PropCast

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 with a conviction for timber long before sustainability became cool. In 2019, Sumitomo Forestry, the Tokyo-listed forestry and housebuilding group founded in 1691, came in on a single scheme: Paradise, a mass-timber office development near Vauxhall. By February 2023, that relationship had evolved into a full corporate merger, with Sumitomo taking a majority stake. The business has since grown from four people to more than 20, with an FCA-regulated fund platform and a first fund, Bywater Fulcrum Value Add Real Estate, now closed and deploying through an LTAF structure. Its first acquisition is 1 Frying Pan Alley in Spitalfields, another office scheme which will be retrofitted to A-grade status using timber.
“It was a game-changer,” Riley says of Sumitomo taking a 51% stake. “We’re a timber-led business. Where we can, we will incorporate glulam and CLT into our schemes. But this is as much about commercial performance as it is carbon.”
Sumitomo stewards more than 40,000 hectares of forest in Japan. Its US housebuilding operations include Tri Pointe Homes (acquired in February 2026 for around $4.3bn) and DRB Group. That scale of parent gives Bywater patient capital, timber expertise and a governance framework that has alerted institutional investors to their unsung book of opportunities.
Living is now at the centre of the strategy. Bywater is active across co-living, build-to-rent and student housing, with three co-living schemes in south London designed by Ackroyd Lowrie and operated by Greystar, and a mid-rise BTR scheme in Kingston approaching planning consent.
Paradise, which opened in 2025, is the UK’s lowest embodied carbon mass-timber office development at 413 kgCO₂e/m². Riley describes the residential ambition as building “a platform on the same low-carbon, timber-led foundations”. Lord Walker of Broxton, Bywater's chairman, brings a platform that few property businesses can match. As chairman of Iceland and the government's Cost of Living Champion, he sits at the intersection of housing, affordability and political access, and has used that position to make the case, including in the House of Lords, that the way Britain builds homes is inseparable from the cost-of-living crisis it is trying to solve.
Both believe co-living could be playing more of a role in solving the housing crisis and, with headwinds still impacting the housing market and notably the viability of ground-up BTR, its younger sibling of an asset class is attractive on account of its higher yields and lower entry point in terms of rents.
“Last year was the year it went from a small subset to something becoming mainstream,” says Lowrie. “Particularly in London, there is so much coming through the pipeline. These applications are going in, they’re going to get consented, they’re going to get funded. Probably not all of them. But a lot of them are.”
Lowrie recently published a co-living design guide, drawing on data compiled exclusively by Savills, covers room sizes, amenity ratios, communal space design and the planning framework that now governs co-living in London. Rather than rehearsing the investment thesis, it takes the decision to build co-living as read and sets out how to get it right. “There are plenty of white papers making the case for why co-living is the next fundable asset,” he says. “This starts from a different place. Chris is in the room to confirm that it is fundable. So the question becomes: how do you actually deliver it well?”
A cautionary tale
Of course, the first name that enters everyone’s minds when discussing co-living is The Collective. Founded in 2010 by Reza Merchant and once the poster child of UK co-living, collapsed into administration in 2021 after racking up losses of £54m in 18 months. The Canary Wharf flagship was sold to Crosstree for £190m in 2022. The original Old Oak scheme, the first large-scale purpose-built co-living building in the UK, was valued at £125m in 2018; Henderson Park acquired the 551-bedroom property for around £60m.
“The second generation are going to blow them out of the water,” says Lowrie. “Before the policies existed, there were no minimum room sizes, no standardisation of amenities. Those first schemes were under-amenities, and they’re going to struggle against what’s coming through now.”
The evidence from better-designed schemes supports that. Cheyne Capital’s Mason & Fifth at Westbourne Park, a 332-studio scheme, was fully let within three to four months of opening. “If it’s the right scheme in the right location, the demand is there,” says Riley.
A “dream project”: timber, heritage and 50% carbon savings
The duo’s Tanner Street scheme in Bermondsey is a fine example of how such projects can rejuvenate old buildings while preserving the spirit of their architectural past. The 112-unit co-living development retains an existing Victorian warehouse and builds new elements in glulam and CLT, saving roughly 50% in upfront embodied carbon compared with traditional construction.
“We’ve put sustainability at the heart of that building and we’ve put building users at the heart of it,” Riley says. “Gym, co-working, shared dining space, rooftop terraces, interactive rooms where you could play golf on a simulator or watch TV together as a group.” Lowrie adds that it is “a dream project for us”, one that “puts sustainability at the front and centre of the design process, not just in the retention and celebration of the existing Victorian warehouse, but through the cross-laminated timber structure.”
Riley is emphatic when pressed around the obvious question of fire safety. “Anything below 18 metres meets building regulations,” he says. “I would actually argue it’s safer. We have fire consultants involved from day one. The microscope is on us more than others, so we definitely do not cut any corners.” The bigger practical challenge, it turns out, is acoustics. Despite being comfortable with the fire performance of exposed CLT, Bywater had to encapsulate the timber at Tanner Street because of impact sound between floors. “You had to put 150mm of concrete on top of the CLT,” Lowrie explains. “Which is somewhat ironic.”
Timber also offers commercial advantages beyond carbon. Riley points to faster construction: CLT is lighter, requiring fewer piles in the ground, and erection times are materially quicker above it. “So we’re out of the ground faster, which de-risks us.” On adaptability: “I just don’t think it’s any different. We’ve got a glulam frame which acts the same as steel or concrete. It’s a frame.” On the carbon numbers: “The 50% upfront saving is substantial. We’re seeking to do the same in a residential world as we’ve done in commercial.”
Lowrie’s rules of thumb
Across the conversation, Lowrie returns repeatedly to a handful of practical convictions. “Good design is good design,” he says. “The principle is the same whether you’re doing a school, a climbing centre or a co-living scheme.” He calls his approach the Dave Brailsford method: every decision optimised. “You’ve got to get the best consent, but that consent also has to be completely buildable, fundable and exitable. If you’re not thinking from the end point backwards, you’re going to get planning for something you...

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 works
The 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 that actually shape a day, a ten-minute walk from a Tube station, good schools nearby, and the app surfaces homes in places the renter had never weighed up.
Behind the conversational front end sits Milo, a proprietary large language model wired to a three-dimensional graph database. It is deliberately closed, working only across the roughly 100 datasets nHabit has ingested rather than crawling the open internet, and it answers in whatever language the question is asked. Renters tune five dials, safety, nightlife, amenities, digital connectivity and mobility, to their own priorities. “Everybody’s different,” Charlton says, recalling a South Korean renter who put safety first and still ended up somewhere that felt unsafe for want of the data to choose well, against a group of Australians who cared about nightlife and nothing else.
Taking on the incumbents
The duopoly has barely moved in twenty years, and Charlton is blunt about why. The portals, he argues, cannot rebuild themselves around AI without tearing up the systems they already run on. “This is a ground-up build, not a ChatGPT chatbot wrapper dropped on top of an existing system,” he says, and the two giants are, in his view, simply too big to attempt it. He is just as withering about the wave of look-alike tools claiming an AI edge. “I look at a lot of businesses and think, that’s basically an AI wrapper,” he says. “You’re just piggybacking on somebody else’s technology. It’s essentially a dashboard.” OnTheMarket and others have tried to break the lock before and offered, in his words, alternative versions of the same thing.
The £1.5 billion claim against Rightmove, led by former Competition and Markets Authority panel member Jeremy Newman and funded by litigation specialist Innsworth Capital, reaches its certification hearing in November, and Charlton reads it as a market finally losing patience. He has heard the standard objection plenty of times. One national agency told him he would need venture capital, private equity and a £20 million annual marketing budget to land a punch. “Social media has genuinely levelled that playing field,” he counters, pointing to the direct-to-consumer brands that scaled through COVID on a fraction of the old launch cost. “If the industry is genuinely sick of the status quo, people need to actually support an alternative rather than just complain.”
What it means for landlords, operators and agents
For the operators and agents who pay to be seen, the first benefit is cleaner demand. Matching renters to homes on lifestyle and neighbourhood fit produces better-qualified leads and fewer dead-end enquiries, the difference between a showcase and a switchboard. The deeper prize is the data underneath. “Data is the new oil,” Charlton says. nHabit builds anonymised personas from how people behave in the app, whether they own a dog, what they linger on, what they swipe away, and reads the patterns the way Netflix reads viewing. “Why is it that people with dogs are less age-sensitive than people with children?” he asks. “The data might tell us.” Ownership is the point he keeps pressing: with the incumbent platforms, the insight ends up in someone else’s hands.
That rewrites the commercial model. Rather than a monthly listing fee, nHabit offers a developer the news that a particular profile of renter was ignoring a location six months ago and is now circling it. Quintain, the Wembley Park operator, grasped the idea at once, Charlton says, and a conversation with the build-to-rent landlord Grainger surfaced something he had missed, that many of its tenants work in the NHS on shift patterns whose travel times look nothing like a nine-to-five. The same logic carries into student housing, where operators such as IQ and Unite hold safety credentials Charlton thinks they undersell, and the recently enacted Renters’ Rights Act only sharpens the appetite for better data.
Agents, meanwhile, get a read on roughly twenty renter typologies and on exactly what a prospective tenant is hesitating over. A structural shift sits behind the sell. A year ago, Charlton estimates, about one per cent of an agency’s leads came through tools like ChatGPT or Claude, and he now puts it at seven or eight per cent, noting that those systems crawl websites selectively. “Agents understand they need to get their websites ready for LLMs,” he says, “and we’ve essentially done a lot of that work for them already.” The value spreads wider still, with one of his non-executive directors, who previously led Microsoft’s digital-cities work, pointing to retailers, hospitality and councils as buyers of the same locational insight.
From architecture to a blended business
The route here ran through the top of global architecture. Charlton trained in interior design at Edinburgh College of Art, decided early that he “would rather employ great designers so we could elevate together”, and moved to Dubai to set up the Middle East studio of Pringle Brandon, the commercial-interiors firm the architect Jack Pringle founded with Chris Brandon in 1986. When Pringle, now chair of the RIBA board of trustees, sold the business to Perkins&Will in 2012, Charlton’s remit widened from fitting out offices to winning architecture for the Dubai developers Emaar and Aldar. A country-scale masterplan changed how he saw the work. “It’s about data, understanding what the infrastructure is going to be in ten, twenty, thirty years,” he says, and the conversations that followed, with Siemens and Schneider, planted the idea behind everything since. He became Perkins&Will’s UK managing director in 2017, ran the London studio for four and a half years and left in 2022 to start i/o atelier, named for the binary of input-output and the atelier, a house of artisans, a “blended business” where machine-learning engineers and designers sit side by side.
nHabit emerged from that studio almost by accident. Asked to measure the “vibrancy” of the places i/o was designing, the team-built mapping software that scored London neighbourhoods on amenities, green space, transport, gyms and the rest of the texture of daily life, then triangulated those points of interest into a picture of how appealing an area really was. Bolted onto the language model the studio had already built, the engine turned out to do something else entirely, helping people find somewhere to live. ChatGPT launched roughly six months after Charlton founded the studio, and the doubters came round. “Many people clearly went away and thought he’s lost the plot,” he says. “Over time those same people have come back and said, actually, you were just ahead of the game.”
Ambition, and what has been built
The proprietary work, Milo, the isochrone engine and the graph infrastructure beneath them, is where Charlton sees defensible intellectual property and the prospect of patents. Because the infrastructure is built, new markets switch on quickly: Manchester and Liverpool are ready, and the longer horizon is Paris and New York, cities restless enough to reward the model. “Why can’t we be the Airbnb of residential rental?” he asks, noting that most rental apps he meets abroad are stuck serving a single city. Airbnb itself started in San Francisco.
nHabit is self-funded and was founded only in April 2025, and the design business is heading the same way, toward helping occupiers procure design rather than only producing it. An adviser put the trajectory back to him, that he is “becoming a tech business that does design rather than a design business that does tech”, a verdict offered with equal parts admiration and unease. The name says as much. nHabit is “inhabit” with the i taken out, a small act of rebuilding from the letters up, which is roughly what its founder has set out to do to the way Britain looks for somewhere to rent.

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 narrow interpretation of what search can be – hence why he’s set up nHabit, which reaches the App Store and Google Play in early June. nHabit will let renters describe the life they want in plain language, analyse London across those characteristics and give 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, talks on this week’s PropCast to set out why he believes the two incumbents are too big to fix the thing renters actually struggle with.
How the search actually works
The 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 that actually shape one’s day, factors like - a ten-minute walk from a Tube station or good schools nearby, and the app then brings forward homes in places the renter had never weighed up.
Behind the conversational front end sits Milo, a proprietary large language model wired to a three-dimensional graph database. It is deliberately closed, working only across the roughly 100 datasets nHabit has ingested rather than crawling the open internet, and it answers in whatever language the question is asked. This approach guarantees the information it returns with is accurate and up-to-date, as well as allowing students or other people moving to the UK to feel comfortable in their property search.
Renters tune five dials, safety, nightlife, amenities, digital connectivity and mobility, to their own priorities. “Everybody’s different,” Charlton says, recalling a South Korean renter who put safety first and still ended up somewhere that felt unsafe for want of the data to choose well, against a group of Australians who cared about nightlife and nothing else.
Taking on the incumbents
The duopoly has barely moved in twenty years, and Charlton is blunt about why. The portals, he argues, cannot rebuild themselves around AI without tearing up the systems they already run on. “This is a ground-up build, not a ChatGPT LLM wrapper dropped on top of an existing system,” he says, and the two giants are, in his view, simply too big to attempt it. He is just as reticent about the wave of look-alike tools claiming an AI edge. “I look at a lot of businesses and think, that’s basically an AI wrapper,” he says. “You’re just piggybacking on somebody else’s technology. It’s essentially a dashboard.” OnTheMarket and others have tried to break the lock before and offered, in his words, alternative versions of the same thing.
The £1.5 billion claim against Rightmove, led by former Competition and Markets Authority panel member Jeremy Newman and funded by litigation specialist Innsworth Capital, reaches its certification hearing in November, and Charlton reads it as a market finally losing patience. He has heard the standard objection plenty of times. One national agency told him he would need venture capital, private equity and a £20 million annual marketing budget to land a punch. “Social media has really levelled that playing field,” he counters, pointing to the direct-to-consumer brands that scaled through COVID on a fraction of the old launch cost. “If the industry is genuinely sick of the status quo, people need to actually support an alternative rather than just complain.”
What it means for landlords, operators and agents
For the operators and agents who pay to be seen, the first benefit is cleaner demand. Matching renters to homes on lifestyle and neighbourhood fit produces better-qualified leads and fewer dead-end enquiries. The deeper prize is the data underneath. “Data is the new oil,” Charlton says. nHabit builds anonymised personas from how people behave in the app, whether they own a dog, what they linger on, what they swipe away, and reads the patterns the way Netflix reads viewing. “Why is it that people with dogs are less age-sensitive than people with children?” he asks. “The data might tell us.” Ownership is the point he keeps pressing: with the incumbent platforms, the insight ends up in someone else’s hands.
That rewrites the commercial model. Rather than a monthly listing fee, nHabit offers a developer the news that a particular profile of renter was ignoring a location six months ago and is now circling it. Quintain, the Wembley Park operator, grasped the idea at once, Charlton says, and a conversation with the build-to-rent landlord Grainger surfaced something he had missed, that many of its tenants work in the NHS on shift patterns whose travel times look nothing like a nine-to-five. The same logic carries into student housing, where operators such as IQ and Unite hold safety credentials Charlton thinks they undersell, and the recently enacted Renters’ Rights Act only sharpens the appetite for better data as the private rented sector increasingly institutionalises.
Agents, meanwhile, get a read on roughly twenty renter typologies and on exactly what a prospective tenant is hesitating over. A structural shift sits behind the sell. A year ago, Charlton estimates, about one per cent of an agency’s leads came through tools like ChatGPT or Claude, and he now puts it at seven or eight per cent, noting that those systems crawl websites selectively. “Agents understand they need to get their websites ready for LLMs,” he says, “and we’ve essentially done a lot of that work for them already.” The value spreads wider still, with one of his non-executive directors, who previously led Microsoft’s digital-cities work, pointing to retailers, hospitality and councils as buyers of the same locational insight.
From architecture to a blended business
Charlton's path to this point ran through the top tier of global architecture. He trained in interior design at the Edinburgh College of Art, and moved to Dubai to establish the Middle East studio of Pringle Brandon - the commercial-interiors firm founded in 1986 by architect Jack Pringle and Chris Brandon. When Pringle, now chair of the RIBA board of trustees, sold the business to Perkins&Will in 2012, Charlton’s remit widened from fitting out offices to award-winning architecture for the Dubai developers Emaar and Aldar. A country-scale masterplan changed how he saw the work. “It’s about data, understanding what the infrastructure is going to be in ten, twenty, thirty years,” he says, and the conversations that followed, with Siemens and Schneider, planted the idea behind everything since. He became Perkins&Will’s UK managing director in 2017, ran the London studio for four and a half years and left in 2022 to start i/o atelier, named for the binary of input-output and the atelier, a house of artisans, a “blended business” where machine-learning engineers and designers sit side by side.
nHabit emerged from that studio almost by accident. Asked to measure the “vibrancy” of the places i/o was designing, the team built mapping software that scored London neighbourhoods on amenities, green space, transport, gyms and the rest of the texture of daily life, then triangulated those points of interest into a picture of how appealing an area really was. Bolted onto the language model the studio had already built, the engine turned out to do something else entirely, helping people find somewhere to live. ChatGPT launched roughly six months after Charlton founded the studio, and the doubters came round. “Many people clearly went away and thought he’s lost the plot,” he says. “Over time those same people have come back and said, actually, you were ahead of the game.”
Ambition, and what has been built
The proprietary work, Milo, the isochrone engine and the graph infrastructure beneath them, is where Charlton sees a moat, with defensible intellectual property and the prospect of patents a strong point of differentiation. Because the infrastructure is already there, new markets switch on quickly: Manchester and Liverpool are ready, and the longer horizon is Paris and New York, cities restless enough to reward the model. “Why can’t we be the Airbnb of residential rental?” he asks, noting that most rental apps he meets abroad are stuck serving a single city. Airbnb itself started in San Francisco.
nHabit is self-funded and was founded only in April 2025, and the design business is heading the same way, toward helping occupiers procure design rather than only producing it. An adviser put the trajectory back to him, that he is “becoming a tech business that does design rather than a design business that does tech”, a verdict offered with equal parts admiration and unease. The name says as much. nHabit is “inhabit” with the i taken out, a small act of rebuilding from the letters up, which is roughly what its founder has set out to do to the way Britain looks...

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 conversation with his boss at Knight Frank & Rutley over funding for an accounting night course, he laughed at the negotiation. “Marcus, if I fund this and you get the qualification, you’ll leave. I said: well, if you don’t fund it, I’ll also leave.”
The qualification opened the door to Henderson, predecessor to Janus Henderson, where alongside veteran fund manager Chris Turner he looked after the private allocation of TR Property Trust, then a smaller vehicle with exposure across both listed and private real estate. Later, in 1999, he assumed control of the listed property equity sleeves of two small Henderson diversified equity funds, each capitalised at between £20 million and £30 million, marking the start of his career in the public markets.
A move to Thames River Capital (TRC) in 2004 with mentor Chris Turner remains a moment Phayre-Mudge recalls fondly. “We told the founders of Thames River, Charlie Porter and Johnny Hughes-Morgan, that the only reason we’d really moved was because we didn’t have to change the name, which was entirely fortuitous.”
A new hybrid fund, blending equities with physical property, launched in 2005 and remains a source of pride. “That fund is still alive and strong and has never closed to redemptions,” he said, a particularly impressive feat given the recent difficulties faced by PAIFs in the UK as well as some of America’s largest real estate fund managers.
The Global Financial Crisis tested the model and, by his own account, came close to derailing it. “Whether by good judgment or good luck, probably a bit of both, we moved to 20% cash in both funds the quarter before Lehman went down. That’s why we survived.”
But he is quick to acknowledge the asymmetry that defines life in fund management. “If you’re a fund manager and you move to 20% cash and you’re wrong, you’ll massively underperform your benchmarks. If you’re right, your clients are still losing money, just considerably less than if they’d been fully invested.”
Among the more provocative observations of his career has been how the rise of passive capital has hollowed out the dialogue between boards and shareholders. “Around 20 years ago, I only ever engaged with the C-suite and had virtually no engagement with boards. That has changed a lot. We’ve had to feed back views to boards behind the scenes, partly because so much capital has moved passive that boards are living in something of a vacuum. They get feedback through formal channels via brokers and bankers, but you hear what you want to hear through those channels.”
That conviction underpins his views on a generation of CEOs and the quality of governance they preside over. He singled out the rise of finance directors moving into the top seat, an evolution he regards with mixed feelings. “There’s always the exception that proves the rule, and one must call out David Sleath for what he’s done at Segro. He’s been there a long time now and is a good example of a CFO who became CEO.”
But, he added, the picture in smaller companies is different. “In the smaller and mid-cap space, I’d say you absolutely need these businesses to be run by people with a property background and a property outlook.”
Alignment between management and shareholders is the thread that runs through much of his commentary. He cited Big Yellow as the gold standard. “The best example of all is Nick Vetch and Jimmy Gibson at Big Yellow. Obviously Jimmy is now retiring, but Nick founded the business and remains executive chair. You know you’re in safe hands because there is alignment.”
LondonMetric’s Andrew Jones and Shaftesbury Capital’s Ian Hawksworth drew similar praise as executives capable both of articulating a strategy and demonstrating meaningful skin in the game.
The era of zero interest rates, he argued, produced a swathe of externally managed vehicles that have since had to confront the consequences of weak structures. “Some very smart people, smart possibly at creating structures rather than necessarily skilled at spending other people’s money, launched a full range of externally managed vehicles.”
On notice periods, his message is unambiguous. “A one-year notice period should be standard. I don’t speak with a forked tongue here. I’ve had a rolling one-year notice period on TR Property since I started in 1997. You’re always 12 months away from the chop, but if you do a good job the board will back you. You can’t have notice periods that are essentially just poison pills.”
He also points to the internalisation of Supermarket Income REIT by Atrato Partners as an example of improved manager-shareholder alignment.
Life Science REIT drew a particularly sharp post-mortem. “I think the creator of Life Science REIT is talented at spotting a business opportunity and market timing,” he said. “Unbeknownst to him, the high noon moment turned out to be the IPO. But the capital had been raised, (was quickly spent on an ecletic mix of standing assets and development opportunities) and the value destruction was borne by shareholders not the manager”
Phayre-Mudge argues that had management been more closely aligned with shareholders, the outcome might have been materially different. The point carries added weight as the sector begins to recover. UK leasing activity across London, Oxford and Cambridge accelerated by 6% year on year in Q1 2026, with Cambridge alone accounting for more than 166,000 sq ft of take-up. That momentum sits within a broader structural story, with the Oxford-Cambridge Supercluster Board and Public First estimating the corridor could deliver £78 billion in additional gross value added if growth accelerates, underpinned by 3,000 knowledge-intensive firms employing 152,000 people and generating £45 billion in annual turnover across the arc.
On the UK majors, Phayre-Mudge is sanguine about Simon Carter’s departure from British Land. “Does it mean there’s a problem inside British Land? Absolutely not. Their campuses, and Broadgate in particular, will continue to thrive. Their retail warehouse portfolio is very good, if fully valued, which is contributing to the share price’s 35% discount.”
Canada Water, however, appears to him more burden than opportunity. “Perhaps a bridge too far, even for a balance sheet the size of British Land’s.”
His critique extended squarely to City Hall. “Unfortunately it’s taken a long time for the Mayor of London to wake up to the fact that he has essentially destroyed large-scale residential development through unrealistic affordable housing requirements. You can’t solve the problem by ensuring that no developer can make any money. The developer will simply wait for a change in government.”
Landsec’s foray into residential drew similarly direct treatment. “Of all the sectors Landsec could have chosen, residential is the hardest to make stack without prior knowledge of that market. The single reason the wider market didn’t like that strategic shift is because it simply couldn’t explain how it would be in any way earnings accretive.”
He sees a wider strategic failure among the UK majors. “Tritax Big Box barely existed 15 years ago. Landsec and British Land could easily have reduced their shopping centre exposure and moved into logistics. But hindsight is a beautiful thing.”
Grainger was treated more sympathetically. “Helen Gordon has done a good job over the years repositioning Grainger, fixing the balance sheet and giving it a clear strategy,” he said, while warning that political risk continues to weigh on the sector. ‘However the earnings yield remains too modest for many REIT investors’.
The US multifamily market, by contrast, offers what he sees as a clearer model. “What you’re selling to the investor is something eminently secure, with genuine index linkage, run with efficiencies that can only be driven by scale.”
Few episodes attracted sharper criticism than Unite’s pursuit of Empiric. “Our counter-argument was straightforward: if you’re an undergrad you want to be in a building with hundreds of other people, facilities, a bar. Postgrads aren’t getting out of the PRS for purpose-built student housing.”
When a profit warning followed within days of the takeover announcement, he was withering. “The whole thing was a catalogue of disaster. Whether...