Urban Splash has secured a new refinancing deal with Aviva Investors, the global asset management business of Aviva plc, completing a £43.5million eight-year debt facility on its commercial portfolio. Aviva Investors has committed to funding an 800,000sq ft workspace portfolio primarily focused on Liverpool and Manchester.
The space is currently 97% let in a diverse portfolio with customers in accommodation from 100 to 50,000sq ft. The facility includes a commitment by Urban Splash to work towards ESG improvements of the assets as part of Aviva Investors’ Sustainable Transition Loans framework, which has provided over £1billion of climate-linked loans since its launch in December 2020.
Urban Splash Director Nathan Cornish said: "We are absolutely delighted to complete this long-term deal with a funder of the stature of Aviva Investors. It is a great endorsement of the value of the Urban Splash brand, our commercial assets, our people – and the customers operating out of our buildings." The transaction completed in just six weeks. It refinances and consolidates separate portfolios which were previously funded by IGC Longbow, Rothschild and the Pears family.
Bathroom pod manufacturer Offsite Solutions has announced its highest-ever order intake with nearly £40million of new contracts. This is for the manufacture of around 10,000 units and is a significant increase on the same period last year.
Contracts have been awarded for steel-framed, GRP composite, and enhanced GRP pods across a range of residential sectors – build-to-rent, student living, and apartments for shared ownership, affordable housing, and market sale. The new contract wins include nearly 1,000 shower pods for student projects for Equans in Birmingham and London, 850 pods for Midgard for another Moda Living scheme and over 900 pods across three new projects for Wates for mixed tenure residential schemes.
James Stephens, Managing Director of Offsite Solutions said: "Despite these uncertain times, the outlook remains buoyant for our business. We have a solid forward order book but with additional capacity to offer more developers and contractors the greater certainty of offsite manufacturing. A substantial proportion of this order intake is for long-term repeat customers - developers such as Fusion Students, Downing, Moda, urbanest, and leading main contractors including Gregor Bamert, Head of Real Estate Debt at Aviva Investors added: "We are very pleased to have started a lending relationship with Urban Splash and look forward to developing it further over time. The diverse property assets are well-designed, well-located and of high quality. Urban Splash manages an impressive range of commercial communities, and we are proud to support them as they continue to reduce the carbon footprint of the portfolio."
Nathan Cornish added: "We are proud of our commercial portfolio and have carefully nurtured our workspaces in recent years, investing in new ideas that will accommodate changing occupier appetites and a new approach to work. It is an area of Urban Galliford Try, Vinci, Mace, Wates, Willmott Dixon, and Winvic. We are also delighted to see new clients and contractors using our pods – Telford Homes, Equans, IQ Student Accommodation, Midgard, and RG Group. We are definitely benefiting from the surge in interest in offsite manufacturing and MMC which are transforming UK construction. Bathroom pods are fast becoming a preferred method of procurement for many developers and contractors.
"Our approach to bathroom construction, pod technology and design enables our clients to have a better engineered, consistently high-quality product than is achievable with in-situ building methods. We can also reduce the impact of skills and labour shortages Splash that has perhaps not occupied the spotlight as much as our residential or regeneration projects, but it is a consistent part of our business which has always underpinned what we do. I am proud to have reached another milestone today and the support of a major financial institution."
Major assets within the 25-asset Urban Splash portfolio include Beehive Mill, Waulk Mill and Stubbs Mill in Manchester, and several buildings in Liverpool including Vanilla Factory and Tea Factory in the centre of the city and the Matchworks in South Liverpool.
Source: www.urbansplash.co.uk
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