully covered and unbroken dividend growth.
Mark Davies, PHP chief executive
The company boosted its rent roll with an extra £3m of income generated in the first quarter of the year following 199 completed reviews, it announced in a trading update ahead of its annual general meeting.
This represents a total increase of around 6% over the previous rent of £54m. PHP said it was pleased with the rental performance of all parts of its enlarged business, with UK primary care up 2.9%, private hospitals up 3.7% and Ireland up 4.4%.
PHP’s annualised contracted rent roll now stands at £345m, up from £342m in 2025.
PHP acquired rival healthcare REIT Assura last year in a £1.79bn deal. Since then, PHP has delivered £7.8m of annualised cost saving synergies, which represents 87% of its £9m target.
The deal, however, increased PHP’s leverage and it has the highest LTV in the sector, at 57%, according to Property Week analysis.
Mark Davies, chief executive of PHP, said: “We have continued to make excellent progress on the delivery of the post Assura combination objectives, since we announced PHP’s latest results in March. These include reducing leverage back to our target range of 40% to 50%, net debt/EBITDA below 9.5x, delivering £9m of annualised cost synergies and integrating the two businesses, all of which we expect to complete ahead of schedule.”
Since PHP’s blockbuster takeover of Assura, the company has also made progress in establishing a new vehicle for its private hospitals portfolio. PHP is also close to completing the transfer of £103m of assets into its existing primary care joint venture.
PHP’s second quarterly interim dividend of 1.825p per ordinary share will be paid on 8 May. It will be paid by way of a property income distribution of 1.325p and normal dividend of 0.5p. The dividend is equivalent to 7.3p on an annualised basis, representing a 2.8% increase over dividends paid in 2025, and marks the 30th year of consecutive dividend growth for PHP.
Andrew Saunders, equity analyst at Shore Capital, said: “PHP looks well positioned, in our view, to continue to deliver attractive organic rental growth supported by the benefits of asset management, development, increased scale and operational synergies.
“We continue to forecast the company benefiting from earnings accretion in FY26F, further supporting an attractive dividend yield – currently 7.8% in FY26F.”
Please visit:
Our Sponsor