PropCast: Abri’s Theo Plowman on what comes after the £39bn affordable housing settlement
About this episode
Theo Plowman discusses the implications of the £39bn affordable housing settlement and the scale of Abri's operations in the UK housing market.
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…
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