This Apartment Complex Brings New Life to a Forgotten Corner of Manchester

When developer Adam Higgins first visited the site that would eventually become the Kampus build-to-rent (BTR) scheme, he knew he was looking at a rare opportunity.

“It’s got canal frontage,” Higgins said in an interview with LoopNet. “It had a couple of wonderful old 1960s university buildings and it also had some old Victorian shipping warehouses. It just had this great eclectic mix of different space and buildings.”

Although Capital & Centric – the property development company Higgins founded with his business partner Tim Heatly in 2011 – had not until then been involved in any residential projects, they knew the site’s unique architecture and ideal location within walking distance from Picadilly train station in Manchester’s city centre had all the makings of a vibrant community-driven, mixed-use build-to-rent development.

At the time, the 2.3-acre site on Aytoun Street by the Rochdale Canal belonged to the Manchester Metropolitan University. After three stages of bidding, Capital & Centric and their partner Henry Boot Developments (HBD) were selected in 2013 as developers of the site.

Their proposal included 534 apartments and more than a dozen leisure/retail spaces across five buildings – one 1964 concrete office tower, two grade-II listed Victorian warehouse buildings, and two new constructions – all opening onto a lush, public garden square.

Nearly a decade later, Kampus won Development of the Year at the 2022 Insider North West Residential Property Awards for what Higgins touts as “the best build-to-rent scheme, not just in Manchester, but in the UK”.

Despite its current success, the site had largely fallen into disuse before being put on the market by the Manchester Metropolitan University.

“The middle of the site … was just a tarmac carpark,” Higgins remembered. “It was a really ugly, uninspiring space that nobody could get into, nobody could cross … It wasn’t permeable at all.”

Moreover, many of the site’s buildings had long been abandoned. The Victorian-era Minto and Turner warehouse, for example, had been empty for about 40 years and was in “a complete state of dereliction”, according to Higgins.

“We weren’t even allowed to go in the building,” he recalled. “There were floors missing and those that were left were completely rotten. You could fall through them.”

Capital & Centric and HBD appointed Dutch firm Mecanoo as concept architects during the planning stages of the canal front project. “We liked the idea of having a Dutch frame of architecture,” Higgins said. “To bring a look of something different to Manchester. We weren’t just trying to copy everything that already exists in the city.”

After Mecanoo drew up the plans that helped secure the deal, the developers hired two UK-based firms with Manchester offices – Chapman Taylor and shedkm – to carry out delivery of the £120 million project that included restoration of listed buildings alongside considerable new construction. The public garden and landscaping design were carried out by Exterior Architecture, another UK firm.

The decision to develop the site for rental apartments rather than for private sale ultimately came down to the numbers, said Higgins.

“It needed a lot of equity, a lot of capital to even get the thing going,” he said. “And we came along to the idea that the only way to do it was to do a partnership with a fund and that the product was going to be a rental product.”

The developers partnered with US-based funders Ares Management, with whom they formed a corporation that retains single ownership of Kampus, as is commonly the case for BTR developments in the UK.

“If we’d sold it all to individual investors”, Higgins explained, “you start to create a problem where it's quite difficult to maintain those common areas. Because the landlords, if they’re all over the world, aren’t really interested in contributing towards service charges to keep the garden beautiful.”

“Because it’s a single build-to-rent ownership model”, he continued, “we can keep Kampus perfectly maintained. We gain our return from the kind of rentals that we can drive from the scheme, so we’re incentivized to make it the best scheme that we possibly can.”

The development offers one- and two-bedroom units in different styles across all five buildings. Monthly rents range from around £1,300 for one bedroom to just shy of £2,000 for two bedrooms. Meanwhile, the Dutch-style penthouses perched atop the newly built towers fetch monthly rents of up to £5500.

Speaking to the current dearth of affordable homes in Manchester, Higgins explained that developers complete a ‘viability exercise’ as part of their planning applications to determine whether they can provide the 20% of affordable units stipulated in Manchester City Council’s planning policy.

Amid a construction boom in the past few decades that has transformed the Manchester cityscape, many new residential developments have been criticized for eschewing that requirement entirely. In the case of Kampus, Higgins said that the current state of the Manchester market would require developers to make considerable cuts to the quality of their offerings to meet affordability criteria.

“One of the problems in Manchester is that, compared to, say, London, the values are still considerably lower … and it costs broadly the same to build,” he said. “So, there isn’t always the scope to provide the number of affordable units that developers would actually quite like to.”

Like many other recent BTR developments, Kampus offers hotel-style service and amenities to all their tenants, including 24-hour concierge service, high-speed internet, laundry drop-off, dog-walking, yoga classes, a residents’ lounge, cinema room, rooftop terraces and the biggest gym in a BTR development in all of Manchester.

“We’re trying to really create a community where all the different residents can meet each other,” Higgins said. “Because by doing that, hopefully, we’ll keep people living in Kampus rather than them being tempted to go somewhere else in the future, because they’ve started to create a community and put down roots.”

While the homes at Kampus may target higher-than-average incomes, Higgins said the vision for the development always included a public square and garden that is open 24 hours a day to all members of the public. “It’s open for absolutely everybody, which is really important in the city centre.”

Inspired by 19^th-century community gardens in places like Kensington, Belgrave and Brighton, the design team put special emphasis on creating a lush greenspace in the middle of the development. Part of that effort involved bringing in mature trees to help create a sense of long-term growth.

“Normally, you go around these schemes and all the trees and plants are a bit of an afterthought, and nothing is more than about a metre high. Whereas when you go into Kampus, we were importing trees that were already eight metres high when we brought them in, because we wanted it to feel like it had been there a long time,” Higgins said.

The focus on community placemaking also means the ground level of the development hosts more than a dozen retail and leisure units, including bars, cafés and restaurants, a bakery, a dog-grooming centre and a general store.

“Our intention … was always to have a wide mix of independent commercial occupiers at ground floor level to give the scheme a buzz and vibrancy throughout the day and evening,” said Higgins.

Commercial units at Kampus are all on full repairing and insuring (FRI) leases. While rents vary, operators all pay into a service charge that contributes towards the general maintenance of the gardens and common areas, and all are encouraged to use the gardens and public space for their business.

In addition, shorter term commercial residencies for pop-up operators and events are available at the Bungalow, a 1960s security hut on stilts located in the middle of the public square.

“I think it’s what we’ve done between the buildings and on the ground floor that sets Kampus apart,” Higgins said. “[It] almost feels like its own little village, right in the middle of Manchester.”

Property management, customer service and residential letting at Kampus are handled by BTR and apart-hotel operator Native, while commercial letting is managed by agents Sixteen Real Estate and Graham & Sibbald on behalf of Capital & Centric and HBD.

While the official launch of Kampus was delayed by six months due to pandemic lockdown measures, the development has achieved more than 90% occupancy since it first opened in the summer of 2021. “It’s been more successful than we’d hoped,” Higgins said. “It’s probably let up faster and we’ve achieved better rents than we’d hoped.”

Higgins also emphasized that Kampus was a valuable learning experience and pointed to upcoming residential projects in the Capital & Centric pipeline in Stockport, Stoke and Sheffield as an indication of the developer’s increasing focus on residential projects that build off the success of the Manchester development.

“It’s shown us what’s possible,” he added. “And I think it’s shown other people what’s possible as well. We use it very much as our shop window to say to our architects, ‘This is what we want. We want the gardens to look like Kampus.’”