Funding boost for £100m Oldham employment site

The North West Evergreen Fund has provided £12.5m towards a link road and infrastructure in Oldham designed to unlock nearly 720,000 sq ft of industrial space and 500 homes.

The road will provide access to Broadway Green, a £100m project off Broadway in Chadderton. Housebuilder Redrow is already on site delivering the first phase of 500 properties, with the first 100 due to complete next spring.

Along with the commercial space, which is expected to create around 2,000 jobs, Broadway Green also features a 25-acre park and has a development value of around £100m. The outline permission for the industrial space provides options for bespoke buildings of between 50,000 sq ft and 450,000 sq ft.

The link road will support the delivery of this industrial space by linking the site to Broadway and the wider motorway network.

The borrower is a joint venture between Foxdenton and Oldham Council; Foxdenton is made up of developer and contractor Seddon, and developer Grasscroft.

The loan is the second funding award that Broadway Green has secured; earlier this year, the road won £4.9m from the Government’s £5bn Housing Infrastructure Fund.

Evergreen uses European Regional Development Fund cash to enable urban development aimed at job creation and low carbon design in priority sites, and is underwritten by the European Investment Bank. The second round of the fund launched in 2015 with CBRE acting as the real estate advisor. Money from the repayment of these loans will be recycled back into the fund to finance new projects.

Eamonn Boylan, chief executive of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and director of the Evergreen Fund, said: “We are very pleased to be investing in site specific infrastructure, crucial to the ongoing success of this strategically important development site.”

Will Church, senior director, in CBRE’s investment advisory team added: “Despite underlying concerns relating to the economy, we are seeing more applications to the Evergreen Fund than ever before with Developers still showing appetite to invest into good schemes. We are delighted to be able to support projects such as this, which will ultimately create employment space so critical to the SME sector, the life blood of the UK economy.”