One of London’s largest and oldest housing associations has cut its development target for next year by more than a third as it overhauls the business in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Peabody chief executive Brendan Sarsfield said he no longer expects the company to meet a goal of delivering 3,300 new homes. “That aspiration will be on hold for a while. I think we will be nearer 2,000 homes as a group going forward. We are at those levels now and we expect to stay there,” Sarsfield said.
“The numbers have changed on everything. What we have to do is work our way through that. We have good land holdings, we own some very good strategic sites in London, and we will be trying to develop those out.”
Peabody announced the targets in 2018 ahead of its merger with South East Town and Country Housing Group and expansion into Kent and Sussex.
But in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, Peabody is scaling back its development programme and risk appetite.
Sarsfield said: “We want to be positive and we feel a sense of duty to try and get back to take risk and build new schemes. We think that’s one of the ways in which we will contribute to growth in economic confidence, but we can only do so much and we will have to limit that.”
Peabody has a portfolio of some 67,000 homes across London and the South East, and Sarsfield said there is likely to be a focus on local outreach and community support.
“The bigger picture is that we probably want to be something different longer-term following this,” said Sarsfield. “We are quite a large organisation and my feeling is that is going to be around how do we get more local to our customers, more part of the community, rather than sitting outside it.”
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