Lending guru Peter Denton has joined housing association Hyde Group as group finance director.
Denton left Starwood Capital where he was head of special situations in December last year and will now help oversee the ownership and management of 43,000 homes in London and the South East.
“I was attracted to the role for a number of reasons. I had always said to myself and my friends that I wanted to deploy what I have learned and experienced in a way that gave something back. It sounds clichéd but it’s true,” he said.
Lending guru Peter Denton has joined housing association Hyde Group as group finance director.
Denton left Starwood Capital where he was head of special situations in December last year and will now help oversee the ownership and management of 43,000 homes in London and the South East.
“I was attracted to the role for a number of reasons. I had always said to myself and my friends that I wanted to deploy what I have learned and experienced in a way that gave something back. It sounds clichéd but it’s true,” he said.
“It was already becoming obvious that the housing association sector was a sector that was blossoming in the eyes of politicians, the commercial property sector and the public. It was becoming more relevant and the opportunity to be involved in moving and reshaping a very large organisation looked appealing. I also sought an executive role, less transactional and more strategically focused in driving a business.”
Denton joined Starwood in 2012 as head of debt and was instrumental in the £228.5m IPO of its real estate debt fund Starwood European Real Estate Finance later that year. The fund now has a market cap of more than £400m. He previously held senior positions at BNP Paribas, West Immo and Eurohypo (now part of Wells Fargo).
Housing associations have become increasingly more commercially minded in recent years as government cut backs have set in and Denton thinks they are playing a more prominent role in providing affordable homes in London than traditional house builders and developers.
“Housing associations are coming out of the corner into the light at the moment, partly because of the political agenda and partly because the need for housing has put a reasonably large emphasis on the sector to help deliver. Housing associations are probably supplying the most houses in London that are contributing towards Sadiq Khan’s target to build 90,000 affordable homes in the next five years.
“The old-fashioned impression of what a housing association is – looking after local housing stock and being dependent on grants – was always wrong and now is very outdated. The reality is they get very little grant money, are substantial in scale and ambition and much more commercial,” he said.
Hyde Group hit the headlines in April last year when it entered talks with L&Q and East Thames to create Europe’s largest housing association but subsequently pulled out due to issues relating to the proposed speed of integrating the businesses. It later said that it was open to merging with other landlords but this is not currently Denton’s or the company’s top priority.
“The company is incredibly focused on its own future and is not embedding an assumption of inorganic growth. It has its own strategy, a clear development programme to build affordable housing in London and the South East and be a great example of a large-scale housing association in the sector. All the focus is about our own future. There is however a backdrop that the government position of rent reductions as well as economies of scale is driving merging activity in the sector.”
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