Unite’s Hayes on plans to integrate Liberty – UK
Unite’s £1.4bn takeover of Liberty Living was completed last week, just over six months after the student accommodation giant announced it was in talks to buy the business from Canadian pension business CPPIB.
The scale of the proposed deal triggered an investigation from the Competition and Markets Authority, (CMA) but it was given the green light in early November.
Property Week caught up with Unite group property director Nick Hayes to find out more about what Unite plans to do next.
Why did Unite want to buy Liberty Living?
We’d admired Liberty for a long time. There¹s good overlap between us as businesses and the cities we operate in. Plus it has always been institutionally well regarded, and had high occupancy. We were thinking about where to take the business and invested a lot of capital in setting up Unite¹s structure for growth, so we reached out to CPPIB to see if they would entertain a transaction …