The global chief executive of residential investor-developer Greystar has vowed to continue pursuing an “aggressive” growth strategy in the UK and Europe.
Speaking at the company’s new London offices at Brookfield Properties’ Gilbert at 40 Finsbury Square, EC2, Bob Faith described the capital as “a crossroads of the world’s investors” and reflected on the group’s decision to start its international expansion in the city.
“When we first came over here it was 2012, just a small team of us,” he said. “The UK was recovering more slowly from the global financial crisis than the US was, and it seemed like there was this amazing opportunity around student housing, then multi-family, which didn’t really exist here. Every time we would talk to someone they would say ‘Oh, that will never work here, no one will ever want to rent in a whole building of rentals’. And we said, ‘Hmm, want to bet?’”
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The global chief executive of residential investor-developer Greystar has vowed to continue pursuing an “aggressive” growth strategy in the UK and Europe.
Speaking at the company’s new London offices at Brookfield Properties’ Gilbert at 40 Finsbury Square, EC2, Bob Faith described the capital as “a crossroads of the world’s investors” and reflected on the group’s decision to start its international expansion in the city.
“When we first came over here it was 2012, just a small team of us,” he said. “The UK was recovering more slowly from the global financial crisis than the US was, and it seemed like there was this amazing opportunity around student housing, then multi-family, which didn’t really exist here. Every time we would talk to someone they would say ‘Oh, that will never work here, no one will ever want to rent in a whole building of rentals’. And we said, ‘Hmm, want to bet?’”
Faith continued: “And that was the bet that we made. If you look around the world at the great cities, they’re all growing. They all have shortage of housing, and they particularly have a shortage of housing that is even somewhat attainable or affordable. That is exactly what we do.”
Greystar now has close to 1,000 employees in offices across Europe, Faith said: “So many people took that bet on us, on the growth.”
“When you look at like what our five-year plan is here for Europe, it’s equally aggressive,” he added. “We are not stopping. We are continuing to grow and we are going to do our part to help solve the shortage of housing that exists in all the great cities across the UK and Europe.”
And playing that part will call on lessons learnt over a decade of operating in London.
“We now have a global platform with what we have learnt by starting here in London,” Faith said. “This really has become our international headquarters. While we have an enormous business in the US, the US is very homogeneous across the market – you could be in Dallas or you could be in Atlanta, and it’s really not that different. And so the skill set to do what we have done – across multiple countries, multiple cultures, multiple languages, multiple regulatory environments – has really been honed here in London.”
