Inside Housing Living presents: Fastest-Growing For-Profits 2025

Auxesia Homes currently owns just 251 homes, but it expects to complete 1,075 homes in the next five years, which it plans to aggregate and sell to housing associations. Claire Donnelly, its interim chief executive, says: “What’s been working well for us has been the speed at which we’re able to execute.”

This year, Auxesia has picked up “quite a few schemes” on the back of traditional housing associations “backing out at the last minute”, she says. “We’ve got some really good relationships with agents who know that they can come to us.”

Auxesia also has a “dynamic” board that can meet regularly, she says. “Having worked with other larger RPs, sometimes they can be much less flexible with their board meetings and committee meetings dates.” The landlord sold 89 homes to Weaver Vale Housing Trust in 2024 and sold 134 homes to Onward Homes in June, which generated the cash to buy more new homes.

Preferred Homes, backed by US teachers’ pension fund TIAA (Teachers Insurance Annuity Association), specialises in retirement homes for rent. It grew from a standing start last year, completing all its 135 currently operational homes during 2024-25.

Stephen Sorrell, social partnership director at Preferred Homes, says it has had “exceptional traction” from local authorities that need extra-care housing and in some cases have sold their own sites to the landlord to build on.

“I’ll give you one great example, which is Telford and Wrekin Council,” he says. “We bought the site from them, which is an old leisure centre. They were the planning authority… and they also took 100% nominations rights as the adult care commissioning authority.”

The council also introduced Preferred Homes to the West Midlands Combined Authority, and “we were able to secure additional grant support via that source”.

Delivery hasn’t all been smooth sailing. For those for-profits applying for grant from Homes England, one big uncertainty last year was around the shape of the government’s next affordable homes programme, which was not announced until the Spending Review in June (although several tranches of bridge funding were made available in the meantime). And build costs continued to rise over the past year, according to Mr Sorrell, before stabilising around six months ago.

Perhaps most importantly, interest rates stayed relatively high during 2024-25, making it harder for for-profits to attract investment. Why would a pension fund invest in bricks and mortar, with all the risk that entails, when it could simply buy UK government bonds and get a good, risk-free rate of return?

This year, there has been lots of discussion about for-profits such as L&G buying occupied homes from housing associations, but we are yet to see a big surge in stock transfers from non-profits to for-profits in our data.

Mr Campbell of Campbell Tickell says: “There are some interesting models being developed by some of the funds and institutions based on acquiring housing that it would not be cost-effective for their current landlords to improve, and retrofitting these to modern standards.”

Looking to this year and beyond, there are encouraging signs. Mr Holdcroft of L&G says he is relatively optimistic about for-profit delivery this year. “I think we’re about to see London come back to life from an affordable housing perspective,” he says, citing the government and the Greater London Authority’s emergency package for developers, which will “allow a whole host of stalled sites to start to come back to life”. 

He also believes “there are other institutions who’ve also got third-party capital to be able to deploy into the market, and I’d hope to see that they will follow our lead”.

You only have to look at our table of the biggest five-year pipelines to see this, which includes some new entrants that currently own very few homes but have big ambitions and even bigger backers. 

For example, BluePine Living (backed by HIG Capital) aims to complete 5,000 homes by 2030, while Zen Housing (backed by Tristan Capital Partners) expects to complete 4,387 homes. House builder Vistry also aims to scale up its for-profit, Linden First, to own 2,700 homes in the next five years.

“As this survey shows, responsible institutional capital is helping to close the UK’s affordable housing gap,” says Kate Butler, assistant director of policy at the British Property Federation. “While much of today’s housing delivery still relies on Section 106 contributions, there is an increasing shift toward long-term, institutional investment into affordable homes.”

The SAHP launching in 2026 offers a “real chance to build on this momentum”, she adds, but the government “must address barriers to institutional investment if it wants to sustain growth”.

“The pipeline is strong, so we can certainly maintain the delivery” this year, says Mr Willcocks of Heylo. However, “our ambition would be to grow considerably”, which is dependent on two things: being able to apply for grant funding again and the wider economic situation.

“We’re hopefully in the final throes of that path to compliance,” he says. “If we can get that sorted over the next few months, then we would certainly be ambitious to be bidding for grant at scale under the SAHP.”

Plus, if “economic conditions start to become a little bit more favourable – and it’s not far off – then those two factors could come into play, and then our pipeline can grow considerably”.

The new SAHP is notable for being a longer, 10-year programme, and for-profits say investor confidence is already improving as a result. The new prospectus also includes a section on using grant funding to convert homes that are built for market sale into affordable housing. “That’s a really big opportunity for us,” Mr Willcocks says, “and it’s really big opportunity to encourage house builders to continue to deliver on sites”.

“As a house builder, they’ll only build homes if they think they can sell them. If they’re struggling to sell them through the owner-occupier market, having a partner like Heylo, where we will work with a national house builder and say, ‘We’ll take 3,000 homes from you over the next two years across 20 sites’, with Homes England support for that, those deals will only increase.”

While our survey focuses on the for-profits that are scaling up quickly, it is important to recognise that not every landlord is chasing growth at all costs. In the same way that there are non-profit housing associations of all shapes and sizes, for-profits are pursuing a variety of different models. Take Grosvenor Hart Homes, owned by the Duke of Westminster’s property company, which currently owns 48 homes in and around Chester. It provides a niche product: affordable housing with wraparound employment and mental health support for children and young families with support needs.

“It’s a social enterprise where impact trumps profits,” says Helen Keenan, chief executive of Grosvenor Hart Homes. “We’re not interested in volume.”

The for-profit acquired a small portfolio of Victorian homes from the Grosvenor estate and converted them to affordable rent, then bought some new build homes designed for private sale and converted them to social rent. It currently has a mental health nurse and three professional co-ordinators, who double up as the residents’ social worker and housing officer.

“We absolutely want to scale it, but we don’t have to do it ourselves,” Ms Keenan says, adding that she is keen to see other providers explore a similar model.

But, for those that are aiming at reaching a larger scale, what could help? Interest rate cuts are top of the list.

“Then you would expect that will result in gilts [UK government bonds] falling, and therefore that should mean that affordable housing becomes a more attractive proposition” for investors, says Mr Holdcroft of L&G. “Given the three years we’ve just had, I’m not saying that’s a prediction that we’re making here, but it’s what would be nice to see happen.”

But there is more the government could do, including tax breaks for for-profits. Ms Donnelly of Auxesia Homes says: “It can be quite controversial, but we incur a lot of taxation costs, particularly around stamp duty, which not-for-profits who are registered as charities do not pay. This means our cost of acquisition is higher… We absorb it in the cost of purchase, but it does mean our underwriting is different to more traditional registered providers.”

Mr Campbell says: “There is no doubt that engaging with funds, institutions and other businesses can unlock considerably more new investment to produce more social and affordable housing. But from what I can see, government doesn’t yet have a fully developed understanding of the range of opportunities here, and could do more to welcome patient capital and other suitable investment into the sector.”

This will now be an annual survey for Inside Housing Living, so we look forward to tracking the growth of the for-profits over what promises to be a crucial next 12 months.

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