emh development update August 2019

A Homes England Strategic Partner

Development update – August 2019

Delivering New Homes

@emhgroup

Welcome

Recognising your important role to emh group’s success, we wanted to succinctly capture the return we are delivering as a result of Homes England’s decision to award us Investment Partner status and the linked £30m grant allocation. Significant progress to identify land, start on site and create partnerships has already been made; seeing us increase our pipeline and completions. By way of quick comparison, last year we delivered 400 homes against a target of 270. This year we are forecasting around 600. We are committed to playing our role in helping the Government achieve its target of 300,000 homes by the mid 2020s. The East Midlands has a projected shortfall of some 24,000 homes (NHF Homes Truths, 2017/2018). We know we can only resolve this in partnership, and so we have aligned our strategic priorities with that of our local authority partners in meeting housing need. We are also enabling other housing providers in the region to develop their own homes, through the successful Quantum Consortium. We would like to thank all those partners for their approach and dedication to working together to help ensure people in the East Midlands have access to high-quality, affordable homes. This document captures our headline performance and the detail of some of our key schemes, matched to our newly-approved development strategy. We are clear on the tenure, place and quality of our offer, and have grown both our development and sales and marketing team to match our ambition.

We hope you find this useful. And, of course, the offer to visit our team or schemes, or for us to share any best practice with other Investment Partner housing providers is always open.

Kind regards Chris Jones Executive Director Development

Development update – August 2019

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Headline performance: Quarter one 2019

276 new homes started

52 new homes delivered

£2,719,750 sales income

100% customer satisfaction on sales

developing in 12 local authority areas

Development update – August 2019

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Key schemes

Here are just three schemes supported by Homes England which capture our development strategy in action. We are creating thriving communities, building high quality homes in the right places, thanks to strong partnerships. We selected these three as they show the flexibility and status of being an Investment Partner.

Ashby ExtraCare Scheme

The East Midlands has an ageing population and a significant need for more homes for later life. Emh group has a proud track record of responding to this need, including our multi award-winning Oak Court and Waterside Court schemes.

Click here to view the development

Work will start this October on our latest ExtraCare scheme, delivering some 65 new one and two bedroom apartments and associated communal facilities including restaurant/ café, residents lounge, hairdressers and therapy room. This scheme is unique in its build as it mixed onsite traditional building techniques, with bathroom pods which

are constructed offsite. This helps reduce build time and offers greater value for money. The £14m scheme, which is supported by £2.6 million Homes England SP grant funding, will complete in January 2021. It will bring cutting edge design together with assistive technology to provide quality homes for older people.

Forest Road, Huncote

We are building some 54 homes (a mix of rent and shared ownership) with Countryside. The scheme was made possible thanks to our Homes England partnership status.

The properties range from 1-bed apartments to 4 bed homes. Showing the high level of demand in the East Midlands, of the 29 shared ownership houses, we have already completed on 12, reserved four and exchanged one.

Development update – August 2019

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Irthlingborough

This land-led scheme has been made possible thanks to the flexibility of the Homes England partnership. The ability to draw down grant on monies spent to date meant we were able to manage the cash flow needed to acquire the site.

We are now working with the local planning authority on a potential 84-home site, offering a mix of tenures. The scheme will involve no loss of high-quality agricultural land.

Taking design cues from the best practice in contemporary housing development; we hope to create a development site that integrates, protects, and allows biodiversity to flourish by conserving and enhancing landscape features.

Innovation insights Volume is only one part of the story; after all it’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it. So, our development strategy is clear not only about the type and tenure of homes we will seek to develop, but the importance of value for money, environmental considerations and innovative approaches. Over the years emh group has delivered schemes that have been innovative in terms of design and construction, including Europe’s largest PassivHaus development. We are currently working with other providers in the region to work jointly on modular construction, and already seeking innovative ways to do more, with less. Here’s a small sample of recent new approaches:

We’ve recently upgraded our shared ownership specification to react to market expectations.

This picture shows a factory specialising in the manufacture of bathroom pods. We are using these at Ashby ExtraCare - they provide efficiencies in the build as quality is higher as they are built in a factory, then delivered just in time, connected and away you go.

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Developing talent

Growing the talent of tomorrow is our key ambition. Funded by our social enterprise groundworks company, our award-winning academy will offer 250 apprentices across the group. Recognising the need for increased diversity within the development industry, we recently recruited three female multi- skilled operatives from a cohort of nine. Pictured is our apprentice of the year Bernicea Dandy, who completed her multi-trade operative

apprenticeship five months ahead of schedule and has progressed onto a single trade in carpentry and joinery.

We recently welcomed Sarah Clark to a new role of Head of Sales and Marketing. Sarah joins us from another housing provider, where she managed a programme of 400 sales and £46million sales income in 17/18.

To find out more about our development activity, please contact: Tim Wade, Director of Delivery, emh group

1 Barton Close, Grove Park Enderby, Leicester LE19 1SJ m. 07736 822324 e. tim.wade@emhgroup.org.uk

emhgroup.org.uk