Institutional investors’ interest in owning private homes for rent, a rapidly expanding investment class throughout the UK, was demonstrated in Belfast in June when Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) and local housing association Clanmil announced a £155m funding deal for 778 new ‘build to rent’ homes in the Loft Line scheme in city’s Titanic Quarter.
LGIM, one of the UK’s largest investors, managing thousands of people’s pension contributions and insurance policies, will fund the construction of the scheme and take control of it when finished.
Loft Lines will provide 627 private build to rent homes plus 151 affordable homes to be managed by Clanmil Housing Association – a significant addition to Belfast’s stock of rented and affordable homes and offering new urban lifestyles in the city’s docklands, with a gym, generous cycle storage and other amenities included in the monthly rent – a short cycle ride from the historic city centre.
The deal is testimony to LGIM’s belief in Belfast as a dynamic place for growth and the need to provide homes people need. It also reflects Belfast’s attractions for many kinds of investors.
Their interest is driven by the £1bn Belfast Region City Deal – a co-investment package to create 20,000 new jobs and a 10-year programme to unlock innovation and research and development in the city. All helped by Belfast’s 100% availability of fibre broadband – the first city in Europe to achieve this, and reflected in the Financial Times’ FDI consultancy’s claim, which monitors foreign direct investment in cities, that Belfast is the UK’s most important regional city for this, second only to Bristol in recent years.
Meanwhile in the city centre itself, there remains the prospect of the Tribeca Belfast development transforming a 12-acre site in the Cathedral Quarter, reintegrating it into the city centre. The scheme will retain and repair historic buildings and create new developments providing retail, restaurants, cultural and workspace uses, reactivating streets and spaces.
The two schemes–Loft Lines, an all new on a brownfield docklands site and Tribeca in the city’s historic centre–demonstrate the challenges and opportunities for the city’s architects, developers and investors. Preservation and modernisation, often combined in a single scheme, are the watchwords.
The city’s dynamic atmosphere of opportunity, reacting to an encouraging policy context, requires an appropriate response in how the city is planned, and how high quality investment opportunities take advantage of what’s on offer to create the city’s future.
VU.CITY is helping. The City Council’s adoption of the platform for planning purposes since 2018 is an encouragement to the city’s architects and others, to do the same. To help test, develop, and persuade, stakeholders of the contribution proposals can make to the city’s future. And to make the most of the historic fabric alongside the new opportunities which it offers, exemplified by the Loft Lines scheme. Making the best of old and new.