Private markets demand local intelligence, not just scale argues Aviva Investors director Jonathan Bayfield. In this week's podcast, in partnership with Property Week, Jonathan joins Andrew Teacher to discuss how a £50bn private-markets platform uses independent research, operating partners and bottom-up intelligence to allocate capital across living, logistics and offices, and why AI may strengthen the case for the best buildings rather than destroy it.

Amanprit Arnold, founder of Disability Urbanism and DeafCity Hub, joins Andrew Teacher on PropCast to explain why she deliberately avoids the word ‘accessible’, what disabled households’ spending power means for landlords, and why Stratford, South Kensington and Oxford Street are the real tests of London’s inclusive design ambitions.

Abri may be one of the UK’s most significant large-scale housing organisations you have never heard of. It owns and manages almost 60,000 homes, stretching from Somerset and Bristol through a Hampshire heartland to Bracknell, Berkshire and, through Octavia, west London. As Andrew Teacher observes on this week’s PropCast, that scale would make it comparable in size with a FTSE 100 company, were it listed. For context, Grainger, the UK’s largest listed residential landlord, owns just over 11,200 rental homes; Abri owns more than five times as many. Even adding Unite Group’s 64,000 student beds to Grainger’s total (and beds, admittedly, are not quite homes), the two listed names together reach around 75,000 roughly the scale of the group Abri now hopes to create through its proposed merger with Curo Group, which would bring the combined organisation to more than 73,000 homes and community assets serving around 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England.Like the G15 giants, Abri has built scale deliberately, through the merger of Radian and Yarlington in 2019, Silva Homes in 2023 and Octavia in 2024, and built capability alongside it: customer satisfaction at the top end of the sector, an A3 stable rating from Moody’s and the Regulator of Social Housing’s G1 and V1 grades, confirmed in November 2025. G1 is the highest governance grade, the regulator’s assurance that the organisation is effectively run and manages its risks. V1, the highest viability grade, confirms “the financial capacity to deal with a wide range...

In the latest episode of PropCast, Chris Riley of Bywater Group and Oliver Lowrie of Ackroyd Lowrie discuss what it takes to design, fund and deliver co-living at scale, why timber construction halves upfront carbon, and what the sector’s rapid growth means for institutional capital.“Design shouldn’t cost extra,” says Oliver Lowrie, co-founder of Ackroyd Lowrie, the architecture practice behind a growing number of London’s co-living schemes. “Gone are the days when you hired a star architect to produce something that looked amazing but wasn’t buildable. We know what the thing’s going to be built out of. It needs to be about pragmatism and making great design.”Nearly 9,000 co-living units were consented across the UK in 2025, according to data compiled by Savills, up 27% on the previous year’s record. In London alone, consents nearly doubled. The capital is arriving. The question is whether the capital (and customers) believe the buildings will be worth it.Lowrie is joined on this week’s PropCast by Chris Riley, who leads development at Bywater Group, the timber-focused developer and investment manager majority-owned by Sumitomo Forestry. Lowrie has designed several co-living schemes for Bywater, including a 112-unit development at Tanner Street in Bermondsey that won planning consent earlier this year. The two firms share a passion for timber construction and low-carbon delivery that sets them apart from the pack. Their collaboration is a useful lens through which to see where the sector might be heading next as it becomes more institutional-ready.Bywater began life as a family-office developer...

In this week's PropCast episode, Andrew Teacher, co-founder of Lauder Teacher, speaks with Raoul Malhotra, founder and CEO of Orka Investments, about building a £700 million real estate manager in just a few years. From partnering with global institutional investors to navigating volatile markets, the discussion explores why operational expertise has become a defining advantage in today's real estate sector.

For two decades, finding somewhere to rent in Britain has meant typing a postcode into Rightmove or Zoopla and scrolling. Steven Charlton thinks that is a thin idea of search, and he has built a platform to prove it. nHabit, which reaches the App Store and Google Play in mid-June, lets renters describe the life they want in plain language and hands back neighbourhoods they would never have thought to type in. “Instead of following the herd to the same old postcodes,” Charlton says, “our aim is to let people search the way they’d plan their perfect holiday with ChatGPT.” The idea has already pulled build-to-rent operators including Quintain and Grainger into conversation, and it arrives as Rightmove, which by its own research takes around 80 per cent of the time British consumers spend on property portals, defends a £1.5 billion class action over the fees it charges agents. Charlton, a former Perkins&Will managing director turned founder, used a wide-ranging PropCast appearance to set out why he believes the two incumbents are too big to fix the thing renters actually struggle with.How the search actually worksThe starting insight is almost embarrassingly simple. “You need to know where you want to live before you can search,” Charlton says, “and how can you know all the areas you could live in when you’ve never been to them all?” nHabit flips that around. A renter draws a boundary by travel time, a method Charlton calls isochrone generation, then tightens it with the things...

Three decades on from joining a graduate scheme during one of the deepest property recessions in living memory, Marcus Phayre-Mudge, fund manager and partner at Thames River Capital, has watched the listed real estate sector cycle through booms, busts, structural change and a creeping crisis of confidence between boards and shareholders. Speaking to Propcast host Andrew Teacher, the long-serving manager of TR Property Investment Trust delivers an unvarnished assessment of governance, manager-investor alignment, communications and the persistent question of scale that continues to challenge the UK market.Phayre-Mudge begins by setting out a framework he still uses to explain the two distinct ways property cycles inflict damage. “There are two diseases for real estate,” he said. “One is a much more short, sharp shock, a bit like being punched in a pub. It hurts like hell, but it’s over quite quickly. That’s when you get a very dramatic change in the cost or availability of capital, which is what we saw in the GFC and more recently in 2021 with the dramatic change in the cost of money.”The second, he warns, is more pernicious. “The other disease, which is actually much more insidious, more of a long COVID if you like, is the consequence of a long period of overdevelopment.” In periods like this, landlords across entire sectors become price-takers, dealing with tenants who know that competition to lease space places enormous downward pressure on rents.His own entry into fund management came via a deliberate pivot away from surveying. Recalling a...

Tom Sleigh, Chairman of the Planning and Transportation Committee for the City of London Corporation, is the youngest planning chair the City has ever had, and potentially the country. Working in one of the most important square miles to the UK economy, infrastructure must be at the heart of all decisions made.The City has undergone a revival in recent years, driven largely by the macro and micro trends since the end of COVID. As Chair of the Planning and Transport Committee, Sleigh acknowledges he has got a lot of plates spinning to keep things running smoothly. On transportation, Sleigh believes the Corporation has a responsibility to provide high quality streets that ensure the smooth flow of people, whether that be on foot, bicycle or other forms of transport. It is the planning side that Sleigh says gets him asked far more questions, but this is the element he views as fairly straightforward. He was to continue to offer a predictable, stable, plan-led planning system that investors, developers and everyone else in the chain wanted to come into business with. Sleigh acknowledges that this is different from the perception sometimes given off, with many people seeing it as adversarial and that often people believe Planning Committees view all change as bad.Sleigh went further to explain how various organisations get a far heavier weighting than others when it comes to planning. These come in many forms, such as statutory bodies, heritage bodies and environmental bodies, although the latter less so in London....

From banking to building, this week on PropCast we are joined by Homes England’s Innovation Lead Ed Jezeph. With an insight into Homes England’s new bank, modern construction methods what positives there are for the future of housebuilding in England.Ed starts by saying how excited he is for Homes England to be launching a bank, noting how it is a natural progression for them as an organisation. Whilst the investment directorate within Homes England has existed for over a decade, largely focussed on debt lending and more recently equity investment and guarantees, this has provided Homes England with plenty of experience. Armed with this experience, they’re now launching the National Housing Bank with 16 billion of government funding announced in June 2025 which, Jezeph says “gives us new funding flexibilities.” He acknowledges some in the market may see them as stepping on other people’s toes, but states “we're not here to compete with the market. We're not here to cut the market. We're here to fill in the gaps. We're a lender of last resort. So, when we talk to our customers, as our borrowers on development finance, we want to know why banks won't lend to them.” He continues to concede this does present some challenges, including but not solely ensuring a cash return for the taxpayer of between 6-8%. All of this has impacted on the housing market in a negative way. He goes on to argue, however, that the real return is "to those communities of stuff...

Michael Keaveney, Director of Land, Development and Acquisition at Grainger PLC, has spent nearly eight years helping to reshape the country's largest listed landlord into a focused, operationally driven Build-to-Rent specialist. In a wide-ranging conversation for Propcast, he covers the logic behind Grainger's in-house model, the progress of its joint venture with Transport for London and a detailed proposal for how social housing in England might realistically be funded.Keaveney arrived at Grainger two years after chief executive Helen Gordon, stepping into a business in the process of significant transformation. From a standing start of one delivered scheme in Barking, the business now has 9,874 BTR homes across England and Wales, underpinned by an operational platform built on a deliberate decision to keep operations in-house. "All of the staff in the buildings that we developed are our staff, they're Grainger people," Keaveney explains. "It gives you absolute control over the product that you're delivering and the customer relationship." The result is a business running typically at 96 to 98 per cent occupancy. "If you don't control that relationship in-house, it's very difficult to get to that data," Keaveney says.He is also clear about what Build-to-Rent actually is. "People misunderstand what Build-to-Rent is. It's not about buildings at all. It never was. It's about service and product," Keaveney says.The joint venture with Transport for London, operating under the Connected Living London banner, has taken longer to deliver than either party originally envisaged. COVID and the second staircase consultation both intervened. Keaveney is...