Quintain Tests BTR Market With £3B Sale
Third time lucky? Private equity firm Lone Star is exploring the sale of the London assets of build-to-rent giant Quintain, along with the firm's development and property management divisions, for a third time.
Discussions about the sale of Quintain’s huge Wembley Park scheme for a price of as much as £3B have begun, React News reported, with JP Morgan and Rothschild appointed to oversee the sales process.
A post-pandemic stabilisation of leasing levels and the amount of capital chasing rented residential real estate have prompted Lone Star to look again at a sale. In 2018 Delancey’s Get Living BTR business almost bought Wembley Park for £2.25B, while the pandemic put paid to a second sales process that started in 2020.
React said that Long Harbour and Patrizia were bidders in that 2020 process, and that AXA IM-Alts had approached Quintain about buying Wembley Park since that process closed.
Bisnow will be hosting its Build-To-Rent Annual Conference, the largest event in the UK BTR sector, at Wembley Park on 8 June. Sign up here.
A record £4.3B was invested in UK BTR in 2021, according to Knight Frank data, up 19% on the previous year, as investors sought the stable income provided by rented residential, caused by an undersupply of affordable homes to buy. Globally, multifamily overtook offices as a real estate investment class in 2021, data from Real Capital Analytics showed.
Lone Star took Quintain private in a £1B deal in 2015, and it has invested a total of £1.7B building out new homes at Wembley Park.
The scheme has planning consent for 8,000 apartments, 2,000 of which will be affordable, and is scheduled for completion by 2029.
So far 3,255 of the apartments have been completed, and 81% of them are leased. There were around 1,700 move-ins last year, the company said.
React said that Wembley Park could be sold as a whole or broken up, with one option a sale of the completed and leased apartments to one buyer, and those still to be built sold to another. The sale will also involve Quintain's development team, and its property management arm, Quintain Living.
