Knight Dragon Turns To Rental Units Amid Sluggish London Market

Amid London’s sluggish home sales market, billionaire Henry Cheng Kar-Shun’s firm intends to create its inaugural rental homes at an East London development. Knight Dragon has teamed with Texas-based Lincoln Property Company and MGT, the British real estate investor, to create 500 rental apartments, Bloomberg reported.

The Greenwich Peninsula development could ultimately have nearly 17,500 residences throughout a plot of land of 150 acres. Knight Dragon has constructed more than 1,000 apartments to date, along with a school, events facility and a portion of a public walkway planned by the High Line’s architects.

The building of the rental units will commence later in 2020, as long as the project gets the green light. As it stands, uncertainty over Brexit, along with multiple tax increases for homes on the upper end of the market, have caused the largest developers in Britain to move away from the more expensive central areas of London.

Companies with developments in progress have moved toward making mass sales to investors in the rental space in lieu of marketing individual units. Approximately 50 percent of the homes under construction in London were not sold as of the conclusion of 2019. Richard Margree, the chief executive officer of Knight Dragon, said per the report, “As a 20-year regeneration, we are consistently evolving our approach to respond to market demand.”

In separate news, rental marketplace Zumper notched $60 million in a Series D funding round led by e.ventures, and now has a total of $150 million. Zunper said it would use the funds to expand its engineering and sales teams, in addition to bolstering its tools for end-to-end transactions.

Zumper taps into technology to link landlords with renters during the process of renting an apartment. e.ventures Co-founder Mathias Schilling called Zumper’s progress “striking,” and said the firm was set to provide “great value” for landlords as well as renters of multi-family properties.