Private rental home builder Grainger sees continued strong rental growth and portfolio expansion

The business, which has a £3.3bn operational portfolio of around 10,200 homes, said positive momentum continued within the business, as it provided an update on trading for the four months to the end of January 2024.

Grainger, which will announce its half-year results for the six-month period ending March 31, 2024, on May 16, said it had a £1.6bn pipeline of a further 5,634 build-to-rent homes.

Chief executive Helen Gordon said: “Positive momentum continues within the business, underpinned by our market leading operating platform.

"We are maintaining strong levels of rental growth with like-for-like rents in our PRS/build-to-rent portfolio growing 8.4 per cent, while maintaining healthy customer affordability levels.

"Occupancy remains high at 97.2 per cent. Our forward-looking key performance indicators show continued high levels of rental demand over the coming months, supporting occupancy.

“Sales from our legacy regulated tenancy portfolio continue to perform well with strong liquidity and pricing.

"The sales market is proving robust with a high proportion of our sales going to ‘best and final’ bids. On average, we are achieving sales prices 2.6 per cent above valuations.

“Since our year end results in November, we have completed 307 homes at The Copper Works in Cardiff and continue with the phased delivery of homes at Weavers Yard in Newbury, with leasing in line with our underwriting assumptions. In the next month we will see two new build-to-rent schemes launching in Birmingham and Bristol totalling 606 homes.”

She added: “In line with our stated strategy, we are continuing to build on our geographic clusters of PRS developments which delivers operational and financial efficiencies, and we are on track with the delivery of our committed pipeline which will deliver significant growth in EPRA earnings (a measure of the underlying operating performance of an investment property company) over the coming years.”

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Looking ahead, Grainger said that demand for renting, and its product specifically, remained exceptionally high.

"The strong, compelling fundamentals of the UK residential rental market continue to underpin our investment case,” it said in a statement.

“We continue to achieve record levels of rental growth, and should wage growth ameliorate later this year, we expect rental growth to continue be higher than historic averages, driven by our market-leading operational platform.”

It added: “With local and national elections later this year, we are comfortable that political and regulatory risk for our business is low and that our responsible approach to delivering high quality rental homes for the mid-market is very much aligned to the main political parties’ priorities.”