Can Capital&Centric keep its cool amid red hot growth? 

Co-founder Tim Heatley is keen to ensure his company remains a disruptor and maintains its edge as it seeks to make a mark in all corners of the country backed by £860m of institutional firepower.

Capital&Centric, co-founded by Heatley and Adam Higgins in 2011, is seen as one of the more in-vogue developers in the country. Much of this is put down to how it differentiates itself from others. The marketing team refers to homes as gaffs, the directors wouldn’t be caught dead wearing suits, and the business has embraced the power of social media in a way few others have. They are seen as cool, or at least cool for a property development company.

But staying cool is hard, especially when you get big. Capital&Centric’s charm is in its non-corporate nature and its founders’ growing collection of Adidas Gazelles. So does the recently established, £860m partnership with institutional investment fund Swiss Life risk softening C&C’s edge?

“We have always been a bit renegade and a little bit outside the establishment,” Heatley said. “So now that we’re kind of in the establishment it is [about] how we then don’t just all of a sudden start to comply and don’t become mediocre and don’t become safe.”

It is perhaps telling that one of the first things Heatley did after the deal was signed was drive down the street of his very first property investment; a terraced house in Salford that he bought for £65,000 and flipped for more than double that.

“I think I needed to sort of like help it to sink in,” he said.

Tim Heatley admits to being obsessed with detail. Credit: via Font Comms

An eye for detail

How a business remains true to its values as it scales is one of the trickiest questions a founder will ever ponder.

For Heatley, it is about sticking to what has got the business from survival mode in its early days to long-term certainty – much of which has been about obsessing over design detail.

“We think the external lights colour in the landscaping has to match the internal light, otherwise you’ve got a different warmth of light level outside and inside the building,” he said by way of example.

“You could ring one of my development colleagues and ask what Kelvin value a light bulb should be and they will tell you the answer.

“People go ‘why are Captial&Centric buildings nice’, it’s because we think about shit like that.”

When I ask him if he thinks he is a control freak he laughs and says he prefers to call it passion.

It not just design that has got C&C to the point a global institutional investor trusts Heatley and his team with close to £1bn. Much of the success has been about place branding, curation, and communication, Heatley said.

The language the developer uses is distinctive and undoubtedly aimed at a younger, trendier audience who might be turned off by the stuffier marketing techniques of more corporate rivals.

“Say goodbye to bland apartments with rubbish furniture and dodgy landlords,” C&C’s website declares about its Kampus development in Manchester city centre.

Heatley thinks others are starting to take notice of what C&C has done and are attempting to emulate it.

“What’s dead nice is I think we have mini versions of us that have a bit of our style, or a bit of our approach, a bit of our language.”

This is a compliment but also a reason to be wary.

In Newcastle-under-Lyme, C&C is converting a former car park into homes. Credit: via Font Comms

“I’m always thinking of who’s coming up in the lift, who are the next Capital&Centrics [that] are good and younger and cooler and edgier. That always kind of keeps me awake at night,” Heatley said.

The The Impact & Places Partnership with Swiss Life and Homes England will see the funder invest in new-build schemes developed by Capital&Centric over the next decade.

It marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for the developer, which is already spreading out across the country at a rapid pace to places including Middlesborough, Crewe, Buxton, Plymouth, Doncaster, Hull, Stoke, Cambridge, Sheffield, Newcastle-under-Lyme, and Rotherham.

The firm has come a long way from terraced houses in Salford one factor that could potentially help the business go event further in the years ahead is having the ear of former Greater Manchester Mayor and soon-to-be Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

Heatley and the PM-in-waiting are friends and have worked together closely over the years on the GM Mayor’s Charity, which Heatley chairs. He was also one of few, if not the only, developers in the room when Burnham made his first big speech following his by-election victory in Makerfield.

“What struck me about Andy’s speech was how much of it reflected the way we’ve been working for years,” Heatley said. “It felt like a blueprint for the kind of regeneration we’ve already delivered across Greater Manchester.”

Burnham’s eagerness to see the public and private sectors work together to deliver housing and revamp high streets “would be good not just for Capital&Centric, but for the country as a whole”, Heatley added.

Weir Mill in Stockport is among C&C’s partnerships with the public sector. Credit: via Font Comms

A point to prove

C&C wants to bring its public-sector-pleasing brand of development to all corners of the UK.

“We want to be in London [and] we are not in Scotland or Wales, which is weird,” Heatley said.

While presenting an obvious opportunity to scale, the Swiss Life partnership was also vindication for Heatley, who admits he is driven by the desire to prove wrong those who doubt him and his company.

“I’m definitely not everyone’s cup of tea,” said Heatley, who describes himself as a “Northern oik”.

“One of my motivations is the haters, the green-eyed monsters, the naysayers.”

Some roll their eyes when Capital&Centric claims it spends £4m a week on regeneration. Others disparage them for their reliance on public sector money.

An example of this is in Stockport, where C&C is developing Weir Mill. Having acquired the site, the local council loaned C&C £60m to build the scheme.

“We always spend our money first,” Heatley said by way of defence. “If Adam (Higgins, Heatley’s business partner] had £4m [to spend a week] I think we’d be doing something else entirely.

“I get [the criticism] because it must be irritating. We probably inadvertently make it look easy, and it’s not.”

Capital&Centric is not the only developer to rely on the public sector to get its schemes. The option is open to others but will require them taking a longer-term view on returns, Heatley said.

“You have to be way more patient,” he said, referring to the seven-year investment horizon Capital&Centric typically takes.

Farnworth Green, a 97-home residential project delivered in a particularly viability-challenged part of Bolton, is a good example of the approach, Heatley said.

“It doesn’t make sense economically on paper, but occupancy is dead high, demand is really high, rental growth is really good, and so it makes profit, but over several years, not at day one,” Heatley said.

“I think people are impatient. When you open a restaurant, the restauranteur doesn’t walk out and go, ‘where’s my for a profit?’ [on day one].”

Farnworth was billed by Capital&Centric as a “reboot” for the area and also demonstrated the company’s ability to tap into the issues impacting local people. “We’re being picky about who we let the commercial spaces to – we don’t want to fill it with vape shops and barbers” the firm said last year.

The perfect foil

Adam Higgins [left] is the less public face of the business. Credit: via Font Comms

“I’ll be out there saying I think that’s shit, I think that’s good, and I think we’re better,” he said.

“It’s passion. It probably gets misinterpreted as ego or whatever else, there’s a bit of that, I’m sure.”

Heatley and Higgins are very different characters. Increasingly, the former has become the public face of the brand while Higgins prefers to operate in the shadows, keeping things ticking over.

“Adam is far more talented than I am in many ways,” Heatley said. “He is one of the smartest blokes I’ve met, massive brain, and he’s able to harness me a bit.”

Heatley remembers the two talking for hours after work in the early days about how to overcome barriers and survive the bumps in the road that have done for many before them.

Fifteen years on, Capital&Centric is growing at a rate Heatley never thought possible. So much so that he has recently started strength training to combat the painful effects of sitting in a car for hours on end travelling between sites across the country.

“There aren’t many development companies from the North or from Manchester that have become institutional in scale and footprint so we are really proud of that,” he said.

“I feel like we’ve just managed to get to the top of the hill, and we can now start to enjoy free-wheeling a bit.”

The likelihood of Capital&Centric taking its foot off the gas seems low. That would mean relinquishing control of an ethos that has been carefully honed over 15 years. Something Heatley – the hot head, the oik, the control freak – is unprepared to do.