Salboy acquires Boddingtons Brewery site to bring 560 new homes to Manchester city centre

Acquisition kickstarts long-awaited regeneration of prime north Manchester location
Salboy’s as yet unnamed £195m scheme sits next to Manchester College’s city centre campus

Salboy, the nationwide property development and funding company, has acquired the former site of the Boddingtons Brewery, a renowned 52,700 sq ft site on the northern edge of central Manchester.

With a £195 million GDV, the mixed-use scheme will split across five buildings, including a 26-storey tower, all of which will comprise 556 new homes for sale and rent, 31,000 sq ft of commercial and retail space, and residents’ amenities that include rooftop terraces and landscaped gardens.

The scheme, which will be named in due course, forms a major part of Manchester City council’s long-planned, residential-led regeneration of the site that was home to the Boddingtons Brewery until 2005. The Council first published its strategic regeneration framework of this site in 2015.

Located adjacent to the site of Manchester College’s new £100 million city centre campus, and in short walking distance of the city’s vibrant Northern Quarter, the scheme is expected to attract students and young people among whom demand for good quality accommodation in central Manchester has never been higher.

A recent report by JLL* confirmed Manchester’s status as the fastest growing city among the UK’s ‘Big Six’ cities outside London, recording 34% growth in the last ten years and the largest employment and population growth in that time too. Data from urbanbubble shows that available rental properties hit record lows in the third quarter of 2022 while achieved rents rose above asking rents for the first time.**

Simon Ismail, Co-Founder & Managing Director of Salboy, comments: “We are delighted to be the new owners of the Boddingtons site – an ideal location for urgently needed regeneration thanks to its close proximity to city centre leisure, business, higher education and transport links. The future of this site has been the subject of local speculation for too long and we are excited to mobilise construction as soon as early 2023 to bring more sought-after homes to people who want to work, live and study in Manchester.”

The scheme will be built by Salboy’s dedicated construction partner, DOMIS with construction with mobilisation due on site early 2023.

To date Salboy has delivered over 2,750 new homes to Manchester and neighbouring Salford. The group has £1 billion across 11 schemes of property currently in development or planning in the North West, London and Cornwall, all of which are due to add more than 2,000 more homes to regions most impacted by the national housing shortage. Construction at Salboy’s mixed-use Viadux scheme continues and in June 2022, the Salboy team entered a joint venture agreement with Relentless, the property development company owned by Gary Neville, to deliver Manchester’s long-anticipated St Michael’s development, a scheme comprising a 5* hotel, 180 residences and leisure spaces.