Home REIT in talks to sell portfolio for £123m

The remaining 153 homes in Home REIT’s portfolio are worth a combined £18.3m, according to a valuation in August by property agency JLL.

Patron Capital was founded in 1999 by Keith Breslauer, a former executive vice-president of Lehman Brothers. The company is based in London, Luxembourg and Spain, and represents around €5bn (£4.4bn) of capital across property, distressed debt and credit-related businesses.

Since 2021, Patron Capital has run a joint venture with for-profit housing provider Oak Housing to acquire affordable homes in London. It also runs a social impact investment fund called the Women in Safe Homes Fund, which provides homes for women and their families at risk of or experiencing homelessness.

Home REIT is in the process of winding down and has been targeting the sale of all its assets by the end of the year to pay off its debts. It posted a pre-tax loss of £475m in its delayed accounts for the year to 2022, which it published in 2024.

It still has a further three outstanding sets of results to publish, each relating to its 2025 financial year, which ran to the end of August. Home REIT’s board said last month that the two half-year results for the 2025 financial year will be published before the start of 2026.

The trust’s shares have been suspended since January 2023.

Home REIT, which floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2020, was rocked by problems after financial research group Viceroy Research published a report raising doubts about its business model in 2022.

Among the issues raised was whether Home REIT’s clients would be able to service their leases on a long-term basis. The fund leases beds to charities to provide accommodation to homeless people, but has struggled to collect rents from some of its tenants, with multiple charity clients entering voluntary liquidation in recent months.

In 2023, Home REIT confirmed its properties were worth almost 60% less than the £977m it paid for them. The Financial Conduct Authority launched an investigation into the investment trust in February 2024.

Separately, in September a different listed investment trust, PRS REIT, agreed to sell its entire housing portfolio to asset manager Waypoint for £646.2m.