Another £20m funding for pioneering Rent To Buy business

Rentplus, a business providing Rent To Buy homes, has announced that it has new funding of £20m - on top of £70m it secured recently.

The company, which was formed in 2012, says it is on course to deliver 5,000 affordable new homes by 2020 and has contracts to build in Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Essex, Suffolk, Northants, Devon, Somerset, West Devon, the South Hams, Sedgemoor, Plymouth and Bicester.

Its new funding comes from Crestline Investors - described as “a credit-focused institutional alternative asset manager” - while its earlier £70m came from BAE Systems Pension Funds Investment Management.

The Rentplus model provides aspiring home owners with privately funded affordable Rent To Buy housing. 

Tenants have fixed term renewable rent tenancies for a period of five, 10, 15 or 20 years at an affordable intermediate rent set at 80 percent of market rent, after which they have the opportunity to buy their own home.

The rent includes service charges and there are no separate maintenance or property insurance costs. 

“With deposits being the greatest barrier to home ownership, we are seeing enormous interest from local authorities, developers and housing associations in Rentplus and remain confident we will meet or exceed our goal of 5,000 new homes by 2020” according to John Gildersleeve, chairman of Rentplus.

In recent years several politicians have espoused Rent To Buy type policies as a way of alleviating the housing crisis.