Sage doubles its number of for-profits with three new registrations

Sage Housing was registered as a for-profit social landlord in 2010 and was bought by Blackstone, the US private equity company, in 2017.

In November 2023, Vistry signed an agreement with Leaf Living and Sage Homes for the sale of more than 2,800 homes, with a total gross development value of £800m. The homes will be delivered by the end of 2025.

It is the first such deal since Vistry announced it will merge its housebuilding arm with its partnerships business to focus solely on mixed-tenure affordable housing.

After the plans were announced, Stephen Teagle, chief executive of Countryside Partnerships, which is part of the Vistry Group, spoke to Inside Housing about his plans to refocus the firm’s efforts on delivering affordable housing.

In 2022, the for-profit built the most affordable homes across the sector, completing 3,447 properties, according to its most recent accounts, from October 2023. These included 1,965 new affordable rented homes and 1,482 for shared ownership.

Its delivery figures came in below its target of 4,071, with Sage blaming its house builder partners for taking “longer to deliver new homes than planned” against a challenging economic backdrop.

The RSH reported a slowdown in registrations of for-profit providers last year, with none registered at all in 2023.

Since a peak in 2020, when there were 42 applications to become a for-profit registered provider, there were 24 applications in 2023 and 17 in 2022.

Jonathan Walters, deputy chief executive of the English regulator, told Inside Housing that he believed the fewer applications were “largely a reflection of market conditions”.