MIPIM | Bankfoot APAM fights chaos with nimbleness
The development manager has no interest in being a sector specialist, recognising agility as an antidote to market volatility and eyeing projects across industrial, offices, and housing.
Speaking to Place North West at MIPIM, managing director Chris Moore and senior director Andy Day said their clients value Bankfoot APAM’s ability to pivot when the market demands it.
Asked whether the approach could lead to accusations of being a jack of all trades and a master of none, Moore, who runs Bankfoot APAM’s London office, said: “It is often horses for courses. We are specialist development managers and being sector agnostic allows us to be quite balanced in our strategy view.
“It allows us to not get stuck down a route. As we know, the markets are quite volatile, and [our approach] allows us to be agile.”
The multi-phase £200m Soapworks scheme in Salford is Bankfoot APAM’s biggest in the North West and provides an example of the firm’s ability to pivot.
The original plan involved refurbishing a disused office building but, when the regional office market took a nosedive in 2023, Bankfoot APAM changed tack.
The updated plans are 70,000 sq ft lighter on the office front, with affordable homes replacing a chunk of the previously planned workspace.
In all, the scheme will deliver 578 homes, 60,000 sq ft of office space, and a 12-storey car park.
If Bankfoot APAM – a joint venture formed in 2020 when Bankfoot and Catella-owned APAM joined forces – does have a speciality it is in repositioning assets, said Day, who runs the firm’s Manchester office.
Soapworks, which the business is developing for the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, is in many ways a typical Bankfoot APAM scheme; a distressed asset in need of a new lease of life.
Another recently delivered heavy retrofit scheme is Belgrave Lane in London, a 108,000 sq ft office development for investor Quadrum.
“We see a huge opportunity in repositioning existing buildings, fundamentally because of the challenges around delivery of new build,” said Day.
“[The retrofit market] is challenged but it also fits nicely into impactful investing as we go on this journey to green and improving buildings.”
The Soapworks scheme falls within the first of two key workstreams for Bankfoot APAM. Pillar one is a pure development management play for clients like the pension fund, for whom Bankfoot is also hoping to deliver 102 homes in Stalybridge, and CapitaLand. In Warrington, Bankfoot APAM has lodged plans to redevelop an industrial complex in Warrington into 295,000 sq ft of modern units for the Singaporean investor.
The second pillar is where Bankfoot APAM wishes to focus more of its time over the coming years. It will see the business co-invest up to 10% in a project or portfolio of schemes.
In the case of its £100m industrial repositioning strategy, which targets the refurbishment of units of around 100,000 sq ft, Bankfoot APAM could invest upto £10m, with the other £90m coming from its capital partners.
The opportunity in this space is huge, according to Moore.
“It’s very much something that could easily be £500m, it’s very scalable,” he said.
The buildings Bankfoot APAM is after for its nine-figure shed strategy fall into a very specific category.
“It’s very opportunity driven,” Day said. “Anything smaller than 30,000 sq ft or 40,000 sq ft, you just can’t do what you need to do efficiently to hit the returns that our capital partners would want. We also don’t want to go too big.”
“We’re finding within that world of 30,000 sq ft to 125,000 sq ft for a single shed, two at most, there is an awful lot of opportunities.”
Being active across various sectors means Bankfoot APAM is alive to the opportunities and challenges in each. Being able to pivot is key to the firm’s attractiveness to its partners but in the current market a change of tack is often aimed at delivering the least bad option rather than a project that will make out-sized returns.
“I don’t think there’s one development appraisal that we look at where it’s not challenged from a viability perspective but also from a planning perspective,” said Moore.
Bankfoot APAM’s aim, according to its two directors, is to minimise risk and uncertainty however it can. One way it is doing this is by using its in-house construction division Vantage as a means of controlling cost and delivery.
Another is sidestepping potential planning pitfalls entirely by being selective about the schemes the company takes on.
“We aim to focus on assets that maybe don’t have any major planning changes or implications,” Moore said.
“So we can basically strip out that 12 months of uncertainty that we’ve seen in a lot of schemes, which makes it all very efficient and all very streamlined to generate the returns.”
With market volatility here to stay, at least in the medium term, Bankfoot APAM plans to continue to look for opportunities to add value where others might not.
“I believe we’re excellent at what we do in our world, specialist development managers who are not sector driven,” Day said.
“It is working on complex stranded assets, buildings, or investments and dragging them through into something that is liquid and performs regardless of the sector.”
