Wembley Park offers a prime example of regeneration as a work-in-progress during a period of unprecedented change, with real estate shifting from a passive bricks and mortar investment to a more dynamic operational business.
As landowner since 2002, Quintain has already transformed much of the 85-acre site next to Wembley Stadium from a motley collection of outmoded, unattractive and unrelated commercial buildings and parking lots into an integrated mixed-use development.
Quintain’s masterplan has evolved since the company obtained the initial planning consent in 2004, most significantly in the way it has reflected changing patterns of residential development in London, turning away from housing for sale to a largely build-to-rent model.
But there is still nearly a decade of development to go before Wembley Park is complete. If anything, the value-shift in real estate is likely to be even more profound during the final stages of what will end up as a 25-year development programme. The idea of “space as a service” is becoming more embedded in the real estate industry as each year goes by. Dramatic changes in transportation – not least around car usage and the onset of electric autonomous vehicles (E-AVs) – are destined to have a major impact on any large-scale project. In real estate terms, these are known unknowns – the final outcome difficult to predict.
It was against this changing backdrop to real estate in June 2017 that Quintain began a joint research project with the London School of Economics (LSE), whose Professor of Urban Studies, Ricky Burdett, is an advisor to the company’s board.
The research involved students on the LSE’s Executive MSc in Cities programme exploring three key issues facing Quintain:
- As the developer and property manager at Wembley Park, how does the company build a community when there is a transient population of renters rather than home owners?
- How can the benefits of regeneration spread to the London Borough of Brent so that Wembley Park is accessible to the wider community?
- How can a development of some 7,000 dwellings by 2027 accommodate emerging mobility trends, advances in E-AVs and the idea of “transportation as a service”?
Such a collaboration between private sector developer and academic institution was unusual but mutually beneficial. The LSE could fulfil its pedagogical remit by giving its “students” – private and public-sector leaders from the UK and overseas – a live project to study. At the same time, the students could offer Quintain a fresh perspective of its main asset after a momentous period of activity. Since 2015, the formerly London-listed company has been taken private by Lone Star for £900m before accelerating development at Wembley Park with additional funding through to 2021. Equally important, Quintain has established Quintain Living, the subsidiary that will manage the rental housing.
“With the LSE students, I could see that we would get something out of this,” recalls Angus Dodd, Quintain’s CEO. “In your day job it’s all about delivery, so here was an opportunity to get a group of people who were motivated, clever and with the time and resource to look at some aspects of the development.”
Of the three topics, the research on mobility trends alongside suggested solutions at Wembley Park resonated most strongly with Quintain – parking provision is a major cost here. Yet the exercise as a whole has been instructive. Though these were conducted as separate studies, clear, overlapping themes have emerged, all of them revolving around the challenge of future-proofing as far as possible the UK’s largest build-to-rent development. To that end, Burdett observes that the research has reinforced the importance of Quintain’s long-term commitment to Wembley Park while maintaining flexibility in the master-planning.
Though construction is due to complete in 2027, the approach to development by Quintain is that this should not be the end of its role – on the contrary. Any true measure of success will depend upon Wembley Park’s enduring appeal to Londoners, essentially as a vibrant residential district in its own right rather than simply a gleaming real estate appendage to the national stadium. With nearly 5,000 of the 7,000 planned homes designated for rental, that is no small undertaking.
Burdett refers to Wembley Park as a “piece of city”, which as he says, must involve “giving attention to the glue in between the buildings as a fundamental aspect of creating communities – they are not disconnected”.
As Burdett and Dodd suggest, investing in the public realm and placemaking generally are essential components of a successful leasing and estate management business. In that respect, Quintain’s role is akin to that of a custodian of Wembley Park.
According to Dodd, there is an analogy to be made here with London’s great estates, and how they have each prospered under single ownership. “They have the luxury and the duty to not look at their ownership as a series of buildings but to look at it as a whole, and that’s what we’ve been forced to do – in a good way because it has value as a whole. It has greater value as a whole than the sum of the individual parts,” he says. “Lone Star is not driven by charity or some philanthropic urban ideal. It’s driven by hard economics, but here I think the hard economics coincide almost exactly with creating a great urban place.”
The authors of the mobility trends research – technology entrepreneur Richard Greco and architects Tomasso Franzolini and Alan Pullman – conclude that “the convergence of trends” – technological, lifestyle, consumer preferences – may have created the challenge facing Quintain but they also offer exciting new possibilities, and not just in generating revenue. They contend that the potential solutions to the parking issue have the additional benefit of strengthening the Quintain’s placemaking objectives.
To that end, Quintain is about to embark on the preliminary planning and design work for the final phases of development at Wembley Park. In effect, this will be a rigorous stress-test for the latest iteration of the masterplan, which was conceived as long ago as 2014 and approved in 2016, but one way or another has to ensure that Wembley Park thrives long into the future.
The megatrends around demographics and urbanisation inevitably inform the thinking behind any long-term urban regeneration project. Yet at the heart of this masterplan review Quintain will also deal specifically with the implications for Wembley Park of declining car ownership and, by extension, a reduced requirement for parking provision.
The objective here for Quintain is to keep its options open for one or more possible alternative uses for valuable space that initially will have to meet prevailing demand for car parking, specifically for Wembley Park’s remaining undeveloped residential plots – one in the north east of the site with consent for 2,000 homes, and another known as Fulton Quarter where there is consent for 1,000 homes.
“In reality, the masterplan is coming up for five years’ old, so now is the time to go back and look at it again and decide if it’s fit for purpose given everything we now know,” says Jason Margrave, Quintain’s Executive Director of Development. “Part of that process is to review our whole approach to car parking, last-mile logistics, storage and other uses.”
Those other uses could include turning basement space into an urban farm, low-cost employment activity or creating a fast-charging hub for electric and autonomous vehicles, which are among the alternatives suggested and analysed by the LSE. There is also one challenge unique to Wembley Park – the obligation on Quintain to provide parking for 30 event days at Wembley Stadium, leaving significant voids for the remainder of the year. The LSE students argue that this space could be leased to organisers of concerts, markets and corporate events. “It was interesting to us because it seems to be an emerging aspect of urban placemaking to find spaces for an interesting cultural and arts programme to create excitement,” says Pullman. “You can differentiate with these tactical interventions and help build a community.”
Quintain has already responded to declining take-up of underground parking at one of Wembley Park’s existing apartment blocks, Emerald Gardens, by converting some of the spaces into storage cages for residents. It’s a good outcome for residents and landlord alike in this era of high-rise, apartment living, where storage space is at a premium. The plain truth, however, is that the floor-to-ceiling heights in the existing basement car parks are too restrictive for much else.
As Margrave acknowledges – and as the LSE study reinforces – the opportunity for major innovation lies at the planning and design stages of a development rather than in retro-fitting an existing building. It is nonetheless a delicate balance of meeting current demand and anticipating change, staying ahead of trends to future-proof a large-scale development as far as possible. That’s the challenge, and the investment risk, facing Quintain.
It is likely to involve Quintain creating a bigger space below ground than is required for parking while installing the infrastructure that would enable alternative uses in the future. “We might pay a little more upfront now but what that buys us is the flexibility to come back in later,” says Margrave. “If car usage tails off, it will not preclude us at that point putting in other uses in that space and delivering value out of something which would otherwise just be sunk cost that will never generate future revenue.”
Margrave says the LSE study has underlined what Quintain was already witnessing in terms of a downward trend for car ownership among a certain demographic. But it has certainly influenced the strategy going forward – the idea of being open-minded alongside a need for flexibility.
“They were looking at the problem, five, 10, 15, 20 years ahead, then bringing it all back and saying where this is all going and how Quintain should be starting to think about it now,” he says. “We were starting to see the beginning of these trends and they were looking all across the globe at clever ways of preserving flexibility. They reinforced what we knew was coming but they just came at it with some blue sky thinking, which we wouldn’t have necessarily got to on our own.”
According to Margrave, the resultant strategy will preserve – possibly enhance – value at Wembley Park, which taps into a wider debate in the real estate industry around obsolescence during this protracted, late-property cycle. We are 10 years on from the financial crisis and therefore inexorably closer to a market correction. When one also considers the dramatic changes in how we live and work, it is incumbent on developers more than ever before to think about alternative uses for their assets and build in flexibility for the future.
In many respects, the issues around mobility and transportation trends – in other words, the logistics of making a large estate function efficiently – epitomise the balancing act between placemaking and hard economics. If Quintain can ease the cost burden while moving closer to “transportation as a service” then potentially it is a good thing for all concerned, not least in helping differentiate Wembley Park and the Quintain Living brand from the build-to-rent competition elsewhere in London. Yet this is not just about greater service to residents – significant though that is – this is about freeing up valuable space in the phases of development to come, perhaps for even more housing.
The future-proofing of parking provision is undeniably a daunting challenge, but it offers the possibility of greater community benefits and something of a real estate windfall that could not be envisaged in the earlier master plans. As Margrave says: “Everything is up for consideration.”
