Event Summary
North West Rental 2025 | Summary, photos + slides
The rental sector is seeing record growth and massive international investment: no surprise then that this Place event attracted a large and vocal audience. Issues discussed included green rooms for a new generation of creatives, opportunities for retrofit, and the ongoing university challenge.
Place North West Rental Conference 2025 was sponsored by JMW and Placefirst.
The state of the market
Economist Katie O’Neill, associate at Knight Frank, had plenty of positives to share. The current value of the UK’s student, build-to-rent and seniors housing market totals £212bn. That’s up 45% since 2020 which she said is the “fastest growth seen on record” for comparable time periods.
Slides: Katie O’Neill, Knight Frank
O’Neill added that 30% of investors expect to have invested across all three of those living sectors by 2029, adding up to £45bn.
She said the challenges would come as no surprise – planning, the cost of finance, affordability and government interference.
There were also some strong stats on market performance last year – particularly in the final quarter. 2024 was a record year for BTR, saw strong performance on single family housing, and North American investment in the UK hit a record high. Looking forward, O’Neill said: ”We are expecting a bit of stabilisation but still healthy returns.”
In terms of delivery, 126,000 BTR homes were complete and operational, 57,400 were under construction and 106,500 had planning permission, with 56% outside London.
However, this makes up just 2% of the private rental sector. Around 14,400 single family home units were completed, with 11,262 under construction. There has been a long-term fall in UK rental listings in PRS and, in terms of PBSA, the market has “been through a lot of noise” due to “policy changes” on education, though she added: “Early signals this year are a bit more positive.
“At a time when universities find themselves in a precarious position, any indication that a student may not study at their university will serve as a huge risk to their reputation.”
Bullish decisions?
Ian Scott, group managing director at Livingway, said: “It’s a great time to be an investor because we have seen yields increase. The availability of opportunity is really the challenge; making deals work on your spreadsheet before you get the deal done.”
Asked by event chair, Place’s Neil Tague, whether rental sector investors and developers were being “bullish”, Alun Davies, head of planning at Placefirst, said: “I wouldn’t go as far as bullish – housebuilders are more bullish. There is money to spend, but it’s getting it to work for everyone.”
Rent or buy?
Though home ownership remains the aspiration in the UK, Rory Keys, regional investment and acquisition director at Sigma Capital, thinks things are changing. He said “Renting is just part of life now. There is an emerging sector of people choosing to rent as a lifestyle choice. They want security of tenure and high quality, which is where single family comes in.”
Building Safety Act
The BSA came up throughout the event, with panellists feeling challenged by the Act’s impact on many schemes.
Tom Sinclair, regional head of residential markets at CBRE, said: “This is the biggest single barrier to building in city centres. The reason is the cost and the additional time attached from first approval.”
He said that only the “boldest developer” would take the “cost risk” of a BTR scheme at the moment, and added: “It doesn’t work for the investor or the developer in its current guise.”
Dan Batterton, head of residential at Legal & General Investment Management, talked about the Act’s six floor limit and agreed: “The BSA is creating much more uncertainty. No one has got close to Gateway 3 yet.
“We need to put more density in the city centre and this is a barrier. Who’s taking the risk, us or the developer?”
The Slate Yard sale
Batterton and Sinclair both worked on this just-completed key Salford sale, which saw private equity giant KKR acquire the New Bailey apartment development for more than £100m.
Batterton said: “One of our priorities is to build more homes and that money will be reinvested to do that. We’ve got about £1bn to put back into the market and invest in BTR across the UK.”
Sinclair said KKR’s purchase was an example of some of that North American capital entering the UK market.
Demand for design
“People rent what they can afford, not what they need,” said Batterton, “and the greatest demand is for the most affordable, studios and one bedroom.”
He added that planning policy in the UK is focused too heavily on family rental and owner occupiers to the detriment of single-living – and thus the lack of design choice was contributing to homelessness as the shortage of affordable homes hit those affected by relationship breakdowns – predominately men. He concluded: “We need a much bigger variety of floorplates.”
Panellists were in agreement that brand is “huge” in the rental sector. O’Neill said: “It’s about an experiential economy. People want to feel like they are living in your scheme, not just sleeping there.”
Mixing it up
Continuing the conversation about PBSA, Verity Cubitt, director for operational capital markets at Savills, said universities were “feeling the pinch” with the fall in international student numbers. She said they were seeking new strategies to release capital which wouldn’t hit their teaching and research space: “They are looking at their accommodation and opportunities.”
Cubitt added: “The lines are blurring between hotel, AirBnB, extended stay, co-living – co-living itself can be on a C1 planning consent.”
She discussed PBSA which “flips” in the summer months to become a hotel, and gave an example of a client who’s considering a co-living development but with a lean towards extended stay.
Amenity-rich schemes
“There is a definite drive for quality now,” said Nik Bremner, director of Select Residential for Select Property. “We’ve seen a lot of amenity-rich schemes hit the market over the last couple of years and people want to live there, but if they don’t service the need effectively and promote the lifestyle that people want, they will simply move on.”
He said a gym is a “minimum benchmark” in the city centre now, but they have to be good enough to entice residents from taking a membership elsewhere. He added: “Co-working lounges are almost a necessity. People don’t want to be compromised working from home – they don’t necessarily want to work in their apartment.
“Another example is outdoor terraces – how can we make that somewhere people want to use? We’ve put a dry bar in so that we can use it for events. There’s a use for this space, it’s practical, and people that live in the building actually benefit from its inclusion.”
Cubitt gave examples of “green rooms” for vloggers, music practice rooms and dance studios where there was a strong community of specialists, especially arts students, in a development. Meanwhile Tom Mees, head of development for Blacklight Capital Partners, said offering access to wellness areas and having a focus on mental health were also amenities worth including.
All panellists agreed there needs to be flexibility in a “fast changing market” and Catalina Ionita, senior architect at Chapman Taylor, said it’s “down to understanding customer behaviours” to “feed a wider demographic” and “bring the different rental markets together”.
“Bringing BTR and PBSA together is a refreshing and unique way of looking at accommodation and putting the place making at the centre of the development. It’s not about segregating uses. The asset may be sold again in the future.”
She also advocated for flexible, multipurpose development: “There is a blurring between uses so if the operator and the users want to keep the segregating, but making it so it can be easily removed.”
Regional diversity
The differences between land availability in the North West’s cities was discussed and Mees said: “Viability is the issue. The pipeline in Manchester will scare you off. Then in Liverpool, for example, with 65,000 students, three established universities, a plethora of higher education establishments, there is no pipeline because the rents are at a level where it’s very hard to build new.”
Office-to-resi opportunities
Scott said: “The office market is really challenging, particularly for older stock. If you can get the scale, the [conversion to residential] schemes work quite well. Delivery costs are a bit more economical than new build and retrofit ticks all the boxes for ESG.”
Ionita has researched ways to reverse the “death of the high street” and she had an interesting take on this challenge, away from the usual “mid market BTR with everything inside” approach. She said: “Could we have the BTR amenities spread out on the high street. People who live there would go out to access the gym, the coffee shop, the co-working, and how would that feel?
“Is there an opportunity to retrofit existing assets, the Debenhams of nowadays?”
What’s next?
Join Place North at our upcoming events
Thursday 25 March – Yorkshire Emerging Development Hotspots 2025
Thursday 17 April – Place Young Things
Thursday 1 May – Industrial and Logistics 2025
Click any image to launch gallery
