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PropCast

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by PropCast: The Property Podcast

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PropCast is a property podcast produced by Lauder Teacher. PropCast covers issues across the whole of the real estate market; from finance and funding through to development and construction.

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Recent Episodes

July 10, 2026

Making co-living institutional with Bywater and Ackroyd Lowrie

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 <a href="https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/372282-0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">data compiled by Savills</a>, 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 <a href="https://bywater.group/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bywater Group</a>, 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, <a href="https://sfreim.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sumitomo Forestry</a>, the Tokyo-listed forestry and housebuilding group founded in 1691, came in on a single scheme: <a href="https://bywater.group/investment/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Paradise</a>, 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 <a href="https://timberdevelopment.uk/finding-a-paradise-in-a-timber-office-building/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">UK’s lowest embodied carbon mass-timber office development</a> 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 housing market and notably the viability of ground-up BTR, its younger sibling of an asset class is attractive on account of its higher yields and lower entry point in terms of rents.“Last year was the year it went from a small subset to something becoming mainstream,” says Lowrie. “Particularly in London, there is so much coming through the pipeline. These applications are going in, they’re going to get consented, they’re going to get funded. Probably not all of them. But a lot of them are.”Lowrie recently published a <a href="https://www.ackroydlowrie.com/your-guide-to-delivering-co-living-developments-that-work" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">co-living design guide</a>, drawing on data compiled exclusively by Savills, covers room sizes, amenity ratios, communal space design and the planning framework that now governs co-living in London. Rather than rehearsing the investment thesis, it takes the decision to build co-living as read and sets out how to get it right. “There are plenty of white papers making the case for why co-living is the next fundable asset,” he says. “This starts from a different place. Chris is in the room to confirm that it is fundable. So the question becomes: how do you actually deliver it well?”A cautionary taleOf course, the first name that enters everyone’s minds when discussing co-living is <a href="https://www.propertyweek.com/news/co-living-pioneer-the-collective-calls-in-administrators" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Collective</a>. Founded in 2010 by Reza Merchant and once the poster child of UK co-living, collapsed into administration in 2021 after racking up losses of £54m in 18 months. The Canary Wharf flagship was sold to Crosstree for £190m in 2022. The original Old Oak scheme, the first large-scale purpose-built co-living building in the UK, was valued at £125m in 2018; Henderson Park acquired the 551-bedroom property for around £60m. “The second generation are going to blow them out of the water,” says Lowrie. “Before the policies existed, there were no minimum room sizes, no standardisation of amenities. Those first schemes were under-amenities, and they’re going to struggle against what’s coming through now.”The evidence from better-designed schemes supports that. <a href="https://www.masonandfifth.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cheyne Capital’s Mason & Fifth at Westbourne Park</a>, a 332-studio scheme, was fully let within three to four months of opening. “If it’s the right scheme in the right location, the demand is there,” says Riley.A “dream project”: timber, heritage and 50% carbon savingsThe duo’s Tanner Street scheme in Bermondsey is a fine example of how such projects can rejuvenate old buildings while preserving the spirit of their architectural past. The 112-unit co-living development retains an existing Victorian warehouse and builds new elements in glulam and CLT, saving roughly 50% in upfront embodied carbon compared with traditional construction.“We’ve put sustainability at the heart of that building and we’ve put building users at the heart of it,” Riley says. “Gym, co-working, shared dining space, rooftop terraces, interactive rooms where you could play golf on a simulator or watch TV together as a group.” Lowrie adds that it is “a dream project for us”, one that “puts sustainability at the front and centre of the design process, not just in the retention and celebration of the existing Victorian warehouse, but through the cross-laminated timber structure.”Riley is emphatic when pressed around the obvious question of fire safety. “Anything below 18 metres meets building regulations,” he says. “I would actually argue it’s safer. We have fire consultants involved from day one. The microscope is on us more than others, so we definitely do not cut any corners.” The bigger practical challenge, it turns out, is acoustics. Despite being comfortable with the fire performance of exposed CLT, Bywater had to encapsulate the timber at Tanner Street because of impact sound between floors. “You had to put 150mm of concrete on top of the CLT,” Lowrie explains. “Which is somewhat ironic.”Timber also offers commercial advantages beyond carbon. Riley points to faster construction: CLT is lighter, requiring fewer piles in the ground, and erection times are materially quicker above it. “So we’re out of the ground faster, which de-risks us.” On adaptability: “I just don’t think it’s any different. We’ve got a glulam frame which acts the same as steel or concrete. It’s a frame.” On the carbon numbers: “The 50% upfront saving is substantial. We’re seeking to do the same in a residential world as we’ve done in commercial.”Lowrie’s rules of thumbAcross the conversation, Lowrie returns repeatedly to a handful of practical convictions. “Good design is good design,” he says. “The principle is the same whether you’re doing a school, a climbing centre or a co-living scheme.” He calls his approach the Dave Brailsford method: every decision optimised. “You’ve got to get the best consent, but that consent also has to be completely buildable, fundable and exitable. If you’re not thinking from the end point backwards, you’re going to get planning for something you...

June 22, 2026

Raoul Malhotra: Building value through operational real estate

In this week's PropCast episode, Andrew Teacher, co-founder of Lauder Teacher, speaks with Raoul Malhotra, founder and CEO of Orka Investments, about building a £700 million real estate manager in just a few years. From partnering with global institutional investors to navigating volatile markets, the discussion explores why operational expertise has become a defining advantage in today's real estate sector.

June 19, 2026

nHabit’s Steven Charlton on taking on the Rightmove and Zoopla duopoly

For two decades, finding somewhere to rent in Britain has meant typing a postcode into Rightmove or Zoopla and scrolling. Steven Charlton thinks that is a thin idea of search, and he has built a platform to prove it. nHabit, which reaches the App Store and Google Play in mid-June, lets renters describe the life they want in plain language and hands back neighbourhoods they would never have thought to type in. “Instead of following the herd to the same old postcodes,” Charlton says, “our aim is to let people search the way they’d plan their perfect holiday with ChatGPT.” The idea has already pulled build-to-rent operators including Quintain and Grainger into conversation, and it arrives as Rightmove, which by its own research takes around 80 per cent of the time British consumers spend on property portals, defends a £1.5 billion class action over the fees it charges agents. Charlton, a former Perkins&Will managing director turned founder, used a wide-ranging PropCast appearance to set out why he believes the two incumbents are too big to fix the thing renters actually struggle with.<h2>How the search actually works</h2>The starting insight is almost embarrassingly simple. “You need to know where you want to live before you can search,” Charlton says, “and how can you know all the areas you could live in when you’ve never been to them all?” nHabit flips that around. A renter draws a boundary by travel time, a method Charlton calls isochrone generation, then tightens it with the things that actually shape a day, a ten-minute walk from a Tube station, good schools nearby, and the app surfaces homes in places the renter had never weighed up.Behind the conversational front end sits Milo, a proprietary large language model wired to a three-dimensional graph database. It is deliberately closed, working only across the roughly 100 datasets nHabit has ingested rather than crawling the open internet, and it answers in whatever language the question is asked. Renters tune five dials, safety, nightlife, amenities, digital connectivity and mobility, to their own priorities. “Everybody’s different,” Charlton says, recalling a South Korean renter who put safety first and still ended up somewhere that felt unsafe for want of the data to choose well, against a group of Australians who cared about nightlife and nothing else.<h2>Taking on the incumbents</h2>The duopoly has barely moved in twenty years, and Charlton is blunt about why. The portals, he argues, cannot rebuild themselves around AI without tearing up the systems they already run on. “This is a ground-up build, not a ChatGPT chatbot wrapper dropped on top of an existing system,” he says, and the two giants are, in his view, simply too big to attempt it. He is just as withering about the wave of look-alike tools claiming an AI edge. “I look at a lot of businesses and think, that’s basically an AI wrapper,” he says. “You’re just piggybacking on somebody else’s technology. It’s essentially a dashboard.” OnTheMarket and others have tried to break the lock before and offered, in his words, alternative versions of the same thing.The £1.5 billion claim against Rightmove, led by former Competition and Markets Authority panel member Jeremy Newman and funded by litigation specialist Innsworth Capital, reaches its certification hearing in November, and Charlton reads it as a market finally losing patience. He has heard the standard objection plenty of times. One national agency told him he would need venture capital, private equity and a £20 million annual marketing budget to land a punch. “Social media has genuinely levelled that playing field,” he counters, pointing to the direct-to-consumer brands that scaled through COVID on a fraction of the old launch cost. “If the industry is genuinely sick of the status quo, people need to actually support an alternative rather than just complain.”<h2>What it means for landlords, operators and agents</h2>For the operators and agents who pay to be seen, the first benefit is cleaner demand. Matching renters to homes on lifestyle and neighbourhood fit produces better-qualified leads and fewer dead-end enquiries, the difference between a showcase and a switchboard. The deeper prize is the data underneath. “Data is the new oil,” Charlton says. nHabit builds anonymised personas from how people behave in the app, whether they own a dog, what they linger on, what they swipe away, and reads the patterns the way Netflix reads viewing. “Why is it that people with dogs are less age-sensitive than people with children?” he asks. “The data might tell us.” Ownership is the point he keeps pressing: with the incumbent platforms, the insight ends up in someone else’s hands.That rewrites the commercial model. Rather than a monthly listing fee, nHabit offers a developer the news that a particular profile of renter was ignoring a location six months ago and is now circling it. Quintain, the Wembley Park operator, grasped the idea at once, Charlton says, and a conversation with the build-to-rent landlord Grainger surfaced something he had missed, that many of its tenants work in the NHS on shift patterns whose travel times look nothing like a nine-to-five. The same logic carries into student housing, where operators such as IQ and Unite hold safety credentials Charlton thinks they undersell, and the recently enacted Renters’ Rights Act only sharpens the appetite for better data.Agents, meanwhile, get a read on roughly twenty renter typologies and on exactly what a prospective tenant is hesitating over. A structural shift sits behind the sell. A year ago, Charlton estimates, about one per cent of an agency’s leads came through tools like ChatGPT or Claude, and he now puts it at seven or eight per cent, noting that those systems crawl websites selectively. “Agents understand they need to get their websites ready for LLMs,” he says, “and we’ve essentially done a lot of that work for them already.” The value spreads wider still, with one of his non-executive directors, who previously led Microsoft’s digital-cities work, pointing to retailers, hospitality and councils as buyers of the same locational insight.<h2>From architecture to a blended business</h2>The route here ran through the top of global architecture. Charlton trained in interior design at Edinburgh College of Art, decided early that he “would rather employ great designers so we could elevate together”, and moved to Dubai to set up the Middle East studio of Pringle Brandon, the commercial-interiors firm the architect Jack Pringle founded with Chris Brandon in 1986. When Pringle, now chair of the RIBA board of trustees, sold the business to Perkins&Will in 2012, Charlton’s remit widened from fitting out offices to winning architecture for the Dubai developers Emaar and Aldar. A country-scale masterplan changed how he saw the work. “It’s about data, understanding what the infrastructure is going to be in ten, twenty, thirty years,” he says, and the conversations that followed, with Siemens and Schneider, planted the idea behind everything since. He became Perkins&Will’s UK managing director in 2017, ran the London studio for four and a half years and left in 2022 to start i/o atelier, named for the binary of input-output and the atelier, a house of artisans, a “blended business” where machine-learning engineers and designers sit side by side.nHabit emerged from that studio almost by accident. Asked to measure the “vibrancy” of the places i/o was designing, the team-built mapping software that scored London neighbourhoods on amenities, green space, transport, gyms and the rest of the texture of daily life, then triangulated those points of interest into a picture of how appealing an area really was. Bolted onto the language model the studio had already built, the engine turned out to do something else entirely, helping people find somewhere to live. ChatGPT launched roughly six months after Charlton founded the studio, and the doubters came round. “Many people clearly went away and thought he’s lost the plot,” he says. “Over time those same people have come back and said, actually, you were just ahead of the game.”<h2>Ambition, and what has been built</h2>The proprietary work, Milo, the isochrone engine and the graph infrastructure beneath them, is where Charlton sees defensible intellectual property and the prospect of patents. Because the infrastructure is built, new markets switch on quickly: Manchester and Liverpool are ready, and the longer horizon is Paris and New York, cities restless enough to reward the model. “Why can’t we be the Airbnb of residential rental?” he asks, noting that most rental apps he meets abroad are stuck serving a single city. Airbnb itself started in San Francisco.nHabit is self-funded and was founded only in April 2025, and the design business is heading the same way, toward helping occupiers procure design rather than only producing it. An adviser put the trajectory back to him, that he is “becoming a tech business that does design rather than a design business that does tech”, a verdict offered with equal parts admiration and unease. The name says as much. nHabit is “inhabit” with the i taken out, a small act of rebuilding from the letters up, which is roughly what its founder has set out to do to the way Britain looks for somewhere to rent.

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What is PropCast?: PropCast is a property podcast produced by Lauder Teacher. PropCast covers issues across the whole of the real estate market; from finance and funding through to development and construction.
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates weekly.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 10 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.

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