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DCH and Knightstone complete merger
Two landlords in the South West have completed a merger to become the region’s largest housing association.
DCH and Knightstone have legally merged to form 36,000-home Liverty after announcing talks between their boards in May last year.
The new association has plans to build at least 15,000 homes over the next 10 years, with a projected turnover of £250m for 2018/19.
It employs around 1,400 staff and provides services to more than 70,000 people from Gloucestershire to the Isles of Scilly.
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In a statement posted on Knightstone’s website, the pair said: “As Liverty, we will transform services and continue to meet changing customer needs and aspirations.
“We will continue to invest not just in housing, but in supporting individual people and communities.”
Liverty will officially launch on 19 March.
It hopes to make £12m of efficiency savings in its first three years of operating and achieve a 25% operating margin.
The group will be made up of one registered provider parent company, with subsidiaries for different operations such as market sales and leasehold management.
Paul Crawford, chief executive of Liverty and former DCH boss, said: “In coming together our combined strength, and capability allows us to develop new affordable and market homes of all tenures at an unrivalled scale in the south west with a projected capital investment in the local economy of over £2bn in the next decade.”
Linda Nash, chair of Liverty and former chair of Knightstone, said: “Knightstone and DCH had a shared goal: through strong and sustainable business growth, to make a transformational investment within the south west region.
“By coming together to form Liverty, we now have the financial capacity, infrastructure and ambition to build homes and support communities at scale, transforming services to meet changing customer needs and aspirations.”
Update: at 12.03pm, 19/03/18: More information about Liverty was added to the story, as well as quotes from Paul Crawford and Linda Nash.
