Market Masterclass: Single Family Rental - What is single family rental?

Daniel Leather:The idea of this series of episodes is to focus on single family rental, which is an asset class that we have seen taking increasing importance within the housebuilding industry; and single family rental is, at its essence, housing stock being delivered to institutional and other investors who will then retain, own and manage that housing stock and rent it out to private renters – so it is not an affordable housing tenure, it does not have a planning status, but it is institutions and investors owning and holding housing stock and renting it out; and the intention of this series is to focus on the various disciplines that feed into a single family rental portfolio deal, so you will be hearing from my colleagues here at Gowling who specialise in planning, in tax, in construction, in site setup and in land purchase and what they are thinking about when they are buying land or setting up sites and how that has become increasingly important that we think about single family rental portfolio deals and that asset class.

So the positives of single family rental portfolio deals that we are seeing are that it is attracting significant amounts of sustained investment into parts of the country that have not seen that before; so we have seen for years and years and years build-to-rent deals being done, PRS deals being done, which has predominantly been investment in the city centres.

Single family rental is different. Single family rental is more regional; it is more detached and semi-detached housing with gardens rather than apartments and, like I say, sites all over the country are attracting investment and people who are interested in taking high numbers of units on developments that, in the past, would not have attracted such inward investment.

So the idea is just to produce a series of episodes here that are useful, informative, helpful for all of the stakeholders in this asset class – housebuilders, investors, operators – and just sort of lead the thinking a little bit in what is a very exciting trend that is emerging. You know, we are seeing lots of activity, lots of deals that are being done and lots more in the pipeline; so we hope that you find this useful and that you enjoy this as much as we have putting it together.