The boutique financier completed its second deal in the co-living sector with developer The Collective earlier this month and has two more currently at the “analysis stage”.

In an exclusive interview with Development Finance Today, Mark Stephen, co-founder at Reditum Capital (pictured above), said that new asset classes were exactly the sort of things it liked.

He stated that the more traditional lenders were not in that space, and that created opportunity for others.

“We've done two transactions in that space, [and] we're looking at multiple others at the moment, and it’s an asset class that just makes sense to me.

“It’s basically the grown-up version of PBSA.

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“When I went to university, you would live on campus for maybe the first year and then you'd move into a shared house with other friends.

“That doesn't happen as much now with PBSA.

“So you've got people that are then moving to a city to start work; they don't want to live in a shared house because they've never done that before, they don't want to live in a studio apartment or a one-bedroom apartment on their own from a cost perspective, and also because they don't know anyone.

“So, this type of accommodation makes complete sense.”

He claimed that this was in addition to people being more transient nowadays and tending to stay in jobs for a shorter period of time than a couple of generations previously.

“So that whole sort of co-living space makes complete sense to me, and it’s been proven on a large scale, and it’s also been proven now that there is institutional debt available for these types of schemes.

“So, it’s a space that I think is growing very quickly and there's a lot of opportunity for us to help fund those sorts of deals.”