A year ago, Danielle Bayless swapped the West Coast for Quintain’s Wembley Park. She tells Emma Rosser how she plans to build something “fresh and emerging” at the UK’s largest BTR community.
When I meet Danielle Bayless, it is a year to the day since she became chief operating officer of Quintain Living, helping to drive forward the UK’s largest build-to-rent neighbourhood at London’s Wembley Park.
It is the latest move in a career spanning more than 30 years, during which Bayless has overseen sprawling BTR portfolios on the other side of the Atlantic. Now living and working outside the US for the first time, she is using that experience to help Lone Star-owned Quintain steer its BTR business through possibly the most challenging period for the sector. The industry is gearing up for post-lockdown lease-up, while battling lingering investor caution and policy in flux.
On a blustery morning in early October, walking around Wembley Park with her Maltese, Quinn, in tow, Bayless explains why she left California for north-west London – and why she decided to live on-site in one of the very homes she is overseeing.
“For me, the opportunity to live in another country and really immerse yourself in another culture has always appealed,” Bayless says. “This offered such an amazing opportunity to use my history and continue my career, and still get that personal experience.”
New digs
Bayless’s introduction to Quintain came from former colleague Greg Spezzano. The two worked together in the late 1990s at developer Alliance Residential. By 2019, Spezzano was managing director of commercial real estate at Hudson Advisors, advising Quintain on behalf of Lone Star funds in London. His pitch to Bayless of an opportunity to shape an emerging sector spoke to her wanderlust. “At home there is very little that is new and fresh and emerging, but there is an opportunity to really be a part of that,” she says.
Further encouragement came from Quintain’s chief executive, James Saunders, who offered Bayless a chance to build the business and shape the sector, as Quintain completes 6,000 homes at Wembley Park and seeks scale in new markets.
Scale means different things in different markets when it comes to BTR. Before moving to Quintain, Bayless was vice president of operations for Essex Property Trust, managing a team looking after a 23,000-home, largely operational portfolio across 86 communities around San Francisco Bay. The portfolio comprised more homes than the entirety of London’s completed BTR stock, which stands at around 20,000 homes.
“You had micro-neighbourhoods throughout the Bay Area that all acted independently and quite differently, which provided its own challenge,” says Bayless. “You had some two-storey garden-style [suburban] product, high-rise in downtown San Francisco, a lot in San Jose that appealed to that young tech analyst working at Apple or Facebook, and then families, taking the kids to school every day before work. It ran the gamut, for sure.”
Wembley Park, when finished, will provide 6,044 BTR homes, a new challenge for Bayless with a smaller portfolio concentrated in one site. Schemes of this size are rare in the US, but Bayless likens her experience of running a range of communities to the demands of different buildings in Wembley Park. “When you get to more than 6,000 homes in one location, you have to have something for everyone,” she adds.
Quintain has around 3,200 homes across nine operational schemes, and the team is keen to ensure a range of amenities and building personalities, targeting a broad range of prospective tenants.
The family-oriented Canada Gardens is set next to a children’s playground with pirate ship, with allotments and a garden shed for working from home. It neighbours The Robinson, which Bayless describes as “The Graduate meets Alice in Wonderland” and includes art deco designs and features such as a rooftop slide, catered to the post-graduate market. Bayless’s personal favourite is Ferrum, the New York loft-style flats near the London Designer Outlet to the south of the area.
Finding ways to expand the brand and finding ways to reach outside of Wembley Park is definitely a big ambition
Danielle Bayless, Quintain Living
Lockdown lease-up
Like many new BTR residents, Bayless picked her flat at Wembley Park through a combination of online tours and video calls. Living on-site has allowed her to take her dream of cultural immersion to another level. “I know first-hand that it feels incredibly safe as a single woman to walk up and down the estate at night and never for once feel uncomfortable. I know what it is like to shop at Sainsbury’s and Amazon Fresh and all of those things,” she says.
These experiences fuel a feedback loop that is now more powerful with Quintain Living having a new business structure uniting development and operations. It means Bayless and her team can be involved at all stages, from understanding staffing needs in site acquisition to picking floorplates and amenities with the design and commercial teams, and, finally, leasing and management.
Quintain’s decision to ditch its Tipi brand in favour of Quintain Living was made before Bayless joined the company. It was a necessary change, she says, “for the maturity of the brand and where the estate was going, and our plans outside Wembley Park”.
While Tipi may have resonated with a younger audience, Quintain Living is designed to appeal also to families and older customers, drawing a new crowd to Wembley. The site is home to 13,000 residents, with ages ranging from 18 to 99. The younger demographic still makes up the bulk of residents – the average age is 32 – but 15% are aged over 41.
Quintain Living faced challenges leasing a large number of homes over various lockdowns. To support leasing post-pandemic, the platform has targeted campaigns to “families and folks over 50” and offered discounts for longer leases. September was the busiest month for Wembley Park, with 500 flats let – a rise of 150% on August, which had also been a record.
Bayless says around half of those residents signed leases of two to three years. “Not only did it help us come out of lockdown with a big bang, but that represents a lot fewer apartments that turn over the couple of years as we are finishing the lease-up,” she adds.
Finishing the lease-up is Bayless’s number-one priority. After that? “Finding ways to expand the brand and finding ways to reach outside of Wembley Park is definitely a big ambition,” she says.
Ground-up teachings
Bayless has made some big hires over the past year, bringing the Quintain Living team to 70, almost a third of the wider business. She has brought on Nick Adams from Savills as head of facilities management, leading a fast-expanding in-house team of seven managing activity “behind the doors”.
Bayless’s hiring spree means training a new generation in operational BTR. “Every person you are hiring is brand new to the sector. There is very little bench strength to pull from. You are teaching everyone from the ground up.” She hopes to import best practices and tools from more established markets, and adds: “The technology and things of that nature are still trailing the US.”
Last year, Quintain appointed its first chief technology officer, hiring Jim Eaton-Terry, who has held tech roles at companies including Whitbread, The Collective and Flybe. Eaton-Terry and the new head of tech, Mike Ralphs, are working to build an end-to-end development and leasing system to support growth outside London and the UK.
With the company’s neatly packaged and operational schemes ticking along, a company sale and new funding for Quintain has been hotly anticipated. But today, with Lone Star still holding on to the developer, Bayless still works closely with Hudson Advisors and Spezzano.
Having ploughed £2.5bn into Wembley Park, any new Quintain projects will be of scale regardless of the funder. Bayless says expansion is likely to spread from the core in Wembley. “I would think in the early days of expansion, you hope to go from London out, just from an economies of scale perspective, it allows you to expand out… Any of the major cities, we would definitely look at.”
After a year in London, her future travel itinerary is more likely to comprise new ventures to Birmingham or elsewhere in the UK. “I have no plans to return home at this point in time – this is definitely something I’m looking at as a long-term opportunity,” Bayless says.
She has already hit the road scoping out new opportunities and competitor product, but as she looks across Wembley Park from the stadium to the undeveloped plots to the north, it’s clear she is not ready to pack her bags just yet.
To send feedback, e-mail emma.rosser@eg.co.uk or tweet @EmmaARosser or @EGPropertyNews
