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House builder gets approval for St Modwen Homes acquisition from competition watchdog
House builder Miller Homes has completed its acquisition of rival firm St Modwen Homes after being given clearance from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Now the deal is approved, Miller Homes will take on 19 live sites, totalling around 3,500 plots for new homes, as well as a further five strategic sites.
Miller Homes said this purchase would help it to meet its goal of building 6,000 homes a year.
The house builder will bolster its existing business in the West Midlands, the East Midlands and the South of England, and enter the South West for the first time.
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It will continue to operate the business under the St Modwen Homes name and will establish a new regional office in the South West of England.
Stewart Lynes, chief executive of Miller Homes, said: “I’m very pleased to welcome the St Modwen Homes employees, customers and suppliers to the Miller Homes family.
“There is a lot of alignment between the businesses; both hold five-star builder status, and both prioritise quality building and customer experience. I’m excited by the growth we will achieve together, building more of the high-quality, sustainable homes the UK needs.”
According to various press reports when the deal was announced, Miller Homes is paying £75m upfront for its rival, with a further £120m deferred and the remainder subject to certain trigger conditions being met.
Blackstone, the US private equity giant, bought St Modwen Properties for £1.3bn in 2021 and has now decided to offload the housebuilding arm.
Under Blackstone, St Modwen turned over £368m in its most recent published results for 2022 from sales of 1,313 homes and made a pre-tax profit of £5.3m.
In August, Blackstone’s for-profit provider Sage Homes offloaded more than 3,000 shared ownership properties to the Universities Superannuation Scheme, the UK’s largest private pension fund.
Miller Homes is owned by another US investor, Apollo Global Management, and operates across England and Scotland. It turned over £1bn in 2023, with 3,475 completions, and made a pre-tax profit of £149.7m.
Just last month, the CMA extended the investigation it started in February last year into eight house builders.
The watchdog opened the probe after it found evidence that some developers may be sharing commercially sensitive information.
In an update on its website, the CMA said the investigation will continue until at least May, due to “additional evidence-gathering”, after the initial investigation ended in December.
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