#226 Bidwells Head of Data, what AI means to property

Apache Capital co-founder and chief executive John Dunkerley joins Andrew Teacher to discuss building a residential investment business through three property cycles, the Middle Eastern capital that backed its early PBSA strategy, the creation of its multifamily platform and why single-family rental housing is now the opportunity commanding his attention.

Private markets demand local intelligence, not just scale argues Aviva Investors director Jonathan Bayfield. In this week's podcast, in partnership with Property Week, Jonathan joins Andrew Teacher to discuss how a £50bn private-markets platform uses independent research, operating partners and bottom-up intelligence to allocate capital across living, logistics and offices, and why AI may strengthen the case for the best buildings rather than destroy it.

Amanprit Arnold, founder of Disability Urbanism and DeafCity Hub, joins Andrew Teacher on PropCast to explain why she deliberately avoids the word ‘accessible’, what disabled households’ spending power means for landlords, and why Stratford, South Kensington and Oxford Street are the real tests of London’s inclusive design ambitions.

Abri may be one of the UK’s most significant large-scale housing organisations you have never heard of. It owns and manages almost 60,000 homes, stretching from Somerset and Bristol through a Hampshire heartland to Bracknell, Berkshire and, through Octavia, west London. As Andrew Teacher observes on this week’s PropCast, that scale would make it comparable in size with a FTSE 100 company, were it listed. For context, Grainger, the UK’s largest listed residential landlord, owns just over 11,200 rental homes; Abri owns more than five times as many. Even adding Unite Group’s 64,000 student beds to Grainger’s total (and beds, admittedly, are not quite homes), the two listed names together reach around 75,000 roughly the scale of the group Abri now hopes to create through its proposed merger with Curo Group, which would bring the combined organisation to more than 73,000 homes and community assets serving around 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England. Like the G15 giants, Abri has built scale deliberately, through the merger of Radian and Yarlington in 2019, Silva Homes in 2023 and Octavia in 2024, and built capability alongside it: customer satisfaction at the top end of the sector, an A3 stable rating from Moody’s and the Regulator of Social Housing’s G1 and V1 grades, confirmed in November 2025. G1 is the highest governance grade, the regulator’s assurance that the organisation is effectively run and manages its risks. V1, the highest viability grade, confirms “the financial capacity to deal with a wide range of adverse scenarios”, and has become rare among large associations. Gary Orr, chief executive of Abri Group and its predecessor organisation Yarlington since 2011, has done a remarkable job steering the organisation through significant change and significant expansion, never an easy thing, particularly in the housing association world. The result is a balance sheet that equips Abri both to manage the daily complexity of providing homes and services for well over 100,000 people, a figure approaching 150,000 through the proposed Curo merger, and to pursue an ambitious growth strategy supported in part by institutional capital. “We’re ambitious about being a trusted partner in delivery and piloting some of these ideas,” says Theo Plowman, Abri’s head of policy and campaigns. “We’re in the room on several different conversations, we’re really well placed and we have the expertise to do it.” Plowman joined a year ago from the British Property Federation, where he led much of the trade body’s residential policy work, particularly on supporting institutional investment into build-to-rent. The conversation that follows ranges across pension capital, shared ownership reform and why the sector needs to stop underselling itself. Scale as strategy Growth is deliberate. In April 2026 Abri published an investment strategy targeting 20,000 new homes by 2036, “doubling our output” as Plowman puts it, alongside around £450m of investment in existing homes and an ambition to become a top five provider by scale, customer satisfaction and as a place to work. Delivery runs through its Strategic Partnership with Homes England, which awarded Abri £300m under the 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme as part of a £2.66bn investment in new homes, joint ventures such as the 50:50 acquisition of the former Ford Airfield in West Sussex, where 1,500 homes are planned, and ambitious regeneration schemes like The Granges in Windsor, where four tower blocks containing 192 properties are being replaced with 413 sustainable homes. The next step came on 1 July 2026, when the boards of Abri and Curo announced they are exploring a new partnership that would create a group owning and managing more than 73,000 homes and community assets, serving 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England, with combined turnover of £598m in 2024/25. Curo, formed in 1999 through a stock transfer from Bath and North East Somerset Council, owns

In the latest episode of PropCast, Chris Riley of Bywater Group and Oliver Lowrie of Ackroyd Lowrie discuss what it takes to design, fund and deliver co-living at scale, why timber construction halves upfront carbon, and what the sector’s rapid growth means for institutional capital. “Design shouldn’t cost extra,” says Oliver Lowrie, co-founder of Ackroyd Lowrie, the architecture practice behind a growing number of London’s co-living schemes. “Gone are the days when you hired a star architect to produce something that looked amazing but wasn’t buildable. We know what the thing’s going to be built out of. It needs to be about pragmatism and making great design.” Nearly 9,000 co-living units were consented across the UK in 2025, according to data compiled by Savills, up 27% on the previous year’s record. In London alone, consents nearly doubled. The capital is arriving. The question is whether the capital (and customers) believe the buildings will be worth it. Lowrie is joined on this week’s PropCast by Chris Riley, who leads development at Bywater Group, the timber-focused developer and investment manager majority-owned by Sumitomo Forestry. Lowrie has designed several co-living schemes for Bywater, including a 112-unit development at Tanner Street in Bermondsey that won planning consent earlier this year. The two firms share a passion for timber construction and low-carbon delivery that sets them apart from the pack. Their collaboration is a useful lens through which to see where the sector might be heading next as it becomes more institutional-ready. Bywater began life as a family-office developer with a conviction for timber long before sustainability became cool. In 2019, Sumitomo Forestry, the Tokyo-listed forestry and housebuilding group founded in 1691, came in on a single scheme: Paradise, a mass-timber office development near Vauxhall. By February 2023, that relationship had evolved into a full corporate merger, with Sumitomo taking a majority stake. The business has since grown from four people to more than 20, with an FCA-regulated fund platform and a first fund, Bywater Fulcrum Value Add Real Estate, now closed and deploying through an LTAF structure. Its first acquisition is 1 Frying Pan Alley in Spitalfields, another office scheme which will be retrofitted to A-grade status using timber. “It was a game-changer,” Riley says of Sumitomo taking a 51% stake. “We’re a timber-led business. Where we can, we will incorporate glulam and CLT into our schemes. But this is as much about commercial performance as it is carbon.” Sumitomo stewards more than 40,000 hectares of forest in Japan. Its US housebuilding operations include Tri Pointe Homes (acquired in February 2026 for around $4.3bn) and DRB Group. That scale of parent gives Bywater patient capital, timber expertise and a governance framework that has alerted institutional investors to their unsung book of opportunities. Living is now at the centre of the strategy. Bywater is active across co-living, build-to-rent and student housing, with three co-living schemes in south London designed by Ackroyd Lowrie and operated by Greystar, and a mid-rise BTR scheme in Kingston approaching planning consent. Paradise, which opened in 2025, is the UK’s lowest embodied carbon mass-timber office development at 413 kgCO₂e/m². Riley describes the residential ambition as building “a platform on the same low-carbon, timber-led foundations”. Lord Walker of Broxton, Bywater's chairman, brings a platform that few property businesses can match. As chairman of Iceland and the government's Cost of Living Champion, he sits at the intersection of housing, affordability and political access, and has used that position to make the case, including in the House of Lords, that the way Britain builds homes is inseparable from the cost-of-living crisis it is trying to solve. Both believe co-living could be playing more of a role in solving the housing crisis and, with headwinds still impacting the h