Patrizia plots 1,000-home UK single-family strategy

Patrizia is looking to develop a single-family housing platform in the UK, with an ambition to scale the business to 1,000 homes. The German investment manager wants to form joint ventures with landowners of sites with planning permission in place, close to employment hubs. Patrizia will focus on what it calls a “value-add SFH strategy”, and look to exit five to seven years after stabilisation. Operation of the sites will be outsourced to a third-party. Investment in the UK SFH market reached £2bn last year, according to CBRE, a tenfold increase from a year earlier and accounting for almost half of the total investment in build-to-rent. Andrew Saunderson, head of UK residential capital markets at CBRE, said housebuilders were looking to “de-risk their schemes through an SFH strategy”. Other investors eyeing an entry to the market include Pension Insurance Corporation, which is planning to make its first direct investment in UK SFH through either forward funding deals, acquiring existing developments or establishing joint ventures with developers. Hayley Rees, managing director at PIC, told EG earlier this month: “When it comes to an entry into a new market, what is of interest to us is not deploying £100m but deploying more than £500m – that is the kind of scale we look at.”