Former General Projects Development Director Ben Cross and Fore Partnership Managing Partner Basil Demeroutis have launched a new development manager that aims to cut the costs of retrofitting obsolete UK property assets, with an iconic project already in its sights.
Cross and Demeroutis this week launched More, which will share staff with Fore, the UK property company founded by Demeroutis and seeded by eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll.
Courtesy of More and WithLove.Studio/Rob Evans
More’s Ben Cross and Basil Demeroutis
The company will look to use its detailed buildings systems knowledge to reduce the cost of retrofitting buildings up to modern energy standards, building on Fore’s work producing buildings that provide a social good.
“A model that we’ve used for the last 30 years is just no longer fit for purpose,” Cross told Bisnow. “It’s failing to deliver risk-adjusted returns to investors. And we need to fix our broken cities.”
The company has its first mandate, undertaking the retrofit of the 151K SF One Poultry office in the City. The postmodernist-style building is well known, given its distinctive shape, colouring and location next to the Bank of England.
It is owned by Korean investor Daishin, which had been the mezzanine lender to the building before buying the senior debt from Bank of Ireland in January last year. The building is entirely occupied by WeWork.
Cross said that the building’s gas heating system needs to be replaced by air-source heat pumps to improve sustainability performance. And more could be made of the ground-floor retail element, which has never been a real success.
On an architectural level, plans call for celebrating the quirky postmodern style, something previous owners shied away from due to the City’s penchant for either older, classical buildings or new glass and steel iterations.
The firm is aiming for retrofits that are up to 50% cheaper than current industry standards. It also hopes to make them faster while maintaining the quality of the finished product, even though that might mean the firm receives a commensurately lower development fee.
One example of achieving those targets is knowing which parts of a building’s mechanical and engineering systems really need to be replaced and which can be retained while still improving building performance, Cross said.
Courtesy of More and WithLove.Studio/Rob Evans
One Poultry in the City
That balance is what it takes to solve the problem of obsolete assets while also carving a niche in a world of rising costs that held back new UK development over the past few years, he added.
Demeroutis said the firm would take on projects in sectors like office and student housing, where first-generation buildings are now reaching obsolescence. The firm would like to add amenities to buildings that would involve a social element as well as services to tenants.
Making a building ESG-compliant is now “table stakes,” he said. That means owners’ thinking about buildings needs to change.
“We don’t want to talk about ESG, really, anymore,” he said. “We want to talk about, ‘How do you create great buildings that are going to rent for more money and sell for better yields at the end of the day?’ And that happens to be something that’s lower in carbon and higher in social value.”
To succeed, the new firm will need to have a generalist mindset with a lot of specialist expertise. Demeroutis used an interesting analogy to demonstrate that point.
“We count the number of items that go into a typical retrofit, and there’s something like more than 2 million individual pieces that go into doing a retrofit of a 100K SF building — that’s more parts than go into the space shuttle,” he said.
“Buildings are complicated, and so you need to have this kind of expert generalism to be able to really unpack how to do every element of that construction better.”
