Giant South Korean Investor Makes £300M UK SFH Debut With Long Harbour
Long Harbour has secured a £300M seed investment for its single-family housing fund from South Korea’s National Pension Service.
The investment is the first in the UK SFH sector for NPS, one of the world's largest real estate owners, and will be supplemented with debt to give the fund £600M to spend. That will enable the delivery of more than 5,000 homes across the UK, Long Harbour said. The equity raise further strengthens a fundraising partnership that began in 2018 and marks the close of the fund’s seed round.
The next equity close is expected within 2025 for other investors. The fund will be acquiring forward funding, forward purchase and standing stock opportunities, targeting new-build family homes across the UK, with a focus on the south and south-east of England.
The new fund builds on Long Harbour’s living strategies in single-family and multifamily. Long Harbour first invested in SFH in 2013 and notably through a large portfolio in the south-east acquired in 2015. Most recently, Long Harbour built a £900M multifamily JV for the UK build-to-rent sector.
The fund is headed up by Managing Director Jack Spearman, who joined Long Harbour in 2009 and led the origination and execution team for Long Harbour’s UK residential secured income programme.
“Our ambition through the launch of this fund is to address the undersupply of high quality, energy efficient and modern, suburban housing in the UK,” Spearman said in a statement.
“Our investment in the creation of a platform, designed specifically to deliver new and sustainable single-family homes in the UK, will assist in addressing the chronic undersupply of high-quality homes across the country,” NPS Portfolio Manager David Yoon said. “We intend to generate significant benefits for both housing providers and prospective tenants, while providing stable and long-term returns.”
Long Harbour first announced the launch of a dedicated platform to invest in SFH in April 2023, led by Spearman. The fund was established to target investment in residential assets across the UK using Long Harbour’s established property management brand, Way of Life, across the single-family portfolio. Long Harbour appointed CBRE to support capital raising.
The platform sits alongside the Long Harbour multifamily investment vehicle. In August 2021, Long Harbour secured a £650M cash injection for its multifamily investment programme, bringing together international investors Public Sector Pension Investment Board and the real estate arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to create a £1.5B platform.
