Show Notes
Three decades on from joining a graduate scheme during one of the deepest property recessions in living memory, Marcus Phayre-Mudge, fund manager and partner at Thames River Capital, has watched the listed real estate sector cycle through booms, busts, structural change and a creeping crisis of confidence between boards and shareholders. Speaking to Propcast host Andrew Teacher, the long-serving manager of TR Property Investment Trust delivers an unvarnished assessment of governance, manager-investor alignment, communications and the persistent question of scale that continues to challenge the UK market. Phayre-Mudge begins by setting out a framework he still uses to explain the two distinct ways property cycles inflict damage. “There are two diseases for real estate,” he said. “One is a much more short, sharp shock, a bit like being punched in a pub. It hurts like hell, but it’s over quite quickly. That’s when you get a very dramatic change in the cost or availability of capital, which is what we saw in the GFC and more recently in 2021 with the dramatic change in the cost of money.” The second, he warns, is more pernicious. “The other disease, which is actually much more insidious, more of a long COVID if you like, is the consequence of a long period of overdevelopment.” In periods like this, landlords across entire sectors become price-takers, dealing with tenants who know that competition to lease space places enormous downward pressure on rents. His own entry into fund management came via a deliberate pivot away from surveying. Recalling a conversation with his boss at Knight Frank & Rutley over funding for an accounting night course, he laughed at the negotiation. “Marcus, if I fund this and you get the qualification, you’ll leave. I said: well, if you don’t fund it, I’ll also leave.” The qualification opened the door to Henderson, predecessor to Janus Henderson, where alongside veteran fund manager Chris Turner he looked after the private allocation of TR Property Trust, then a smaller vehicle with exposure across both listed and private real estate. Later, in 1999, he assumed control of the listed property equity sleeves of two small Henderson diversified equity funds, each capitalised at between £20 million and £30 million, marking the start of his career in the public markets. A move to Thames River Capital (TRC) in 2004 with mentor Chris Turner remains a moment Phayre-Mudge recalls fondly. “We told the founders of Thames River, Charlie Porter and Johnny Hughes-Morgan, that the only reason we’d really moved was because we didn’t have to change the name, which was entirely fortuitous.” A new hybrid fund, blending equities with physical property, launched in 2005 and remains a source of pride. “That fund is still alive and strong and has never closed to redemptions,” he said, a particularly impressive feat given the recent difficulties faced by PAIFs in the UK as well as some of America’s largest real estate fund managers. The Global Financial Crisis tested the model and, by his own account, came close to derailing it. “Whether by good judgment or good luck, probably a bit of both, we moved to 20% cash in both funds the quarter before Lehman went down. That’s why we survived.” But he is quick to acknowledge the asymmetry that defines life in fund management. “If you’re a fund manager and you move to 20% cash and you’re wrong, you’ll massively underperform your benchmarks. If you’re right, your clients are still losing money, just considerably less than if they’d been fully invested.” Among the more provocative observations of his career has been how the rise of passive capital has hollowed out the dialogue between boards and shareholders. “Around 20 years ago, I only ever engaged with the C-suite and had virtually no engagement with boards. That has changed a lot. We’ve had to feed back views to boards behind the scenes, partly because so much capital has moved passive that boards are living in something of a vacuum. T
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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