It has been an eventful few months for Quintain, the company behind the mammoth Wembley Park regeneration project in north-west London.
In January, private equity owner Lone Star pulled what could have been a blockbuster £3bn sale of the developer, which it took private in 2015, citing uncertainty caused by the third Covid-19 lockdown.
Then, last week, the company finally lifted the curtain on a major public realm makeover for the area around Wembley Stadium – an event it had been building up to for nearly 20 years.
During all this, chief executive James Saunders (pictured above) has seen his private equity bosses wrap up the acquisition of another listed real estate company, McCarthy Stone, reigniting commentary around the merits of taking companies off the public markets to carry out major regeneration schemes.
Now, as Quintain presses on in earnest with the remainder of the Wembley Park project – still seven years off completion – EG catches up with Saunders to find out more about his priorities for the scheme, the benefits of going private and the abandoned sale by Lone Star.
Last week you revealed the new-and-improved Wembley Way. How important is that in the context of the wider Wembley Park scheme?
This has been 18 years in the making. It has taken us that amount of time to realise this project. It is also the spine of the whole site; it is the first impression one gets when coming out of Wembley Park Tube station and it is the major thoroughfare. So finishing that job was strategically very important.
The old pedway that used to be there (pictured below) was completely redundant apart from on match day. The amount of space that has been liberated from taking that down is equivalent to about one-and-a-half pitches at Wembley Stadium. It dramatically improves both the retail setting around it and the residential setting.
Despite the fact that we have been working on Wembley Park since 2004, we are effectively two-thirds of the way through in construction terms. But this is a major piece of the placemaking completed, and it is now for us to finish the residential bit, build the community around it and, with retail reopening, fill this place with life.
Has being private for the past five years helped Quintain as it gets on with the scheme?
I think long-term regeneration projects are best done by private companies, at the end of the day. We struggled as a quoted company to report to shareholders’ expectations on a quarterly basis, while working on a scheme that is going to take between 10 and 20 years to deliver significant income.
Being a private company funded by private equity has been massively beneficial to Quintain. It has allowed us to build 10 buildings simultaneously, and in our next phase we will be doing the same. When we were a plc, we used to do two buildings at the same time.
So it has increased our pace, and it has allowed us to work with higher levels of debt than we would have been able to sustain as a quoted company. It has been very positive for us, and we have always had a strong partnership with Lone Star.
Lone Star pulled a planned sale in January. Is it going to revive that process?
Well, it is very much in Lone Star’s hands at this point. What we went through at the end of last year started off as a conversation about a number of buildings, and because of the interest the sites attracted, it became a bigger conversation.
It just proved too problematic to complete that transaction in the early stages of the latest lockdown. So from Quintain’s perspective, last December we secured our major bank refinancing – a new £860m facility which allows us to complete all the buildings under construction at the moment.
That was the major milestone for us that allows us to complete the job in hand and keeps the business moving forward.
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