Grosvenor has appointed Steph Ball to lead its UK residential lending strategy as the Duke of Westminster's property company looks to deploy £900 million over the next 10 years, CoStar News can reveal.
The company said that having joined Grosvenor in 2011, Ball has considerable understanding of the business and the real estate sector, having held finance and tax positions across the organisation, most recently as finance director for Grosvenor’s investment team.
She is a Chartered Accountant and before joining Grosvenor, she advised private equity clients on potential acquisitions, divestments and portfolio reorganisations at Deloitte.
Since launching its residential lending strategy in 2022, Grosvenor has supported over 3,200 new homes across a range of housing tenures, including build to rent, PBSA and market sale homes.
Grosvenor said it has leveraged its extensive development expertise and decades of providing structured development finance in Canada and the US to build an experienced team within the UK property business.
As well as investing Grosvenor’s own balance sheet capital, the business has entered into a £100 million lending partnership with Generali Real Estate, one of the world’s largest insurance companies.
With a mandate to further diversify the organisation’s investment portfolio by financing high quality residential projects in areas of housing demand, Grosvenor’s lending platform will look to deploy £900 million into the sector over the next 10 years.
Rachel Dickie, executive director of investment and development, Grosvenor said in a statement: “Steph has an extensive understanding of the real estate sector. As a proven leader with a talent for structuring transactions, she is the ideal person to lead our lending strategy through this period of expansion.”
Ball, said: “With strong fundamentals underpinning the housing market, consumer confidence returning and inflation data looking positive, we expect to see an increase in development activity in the coming months. I’m looking forward to building on our successes to date, working with both our existing partners and the wider market to support their activity.”
The Grosvenor family's ancestry can be traced back almost 1,000 years, while its association with London property began in 1677 when land to the west of the City of London came into the family following the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor to Mary Davies. That has developed into one of London's most valuable real estate portfolios.
The company now develops, manages and invests in property across many of the world’s leading cities and is a major investor in the food and agtech sector.