#Liverpool buy to let investments

[zunikh]

Discover the highest-yielding areas for buy-to-let property in the UK with insights from Zunikh. Explore cities like Liverpool, Manchester, and Nottingham, offering strong rental yields and vibrant markets. Maximise your returns with our expert advice and tailored strategies. Contact Zunikh today for prosperous investment opportunities.

[liverpoolpropertyinvestments]

Liverpool Property Investments UK finds and compares the best high-yield property opportunities for investors.

Liverpool Property Investments UK specializes in finding the best property investment opportunities in Liverpool for investors. Whether you're looking for buy-to-let properties, off-plan developments, or high-yield apartments, we do the hard work for you. Our team analyzes the local market, compares the top developments, and delivers tailored recommendations based on your specific investment goals.

Name: Liverpool Property Investments Address: Seymour Terrace, Seymour St, Liverpool L3 5PE, UK Phone: 0161 524 5367 Website: https://liverpoolpropertyinvestmentuk.co.uk/

[christianlanden]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[lindaboggers]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[georgeschuylerfinance]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[saltygardenerlove]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[bertrhert]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[markeduke]

All About Harmonizing Countryside Charm with Modern Living Comforts

At Prospect Homes Burscough, our commitment lies in crafting superior residences that seamlessly blend aesthetic appeal with everyday comfort. Enter Bridgemere Burscough, an enclave of executive homes boasting three and four bedrooms, nestled within the serene West Lancashire countryside. Positioned adjacent to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and embraced by verdant farmland on the outskirts of Burscough, Bridgemere exudes a vibrant ecosystem teeming with local wildlife. Here, residents are greeted by the tranquil ambiance punctuated by the clucking of moorhens, the melodious chirping of songbirds, and the gentle hum of passing barges.

Despite its idyllic rural setting, new builds burscough maintains convenient connectivity to urban amenities such as shops, schools, and major roadways, epitomizing modern living at its finest. New homes burscough offers the allure of countryside living without compromising proximity to essential services, delivering the best of both worlds to its residents.

Bridgemere new build homes burscough presents an unparalleled opportunity for those yearning for a harmonious blend of natural splendor and contemporary convenience. Let’s delve into what renders this community an appealing haven for the owners of new homes in burscough.

Nestled amidst the West Lancashire countryside, Bridgemere, property for sale burscough offers residents breathtaking vistas and an unparalleled sense of tranquility. Homes to buy burscough Surrounded by lush greenery and rolling landscapes, Homes to buy in burscough serves as an escape from the hustle and bustle of urban life, allowing residents to immerse themselves in the beauty of nature.

The proximity to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the abundance of farmland create a haven for diverse wildlife, from vibrant butterflies fluttering in the breeze to graceful swans gliding across the water. House for sale in burscough Bridgemere fosters an environment where nature enthusiasts can revel in the wonders of the natural world.

Prospect Homes Burscough prides itself on crafting residences that seamlessly integrate with their natural surroundings while providing modern comforts. The new builds in Burscough, including those in Bridgemere, feature contemporary architecture, spacious interiors, and high-quality finishes, ensuring a luxurious living experience for residents.

Thoughtful community planning lies at the heart of Bridgemere’s design, fostering a sense of belonging while respecting individual privacy. Well-manicured green spaces, walking trails, and communal areas encourage neighborly interaction, cultivating a tight-knit community atmosphere.

Despite its rural setting, Bridgemere offers easy access to essential amenities, including shops, schools, healthcare facilities, and recreational areas. For those seeking property for sale in Burscough or new homes to buy, Bridgemere presents an enticing option, blending countryside serenity with modern convenience.

Situated in close proximity to major roadways such as the M6 and M58 motorways, Bridgemere ensures seamless connectivity to nearby towns and cities homes for sale Ormskirk, Liverpool, and Manchester. Commuters can effortlessly access urban centers for work or leisure, enhancing the community’s appeal.

With a selection of three and four-bedroom homes, Bridgemere caters to families of all sizes. The community is designed with families in mind, offering safe play areas, schools, and recreational facilities nearby, fostering a family-friendly environment.

The combination of Bridgemere’s idyllic location, modern amenities, and strong community appeal makes it an attractive investment opportunity. Whether as a primary residence or a rental property, homes in Bridgemere are poised for long-term value appreciation.

Above all, Bridgemere offers residents a superior quality of life, characterized by clean air, tranquil surroundings, and a sense of belonging within a close-knit community. Bridgemere epitomizes the perfect fusion of countryside charm and modern living, offering residents an exceptional lifestyle where nature meets luxury in Burscough and Ormskirk. For those considering homes for sale in Ormskirk or houses in Ormskirk to buy, Bridgemere’s allure extends to those seeking a tranquil yet connected living experience.

Bridgemere epitomizes the perfect fusion of countryside charm and modern living, offering residents an exceptional lifestyle where nature meets luxury in Burscough and Ormskirk. For those considering homes for sale in Ormskirk or properties to buy in Ormskirk, Bridgemere presents an enticing option. With its idyllic surroundings, modern amenities, and strong sense of community, Bridgemere promises a superior quality of life for homeowners. Whether seeking a peaceful retreat from city life or an investment opportunity with long-term value appreciation, Bridgemere by Prospect Homes Burscough stands as a testament to excellence in residential living. Experience the best of both worlds at Bridgemere, where every moment is an opportunity to embrace the tranquility of the countryside while enjoying the conveniences of modern living.

[Related site1] [Related site2]

[craigmyersfinance]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[dreamilykawaiibasement]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[brianway23]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[movieblogreview]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[yourfinancestu]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[edwardredwould]

 Build to Rent: Opportunities in a Growing Sector

The build to rent (BTR) sector is growing rapidly across the country, with soaring demand from both investors and residents for high-quality rental developments in cities as well as suburban areas.

This roundtable brought together developers, public sector representatives and property experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges for the sector in the North West.

The changing face of build to rent

Jessica Turner: We’ve seen a big rise in suburban build to rent schemes. We have a contract with Peel which is for their suburban build to rent arm Letta. We worked with them on a scheme of nearly 100 single family homes and that had 98.9 per cent let off plan and moved in on the day of practical completion. We’re seeing a big growth in single family schemes. Families want to live somewhere that is stable and secure where they can stay for the long term. Sometimes with private landlords, they can be worried about the property being sold and having to move out once they’re settled in the local area with children in school. 

The incoming regulation is going to continue that professionalisation that we've already seen in the market. Landlords with small portfolios are already stepping back from it because they are seeing it as having more risk involved. From a tenants perspective, it will give more security knowing that their home is theirs, they are allowed to have pets and the landlord can't just issue a no fault eviction.

Michelle Brooks: It’s a conscious decision that the government is making to professionalise that service and we are seeing investors step in. That does make it difficult for smaller landlords and developers but that professionalisation of the industry is a trend that is going to continue. The offer is better, which is allowing rents to be pushed a little bit higher.

In Liverpool, there is still a ceiling to those rents in comparison to Manchester, but again the more investment we get, the more opportunities there will be for development. Salford is a great example, I worked there twenty years ago and there was very little there but the BBC moving in led to more investment and others following, so it's a question of how do we bring that to Liverpool. 

Adam Ross: I believe we will see Liverpool rents heading in the same direction as Manchester, otherwise we wouldn't be building here. At the moment, we've got 530 apartments that we're actively building in Liverpool and another 500 in planning. It's about following the investment, Peel are doing the Liverpool Waters project and we're buying as many plots as we can in and around that development. We know once that completes, it will bring a lot to the area with commercial spaces as well as places to live, and it's going to positively impact the area around it. We're probably five or six years behind where Manchester is but if there are enough developers, we will catch up eventually.

Opportunities in the market

Sophie Bevan: There are lots of exciting things coming forward in Liverpool with a strong pipeline of residential projects. We’ve recently assembled a multi-disciplinary team to work on Festival Gardens, and we're now refining our objectives for the site. The likelihood is we'll be going out in the autumn to get a developer for that site. It's really exciting because this is traditionally a semi-suburban location but it's got the opportunity to reinvent what that edge of city centre living opportunity can be now with an emphasis on sustainability, waterside living and greater transport connectivity.

We're expecting to see some build-to-rent included in the offering, possibly more of the single family offering. We've also had interest from later living providers. We want to see a genuinely diverse mixed community there that is place-based and innovative from the developers coming forward, really capitalising on the opportunity it presents.

Ross: We launched a development of 62 units on Naylor Street in Liverpool recently which sold in two weeks so the demand on the investment front is there. We also handed over a scheme in Crosby in January this year. That is 27 build to rent apartments and they’re all rented out now. We know there is a housing shortage in Crosby and there is a need for that type of development in the area. The demand for tenants wanting to live somewhere that is slightly out of the city centre but easily commutable is there so we saw it as a great opportunity. As soon as we finished, it was fully rented out in 3 weeks.

The demographic has completely changed from a tenant perspective. We used to just be targeting young professionals living and working in the city but that's changed now. With planning requirements, we're having to add in a lot more three bedroom apartments and we can no longer get approval for studios in some of the developments. We're targeting different tenants depending on where the development is.

Our development at Crosby for example is very family-orientated and we have another development on Commercial Road in Liverpool where, due to the new space standards coming into place, we've had to build much larger apartments than we would've done previously to create space for families.

Michael Allison: At Roma Finance, we lend across the UK and a big trend we're seeing is people creating homes where there once weren’t homes in town centres. In the North West, you've got examples like St Helens and Huyton where there is investment going in and infrastructure and transport, but the high street is actually changing from being a place of retail to leisure and living. There are banks closing across the UK in really prominent positions on high streets. We've seen projects using the ground floor of those units for artisan coffee shops then creating residential space above. There is so much opportunity for residential in town centres, and it brings that footfall back onto the high street.

Residential has got to go hand in hand with other investment. If you think about Prescot, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse has opened up opportunities for them. We're also doing transactions in Morecambe which isn't typically somewhere you would invest in because it's a seaside town but the plans for the Eden Project nearby are creating investment opportunities.

Sam Hyde: Crewe is a good example of that, I was going to invest in Crewe because there are lots of opportunities coming up for residential but people don't really want to live there because it hasn't had the investment into the commercial and leisure side, and since HS2 pulled out, it's been like a ghost town in terms of investment. As I'm fairly new to the game, the important bit for me is the exit, so I'm going for the safe bets, investing in places like Prestbury where there is a lot of wealth and if something comes on the market, it sells quickly. We've bought some land that has planning [in Prestbury] and we know the development should go quickly. We’ve worked with Roma to fund some of our developments. It can be daunting taking out property finance but Roma really worked with us from start to finish through the good and bad. We worked together on an Urmston development, where we completely stripped a property back to its bones and recreated it, turning it into something special. We exited with £100,000 surplus profit retained in the property.

Sustainability and social impact

Peter Reavey: On the Millers Quay scheme at Wirral Waters, we have roughly 75 per cent of our workforce that have come through some sort of work placement or local employment. We've worked very closely with the council, Wirral Met College and our client to make sure we're offering as much as we can within a very close radius of the site. We've worked with young people coming in to upskill them. The college is right on our doorstep so early on, we looked at all the different trades we would need and put the college in contact with the supply chain, and that has been very successful.

The M&E [mechanical and electrical services] will be very sustainable on the Millers Quay scheme with heat recovery and power systems. It's great to have sustainability elements but it's all driven by cost. Most of the apartments over there will be category B in relation to their energy rating. We've tried to work with designers to ensure we're as sustainable as we can be. We like to be involved early on in the process so we can focus the design team as to what's affordable. It's great having all these aspirations but they're not affordable in a challenging market, with hyperinflation in construction costs over the last four or five years.

People think the costs are going to take a nosedive but I don't see that. The industry has got used to paying a certain price. In Liverpool, the construction cost per square foot is the same as Manchester but if the rents aren't there and the funders don't see a return, it doesn't stack up. The cost of borrowing has also increased so all of those things have created a difficult market at the moment.

Turner: From a tenant perspective, electric charging is definitely higher on the agenda than it was five years ago. In more suburban schemes, if they come with EV charging, it's allowing rents to be inflated because people know the cost of their bills is going to be cheaper than if they were renting an older property. There was some recent research from Rightmove that said that people are now looking at the sustainability of a property when they're looking to rent, not just the cost, which is really interesting from an operational management perspective.

Allison: On new developments, sustainability elements like EV chargers and bike storage are included automatically now but the developer has to make it stack. The developers have got to manage the margin so if the incentive isn't there to do more, the question is will people do it?

Matt Floyd: We've taken the decision to be proactive with sustainability rather than waiting to be instructed by policy. We've derived a net zero strategy where we've cherry picked some key elements from different bodies that monitor building performance. We've got a fund level strategy that applies to a lot of our developments so we know what we can achieve and what we need to build into our models from day one.

It's the same thing in terms of social impact in terms of housing. We want to be earlier on in the cycle. If we're forward funding a development, we often find it's gone through planning and the plans are more fixed so it's harder to influence the design whereas if we pick up a land parcel, we can take it through the whole way.

One of the key investment metrics we look at is what that building is going to do for the community and what the community needs. That can include key worker allocation and lower rents, plus public-facing amenities that serve the local community.

If we develop ourselves, we can curate the design and the specification to enable us to voluntarily offer up some key worker accommodation. That isn't just a blanket 20 per cent off the market rent for 20 per cent of the units, there is a detailed model behind it that looks at your net income position and therefore we look at what truly affordable looks like. It's a unique assessment so we can start to play with the metrics to see what locally makes an impact.

We did that on a building we launched last summer in Manchester, Poplin, which has been hugely successful and filled up very quickly. Some of the key workers there are teachers down the road and they've been able to move back into the city and save a meaningful amount.

Creating communities

Turner: If there are different tenures within a new build development, such as rental, shared ownership and open market sale, it allows a family to stay in one location and move through, so it helps create a community feel.

Bevan: It’s important to have genuine diversity in the housing market for the city so we can offer something for everyone, whether it’s family homes in the rental sector or homes for key workers. I don't think [homes for key workers] was considered as a market area maybe five or ten years ago. We need to make sure we are more diverse than perhaps we have been in previous years.The rental market is evolving as the student accommodation market has. If you look at where that was ten years ago, it was completely different.

We have student housing around certain areas of the city where the neighbours aren't so keen on that so by creating more student accommodation in the right areas that is well-managed and well-provisioned, we can release housing for families, so it's a win-win.

The later living sector is really interesting. How do we provide the right facilities for an ageing population? We are going to struggle if we don't get it right with mixed communities. If your building is attracting tenants of an older age profile, there might need to be different services provided, which can be very discreet but provide a bit more support should they need it.

[benjaminhugo]

Why Should You Try Vintage Clothing

We live in a time when fast fashion is the main trend; however, there’s a magical feeling of something different when choosing vintage clothing. These ageless pieces not only give you a unique way to show off your style, but they also convey a rich history and a strong support for being green. You may be a fashionista or you may just appreciate the finer things in life, but if you have the chance to enter the world of retro clothing, you will see that it will take you to a whole new sensory level that will impress you forever.

Unique Style Statement

Vintage clothing stands out. Every single garment is a true piece of art and it is a time capsule from the past that allows us to see the clothing fashion trends of old times. Some of my favourite items are vintage Adidas tracksuits and Barbour Jackets, which help me to create a completely unique look. No more of the embarrassment when someone in the event is wearing the same outfit you are. As a vintage lover, your look is a one-of-a-kind creation that reflects your personality and the legacy of your garments.

Exceptional Quality

The other thing that will impress you about vintage clothing is its quality. Clothes have been designed to last, constructed with care and durable materials. These items can range from a sturdy vintage wax jacket to a durable Carhartt jacket. They are designed for long-term use. Vintage is such a choice because you are putting your money on a true piece of fashion history that is surely of high quality.

Sustainable Fashion Choice

The costs of fast fashion are not only expensive in numbers but also in the environment. The choice of vintage is a fashionable way of saving a bit of this planet. You do this by wearing and caring for the vintage clothing again, decreasing the waste and lowering the demand for new clothing production. It's a choice that also loves the planet as it aims to be environmentally friendly.

Historical Connection

All vintage things are history in themselves. Vintage football shirt or retro rugby shirt take you back to the past in a symbolic way. Which is more understandable and convincing. It`s like putting a wild card at your disposal, whether it belongs to a champion of the sports or a time of a fashion that seems to have taken the whole era by storm. With the interconnection, your wardrobe is not limited to a list of items; rather, it has a story behind each of them, making you like fashion more.

Value for Money

Although vintage clothes can vary greatly in price, the value one can acquire by adding them to their wardrobe is incomparable. It’s not just about purchasing clothes but also about buying a piece of art, history, and quality in the fashion industry, which is rarely paralleled in modern fashion clothing. Additionally, vintage items may be even more expensive in the future, so they mean a purchase and a long-term investment.

Wide Variety

Vintage is like a rainbow of clothing styles in all shapes and sizes. From vintage knitwear to vintage sportswear, the choices are many. At the thrift shop, you find things from different eras, designers, and styles all in one location. Towns like Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Cardiff are among the cities that present incredible second-hand outlets for vintage clothes, serving as hunting areas for fans to visit.

Conclusion

Although the road to embracing vintage clothing may be full of ups and downs, the benefits from this journey is guaranteed to make your personal style more interesting, your history closer, and the environment cleaner.

At https://headlock.co/, we strive to celebrate the essence of the vintage style and the unique beauty of the bygone era through our carefully selected vintage pieces that will add an irresistible yet timeless touch to your wardrobe.

Let us together jump into the realm of vintage wear and witness the thrill of wearing apparel that has weathered the test of time, each with its own narrative to share.

[posthavenblog]

All About Harmonizing Countryside Charm with Modern Living Comforts

At Prospect Homes Burscough, our commitment lies in crafting superior residences that seamlessly blend aesthetic appeal with everyday comfort. Enter Bridgemere Burscough, an enclave of executive homes boasting three and four bedrooms, nestled within the serene West Lancashire countryside. Positioned adjacent to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and embraced by verdant farmland on the outskirts of Burscough, Bridgemere exudes a vibrant ecosystem teeming with local wildlife. Here, residents are greeted by the tranquil ambiance punctuated by the clucking of moorhens, the melodious chirping of songbirds, and the gentle hum of passing barges.

Despite its idyllic rural setting, new builds burscough maintains convenient connectivity to urban amenities such as shops, schools, and major roadways, epitomizing modern living at its finest. New homes burscough offers the allure of countryside living without compromising proximity to essential services, delivering the best of both worlds to its residents.

Bridgemere new build homes burscough presents an unparalleled opportunity for those yearning for a harmonious blend of natural splendor and contemporary convenience. Let's delve into what renders this community an appealing haven for new homes in burscough.

Nestled amidst the West Lancashire countryside, Bridgemere, property for sale burscough offers residents breathtaking vistas and an unparalleled sense of tranquility. Homes to buy burscough Surrounded by lush greenery and rolling landscapes, Homes to buy in burscough serves as an escape from the hustle and bustle of urban life, allowing residents to immerse themselves in the beauty of nature.

The proximity to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the abundance of farmland create a haven for diverse wildlife, from vibrant butterflies fluttering in the breeze to graceful swans gliding across the water. House for sale in burscough Bridgemere fosters an environment where nature enthusiasts can revel in the wonders of the natural world.

Prospect Homes Burscough prides itself on crafting residences that seamlessly integrate with their natural surroundings while providing modern comforts. The new builds in Burscough, including those in Bridgemere, feature contemporary architecture, spacious interiors, and high-quality finishes, ensuring a luxurious living experience for residents.

Thoughtful community planning lies at the heart of Bridgemere's design, fostering a sense of belonging while respecting individual privacy. Well-manicured green spaces, walking trails, and communal areas encourage neighborly interaction, cultivating a tight-knit community atmosphere.

Despite its rural setting, Bridgemere offers easy access to essential amenities, including shops, schools, healthcare facilities, and recreational areas. For those seeking property for sale in Burscough or new homes to buy, Bridgemere presents an enticing option, blending countryside serenity with modern convenience.

Situated in close proximity to major roadways such as the M6 and M58 motorways, Bridgemere ensures seamless connectivity to nearby towns and cities homes for sale Ormskirk, Liverpool, and Manchester. Commuters can effortlessly access urban centers for work or leisure, enhancing the community's appeal.

With a selection of three and four-bedroom homes, Bridgemere caters to families of all sizes. The community is designed with families in mind, offering safe play areas, schools, and recreational facilities nearby, fostering a family-friendly environment.

The combination of Bridgemere's idyllic location, modern amenities, and strong community appeal makes it an attractive investment opportunity. Whether as a primary residence or a rental property, homes in Bridgemere are poised for long-term value appreciation.

Above all, Bridgemere offers residents a superior quality of life, characterized by clean air, tranquil surroundings, and a sense of belonging within a close-knit community. Bridgemere epitomizes the perfect fusion of countryside charm and modern living, offering residents an exceptional lifestyle where nature meets luxury in Burscough and Ormskirk. For those considering homes for sale in Ormskirk or houses in Ormskirk to buy, Bridgemere's allure extends to those seeking a tranquil yet connected living experience.

Bridgemere epitomizes the perfect fusion of countryside charm and modern living, offering residents an exceptional lifestyle where nature meets luxury in Burscough and Ormskirk. For those considering homes for sale in Ormskirk or properties to buy in Ormskirk, Bridgemere presents an enticing option. With its idyllic surroundings, modern amenities, and strong sense of community, Bridgemere promises a superior quality of life for homeowners. Whether seeking a peaceful retreat from city life or an investment opportunity with long-term value appreciation, Bridgemere by Prospect Homes Burscough stands as a testament to excellence in residential living. Experience the best of both worlds at Bridgemere, where every moment is an opportunity to embrace the tranquility of the countryside while enjoying the conveniences of modern living.