Crown Estate And Lendlease Plan JV For £22B Development Pipeline

The Crown Estate and Lendlease are planning a tie-up in which they will work together to build out the latter’s £22B UK regeneration pipeline. 

The pair is in the late stages of creating a joint venture to construct what is one of the largest development portfolios in the UK, Green Street News reported. The six projects that could be included have a total potential end value of about £22B, comprising 25,000 homes and 9M SF of commercial space. 

Lendlease has been looking for new ways to inject capital into UK development after announcing a strategy change last year to focus on its home business in Australia.

Meanwhile, the £16B Crown Estate has been freed up for expansion by new powers granted by the Treasury allowing it to borrow for the first time in its history. 

The two companies have a personnel link: Crown Estate CEO Dan Labbad was Lendlease’s European head until taking his current role. 

The six projects being discussed are:

• The regeneration around Euston station, which comprises 3.6M SF of offices, 700K SF of retail and 2,000 apartments.
• Silvertown Quays and Millennium Mills in Docklands, east London, including 6,300 apartments and 1.1M SF of offices.
• Thamesmead in south-east London, which includes 11,500 homes, 400K SF of offices and 500K SF of retail.
• Stratford Cross, which comprises 1.2M SF of offices and 683 apartments.
• High Road West in north London, including 2,500 homes.
• Smithfield Market in Birmingham, which comprises 3,100 apartments, 900K SF of offices and 470K SF of retail.

Some of these schemes have other joint venture partners, and the Crown-Leadlease JV would likely raise fresh capital and bring in other partners for individual projects. But the tie-up would allow projects that have been on hold to recommence. 

The Crown Estate is made up of assets that are owned by the reigning British monarch and managed by an independent board. Seventy-five percent of its profits are directed to the UK Treasury, or £4.1B over the last decade, with the remainder going to the king and the royal family.

Its assets include, among £6.9B of assets in the UK capital, the entirety of London’s famous Regent Street, the parkland around Windsor Castle and a portfolio of regional assets.

It also lays claim to a huge slug of the UK’s offshore wind sector. The Crown Estate owns most of the UK seabed, out to a distance of 12 nautical miles along 6,500 miles of coastline, excluding Scotland. It researches and readies the seabed for development before leasing it to offshore wind companies, which build wind farms there.

The value of that portfolio was £4.4B at the end of 2023. It created 12 gigawatts of renewable energy last year, enough to power 11 million homes.