Vistry strikes £35m partnership deal with Hyde Group

Vistry has announced a new deal with Hyde Group to  develop 160 affordable homes on a former RAF base in Ramsey, Huntingdonshire.

The development at the former Royal Air Force station in Upwood, a village in Huntingdonshire, will deliver 74 homes for social rent and 86 shared-ownership homes.

The development and sales director at 50,000-home housing association, Hyde, Steven Morrice, said: “All 74 social rent and 86 shared ownership homes will be energy-efficient, with air source heat pumps and electrical vehicle charging points, and will be ready for their first residents in summer 2025.”

Hyde operates in London, the South-east, the East of England and the East Midlands. 

>> See also: Hyde increases neighbourhood teams and reduces patch sizes

>> See also: Vistry signs £76m partnership deal to build 259 homes in Devon

The site already has planning permission and construction is expected to start later in 2024.

Last week, Vistry announced that it had signed two deals with Homes England to deliver a total of 1,000 homes.

Homes England appointed Vistry to lead the regeneration of Birmingham City Hospital and a site in Hardingstone, Northamptonshire.

In September last year, Vistry announced that following its £1.1bn merger with Countryside in 2022, it would transition to focusing its entire business on partnerships.

In January, Stephen Teagle, chief executive of Vistry’s partnerships business, told Housing Today that the housebuilder was due to announce forward sales deals of 1,000 homes or more in the next few weeks as it aims to ramp up delivery to more than 20,000 homes a year towards the end of 2025, going into 2026.

Partnerships housing is the name given to a development model under which developers work with housing associations, local authorities, and investors in private rented housing to bring forward developments which tend to have a much lower proportion of homes for private sale than traditional developers would usually deliver.

In 2023, 67% of Vistry’s total completions were partner funded – meaning they were presold to a registered provider, local authority or private landlord – and 33% sold directly on the open market. 

Vistry’s transition to a partnerships model has seen its revenue figures improve. In its results for the year ending 31 December 2023, Vistry’s revenue was £3.56bn, representing a 28.6% increase from the previous year’s revenue of £2.77bn.

A profit of £305m before tax was recorded, a 23.2% on the £248m it made in 2022.