Last week, the UK build-to-rent sector had its eyes on growth in London and the South East. This week, it’s the regions.

Sharia-compliant lender Gatehouse Bank is to team up with North American multifamily specialist TPG Real Estate Partners to create a new build-to-rent platform with an initial development value of £50M.

The platform has been seeded with four sites in the Midlands, Greater Manchester and Merseyside acquired from Countryside, the housebuilder, amounting to 320 units. The aim is to grow rapidly to 2,500.

Unlike some new entrants to UK BTR, the focus will be on the North and the Midlands. The partnership will also break away from the pack by focusing on single-family rental, rather than multifamily, and suburban homes, rather than city-centre apartments.

Gatehouse has already established two significant build-to-rent property portfolios, but with the third, it said it aims to become one of the UK’s largest providers of purpose-built single-family rental homes.

“This joint venture will see significant capital being deployed to build and develop the next generation of build-to-rent housing, concentrating on high-quality family homes in suburban locations,” Gatehouse chief commercial officer Paul Stockwell said.

In January 2021 Gatehouse sold Thistle, its first BTR portfolio, for around £150M. The deal, believed to be the largest transaction of its nature in the UK to date, comprising a portfolio of 918 houses across 15 sites, predominantly two- and three-bedroom homes across North-West England.

San Francisco-based TPG is best known in the UK for its involvement in commercial property, not least the 1.5M SF Arlington business parks portfolio predominantly located in the South East. It sold Arlington to Brookfield earlier this year as part of a £13B deal spree by the Toronto-based investors.

Earlier this summer TPG doubled down on its U.S. multifamily operations, acquiring Watergate Pointe, a 608-unit waterfront multifamily community at Chesapeake Bay, Annapolis, Maryland, for $154M. The buy was a joint venture with The Bainbridge Cos.