Greater Manchester is on a building boom. But the more important story is not the output — it is the culture.
In the past twelve months, Manchester City Council completed 4,766 new homes. The figures come from Manchester City Council’s own Housing Strategy Update, presented to the Communities and Equalities Scrutiny Committee on 22 July 2026 which also claimed they were out building London.
Manchester is in relative terms out building London. It is the outcome of two different models of urban governance. But to understand what it actually means — and what London would need to change to close the gap — you have to go beyond the headline and look at the delivery architecture underneath it.
A decade that changed a skyline
The transformation of Manchester has been visible to anyone who has visited the city over the past decade. I was up there over the summer and was genuinely astounded by the change in the last 24 months alone. The skyline has altered completely and keeps changing. Trinity Heights topped out at 60 storeys — 183 metres, the tallest residential building in the north of England. Three60, 51 storeys on Crown Street, completed in 2024. One Port Street, 33 storeys in the Northern Quarter, approved, built and occupied within four years of planning submission. In London, schemes of equivalent scale can often take a decade just to get a spade in the ground.
These are not isolated towers. They are the visible expression of a development culture operating at a different speed to a different set of rules. It is tempting to reach for easy explanations — the BBC moving to Salford MediaCityUK, Abu Dhabi United Group’s ownership of Manchester City, the regeneration of Ancoats. All of these have played a part, but they are consequences as much as causes. The deeper explanation is that Manchester made a political decision, sustained over more than a decade, to treat density as a tool of urban growth rather than a problem to be managed. The development community read that signal and capital followed. In London, a different approach was taken. Whilst Manchester became more permissive, London’s capital investment became intensively negotiated and deadlocks emerged across the city.
Intelligent density and a willingness to experiment with old and new and with different typologies such as duplexes and maisonettes is one of the reasons why places such as Ancoats have been such a success.
The numbers confirm the direction of travel. Asking prices in Manchester have risen by more than 60% over the past decade. London, supposedly the engine of the national economy, has managed around 7% — and in some areas it is negative. That is not a failure of London’s desirability. It is a failure of London’s supply. And critically, Manchester’s price growth has happened alongside increasing supply, not instead of it. The two are not in conflict. They are the same story.
Two cities, two dominant developers — and what that tells you
Both cities have a dominant developer, and the comparison is instructive. In London, Berkeley Group accounts for approximately 25% of private units currently underway — spread across more than one hundred schemes. In Manchester, Renaker Build accounts for 38% of units underway, concentrated in a much smaller number of large schemes. Berkeley is managing complexity at scale across a fragmented, multi-tenure, multi-borough landscape. Renaker is building towers, fast, with a standardised model that benefits from repetition and scale.
That difference reflects the planning environment each developer is operating in. Berkeley’s 100-plus active schemes represent 100-plus individual planning negotiations, viability assessments, heritage assessments, S106 agreements, and committee appearances — each one a potential point of failure. Renaker’s concentrated model reflects a planning system that has decided where tall buildings go, made that decision stick, and got out of the way. One model produces complexity. The other produces buildings.
Molior H1 2026 data shows that the number of housing starts in London and Manchester is broadly comparable on a relative basis. The delivery gap is therefore not primarily a starts problem. It is a completion and absorption problem — and understanding why Manchester completes and absorbs faster requires understanding the tenure difference between the two markets.
The S106 trap London has built for itself
S106 affordable housing obligations run at approximately 35% in London. In Manchester they run at around 5%.
The immediate response — from London planners, housing campaigners, and much of the political class — is that this proves Manchester is failing on affordable housing. But that conclusion confuses the mechanism with the outcome. Manchester is not delivering less affordable housing because it has lower S106 obligations. It is delivering affordable housing through a different and more effective route: council land, Homes England grant, the city’s £1.2 billion revolving housing fund, and partnership with registered providers. The affordable housing is real, it is delivered, and it does not depend on making every private scheme unviable in order to extract it.
The results speak for themselves. In 2025/26, Manchester completed 901 affordable tenure homes — the highest number since the late 1990s, of which 439 were for social rent. The city centre delivered 259 affordable completions, its largest ever. Affordable housing starts increased by 12% since 2022/23, bucking the national trend. The housing register has reduced for the first time since the pandemic, with 2,000 fewer households on the list than six months ago. Manchester is the only UK Core City to have reduced temporary accommodation placements since 2022, all but eradicating B&B placements for families.
London has convinced itself that maximising S106 affordable housing obligations is the same as maximising affordable housing delivery. Manchester has not made that mistake. The consequence in London is documented across PropViews’ case studies: Berkeley Homes at Borough Triangle, consented at 35% affordable, back at committee eighteen months later at 10% because the scheme is in deficit. The Stag Brewery — nearly a decade, the Inspector agreeing with the developer on every disputed viability input, 7.5% affordable delivered against the 30% the refused scheme would have provided. The Aylesham Centre — 867 homes refused on a clocktower. The Rockwell Glassmill — 54 social rent homes never built because the committee that encouraged the height-for-social-rent trade refused to honour it.
London has not been protecting affordable housing by maintaining 35% S106 obligations. It has been protecting the appearance of affordable housing policy while the actual homes fail to get built. The policy number is intact. The pipeline is not.
Why Manchester keeps building: availability, multifamily and the pre-sold model
Only around 10% of units currently underway in Manchester are available — either under offer or unsold completed stock. That is an extraordinarily tight availability figure for a city building at Manchester’s pace. It means the pipeline keeps moving because the product keeps selling.
Two things explain this. First, over half of the units underway in Manchester are multifamily — build-to-rent schemes held by a single institutional investor that never enter the open sales market. There is no absorption rate problem on a BTR scheme. Units are occupied as they complete and the developer’s cashflow is not dependent on individual sales. This is the model that has allowed Renaker and others to maintain construction pace through the same cost inflation and interest rate environment that has stalled London’s for-sale pipeline. In London, build-to-rent is close to unviable at scale, and the new draft London Plan’s own numbers will entrench that problem rather than solve it.
Second, speculative for-sale schemes in Manchester are heavily pre-sold before construction starts. Vivere, a 437-unit scheme, was 85% sold out prior to construction commencement. That pre-sale depth reflects genuine market confidence — buyers and investors committing capital to off-plan purchases because they believe in the city’s trajectory. It also transforms the development economics: a scheme that is 85% pre-sold before breaking ground carries a completely different risk profile to one relying on sales velocity during a 144-month build programme in a softening market. The contrast with Berkeley’s sales forecast position at its Borough Triangle site could not be more stark.
London’s for-sale model leaves developers exposed to market absorption risk at exactly the point when that risk is highest — after years of planning attrition, with costs inflated and the sales market moved. Manchester’s combination of BTR dominance and pre-sale depth removes that exposure at source. But the deeper question that London’s policymakers are not asking is what is driving all-in costs for a two-bedroom apartment to blend out at around £550,000 per home. Until that question is answered honestly, no amount of S106 flexibility will make the economics work.
The spatial city
The most analytically interesting thing about Manchester’s model is not the towers. It is the spatial logic behind them. Greater Manchester is operating as a spatial city in a way London has ceased to be — using density strategically, concentrating it in the city centre and key regeneration nodes, and allowing the suburbs and satellite towns to offer genuine affordability in return. The result is a functioning housing chain. London has broken its equivalent.
The real action is in Ancoats, in the new neighbourhoods clustering around Co-op Live, and along the Metrolink corridors pushing out towards Trafford and beyond. Ancoats, barely a decade ago a post-industrial quarter of empty mill buildings, is now one of the most sought-after urban neighbourhoods in England. That transformation attracted capital, which attracted residents, which drove reinvestment into adjacent areas. Levenshulme, Stretford, Stockport — places that would barely have registered on a London investor’s radar ten years ago — are now genuine beneficiaries of a ripple effect that started in the city centre. Trickle down, deployed carefully and at scale, is working. London has not built enough for that chain to form, and City Hall’s hardnosed viability culture has driven too many schemes into deadlock and unviability to allow it to form freely.
Levenshulme is one of Manchester’s inner suburbs which has witnessed significant demand as the housing chain radiates outwards from the centre.
Manchester’s Metrolink expansion has been central to this — linking the city centre to acres of brownfield opportunity across Trafford and the wider conurbation in a way that makes development viable at lower density and lower cost than anything achievable in inner London. Transport investment and housing investment are being planned together, not in parallel silos. That is what a spatial plan looks like when it is actually working.
London’s spatial strategy has moved in the opposite direction. The assumption is blanket high density everywhere. The new Green Belt release policies, rather than creating a differentiated spatial hierarchy that uses density intelligently, risk demanding Nine Elms-level intensity from locations that can support neither the commercial model nor the social outcome. Manchester zones for growth in the right places and lets affordability flow outward. London zones for height and density everywhere and wonders why nothing gets built in places like Romford in Havering which could offer a lower rise high density suburban formats where young families could locate close to the city. The same is true of Enfield, Barking and many other places where suburban high density is ignored in place of flatted developments that no longer stack. Creativity, innovation and holistic thinking is much needed along with much more transparency, honesty and debate about what is not working.
Clever use of public funding
Greater Manchester operates a revolving housing fund of £1.2 billion that provides bridge loans to developments — including the skyscrapers that have transformed the city centre. This is patient, strategic public capital doing what it is supposed to do: bridging the gap between a viable long-term scheme and the short-term financing conditions that prevent it from starting. London has not entirely retreated from this model, but because the system has become increasingly rationed and the all-in costs of production are now so high, low-cost loans are no longer a sufficiently material lever on their own. The GLA’s housing budget is larger than Greater Manchester’s revolving fund. The structural commitment to deploying it as active development capital — rather than as a grant mechanism attached to undeliverable affordable housing conditions — is not.
The mayoral variable
You cannot explain this gap without talking about political leadership. Andy Burnham published his housing delivery numbers and called them his best year yet. He owned them. He treated them as evidence of successful governance and invited the public to hold him accountable. Housing delivery in Greater Manchester was a political achievement, not a planning headache. He is now Prime Minister. The model he helped build in Manchester is the model he brings to Downing Street — and it is a model that out-delivered the capital.
Too often City Hall has treated the housing crisis as someone else’s fault — the government’s, the developers’, the boroughs’. It was a welcome sign when they engaged in the crisis through the emergency measures LPG.
But the truth of the matter is that development requires a complex ecosystem of partnerships and pragmatism. That needs a leader at the top who will roll up the sleeves and engage on a plot by plot basis rather than leaving it to deputies who appear to have limited sway.
With direct control over the London Plan, Mayoral call-in powers, the GLA’s own land portfolio and housing investment programme, London has everything it needs to come back. It must first win the emergency LPG measures published in March 2026 — the fast-track route, the grant funding, the CIL relief — are being legally challenged. The plan that was supposed to be London’s growth framework has become, site by site, a veto machine. This needs to be properly looked at and London’s built environment needs to engage in the debate rather than shy away from it at conferences such as LREF which are brilliant conveners but have lost their way in asking the difficult questions London needs to ask.
The contrast is not about resources. It is not about land. It is not about demand. The variable is political will and the planning culture that flows from it. Manchester’s planning committee approved Three60 — 51 storeys — without years of heritage attrition. A scheme that would be unremarkable in Ancoats is a planning crisis in Peckham.
The lesson from Manchester is not simply that London should lower its S106 obligations or build more towers — though both can help in the right areas. It is that a functioning housing market requires a spatial strategy that uses density intelligently, tries to understand what drives the costs of delivery and find policies that address it. It requires a political leader who owns the delivery numbers, and a planning culture that treats housing as an economic growth story rather than a zero-sum negotiation. None of this can happen without first having an honest debate about what’s not working.
