A giant Australian pension fund is in talks to buy 500 build-to-rent (BTR) homes in Manchester.
Kampus contains more than 500 homes across five buildings, located in Manchester (picture: Alamy)
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A giant Australian pension fund is in talks to buy 500 build-to-rent homes in Manchester #UKhousingAustralianSuper, Australia’s largest pension fund, is in advanced discussions to buy the Kampus BTR scheme from Ares Management.
The deal is worth around £170m according to Green Street News, which first reported the transaction. Should it complete, the scheme in Manchester city centre would be AustralianSuper’s first BTR investment outside London.
It would also be one of the biggest deals of the year for an existing BTR scheme in Manchester. Knight Frank is advising Ares, which declined to comment for this article, on the sale of the scheme.
Kampus, which includes more than 500 homes across five buildings, was completed in 2022 by developers Capital & Centric and HBD with backing from Ares.
The scheme is located in the Gay Village, close to the University of Manchester and Manchester Piccadilly station. It is considered one of Manchester’s flagship BTR developments.
Earlier this month AustralianSuper pledged to invest £500m into UK rental homes across student housing, co-living and BTR schemes.
The pension fund is aiming to become one of the top five operators of rental homes in the UK within five years. Its first investment was a student housing development in Bristol, which has contractors currently on site and is scheduled for completion in 2027.
AustralianSuper is also in talks to buy six student accommodation schemes from Harrison Street, totalling 1,616 beds in six UK cities, for £250m.
The fund’s chief executive officer, Tim Butler, is leading its push into the UK living sector. He was previously the founder and co-investor of UK landlord Student Roost, and one of the founding shareholders and main board director of Unite Group, the UK’s largest student landlord.
Earlier this month, British asset manager Legal & General announced it will invest a further £2bn across housing and infrastructure over the next five years, in addition to its previous pledge made in 2022 to invest £2.5bn in build-to-rent homes.
It said this would create about 24,000 jobs and deliver approximately 10,000 new social and affordable homes.
The £53bn state-backed National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) has also pledged to invest a further £500m in its private equity mandate with Schroders in the next 12 months, and expects to allocate £100m to UK companies.
Nest, which began its private equity programme three years ago, has invested £2bn in the sector, with almost 20% of this being invested in the UK.
Meanwhile, data from JLL published this month showed that in the nine months to September this year, a record 43% of all urban BTR transactions targeted existing stock, a sharp rise from the five-year average of 23%.
The property agency said this was driven by challenges to viability and delays caused by building safety regulations, coupled with a growing amount of existing stock being marketed.
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Picture: Alamy