Australia’s largest pension fund to invest £500m in UK rental homes

It will be headed by AustralianSuper’s chief executive officer, Tim Butler, who was previously the founder and co-investor of UK landlord Student Roost, and one of the founding shareholders and main board director of Unite Group, the UK’s largest student landlord.

AustralianSuper has decided to launch a living platform in the UK because it believes there is an attractive investment opportunity.

The pension fund called the UK a “favoured destination” for living sector investment, with over 80% of investors planning to increase their allocation, according to a Cushman & Wakefield survey.

While the UK is facing a persistent supply-demand imbalance in housing, there is still “significant room” for institutional investors in the £1.6tn UK private rented sector. Only 2% of private rented homes are institutionally owned, with the remaining 98% owned by private buy-to-let investors.

The UK population is projected to reach 72.5 million by mid-2032, adding further demand for housing, it added.

Meanwhile, there was a record number of UK university applications in 2025, with a projected student bed deficit of over 62,000 by 2026.

Damian Moloney, deputy chief investment officer at AustralianSuper, said: “Today’s announcement demonstrates the continued attractiveness of the UK as a global investment destination, with AustralianSuper on track to deploy more than £8bn of new capital into the country by 2030.”

AustralianSuper is the 17th-largest pension fund in the world by total assets. As of June 2025, the fund has £11bn invested in the UK and plans to raise this to £18bn by 2030, with an ambition to manage £250bn of these assets from its London office by 2035.

The announcement comes ahead of pension summits in London and Birmingham this week with the UK government and institutional investors, which aim to strengthen relationships and identify barriers to investment in the country.

Britain’s largest pension providers have joined the new Sterling 20 partnership, where they aim to work together to plan ways funds can be better matched to UK infrastructure and growth projects.

This builds on the Mansion House Accord, a voluntary commitment from earlier this year, where 17 of the UK’s largest pension providers pledged to invest at least 5% of assets in UK private markets by 2030.

This week, British asset manager Legal & General announced it will invest a further £2bn across housing and infrastructure over the next five years, in addition to its previous pledge made in 2022 to invest £2.5bn in build-to-rent homes.

It said this would create about 24,000 jobs and deliver approximately 10,000 new social and affordable homes.

The £53bn state-backed National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) has also pledged to invest a further £500m in its private equity mandate with Schroders in the next 12 months – expecting to allocate £100m into UK companies.

Nest, which began its private equity programme three years ago, has invested £2bn in the sector, with almost 20% in the UK.