Salboy, the UK property development and funding group, has officially launched Salboy Construction, a specialist residential construction business created to deliver and support complex, time-critical and distressed housing schemes at a time when rising build costs, contractor capacity constraints and programme risk are increasingly impacting new housing delivery across the UK.
“The outlook for housing developers, fundings and associations shouldn’t look as bleak as it does,” comments Andrew Cavanagh, CFO of Salboy. “Buyer demand is robust, finance is accessible, and the supply:demand ratio for new housing in this country is skewed heavily in their favour. But the difficulty of securing capable construction partners to build in locations where houses are most needed is reaching fever pitch. Across the country, developers’ schemes are slowing down, stalling altogether or taking years to get out of the ground because suitable contractors cannot be mobilised quickly enough or with sufficient certainty that they can deliver on time and on budget.”
Salboy Construction was established by Salboy in April 2024 in response to these conditions. The business was initially focused on supporting some of the Group’s own developments, as well as select sites funded by Salboy Capital, the Group’s property funding partnership business.
In less than two years, Salboy Construction has grown to a team of 16 construction professionals, quantity surveyors and procurement specialists and has delivered 120 homes with a further 139 currently under construction. The team is now contracted to work on sites by both Salboy’s development team and a number of other developers, funders and housing associations around the country.
Salboy Construction’s team is deployed onto a mixture of brand new sites where work needs to begin from scratch, as well as onto distressed sites where either sufficiently qualified partners were unavailable locally, or problems had slowed progress and a new delivery process was needed to bring the project to fruition.
The business has live and completed schemes in Greater Manchester, Cheshire, London, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and Staffordshire. Recent projects include new-build sites in Wandsworth in London, Tuckingmill in Cornwall and Tean in Staffordshire, in addition to the takeover of a 70-home residential site in Lincolnshire, the reset of two distressed urban schemes in South London, and the delivery of a 77-home affordable housing development in Cornwall.
With this track record firmly in place, Salboy Construction is formally launching its services to a wider range of third-party clients nationwide. Andrew Cavanagh: “Over the past few years, more and more funds, banks, housing associations and registered providers of social housing have approached Salboy to help bring their projects forward. Until this point, capacity was our only constraint. We’re excited that now, thanks to Salboy Construction, we can start saying ‘Yes’ to more of these projects and bring forward more homes where they’re desperately needed.”
Demand is particularly high in cost-sensitive areas, such as affordable housing, where Salboy Construction has recently begun work on schemes for three registered providers.
The business operates through a hybrid delivery model, combining its own direct delivery teams with a national network of trusted regional partners, including Salboy’s long-standing partner in the Northwest, Domis Construction. This structure allows Salboy to maintain full oversight of every scheme and ensure consistent standards of governance, reporting, quality and cost control.
One of Salboy Construction’s key strengths and differentiators is its home-grown procurement network that enables regional partners to save up to 20 per cent on common building materials. The network gives the SME partners Salboy Construction works with access to the buying power and supplier relationships normally reserved for Plc housebuilders, helping them manage inflationary pressures and reduce exposure to material price volatility. Access to the procurement network is also available to developers funded by Salboy Capital.
Stephen Ward, Construction Director at Salboy: “Anyone working in the construction space today will have seen good housing schemes stall, not because demand wasn’t there, but because the right delivery partner could not be secured or retained. That is exactly the gap Salboy Construction has been created to fill. In a short space of time we’ve been able to show developers and funders we’ve the right mix of domain expertise, supplier leverage and tenacity to bring greater certainty to schemes that might otherwise struggle to get off the ground.”
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