PropCast

A year into his role as Head of Policy and Campaigns at Abri, former British Property Federation residential policy lead Theo Plowman joins Andrew Teacher, to explain why the sector’s hard-won settlement is only the start, and why pension capital, shared ownership reform and a dose of self-confidence will decide what comes next.

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 of adverse scenarios”, and has become rare among large associations.
Gary Orr, chief executive of Abri Group and its predecessor organisation Yarlington since 2011, has done a remarkable job steering the organisation through significant change and significant expansion, never an easy thing, particularly in the housing association world. The result is a balance sheet that equips Abri both to manage the daily complexity of providing homes and services for well over 100,000 people, a figure approaching 150,000 through the proposed Curo merger, and to pursue an ambitious growth strategy supported in part by institutional capital.
“We’re ambitious about being a trusted partner in delivery and piloting some of these ideas,” says Theo Plowman, Abri’s head of policy and campaigns. “We’re in the room on several different conversations, we’re really well placed and we have the expertise to do it.” Plowman joined a year ago from the British Property Federation, where he led much of the trade body’s residential policy work, particularly on supporting institutional investment into build-to-rent. The conversation that follows ranges across pension capital, shared ownership reform and why the sector needs to stop underselling itself.
Scale as strategy
Growth is deliberate. In April 2026 Abri published an investment strategy targeting 20,000 new homes by 2036, “doubling our output” as Plowman puts it, alongside around £450m of investment in existing homes and an ambition to become a top five provider by scale, customer satisfaction and as a place to work. Delivery runs through its Strategic Partnership with Homes England, which awarded Abri £300m under the 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme as part of a £2.66bn investment in new homes, joint ventures such as the 50:50 acquisition of the former Ford Airfield in West Sussex, where 1,500 homes are planned, and ambitious regeneration schemes like The Granges in Windsor, where four tower blocks containing 192 properties are being replaced with 413 sustainable homes.
The next step came on 1 July 2026, when the boards of Abri and Curo announced they are exploring a new partnership that would create a group owning and managing more than 73,000 homes and community assets, serving 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England, with combined turnover of £598m in 2024/25. Curo, formed in 1999 through a stock transfer from Bath and North East Somerset Council, owns more than 14,000 homes concentrated in Bath and Bristol, a natural western extension of Abri’s footprint. Gary Orr calls the two organisations “an excellent fit for one another”: the same geography, the same core purpose and values, and, in his argument, the combined strength to invest more in customers’ homes, offer greater services and build more much-needed affordable homes. A final decision is expected later this year, following formal consultation with customers and approval of the full business case by both boards.
The logic is the one that has driven every stage of Abri’s growth since 2019. Scale spreads fixed costs across more homes, cuts procurement costs per unit and builds the balance sheet capacity that funds better services and more development. Against the triple squeeze Plowman describes later in the conversation, on grant-funded delivery, existing stock and compliance, consolidation is one of the few levers a housing association controls entirely itself. A combined group would lift Abri from around 20th to around 13th among UK housing associations by turnover, according to Housing Today’s rankings of 2024/25 accounts, a meaningful step towards the top five ambition set out in April’s strategy.
A century of shelter
If scale is the future, purpose is the foundation, and Abri’s roots run deep on both sides of the group. Its founding organisation, the Swaythling Housing Society, was established in Southampton on 26 November 1925 by three local men: Fred Woolley, an accountant and civic leader who went on to serve as Mayor of Southampton and became the society’s first chairman; Claude Ashby, a businessman and director of the Bursledon brickworks; and the architect Herbert Collins. Between them they put up £200 of shares, with Collins’ father lending the fledgling society £14,000. A group approaching 60,000 homes began with £200.
That same year the society built its first homes at Pilgrim Place, off Mansbridge Road, under the Housing Act 1924: let at restricted rents, built by the society’s own workforce to Collins’ designs, and still standing a century later, characterised by generous green spaces and a strong sense of place. Collins cross-subsidised the work by designing larger homes for wealthy buyers. At Southcliff House, built in 1930 as flats for single women, the society’s women rent collectors lived among the tenants they served. Abri marked the Swaythling centenary in 2025. Few businesses of any kind can point to a hundred years of continuous social purpose.
Collins took his inspiration from Octavia Hill, a figure every bit as significant to the housing association movement as the better-remembered names of Peabody, Guinness and Rowntree, and arguably more so. George Peabody (1862), Edward Guinness (1890) and Joseph Rowntree (1904) endowed the great institutions that bear their names; Hill invented the method they all came to use. In 1865, aged 27, she persuaded John Ruskin to buy the leases of three run-down cottages in Paradise Place, Marylebone, on the condition that they returned 5% on his investment. She renovated them, collected the rents weekly in person and built a professional, predominantly female force of housing managers around a simple conviction: decent homes, fairly managed, change lives. By the end of her career she was managing housing for 3,000 to 4,000 Londoners. She saved Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill from development, foresaw the green belt in her 1888 essay More Air for London and co-founded the National Trust in 1895. Her “five per cent philanthropy”, a fair return on capital doing social good, is the direct ancestor of the pension fund proposition Plowman spends much of this conversation making. And her legacy lives on inside the group itself: Octavia, the west London association that joined Abri in 2024, descends directly from the homes she managed. Through that merger, Abri now carries the weight and heritage of Octavia Hill’s foundational housing association, with a history stretching all the way back to 1865. Where Herbert Collins laid the cornerstones in 1925, Hill’s model of professional, ethically driven management and “five per cent philanthropy” had already set the blueprint sixty years earlier. In this sense, Abri’s story is not only one of modern growth and consolidation, but the continuation of the very method that built the movement.
The settlement and what comes next
At the June 2025 Spending Review, Rachel Reeves committed £39bn to a new Social and Affordable Homes Programme over 10 years, almost doubling annual grant funding, alongside a 10-year rent settlement at CPI plus 1%. There has been plenty of speculation of late about the settlement and whether it should be reallocated. That is not something Plowman comments on, but he is clear about what it delivered: “The housing association world got a lot...

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.