Operating and Financial Review

Objectives and strategy

British Land's primary objective is to produce superior, sustained and secure long-term shareholder returns from management of our chosen real estate activities and their financing.

Our strategy aims to capture superior total return through the high occupancy and rental growth which results from successfully building our business around customer needs. We seek to do this in a number of ways. Property sales and purchases adjust the market and sector mix of our property portfolio to best capture growth trends in customer demand. Within our selected markets we also recycle capital, buying and selling buildings to improve the appeal and growth prospects of our holdings. And we look to create more value from new development in areas where demand for the best new space is highest. Our occupancy and rental growth is further enhanced by active asset management to hone our buildings' customer appeal.

The importance of the investment markets which interlink with our occupier markets also dictates that adroit financial management, partnerships and deal-doing complement our property based strategies to capture and translate property returns most efficiently to our shareholders.

In executing these strategies our 'bedrock' disciplines are:

a focus on areas where we have or can build competitive advantage
clarity that our business success will come from serving customers well
a bias to high-quality assets, with long lease profiles and favourable demand and supply characteristics
strong integrated risk management skills – blending leasing, development, asset and liability risk into a single attractive and secure growth proposition for shareholders
a confident, entrepreneurial, performance-driven culture
particular regard for long-term income/cash flow growth
an appreciation of the importance of sustainability to our customers and other stakeholders in the built environment on which we operate.