Colin Godfrey0:12
Hello, well I'm Colin Godfrey, CEO of Tritax Big Box REIT, founder of the business which we IPO'd in December 2013. We are the UK's leading logistics property platform, formed of the largest investment platform of over 40 million square feet let to high quality customers on long leases. We also control the UK's largest logistics-focused land development platform, largely held under capital efficient option agreements, and the assets that we own are mission critical to our blue chip clients, underpinning their supply chains.
So our objective is to deliver low-risk, income-oriented total returns for our shareholders, and we look to provide transparent, high quality, and resilient quarterly progressive dividends for our shareholders.
So we generate resilient income from high quality clients on long-term leases, and our weighted average unexpired lease term is around 10 years. We've also had a 10-year track record of 100% rent collection even during COVID, and we've had no voids in the initial 10-year life of the company. So the investment portfolio underpins the quality of our income, and we enhance this through active development to a maximum of 10% of our gross asset value, and this helps to provide attractive returns but also renews and modernizes the quality of our investment portfolio.
So we have a strong balance sheet, reflecting a low level of gearing at around 30%, and with no near-term refinancings. Most of our debt is fixed or subject to interest rate caps which provide protection to growth in interest rates, and that's insulated as well against the rapid increase in the cost of debt, but also provides us with the capacity and flexibility to continue to fund our strategy.
There are three really clear growth drivers for our business. The first one is already embedded within our business. For instance, we have done pre-leases to new clients, we're in the process of constructing those buildings, and yet those leases have yet to commence and so therefore they've yet to become income producing. There are also opportunities within our business to capture significant rental growth over time, and that's because our buildings are let at a lower rental value than the market level, and we call that the reversion, and currently that's sitting at around about 26%. So over the course of the next five years we should capture the vast majority of that increase. And secondly, I point to our development portfolio. This is the UK's largest logistics-focused land platform and it has significant value opportunity embedded within it. We are currently delivering in excess of a 7% yield on cost, and obviously as I mentioned earlier, it has the potential to renew the portfolio over time with best-in-class modern buildings. And we have the opportunity to deliver value implicitly within the portfolio through investment, acquisitions, and disposals, active asset management, and we're looking at exploring ways in which we can deliver further value for our shareholders through near-term adjacencies such as for instance data centers, which are highly attractive at the current time.
Well, it's been a challenging two years, but we've continued to deliver attractive levels of income growth and delivered against our strategy. So we believe the market's at an inflection point, with vacancy starting to fall, occupier interest is increasing, and development starts are reducing. So that's positive for future rental growth, noting that vacancy is now down to 5.3% in the UK and rental growth is running at around about 4%, and investment volumes are picking up, indicating positive momentum against the backdrop of reducing inflation and reducing interest rates, which bodes well for potential improvement in capital values. So looking at the long-term view, we believe that our market is in its infancy. There are strong structural tailwinds that we believe will deliver value in the longer term. We believe that UK logistics is the most attractive sector in commercial property, and we're really excited about the prospects for our business over the next few years.
