UKAA announces new Investor and Lender Forum Chair and committee

The UK Apartment Association (UKAA) has appointed Ashley Perry as the new Chair of its Investor and Lender Forum.

Perry, who is investment director at UK living real estate investment manager Apache Capital, was previously Vice-Chair of the Forum and replaces CBRE’s Jason Hardman, who has completed his two year period as Chair. 

Perry has been with Apache Capital since 2022, helping to shape the company’s mutli-family investment strategies which include a 6,000+ home build-to-rent (BTR) joint venture with Moda Living. Present Made, Apache Capital’s single-family housing platform, is to be funded in a joint venture with Nuveen Real Estate. Across both its multi- and single-family strategies, Apache Capital has completed over £1bn of debt and equity funding transactions in the past 12 months.

UKAA’s Investor and Lender Forum, which acts as educational network for the BTR finance community, will also create a committee that brings together pre-eminent UK BTR lenders and investors to help broaden the sector’s appeal to a wider selection of lenders. 

The committee is made up of leading representatives of the BTR investment community, including Realstar, Lloyds Banking Group, CBRE, Bridges Fund Management, Get Living, Invesco, Patrizia and M&G Real Estate.

The Investor and Lender Forum will also support the UKAA’s expansion into the single-family housing (SFH) sector, following the creation of a formal partnership with the British Property Federation (BPF) last month. Build-to-rent’s major lobbying groups have partnered to support the build-out of a joint policy and political engagement framework, acting as a single voice for one of UK housing market’s fastest growing sub-sectors. 

The record £1bn invested into SFH in the first nine months of 2023 was more than triple the amount for the whole of 2022, according to Savills. International and domestic Investors have been targeting a mixture of ground-up development and existing stock strategies, with structural drivers including a cooling housing market, attractive supply-demand dynamics, and access to inflation-linked, long-term income streams.

Ashley Perry, Chair of Investor and Lender Forum, UKAA, said: “The Investor and Lender Forum has made fantastic progress in the last two years, being an important educational, networking and knowledge-sharing platform that supports the wider objectives of the UKAA.

“Professional rental housing is one of institutional capital’s most favoured asset classes in the UK, with organisations such as the UKAA and BPF helping to shape a favourable policy climate that lowers the barriers to entry and maximises the potential of the build-to-rent and single-family housing sectors.”

Brendan Geraghty, CEO, UKAA, said: “We thank Jason Hardman for his support and service to the UKAA as former-Chair of the Investor and Lender Forum and value his continued contribution to the new committee. The UKAA warmly welcomes Ashley Perry as the new Chair; a tireless advocate for the UK BTR sector and through his role at Apache Capital, an early pioneer in BTR that has been behind a string of landmark deals, will provide invaluable insight to the members of the Investor and Lender Forum.”

The UKAA was founded in 2016 and has established itself as the representative body for institutionally backed, professionally managed rental homes and the voice of the whole BTR sector.  Its 330 members are comprised of the UK’s leading investors, operators, developers, advisors, and suppliers in the residential rental sector.