Resi investor Inhabit has been granted an extension on the planning consent for its Manchester scheme at 10-12 Whitworth Street, with an expiry after 18 months if it fails to secure a contractor.
Planning consent for a 35-storey tower with 327 apartments expired on 11 April, three years after it was granted.
The scheme is one of seven sites in Inhabit’s 3,300-home portfolio, which has a combined gross development value of around £1bn.
The Whitworth Street development has been in the works since 2006. The former owner sought to deliver a hotel on the site, but entered into an agreement to sell the site pending planning consent.
In 2014 RoC Consulting valued the residential scheme at £60m. An application for a BTR scheme designed by 5Plus Architects was submitted in April 2016, replacing a 2015 application. The application said the investor would seek to hold the assets as a long-term investment, but instead Inhabit has (so far unsuccessfully) attempted to secure a buyer.
The company entered into discussions to sell the portfolio to Greystar last year.
The sale collapsed after the parties failed to agree on pricing, and Inhabit has been quietly marketing the sites individually since the end of the summer.
The extension from Manchester City Council requires that a plan detailing interim management of the site pending construction is submitted to the council within 12 week. It also dictates that no development shall be carried out if the construction contract is not agreed by 11 October 2020.
A letter from the council said: “Any development activities on the site shall cease and no further development permitted by this planning permission shall be carried out.”
In the case that a contractor is appointed, they will have one month to submit further plans detailing how the site will be “restored, landscaped and managed” in accordance with the planning permission.
Inhabit Residential, formerly Residential Securities, was set up as a PRS company in early 2016, with Ana Nekhamkin as its managing director and £150m in equity. It was seeded with the seven sites.
Michael Kovacs and Brandon Hollihan – the pair that run investment group Castleforge – are both listed at Companies House as directors of Inhabit Residential.
They set up Castleforge, then Mercers, in 2010 to take advantage of distressed pricing in the real estate market. They had worked together previously at Westbrook Partners, and raised £235m in a second UK-focused property fund, Mercer Real Estate Partners II, in July 2016. It changed its name to Castleforge in September 2016.
The planning application was submitted by a company called Brigantes, on behalf of Inhabit/Mercer. A week after receiving the extension, this company entered into a voluntary dissolution.
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