Propertyshe: Thomasin Renshaw

“We can run a feasibility on a site within a few hours.  It's absolutely incredible.  We can essentially get to a place where we can go for our first meeting with the Local Authority within a matter of a couple of weeks, which means we believe we're in a place to be able to genuinely turbo charge development in this area.  And one of the things that we also know is obviously we, as a business, operate about 1.1 million rental homes across the world.  So if anybody's going to understand what rental homes need and what people who rent in rental homes need, we do back ourselves on that.”

Susan Freeman

Hi, I'm Susan Freeman.  Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment.  Today I'm delighted to welcome Thomasin Renshaw.  Thomasin has recently been appointed Managing Director of UK Development and leads the Greystar UK Development and Construction teams.  She will be responsible for leading their strategy across build-to-rent and purpose-built student accommodation.  She joins from Pocket Living, where she served as Chief Development Officer, overseeing its entire pipeline of major London schemes, including the award-winning Sheepcote Road in Harrow, and Atlas Wharf in Old Oak.  Her earlier roles at Grosvenor and Muse Developments established a strong track record in regeneration and public-private partnership, working with Local Authorities and institutional stakeholders to unlock major development opportunities, including the 2 acre South Molton Triangle in Mayfair.  She has over 20 years of experience leading complex residential and mixed use regeneration projects across London and the UK.  Thomasin holds a Bachelor of Science in astrophysics from University College London and a Master of Science in surveying from the University of Reading.  She's a fellow of the RICS.

So Thomasin, welcome. It's lovely to see you.  I was thinking about when we first met.  I think it was one of those early lockdown online panels where the tech didn't work and we all ended up in separate pods and couldn't speak to each other, if that sounds familiar.

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, that's right.  It was a MIPIM webinar that we were meant to be doing a panel, I think live at MIPIM, and MIPIM got cancelled and I remember it was the first one of those that I had to do and I remember being terribly anxious about having to set everything up in my living room so that I had the best Wi-Fi connection.

Susan Freeman

And then it didn't work because we couldn't actually communicate with each other.

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, it was a lot of fun and games.

Susan Freeman

So hopefully things will go better today.  So, every career has a beginning, and if we went back to the start, what was it that first attracted you to real estate, and was it something that you had intended to go into from school days?

Thomasin Renshaw

Interestingly not, although there was an indication that probably it was the right direction of travel for me, which I'll explain to you.  So, while I was doing my A levels, and I did all sort of science with a bit of Spanish for A levels because I wanted to become a scientist, my school, and I'm not quite sure, I would do, or sometimes wonder where they got the funding for this, because it was a state school.  They got us to do this day of testing called the Morris Speed Profile.  Mine came out and said, I do, I distinctly remember it said architect, civil engineer, surveyor this, surveyor that and I remember at the time going, oh no, I don't want to do that, I want to be a scientist.  Why, why has it come out saying that?  And one of the things that it had flagged was that I have extremely high spatial awareness and it was something I wasn't really using a great deal, I suppose.  But I've always been quite creative and I've always enjoyed making things, so maybe that's part of it, I don't know.  I think that actually speaks a lot to how I've ended up where I've ended up.  And obviously I am suited to it because it's an industry and a career that I enjoy immensely.  I genuinely enjoy work and when I took my two maternity leaves, I was really quite keen to get back to work.  You know, obviously quite clearly conflicted with wanting to spend time with my children, but it's, it's also sort of something that is quite a big drive for me, the need to work and to feel, to feel useful and to feel like I'm progressing things and pushing things forward.  But also I know that my work really suits me. It suits my strengths, the things that I enjoy and obviously this test back in 1995 or something predicted this, and yet I chose to ignore it.  So I trotted off to University, did a degree in astrophysics, completely…

Susan Freeman

As one does.

Thomasin Renshaw

And I suppose I sort of rationalised it a little bit because it is a in some ways a bit like property.  You're dealing with 4 dimensions, you've got your 3 dimensions that you're working in, but time is a really important dimension in property as well.  Time and money, the two are often very intertwined.  So in some ways not so surprising. But around about halfway through my degree, I realised that I had this thing when I was at school, I wanted to try and figure out black holes.  That was what I was really interested in and then I think it was around the beginning of my second year, or midway through my second year, at University, it sort of really did start to dawn on me that maybe work as a research scientist wouldn't really suit me.  I sound like I'm kind of stereotyping a little bit, but the people I met who were sort of full-time scientists and my tutors, etcetera, they just weren't really like me.  They weren't very outgoing, and I am very outgoing, I enjoy spending time with lots of people, another reason why the property industry really suits me, but they were quite introvert and sort of quiet.  And I guess I wanted more than that.  I wanted a life that would be fun and engaging and creative as well.  Coming back to that point around me always being somebody who's busy sort of making things as a child, I was a huge Lego kid, which is another really big clue.

Susan Freeman

Samantha McClary will love that.

Thomasin Renshaw

Yes.  I've got photos of me back in the day when photos were an expensive resource.  I've got photos that I'd insist my mum took of me next to skyscrapers that I'd built and it was always either building tall or building wide. So I'd build entire streets of buildings and amenities like police stations and playgrounds and things so I mean, it really was all written out, the way of what I was going to do without me realising it.

Susan Freeman

At what stage did you give in and sort of gravitate towards real estate?

Thomasin Renshaw

So I didn't give in even then.  I decided in, I suppose one of the things that people on my course often ended up doing if they didn't become a scientist was to go and work in the city.  And for me, that was also something that wasn't going to allow my kind of creative side to come out and so I carried on resisting working in any kind of financial sector and I suppose a lot of people might think property is that way inclined, but I think in reality it was because I didn't really know anything about property.  In my mind, property was being an estate agent or building bridges, and I didn't want to do either of those two things.  I just didn't have any role models or anybody I knew personally who worked in property so I had nothing to base it off.  It didn't even occur to me really that that was something that I could or would want to do.  And so I kind of went off the other end of the spectrum really from the astrophysics and decided by the time I was leaving University that I was going to work in the music industry.  There was a little bit of a property industry interlude with that.  So, I left University, I decided that to get in the music industry, probably the best thing I could do would be to go in as some form of assistant or secretary or something like that.  So, I went off and did Pitman training, and actually really useful because I can still touch type faster than many other people and I did go on to do some temping.  So, my first temping job was Interestingly enough, at Enron, which was filing things in German for a week, and I don't speak German.  I speak a bit of French and Spanish, but I don't speak any German so that was interesting.  And my second temping job was a secretarial role at a property company, and I worked there for a week, and the lady who placed me there had got good feedback on me, so she placed me the next week at a different property company, and this one's called Metropolis Developments, and I ended up being asked to stay there.  It was an interesting role because it was a sort of hybrid.  It became a hybrid role.  It was meant to be a PA kind of role, and it extended over towards being, actually, I started getting much more involved in the land buying side and trained to do appraisals and things like that and so I became a bit more of a coordinator in reality, coordinating land bids and things like that.  And I did that for 6 months, but the call of the music industry was still there.

Susan Freeman

Oh no, you didn't even realise at that stage that you were destined to be real estate.

Thomasin Renshaw

No.

Susan Freeman

Okay.

Thomasin Renshaw

It was really interesting.  I did enjoy it, but I had this thing in my head that I kind of needed to do.  And so I did go off and work in the music industry, and I had two different jobs in the music industry.  First of all, as a live music agent's assistant, and then as a music agent myself.  So I was actually representing bands and DJs, predominantly DJs actually and doing some PR as well, which was also a really good thing for me to sort of learn how to do and I think actually pays dividends in your career if you've done something like that.  And meanwhile, I had obviously been mulling over this experience I'd had of the 6 months in the property industry. And I enjoyed working in music, it was a huge amount of fun in my early 20s.  I mean, I actually don't have any regrets about it at all, but at the same time, it's quite a difficult life in a lot of ways.  You get invited to these amazing events and parties, and then you can't afford a taxi home and you have to get 2 night buses back from Brixton back to where you're living.  And so it dawned on me, and actually there was a very defining moment where I realised I needed to think about a sort of more stable career, a more professional career, as it were, was when my husband and I bought our first flat.  I actually, if I had gone on the mortgage and gone on the deeds of that flat, I would have brought down the amount we could have actually borrowed because my earnings were so low.  And when you've got the multiplier of 2.5 versus 3.5 for a single person as it was back then, it was just a bit of a moment where I was like, okay, hang on a minute, is this the life I want to have for the next 30, 40 years?  And it made me really think about that time that I had spent working in the property industry. And I thought about that Morris speed test as well and I thought, hang on a minute, this really is something that I think I could enjoy, I could be good at, I'm going to give this another go.

Susan Freeman

Okay. So what was your first meaningful role?  I know you were at London and Regional, but I think that was about 2007 onwards, wasn't it?

Thomasin Renshaw

That's right.  Yeah, so I worked for a small property developer before that for about, oh, I think just over 4 and a half years and that was a very broad role because I was running the projects. When it started, it was just me and him.  I essentially kind of had to organise everything.  So I was organising all the banking for the business. I was organising the loans, I was organising the hiring because we grew to be about 6 people by the time I left.  I was even doing my own PAYE calculations for my salary.  So it was a very, very broad role and it was very interesting, but it was really because it was a small business we were mainly just buying land, getting planning permissions, and selling them.  I really wanted to work in a business that was actually building stuff, and on a much bigger scale and I think I worked out really early on that I like, you know, things at large scale.  And that's when I went to work for London and Regional in 2007.

Susan Freeman

And what did you learn there?  I mean, did they let you loose on major projects or was there a sort of learning curve?

Thomasin Renshaw

I learned so much there because, not least because I was there 2007 to 2010, which was obviously the year of the GFC.  So, it was absolutely fascinating.  So, I worked alongside Geoff Springer, who's still a development director there, on the larger projects like 55 Baker Street, Greenwich Wharf, and a bunch of others, one on Tottenham Court Road.  And I would do bits of those projects because there really were only 4 and then 3 of us in the development team.  And the third person in the development team was running his own projects, so you know, I just mucked in on what needed to be done.  I did have my own projects as well.  Those included a portfolio of Texaco garages that we were building out, and some of them needed to be sold and all sorts of different things needed to be sorted out for those and so I ran a number of those and I was also responsible for the David Lloyd portfolio.  So we bought the whole portfolio of David Lloyd clubs, tennis clubs, and I became responsible for all of the undeveloped sort of plots the land and looking for opportunities to develop on those.  So that was really quite good fun going around, visiting them all, thinking, you know, looking at doing some strategic land promotion, those kinds of things.  But mainly I think it, the learnings related to the GFC and, and actually watching things just tumble in front of everybody's eyes.  You know, it's the first recession I've worked through, everything had been incredibly buoyant until then, you know, you as I said, mentioned in my first role, you could make money by buying a piece of land, getting planning, and selling it on.  And so I hadn't really comprehended that things could go the way that they did.  To be honest, I'm not sure many people had.  And the one thing I would say I learned from my period at London Regional was gut instinct.  I've always had it in me to be able to make decisions quickly, but the ability to have that commercial instinct very quickly on something.  I would frequently be asked to sort of go into a meeting on my own at fairly short notice that somebody else might have arranged but then couldn't attend, and I would have to work out within around half an hour whether something had legs or not.  We were being sent all sorts of interesting bits and pieces from the banks, particularly the Irish and Icelandic banks, because they knew we were well capitalised and we could execute on any deals that we liked.  And that was exciting and really interesting, you know, digging through what was worth looking at, what wasn't.  But we had so much on that we had to make those decisions quickly and I think that's something that's serving me now in my career really well, having built that up.

Susan Freeman

Yeah, that must have been an amazing experience and as you say, there were all these opportunities coming through the banks and you had to decide which ones were worth running with.  So, an interesting time and then your next role was at Muse.  What made you move on, and what were you looking for at that point?

Thomasin Renshaw

So, I had run a couple of bids, actually, whilst I was at London Regional.  We were the under bidder for South Acton Estate, for instance, and they were regeneration projects and I really enjoyed those.  I just found them, the scale really exciting, the sort of element of really improving a place by sort of working through the complexity of how everything works together because I suppose all of the roles that I did until recently were mixed-use development roles.  And so I'd had a little bit of a taste for regeneration and when I was approached about the role at Muse, I was, you know, absolutely sure that I wanted to make that step because it was, you know, a business that focuses on exactly doing those kinds of schemes.  So yeah, it was a good move for me, I think.

Susan Freeman

And was there sort of any particular scheme there that you put your heart and soul into that you want to talk about?

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, so I discovered that having had that experience already at London Regional, I was actually very good at doing bids.  I had really high hit rate, and so I became like the bid queen of the office.  I did pretty much, I think, nearly all of the, bar one, I think, of the bids that came through in my 5 year time there and I quite enjoyed the process.  I like being involved in the upfront part, the sort of blue sky thinking, the creative side.  So coming back to that point earlier about, I really enjoy the creative side of property, and that means thinking creatively, not just actually creatively in terms of how something looks or feels, but also creative problem solving.  And I think in that really early stage of looking at a site or an opportunity on something that's quite complex, it's like you really get to think deeply about what you want to do and what the area needs and how those meet.  But I also think it spoke a lot to my people side.  I like to very actively listen to people and so when I had the opportunity for engagement with the people we were bidding to work with, I would really pay attention a lot.  It sounds like an obvious thing, but I would ask lots and lots of questions to try and find out from them what they were looking for, to make sure that what I was offering was going to align with that.  So you're kind of meeting their hearts and minds as well as the practical side of things and I think that was the beginning of some of the work that now I'm sort of moving into more doing it kind of politically, for instance.  But that intersection of it all, I found really was a bit of a sweet spot for me.  And so I brought in quite a few different projects, and I had a couple of projects that I was working on anyway, which is Chatham Place in Reading, and I did the second phase down in Mill Bay in Plymouth but I won a scheme in Basingstoke.  When you say, was there one, the main one actually was probably the first kind of career defining project I worked on was the Lambeth Town Hall scheme with Lambeth Council and I won that, literally I found out I won it, I think the night before was what was meant to be my last day of work before maternity leave with my son.  So I ended up with my first period of what was meant to be maternity leave actually working remotely, writing lots of board reports and trying to get everything organised for the team to be able to take that through whilst I was off.  But it was a really fantastic scheme, I genuinely enjoyed working on it.  It was hard, don't get me wrong.  It was a complicated scheme and there were a lot of demands from it, both from the council, both the officers and the politicians at the Local Authority.  In essence, it was to build a new council office building, which is now up and running and looking beautiful still, which would enable the council to decant from loads of different offices into that one and to refurbish the Grade II listed town hall in Brixton, and to build out some residential across 3 different plots to help pay for it all.  So it was a really nice mixture of decent amount of resi, big office building, and some heritage work, which kept it really interesting.  But again, it involved a lot of working in conjunction with council, making sure that we were doing everything that they needed, but also making sure we had a, a viable and, and profitable scheme for us as well and lots and lots of work with the local community as well.

Susan Freeman

Sounds like a pretty amazing project, and to be working with the council on their offices, you know, they're really putting their trust in you, so an amazing experience.  Your next move was to Grosvenor, which was, I mean, completely different again, you know, an estate with long heritage and what was it about the Grosvenor role that attracted you?

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, it's interesting because they are very different types of businesses, and I think I have worked for a lot of different types of businesses in my career.  I think it was a couple of factors, actually.  I think there was a point where at Muse I was really keen to progress personally, but at that point it had a very flat structure and I reported straight into the guy who's our regional director, and there wasn't really anywhere for me to move and I was really getting to a point then, you know, I was running multiple large projects, I really wanted to move into a place where I, you know, I would start to have line management myself, and I had been training somebody in their APC and really enjoying that side of things.  So there was that, but I was really enjoying my time at Muse.  I wouldn't have gone had I not found a role that had really attracted me as well and if I'm really honest, it was just really hard to say no to 2 acres of Mayfair.  I think there's probably a bit of a Monopoly player in me somewhere. But also it had all the hallmarks of a scheme that actually in some ways quite similar to the other one.  Weirdly enough, another triangle site, both of them were triangle sites.  Uh, this one became known as the South Moulton Triangle and I was also aware that it had been in the works at Grosvenor for a long time.  Um, people had been trying to move it forward, there had been lots of leases that had been aligned, but there were a couple of buildings that still needed to be bought in that people hadn't managed to secure and so it still needed a lot of work, and I quite like a challenging task.  So I liked the fact that it was, you know, going to be tricky, it was going to be complicated, lots of listed buildings across the site, just over half of the site is covered by listed buildings, and I'd had that bit of a taste of that in Brixton. 

Susan Freeman

It's a huge site.  I actually didn't realise the enormity of it, but perhaps for our listeners, you've just explained what part of Mayfair this is.

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah so it felt to me like it was a bigger version of what I'd been doing in Brixton, I suppose, in some ways.  So that's what really, you know, it was like a step up and that was really exciting and obviously value-wise it was, you know, several multiples higher as well and essentially it's the triangle of Mayfair that is Davies Street.  So if you come out of the Elizabeth Line station and head south, you are there on that side of the triangle.  And then if you head south, if you turn left, when you get to Claridges, you're walking alongside the southern part of the triangle, Brook Street and then essentially the boundary on the other side, on the sort of long side of the triangle, is a bit less clear because you've got South Morton Lane, which is very much defined as being within it. And then there was round about half of the properties on South Morton Street were also included on that side. So what I loved about that project was that it was a really chunky bit of, you know, prime West End and so I could really think in a completely different way compared to other projects I'd worked on where I'd been fairly constrained in terms of what was viable.  I could really think outside the box because we had the values to support it.  So there were certain things that I really enjoyed thinking about differently and I think this is one of the things that I've enjoyed actually when I've changed roles is I've had to kind of recalibrate my brain and think about things differently.  And one of the things that I worked out quite quickly was, oh, hang on a minute, we have the freehold, including under the roads, for instance so where there's the sort of northern and southern block, I worked out that actually, you know what, we could build a basement that goes under the road and just put the road back and everyone said, oh, we can't do that.  And I said, well, why can't we? We own the freehold under the road, let's do it, and we did.  And it's under construction now so that's really quite cool.  Just think, elements of that.  And the listed buildings created a lot of complications as well and we needed to essentially double the floor space on the side so there were lots of work that we did with the Local Authority, particularly Robert Aiton, who was there at the time on the heritage side.  And one of the things that we employed a lot actually was using VR.  I had the absolute pleasure of working with Hopkins Architects, who were just brilliant to work with and we developed the design in VR, and that meant that we could not only use VR to help us work out what the right design moves were, when we had to choose between options, we would take that to the Local Authority as well.  And I remember Robert getting very excited and going to find John Walker one day when we'd brought it in for the first time to show him how this all worked and I think it really showed a lot of transparency because they could walk around what we were proposing, and we were a completely open book on that, which was very powerful.  So we were able to agree a number of heritage interventions that could have been quite difficult to achieve otherwise so, some elements of façade retention.  I was walking past a couple of months ago and I saw, oh, there we go, their façade's being jacked up like we said it was going to be and that was really quite fun to see that actually happening live.  And there are also elements of the listed buildings where we retained the front rooms of the building so that from the street it presented completely as it would have done, but then behind integrated that to the proposed office building.  So there were lots of different solutions that we came up with that were, some of them been sort of done before, others a bit more unusual and I really enjoyed that creative process.

Susan Freeman

Yeah, I have driven past a couple of times and seen that there's work going on, but I didn't realise the enormity of it.  So, when it's finished, will the facades look very much the same as they did originally, and will all the sort of new construction be behind that?

Thomasin Renshaw

Essentially, yes.  So, other solutions on some of the buildings that weren't listed was, because they had some, a couple of buildings that have rather nice stone facades, the stone actually has come down and will go back up. So, they will look slightly different, because one of the problems when you've got buildings of various different ages is floor levels and so we had to, that's one of the reasons we had to jack some of the facades up.  But also you need to knit everything in so you've got consistent floor plates to be able to achieve the kind of floor plans that you need for what is going to be probably the most prime office space in the West End.

Susan Freeman

And I think you then hit another interesting period, lockdown for Covid, while you're in the middle of your planning negotiations.  So how did that pan out?

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, so we had, I think it was very early, something, it was, I can't remember the exact day, it must have been something like the 5th of March, we'd gone to board and got agreement that because there was some planning changes due to come in that we were going to fast-track getting the application in.  We hadn't agreed everything, but we were just going to do our best job of getting an application in that was going to at least secure like the kind of main part of the consent and then we could tinker with that as we needed to later.  And then Covid hit and I remember the first lockdown because it was my daughter's birthday, it was the 16th of March, and we were about a week or so, week and a half post this board decision mobilising for getting a planning application in.  And it was really weirdly most fun parts of my career in a sense, because we were in lockdown, but we had such a strong purpose and it was, you know, I made it my absolute mission to make sure that everybody involved in the project felt as passionately as I did about it and so I was working as long hours as anybody else.  We were working on this application and really busy and purposeful despite being locked down. So we had all sorts of chaos around us where everybody was trying to work out how they work from home, how they do drawings, Hopkins had to figure out how they were going to do all these drawings remotely, but everybody was absolutely with me that this was something we were going to achieve.  And we had set ourselves a target of 3 months to get this planning application in, and we hadn't agreed all of it yet with the planning team and so we just ended up spending hours and hours on video calls with Westminster Council, talking them through everything.  We were just, you know, we had to make decisions quickly, which is again, something echoing what I was saying earlier, something I quite enjoy working at a really fast pace and we did it. We actually got this application in in June, and I remember we were still in lockdown when we did it and everybody in the team, you know, from the architects, the QS, everybody who'd been involved, it was such a sense of euphoria that we genuinely did all have a party from our gardens.  Everyone sort of tried to do that thing where they, because it was a lovely June day, I remember and everybody tried to do that thing where you have a remote party through Zoom or Teams?  We did actually do it for hours because we were just like, yes, we've done it and we all really deserved a bit of a joyful time together.  I’m still very close to many of the consultants actually who were on that journey with us, it brought us all together to, yeah, it was an amazing, an amazing experience.

Susan Freeman

I can't imagine there are many Local Authorities you would have been able to do that with, to have Westminster on board and doing all that online.

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, I think my gut is that they really enjoyed having the purpose too during that period.

Susan Freeman

I imagine, because it takes your mind off all the other things that were going on.  So, at that point, so, you know, obviously there'd been this real high and achievement, and did you then feel that it was time to find another challenge?

Thomasin Renshaw

Yes, so we did, we submitted it in June, and we got we got it through committee with an unanimous decision by mid-December and that was incredible.  Such a large application to get through that quickly and with a unanimous decision was definitely another high.  I hadn't really decided, but there are moments I think, you know, like that when you think, right, okay, am I going to stick with this for the next 6, 7 years to see it through, to see it built, or, you know, I'd already spent 5 years of my career on this one project and there was a part of me that was thinking, hmm, hang on a minute, maybe I want to do something more.  And I think the thing that was calling me at that point was I knew that if I carried on in the world of big projects, the projects would just get bigger and bigger so, I decided what I really needed to do was to work across multiple projects and really test myself as a leader and get away from the coal face because although I was leading a team, that was leading the South Molton Triangle project, I was still pretty involved in the day-to-day.  And that's when the opportunity came up to work at Pocket Living.

Susan Freeman

So, Mark Blessing, the Founder and CEO of Pocket Living, has of course been on this podcast, so we talked about Pocket but it's quite, I think, an unusual business, you know, it really is a mission and what was it?  How did Mark persuade you to join?

Thomasin Renshaw

I think that he did a good job persuading me, but I think really it was me that was attracted to the trickiness of it all.  I knew that what Pocket does doesn't fit any particular planning box.  It doesn't tick any planning box really, actually, um, but actually, so it's all about hearts and minds and all about persuading and there's a sort of campaigning side that comes with being at a business like Pocket.  And I'd always been somebody who'd engaged a lot with politicians, as you know, speaking back to my Muse days and I knew that what Pocket does was something I felt passionately about, and I felt I could, I just, I felt like I could do that and as I say, I quite like a really difficult challenge.  So honing both my skills on the leadership side of stepping away from being at the coal face of running projects and leading a team of people running projects, and that piece on the political side and actually, I think that was a really good decision because I have come out of my period with Pocket feeling like I actually have a more complete set of skills to offer, then going back to doing bigger projects again now.  So it's a funny thing.

Susan Freeman

And I think for our listeners who may not have listened to the podcast with Mark Flessing, could you explain briefly how Pocket is different?  What sort of homes Pocket actually provides?

Thomasin Renshaw

So when I joined, we were solely focused on discount market sale, which is homes sold to local people on a salary up to the Mayoral income cap in London that are 20% discount local values.  But actually whilst I was there, we were also looking at our rental strategy.  So I was very involved in setting up the rental strategy for Pocket Rent and going out and actually leading the charge in terms of working out how we were going to operate those buildings, how we were going to get planning for them, and going and speaking to Local Authorities and getting feedback on it as well.  And so I had, I suppose, two opportunities with two different types of products that I had to work my way through getting really good and full support for.

Susan Freeman

The flats are all sort of smaller than usual, but very well designed so that they are affordable for people who couldn't otherwise afford to buy or rent.

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, so they are space standard compliant and actually, before my time, Pocket had been the ones who'd got the one bed, one person space standard adopted, and they're actually slightly larger than the minimum space standard, but they're very well designed and actually, when people say, oh, they're small, I spent a lot of time touring people around a Pocket flat to show them that actually it doesn't feel small at all.

Susan Freeman

No, I've done the tour, and I actually was very, very impressed, they don't feel small.  So it was a new role at Pocket, and Pocket again, a sort of entrepreneurial business, so, you know, different from Grosvenor.  So, how many projects were you working on?  Were you having to deal with multiple Local Authorities?  Having dealt with one Authority, you know, in your last role, you were then dealing with multiple Local Authorities all over London?

Thomasin Renshaw

Oh yeah, I think when I joined we had 13 projects, 14, something like that.  There were a couple that were in the same Local Authority, but yeah, a lot of different Local Authorities.

Susan Freeman

And what did you learn from Mark about trying to change the world and communicating a mission where you had to get politicians on board and talk everybody around?

Thomasin Renshaw

I think the main thing I learned was actually talking to who your customer is, and that's something I'm using a lot again now.  Being able to articulate who is this housing for and why we were building it and why those people needed it.  I'm a really big passionate believer in giving people choice in housing, and that would be something that I used to say a lot.  Nobody's being forced to buy or live in a pocket flat, but it gives them the choice, they've got the option whether they want to do it or not and I think one of the things that frustrates me a lot about the sort of mid-market in the UK is people don't have that much choice.

Susan Freeman

That is true.  So really interesting, useful learning then, which has prepared you very well for your relatively new role at Greystar, which, you know, please tell us about, and then we'll get on to the exciting new announcement a few days ago on sort of slight change of strategy.

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, so I joined Greystar just before Christmas to lead all our UK development and construction activity.  This role, I would say, encompasses almost everything that I've done before.  It feels very neat, but also very satisfying because we've got the prime London developments that we're doing, you know, we're building 1,600 homes in Bermondsey, which funnily enough was actually the sister project of my project in the Major Projects team when I was at Grosvenor, it used to be a Grosvenor project.  When I landed, I actually knew quite a lot about it by osmosis of having sat around the team who were doing that project at Grosvenor.  We've had some lovely tours of people who've worked on the project before.  So I've been there and worked on, you know, really prime assets and driving values and really beautiful design, but also that very entrepreneurial way of working, which I would say is definitely that at Pocket, but also at London Regional.  Pocket is owned by Related in America, so I actually had quite a good taste of them, you know, working for an American business and I really enjoyed it, I like the straightforwardness of it.  And also where we're at at the moment, as we've just announced, we are pushing forward with what we call our garden strategy.  So most of the development work that Greystar does in America is actually what we call garden communities, which are low to mid-rise communities of mid-market housing aimed at regular people who want to rent a nice apartment with a good specification, but at a monthly price cheque that they can afford.  And we don't really have that in the UK, we just don't have it and obviously we all know that, you know, landlords are exiting the market and so coming back to that point about choice, there's a lot less choice for people at the moment who aren't able to buy or don't wish to buy.  And I think that's something that increasingly is happening as well, particularly where we have a global workforce and so we, and I feel really passionately about the fact that we need to have vast swathes of mid-market rental homes in locations that might be out of London, but predominantly not in London.  And our first scheme that we are bringing forward is just outside Cambridge on an urban and civic master plan called Waterbeach.  It's the most beautiful location opposite this man-made lake, and it's going to be absolutely stunning but we've worked really hard on the unit types.  So we are very focused on making sure the unit types are efficient.  We haven't got any wasted space so it's bringing out a bit of the kind of Pocket experience that I have and making sure that by doing that, it's a similar idea in the sense of just trying to drive down the cost to people and we've already spent so much time looking at things like kitchen specification because we all want people, even if they're not spending a lot of money on a monthly cheque, to be really proud of where they live.  And I spent a bit of time back in April out in the States looking at some of our projects there and they're beautiful, they're absolutely lovely.  They're not really high specification, but I'd be very happy to live there, you could see that people really enjoyed living there.  Also, what was lovely is the managers who were showing us around the assets, you know, knew that the people who lived there were proud to live there too and I think that's what really matters.

Susan Freeman

And I was very excited that the press release mentioned Hampstead Garden Suburb as an example of a garden community, because that's where I live so I'm all for places where you have actually got, you know, green spaces to walk the dog and, you know, the kids to go and play.  I'm also very excited about that, that it's an urban and civic on site because James Scott was on this podcast quite recently.  So, I mean, what sort of scale, I mean, what, what are you aiming for with these schemes?  How many homes?

Thomasin Renshaw

We genuinely think the sky's the limit because we think actually the UK really needs this product and would hugely benefit from it.  So our target is 20,000 homes within the next 4 years to get on site.  We've been working super hard on how we develop our designs faster and having standardised design is actually super helpful.  We've got this design tool, we can run a feasibility on a site within a few hours, it's absolutely incredible.  We can essentially get to a place where we can go for our first meeting with a Local Authority within a matter of a couple of weeks, which means we believe we're in a place to be able to genuinely turbocharge development in this area.  And one of the things that we also know is obviously we, as a business, operate about 1.1 million rental homes across the world so if anybody's going to understand what rental homes need and what people who rent in rental homes need, we do back ourselves on that.  And what we have seen time and time again is the things that people really need are good co-working spaces and a simple gym.  If you can deliver both of those two things and keep your operational costs low, but still give a really good quality of offering in terms of the operations, you get the right balance, and that then enables us to be able to develop exactly those kinds of sites.

Susan Freeman

Yes it's interesting because I think we forget that this, you know, the build-to-rent institutional sector is relatively new to the UK.  It took quite a lot of time to actually get it off the ground, so that know-how from the US is very useful.  Now, you also have, I think, within your remit, student accommodation in the…

Thomasin Renshaw

Yep.

Susan Freeman

That must be a new, I know you've covered lots of development areas, but that's a relatively new sector for you?

Thomasin Renshaw

Yeah, I think one of the benefits of being a mixed-use developer in my career is that you're always having to do something new, and I enjoy that, if I'm honest.  If I were doing the same thing over and over again, life would be a bit dull, wouldn't it?  So we've got two very large student schemes underway at the moment, one of them is a 37-story tower in Manchester, just over 1,000 beds, and one is actually a sort of ground scraper in Selly Oak in Birmingham that's just under 1,000 beds.  But we are very actively looking at new student opportunities at the moment, as well as obviously the garden piece.  But we haven't completely turned our back on London, so we're still good, still looking schemes in London.  I think because our focus is obviously we're talking about the Garden Strategy a lot.  Some people have come to me and said, oh, you're not going to work in London anymore and I'm like, well, hang on a minute, we are building out a fair few thousand homes already in London. But, you know, no, we're still looking, we're still keen, but it's just, it's a challenging environment out there, being candid, in terms of development viability.  There have been a lot of costs being added to development costs, and so It does mean you're going to focus on where the viability sits, and for us at the moment, I would say that is in the low to mid-rise, so up to 6 storeys, and student sector.

Susan Freeman

And is there anything in the New London Plan that gives you cause for hope?

Thomasin Renshaw

Yes, I think there is, you know, there's quite a good section there around build-to-rent, we'll be heavily engaging. One of the things, obviously, as I kind of alluded to, is political engagement, but actually very, very active in terms of policy engagement and at Pocket, that was a very large part of what we've done and I, I can point to various things in policies that were, were suggested by me, which is rather nice when they get adopted.  So those little wins kind of spur you on to keep trying and keep having conversations about shaping policy, um, and I think that is a very important part of what we should all do in the sector.  I think it's very easy to rely on big organisations, member organisations, to make representations, but there's nothing like, particularly if you're in a niche sector like build-to-rent or anybody out there doing anything that's a bit unusual, making your case individually.  It's easier to land it if you speak from personal perspective, I think.  Particularly if you're in development and you want to comment on development, it speaks volumes if you're the person out there trying to make these things happen.  Asking, you know, a political engagement consultant to write it for you, it's not going to land the same way.

Susan Freeman

So just looking across the various roles that you've had, London and Regional, Muse, Grosvenor, Pocket Living, now Greystar, each business has been different with different customers.  Do you think there's a common thread that connects them all for you?

Thomasin Renshaw

I think more where I'm now is the culmination of everything else.  But the common thread is probably I've been attracted to roles where there's a challenge.  I need a good challenge, it gets me out of bed in the morning.  It's a slightly sort of flippant thing to say, but I need it to be difficult.  I get much more satisfaction from achieving something that's really difficult and feels like things are stacked against you.

Susan Freeman

Yeah, that's really interesting because a lot of people would go for a sort of easier life, wouldn't they?  Something that they're used to.  So I have to ask you this because, you know, we always talk about the fact that property, you know, is traditionally male-dominated, and I just sort of wondered, you know, whether you have seen that as an issue, whether you feel it's held you back in any way, or, you know, helped promote your career because you are, you know, regarded as a bit different when you go onto a construction site.

Thomasin Renshaw

Well, interestingly enough, I actually didn't meet anybody who did what I did for 10 years at in my career as another woman.

Susan Freeman

Wow. Okay.

Thomasin Renshaw

I didn't meet another female development manager.

Susan Freeman

That says a lot, doesn't it?

Thomasin Renshaw

A few years I think, I mean, it was at a lunch with an architect, I met a development manager who funnily enough was from Grosvenor, while I was at Muse, who was a woman and I was like, oh, you know, will you meet me for coffee?  I knew lots of people who worked in consultancy and I knew there were women in the industry because I read about them and I heard about them, but I didn't meet anyone.  Now, has it held me back?  No.  If I think about where I've been, astrophysics, music industry, property industry, they're all actually male-dominated so maybe it doesn't bother me as there've always been enough women around that it hasn't been an issue that I felt like I've been a woman on my own.  So I've always made really good friends with other women in the businesses I've worked and yeah, I've got good friends in all of them that I've worked, everywhere I've worked, that I'm still in touch with and still really value as friendship.  So, it hasn't necessarily been an issue. I think it was probably a bigger issue when I was, you know, the age where people might think I might have children.  I think I had to be a lot better than other people to get jobs in that period, which is unfair, I suppose.  I said to my sister recently that I get speaking opportunities because I'm a woman.  She said, doesn't that bother you?  And I said, no, because actually I think it's just making it fair overall.

Susan Freeman

Well it’s true and if somebody's prepared to give you a platform, then you get the opportunity to get your views out there.

Thomasin Renshaw

I was just going to say, one of the things that I am really passionate about though, is sharing those opportunities with other people and particularly other women.  So I'm always quite busy trying to find opportunities for other people as well and that's a real joy to be able to do.

Susan Freeman

That's fantastic, because, you know, with younger people coming into the industry now, it's not always easy to see what the path should be so, you know, to actually be able to help is brilliant.  So, Thomasin, thank you so much, that's been a fascinating canter through your career to date, and the new garden communities sound absolutely fantastic, so best of luck with those.

Thomasin Renshaw

Thank you very much.

Susan Freeman

Thank you so much, Thomasin, for sharing some of the highlights and challenges of bringing forward so many major regeneration projects.  You're clearly someone who enjoys a challenge.  Very best wishes for your new role, and I look forward to watching your garden-style communities grow.  So that's it for now, I hope you enjoyed today's conversation.  Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast interview coming very soon.  

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