bri may be one of the UK’s most significant large-scale housing organisations you have never heard of. It owns and manages almost 60,000 homes, stretching from Somerset and Bristol through a Hampshire heartland to Bracknell, Berkshire and, through Octavia, west London. As Andrew Teacher observes on this week’s PropCast, that scale would make it comparable in size with a FTSE 100 company, were it listed. For context, Grainger, the UK’s largest listed residential landlord, owns just over 11,200 rental homes; Abri owns more than five times as many. Even adding Unite Group’s 64,000 student beds to Grainger’s total (and beds, admittedly, are not quite homes), the two listed names together reach around 75,000 roughly the scale of the group Abri now hopes to create through its proposed merger with Curo Group, which would bring the combined organisation to more than 73,000 homes and community assets serving around 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England.

Like the G15 giants, Abri has built scale deliberately, through the merger of Radian and Yarlington in 2019, Silva Homes in 2023 and Octavia in 2024, and built capability alongside it: customer satisfaction at the top end of the sector, an A3 stable rating from Moody’s and the Regulator of Social Housing’s G1 and V1 grades, confirmed in November 2025. G1 is the highest governance grade, the regulator’s assurance that the organisation is effectively run and manages its risks. V1, the highest viability grade, confirms “the financial capacity to deal with a wide range of adverse scenarios”, and has become rare among large associations.

Gary Orr, chief executive of Abri Group and its predecessor organisation Yarlington since 2011, has done a remarkable job steering the organisation through significant change and significant expansion, never an easy thing, particularly in the housing association world. The result is a balance sheet that equips Abri both to manage the daily complexity of providing homes and services for well over 100,000 people, a figure approaching 150,000 through the proposed Curo merger, and to pursue an ambitious growth strategy supported in part by institutional capital.

“We’re ambitious about being a trusted partner in delivery and piloting some of these ideas,” says Theo Plowman, Abri’s head of policy and campaigns. “We’re in the room on several different conversations, we’re really well placed and we have the expertise to do it.” Plowman joined a year ago from the British Property Federation, where he led much of the trade body’s residential policy work, particularly on supporting institutional investment into build-to-rent. The conversation that follows ranges across pension capital, shared ownership reform and why the sector needs to stop underselling itself.

Scale as strategy

Growth is deliberate. In April 2026 Abri published an investment strategy targeting 20,000 new homes by 2036, “doubling our output” as Plowman puts it, alongside around £450m of investment in existing homes and an ambition to become a top five provider by scale, customer satisfaction and as a place to work. Delivery runs through its Strategic Partnership with Homes England, which awarded Abri £300m under the 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme as part of a £2.66bn investment in new homes, joint ventures such as the 50:50 acquisition of the former Ford Airfield in West Sussex, where 1,500 homes are planned, and ambitious regeneration schemes like The Granges in Windsor, where four tower blocks containing 192 properties are being replaced with 413 sustainable homes.

The next step came on 1 July 2026, when the boards of Abri and Curo announced they are exploring a new partnership that would create a group owning and managing more than 73,000 homes and community assets, serving 142,000 customers across the south and south west of England, with combined turnover of £598m in 2024/25. Curo, formed in 1999 through a stock transfer from Bath and North East Somerset Council, owns more than 14,000 homes concentrated in Bath and Bristol, a natural western extension of Abri’s footprint. Gary Orr calls the two organisations “an excellent fit for one another”: the same geography, the same core purpose and values, and, in his argument, the combined strength to invest more in customers’ homes, offer greater services and build more much-needed affordable homes. A final decision is expected later this year, following formal consultation with customers and approval of the full business case by both boards.

The logic is the one that has driven every stage of Abri’s growth since 2019. Scale spreads fixed costs across more homes, cuts procurement costs per unit and builds the balance sheet capacity that funds better services and more development. Against the triple squeeze Plowman describes later in the conversation, on grant-funded delivery, existing stock and compliance, consolidation is one of the few levers a housing association controls entirely itself. A combined group would lift Abri from around 20th to around 13th among UK housing associations by turnover, according to Housing Today’s rankings of 2024/25 accounts, a meaningful step towards the top five ambition set out in April’s strategy.

A century of shelter

If scale is the future, purpose is the foundation, and Abri’s roots run deep on both sides of the group. Its founding organisation, the Swaythling Housing Society, was established in Southampton on 26 November 1925 by three local men: Fred Woolley, an accountant and civic leader who went on to serve as Mayor of Southampton and became the society’s first chairman; Claude Ashby, a businessman and director of the Bursledon brickworks; and the architect Herbert Collins. Between them they put up £200 of shares, with Collins’ father lending the fledgling society £14,000. A group approaching 60,000 homes began with £200.

That same year the society built its first homes at Pilgrim Place, off Mansbridge Road, under the Housing Act 1924: let at restricted rents, built by the society’s own workforce to Collins’ designs, and still standing a century later, characterised by generous green spaces and a strong sense of place. Collins cross-subsidised the work by designing larger homes for wealthy buyers. At Southcliff House, built in 1930 as flats for single women, the society’s women rent collectors lived among the tenants they served. Abri marked the Swaythling centenary in 2025. Few businesses of any kind can point to a hundred years of continuous social purpose.

Collins took his inspiration from Octavia Hill, a figure every bit as significant to the housing association movement as the better-remembered names of Peabody, Guinness and Rowntree, and arguably more so. George Peabody (1862), Edward Guinness (1890) and Joseph Rowntree (1904) endowed the great institutions that bear their names; Hill invented the method they all came to use. In 1865, aged 27, she persuaded John Ruskin to buy the leases of three run-down cottages in Paradise Place, Marylebone, on the condition that they returned 5% on his investment. She renovated them, collected the rents weekly in person and built a professional, predominantly female force of housing managers around a simple conviction: decent homes, fairly managed, change lives. By the end of her career she was managing housing for 3,000 to 4,000 Londoners. She saved Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill from development, foresaw the green belt in her 1888 essay More Air for London and co-founded the National Trust in 1895. Her “five per cent philanthropy”, a fair return on capital doing social good, is the direct ancestor of the pension fund proposition Plowman spends much of this conversation making. And her legacy lives on inside the group itself: Octavia, the west London association that joined Abri in 2024, descends directly from the homes she managed. Through that merger, Abri now carries the weight and heritage of Octavia Hill’s foundational housing association, with a history stretching all the way back to 1865. Where Herbert Collins laid the cornerstones in 1925, Hill’s model of professional, ethically driven management and “five per cent philanthropy” had already set the blueprint sixty years earlier. In this sense, Abri’s story is not only one of modern growth and consolidation, but the continuation of the very method that built the movement.

The settlement and what comes next

At the June 2025 Spending Review, Rachel Reeves committed £39bn to a new Social and Affordable Homes Programme over 10 years, almost doubling annual grant funding, alongside a 10-year rent settlement at CPI plus 1%. There has been plenty of speculation of late about the settlement and whether it should be reallocated. That is not something Plowman comments on, but he is clear about what it delivered: “The housing association world got a lot of what it actually wanted - a long-term and workable commitment from the government.” The question now, he says, is what comes next. “We can’t really go back to government cap in hand.”

Plowman credits the National Housing Federation and Angela Rayner for securing the settlement amid competing priorities everywhere. It is a remarkable turnaround for a sector that spent the second half of the 2010s absorbing George Osborne’s 1% annual rent cuts, a policy that in effect cut the sector off at the knees.

But many politicians, and those outside the sector, misunderstand how the grant regime works - it is not simply £39bn to go and spend on anything. Housing associations need their own cash, their own equity and debt, to go alongside it, and when other priorities trump ground-up development, these sorts of settlements can often go unspent. This is why, Teacher argues, there needs to be maximum flexibility within the affordable housing budget, so that a multi-tenure approach can be prioritised and housing associations have the agency they need to make the right decisions. Ultimately, that can benefit many different areas of government spending. Teacher pushes the fiscal logic: every pound not spent on social housing surfaces somewhere else, in temporary accommodation, in housing benefit, in the NHS, in the criminal justice system and in lost economic growth, all of it landing back on the taxpayer. “Those figures stack up and make sense in Treasury’s mind,” Plowman agrees. “I think that’s partly why the settlement did come through.”

Less house for your buck

The headline numbers also flatter to deceive. “Because of build cost inflation and all the extra compliance issues, we are getting less house for our buck,” Plowman says, describing a triple squeeze: delivering grant-funded development already committed, investing in existing homes and absorbing compliance costs from MEES and EPC requirements, with the capacity to acquire Section 106 units under strain on top. Housing associations also plan beyond the political cycle. “Things like the 10-year settlement are development plans we’re seeing through for the long term, way outlasting any government tenure,” he says. “That’s sometimes where you get a bit of a clash of priorities.”

The pension capital answer

“One of the great things about the scale we’re building, and the superb quality of the team we have, is that it will enable us to grow and explore outside capital, with institutions that want to come in and back affordable housing,” says Plowman. It is an approach that, while not yet commonplace, is growing in popularity among the leading, pioneering housing associations, who recognise that expanding the balance sheet is a powerful way to deliver their ambitions. “There’s going to be a big shortfall between what we can fund on our current balance sheets and what we can fund with the grant funding we’ve got,” he adds. “That’s a really interesting question for me and all housing geeks: finding the best way to unlock it.”

The Mansion House Accord, under which 17 of the UK’s largest workplace pension providers pledged to allocate 10% of defined contribution default funds to private markets by 2030, with half of that in the UK, sets the pathway. UK pension allocations to private assets currently sit at around 3%, a fraction of American levels, and housing is a small element within that. President Trump’s reforms to the 401k system are pushing US retirement money the same way. Plowman talks of the “beautiful synergies” on offer: “it would be really wonderful to see a world where local government pension scheme cash is invested in their local area, invested back into those schemes.”

For pension funds, the attraction is the profile of the income. “It’s all about security, long-term safety and stability,” Plowman says. “You’re almost buying a premium there. That’s why affordable housing is just so beautifully attractive. Housing associations have been around for a long, long time, providing those steady returns.”

Abri’s approach, wanting to partner with patient capital, has clear echoes of what Octavia Hill did with Ruskin 160 years ago: a fair, modest return on capital in exchange for professionally managed homes that change lives. It is also where the G1 and V1 grades earn their keep, as the first assurance any institutional investment committee will ask for.

Fixing shared ownership

Shared ownership has a reputation problem with consumers and policymakers alike. It is seen as illiquid and hard to exit, with complaints about fees and valuations wrapped up in the wider leasehold scandal, and shared owners paying 100% of service costs on a property they only part-own. “Shared ownership is a real headscratcher for all policymakers,” Plowman concedes, “because we can all see it definitely has an important place, and the policy idea behind it was a good one. The challenge has been the number of people actually staircasing, actually turning it into the product it should be.”

The fixes are coming from inside the sector. Paul Hackett at Southern Housing has proposed working with mortgage lenders on products that let shared owners at lower loan-to-value ratios borrow their way to 100% ownership, which helps consumers staircase out and helps associations recapitalise, freeing money for development pipelines. “As a policy guy, I was very bitter and jealous, because I wish I’d come up with that idea,” Plowman admits.

The Shared Ownership Code and the reinvigorated Shared Ownership Council are early steps in the same direction. But they do not yet resolve the more difficult, structural questions around how risk, cost and value are sustained over a household’s full stay in the tenure The unavoidable issue underneath all of it is service charges. “Service management is expensive and difficult,” Plowman says, “with razor-thin margins for the likes of FirstPort, Rendall & Rittner and Savills. It’s a difficult industry to get right and to have done well and cost-effectively for any owner, let alone shared owners.” There is an opening for housing associations, with the management infrastructure they already possess, to do it better- and to use their learning to inform the next phase of shared ownership thinking, moving beyond access and transparency towards long-term sustainability as an affordable product, better system design and clearer shared risks on service charges.

The modesty problem

Since the global financial crisis, housing associations have extended far beyond their formal remit. “The amount of stuff that housing associations do outside their basic remit as a landlord was one of the big things I saw when I joined Abri,” Plowman says. Teacher goes further: “pretty much every housing association since the GFC has been running the country by all of the things that they do beyond housing”, providing support to people who would otherwise fall between the cracks, largely unseen by policymakers, customers and the public.

Plowman agrees the sector undersells itself. “I feel like we do have a little bit of a problem with modesty, almost,” he says. “There is a nervousness, because across the sector we still have so many issues where we’re not delivering for our customers, that there’s almost a fear of shouting from the rooftops about all the good things you are doing.” Context matters, though. With almost 60,000 homes, even a 99% success rate, remarkable for any organisation in any industry, still leaves 600 households a year with a bad experience, and 59,400 without one. Abri’s customer ratings sit at the top end of the sector, and Plowman is “proud of what we’re achieving”.

Looking ahead towards Q3 and Q4, Plowman is positive about Abri’s ambitions and the increasing prominence being placed on the affordable housing sector, but warns: “We can’t take anything for granted. Given all of the instability we face in the world right now, as a sector we need to come together and work more closely with everybody around us. Punching out of the echo chamber has never been more critical.”