Australian bank Macquarie has confirmed its first move in build-to-rent with a new developer named Goodstone Living.
Earlier this year, EG revealed that Macquarie had joined forces with the founders of Essential Living to raise £1bn for its BTR debut.
The business will acquire, develop, own and operate BTR schemes in London and key regional cities. It will combine a mix of ground-up development, but will also target fully stabilised assets, forward funding and M&A.
The business will be led by Essential Living founders Darryl Flay and Martin Bellinger.
Dana Gibson, co-head of Macquarie Asset Management’s Real Estate team in Europe, said the new venture was “strategically aligned with our focus on establishing and incubating specialist real estate managers in sectors that we believe are supported by significant structural tailwinds”.
Gibson added:“This sector has emerged as a global mega-trend in real estate over the last 10 years, driven by secular trends including urbanisation, digitalisation and demographic shifts. This has created an opportunity to access this growing asset class at scale.
“We expect there will be strong demand to partner with specialist full-service platforms that can access opportunities and develop, own and operate units at scale.”
Darryl Flay, principal at Goodstone Living, added: “Covid-19 has reinforced the long-term fundamentals underpinning the need for better quality rental housing and we see a significant growth opportunity in the build-to-rent sector as the expectations of renters increase and demographic change continues to reshape the market.”
Martin Bellinger, principal at Goodstone, added that Goodstone will have “an intergenerational mindset”.
He added: “Significant advances have been made in technology over recent years and by digitising more of the customer journey we can create a more frictionless end-to-end operational platform that is efficient, scalable and above all, sustainable.”
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