Urban Splash has completed a £100m fundraise to bolster its PRS portfolio.
The developer launched the second fundraise for the Urban Splash UK Residential Fund in 2020, to support delivery of a further 500 homes.
The new raise followed £20m in seed funding, with founding investors including Paul Gough of Star Capital. The fund allowed Urban Splash to diversify into the private rented sector and was the first time the developer brought outside investment into its portfolio. Urban Splash has raised £140m in total for the fund USUKR through institutional and high net worth investors.
The fund targets an IRR of 10%, including dividends of 3% per annum. It is led by former UBS analyst Akeel Malik, with Star Capital Partnership as the alternative investment fund manager and John Forbes as independent chair.
It has a focus on PRS, but also invests in properties that can be sold on the market. The fund has a current portfolio of 194 homes across Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol and Bradford.
Urban Splash is targeting new schemes in Milton Keynes, Cambridge, the Wirral and Plymouth and hopes to grow the USUKR portfolio to more than 300 homes. The fund has first-look access over the £1.7bn residential pipeline of Urban Splash Group and House by Urban Splash.
Malik said the investor interest was “particularly encouraging in the context of a challenging macroeconomic and social environment, as a result of the Covid pandemic”.
He added: “The fundamental appeal here is great design; our offering gives investors access to an award-winning collection of homes, evenly spread across the country and comprising mixed tenure – be it studio apartments to four-bedroom houses.”
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