Report Gives Rare Glimpse Under The Bonnet Of A £2B BTR Giant
The annual report of build-to-rent giant Get Living showed the company’s portfolio value tipping above £2B for the first time in 2020, in spite of the coronavirus pandemic, and rents remain broadly resilient.
Get Living is a private company owned by shareholders including Delancey, Qatari Diar, APG, Oxford Properties and Allianz, and as such does not publicise its financial performance. But an annual report for 2020 published recently on the Channel Islands-based International Stock Exchange highlights how the first UK firm to undertake BTR at scale has become one of the country’s largest property companies.
Get Living’s portfolio grew in size from £1.83B to £2B, with the growth mainly coming from new acquisitions. Its investment portfolio was valued at £1.63B at the end of 2020, and its development portfolio at £376M. It had a portfolio of about 4,500 homes at the end of the year, with 2,600 finished and available to rent.
East Village, the former 2012 Olympic Athlete’s Village in Stratford, east London, is its largest scheme, with 1,900 completed apartments and another 1,500 in the pipeline. It also has schemes open in Elephant & Castle, south London, and Salford, Greater Manchester. It has developments planned in Elephant, Lewisham, Glasgow and Leeds, and a target of 15,000 units.
On an operational level, the company said that Covid-19 lockdowns had caused occupancy to drop, but did not specify by how much. In spite of this, it said revenue in the nine months ending December rose 14% to £45M and rent collection was above 95%. Rents dropped 6% to attract tenants, but net rental income was flat at £38.7M.
The company has about £1B of debt, which has an average cost of 2.5%, some of it secured against individual projects and some at a corporate level.
The company gave a breakdown of estimated rental values at its schemes that are open and operational. At East Village, estimated rental values are £31 per SF; at Victory Plaza elsewhere in Stratford, they are £33 per SF; at Elephant, they are £40 per SF; and at New Maker Yards in Salford, they are £21.50 per SF.
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