By Charles Ferguson-Davie, Co-CEO and CIO, Moorfield Group
Demographically driven real estate
England and Wales have recorded their biggest annual population growth in 75 years. According to the ONS, the population increased by almost 610,000 to 60.9 million over the last year.
Declining birth rates, an ageing population and reforms to immigration policy have led to higher levels of net migration, boosting the number of people between the ages of 20 and 65 that are classified as the working age population. It is interesting to note the UK’s expected ongoing population growth in the years ahead versus Europe’s shrinking numbers.
Higher population levels heighten the need, and scarcity, of many real estate asset types required to cater to the fundamental requirements of a growing number of people.
This is certainly true for residential and we continue to see good reason to invest in the sector, having recently agreed to fund a 440-home, £150m Build to Rent (BTR) development in Greater Manchester on behalf of our latest value-add fund, MREFV.
We have also been active in the single-family rental housing sector (SFR), which is being funded by MREIT, our private, residential-for-rent focused REIT that is one of the spokes within our hub-and-spoke model for MREFV, where we are looking to create sector-specific side-car vehicles to complement the main diversified fund.
Moorfield is also looking to cater to the ageing population, having initiated a £125m joint venture with Allegra Care in 2020 to assemble a market-leading portfolio of nursing and dementia care homes and having invested in Audley, the UK’s leading independent retirement community (IRC) developer and operator, since 2008.
The growing population also means demand for other real estate such as logistics, self-storage, and open-storage – all sectors we are targeting as part of our thematic ‘living and storage’ strategy for MREFV.