Exclusive: Sage Homes’ chief financial officer on rapid growth and the path to profitability

The landlord is currently England’s biggest for-profit affordable housing entity. It invested £353m to deliver 3,985 new affordable homes in 2024 and has delivered a total of 20,000 affordable homes since 2017, with a further 2,500 under construction.

Around 11,000 of Sage’s homes are affordable and social rent, with the remainder shared ownership. Most of its homes are purchased from house builders through Section 106 agreements, but it has also delivered around 4,100 ‘additionality’ homes, by buying non-Section 106 homes using grant from Homes England and the Greater London Authority.

Asked when Sage will achieve profitability, Mr Goodey said: “Our focus right now is on delivering high volumes of high-quality new affordable homes… [But] as the balance of construction in progress versus homes in operation changes over time… that will start to cycle through to a different position.”

Milestones for Sage during 2024 included the sale of 3,000 homes and one of its registered providers to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), renamed Sparrow Shared Ownership; and investing in a new internal management team.

With the provider still in rapid-growth mode, profitability remains elusive.

Sage Homes RP Limited (SHRP), now the main development vehicle for the group, reported a post-tax loss of £38.2m for the year to December 2024, up from £5.1m in 2023. Its turnover surged 456% to £306m. SHRP had delivered 8,875 homes at the end of 2024, with an additional 3,491 under construction.

Much of this dramatic growth came from reorganising Sage’s existing homes. SHRP took on around 9,000 homes from another for-profit, Sage Housing Limited, before that provider was sold to USS to create Sparrow Shared Ownership. Mr Goodey said, “We started signing new delivery transactions into SHRP in advance of that sale.”

SHRP’s loss for 2024 was primarily fuelled by a huge rise in interest expenses, to £76m, up from just £934,000 in 2023. It has a large revolving credit facility that it uses to build new homes and hold them in the short term before they are transferred to other Sage-owned providers.

“Relative to income, our financing costs are different from most registered providers,” said Mr Goodey.

“We delivered 27% growth in our homes in operation, year on year. It’s an extraordinarily high amount, so we run a very significant construction-in-progress balance that we do, obviously, finance.

“So when you look at our conversion from net operating income down to comprehensive income loss, you can see that interest cost coming through.”

Sage Rented Limited (SRL), the group’s long-term vehicle for completed rental homes, reported a post-tax loss of £42.6m for 2024, up from a loss of £39.5m the previous year. SRL owned 6,820 homes at the end of 2024. Turnover at SRL rose to £65m, driven by the transfer of 3,499 homes at the end of 2023 from Sage Housing Limited.

“When they come across, we do that because we then take out longer-term financing against them,” Mr Goodey said.

Interest expenses at SRL were also up around £14m, to £60.7m. Sage attributed the higher debt levels to the full-year impact of a £308m bilateral loan facility which refinanced the 3,499 homes.

Mr Goodey said all of the proceeds Sage received from the Sparrow sale were recycled into the business. “We’re still growing a lot. We’re still consuming capital from our shareholders, who have been extraordinarily supportive of Sage in its growth for the last seven years or so.”

Sage was set up by private equity firm Regis and funded by US private equity giant Blackstone.

At the end of 2023, Sage Homes ended its management contract with Places for People housing association and transferred its homes to in-house management. It also invested considerably in its customer centre in Northampton.

“That’s a reasonably large investment one has to make in technology and process, but I think we’re seeing that bear fruit,” Mr Goodey said. At SHRP, customer satisfaction for affordable rent tenants currently stands at 86%, while for shared owners it is 59%.

There is no sign of another big Sparrow-style sell-off on the horizon, Mr Goodey said, but Sage will continue to trim its portfolio. It sold 400 homes in the North East of England to Vico Homes in June 2025.

“Sage has built up around 550 sites. [You can] take a step back when you get to this scale and say, ‘Where are we operationally dense and can provide a good service really efficiently?’ There are certain small locations where that’s not the case,” Mr Goodey said.

Earlier this month, Sage announced it had recruited Platform Housing Group boss Elizabeth Froude as its new chief executive. She will succeed Mark Sater, who announced earlier this year that he will be stepping down after five years in his role.