Big Impact: Cheyne Launches Second Social Real Estate Fund After Forerunner’s Success

Cheyne Capital is launching a second social impact real estate fund, following on from the success of its first foray into the sector.

Following the first investor allocations, the Cheyne Impact Real Estate Trust is deploying an initial £150M to address the need for long-term, affordable housing in the UK. 

The fund will focus on working with a mixture of councils, housing associations and charities from across the UK to provide affordable and keyworker housing as well as supported living facilities, care provision and mixed tenure developments.

It will be evergreen and Cheyne said it aims for a balanced approach to financial and social return with a view to generating a stable, long-term, inflation-linked dividend while creating positive social outcomes. It has been developed with specifically defined outcome objectives that form the basis of each investment and are monitored over the life of each project. It seeks to address at least three of the UN Sustainable Development Goals: good health and wellbeing, reduced inequalities, and sustainable cities and communities.

Cheyne said it will shortly begin executing some of its advanced pipeline of £550M of investments that would deliver around 3,000 homes.

The fund follows Cheyne’s Social Property Impact Fund, which was launched in 2014 to help tackle the shortage of housing solutions for disadvantaged groups in the UK, the first of its kind in the country.

“We have spent the past six years building up a broad network and pipeline and have the deep experience to help us continue delivering on our conviction that financial and social returns are not just complementary but will actually lead to superior outcomes over the long term,” Cheyne President and co-founder Stuart Fiertz said in a statement. “In these unprecedented times, it is more important than ever that we are able to offer our investors access to secure, long-term, inflation-linked cash flows.”