Matt And Paul: Their Stories Of Homelessness
The story behind the fund
Resonance launched pioneering impact property fund Real Lettings Property Fund 1 (RLPF1) with leading homelessness charity St Mungo’s Real Lettings in 2013. This trail-blazing fund raised £56.8m from socially motivated investors to buy a portfolio of 259 homes across London.
RLPF1 houses people in the capital who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in stable, private tenancies without deposits. After buying each of the 259 properties the fund refurbished all of them to a high standard, including making them more energy efficient and before handing them to Real Lettings to manage and support tenants in their tenancies.
The social purpose of this fund is to help people experiencing and facing housing crisis to become more independent, linking stable housing to positive development in other parts of their lives. Providing decent, stable and affordable housing is enabling people to be moved out of temporary accommodation such as B&Bs and hostels. Providing tenants with a stable foundation is helping them to improve their resilience against homelessness, take steps towards employment, education and training and to feel more hopeful about their futures, including the option to move on into private accommodation and social housing.
Following the success of RLPF1, two further impact property funds were launched with housing partner Real Lettings: National Homelessness Property Fund (NHPF1) in December 2015 and Real Lettings Property Fund 2 (RLPF2) in January 2017. Four further funds have since been created and launched, since then, so that Resonance now has 7 impact property funds in its portfolio.
In early 2023, the first of most of RLPF1’s tenanted properties started transferring from Real Lettings to Notting Hill Genesis (NHG), one of the largest charitable housing associations in London. Almost all the fund’s properties are now managed, and tenants supported, by NHG.
To date across all Resonance’s homelessness property funds, over 3,600 people have been housed in over 1,140 homes.
