2024 highlights
At Grosvenor, we are united by a single purpose: to deliver lasting commercial, social and environmental benefit.
We are reporting on Grosvenor's activities and how they are driving positive change in urban property, food and agtech, rural estate management, philanthropy and social enterprise, to deliver on that purpose.
We hope this will give you a sense of our focus, progress and ambition.
Please see highlights from our Annual Review below and in the links above.
Find out more about how we are delivering positive change in the case studies below.
Strategy: CEO Perspective
Grosvenor’s 2024 was marked by a strong financial performance. We reached key milestones in advancing our long-term strategy and continued to make good progress in addressing significant environmental and social issues.
Against a challenging year for the global economy, mediocre growth (compared with pre-pandemic averages) and mounting geopolitical tensions, our businesses successfully weathered the persistence of comparatively high interest rates, lukewarm investor confidence within our markets and weaker consumer demand.
Our commercial activities – which span international urban property investment, asset management and development, food and agtech investment and a series of rural estates business activities (primarily focused on property, dairy and arable farming, and sustainable timber production) – performed strongly and significantly ahead of our expectations at the beginning of the year.
Strategic highlights
1. We achieved a strong financial performance, ahead of expectations.
2024 saw strong financial performance across Grosvenor's different business units. Strong performance in the core property business was supported by the continued growth of our Food & AgTech business, and a strong year for the Rural Estates.
- Our international urban property business grew underlying profit – the net operating result from recurring revenues after costs – of £86.4m, an increase of 16.5% on the previous year, thanks to rental growth, including from completed developments and cost savings. Revenue profit, which includes the results from our property trading activities, was £82.1m – almost double the previous year. Total return on property assets was 3.4%, thanks to the higher revenue profit, positive valuation movements and gains from investment property disposals in the UK. And our average (global) occupancy of 97% (2023: 95%) demonstrates enduring appeal and strength of the portfolio to occupiers.
- Our food and agtech business focused on helping portfolio companies scale their operations, achieve profitability, and raise new funds for investment. The portfolio’s value increased to £469.6m compared to £391m in 2023, inclusive of £48.5m of fresh capital committed to help the businesses accelerate growth.
- And net profits increased across Rural Estates to £3.7m (2023: £3.0m) thanks to resilient farming returns, new property acquisitions and higher commercial timber sales.
2. We executed on key decisions that we believe will prove transformational in driving investment and future growth.
A series of significant decisions we believe will prove transformative for our long-term success were taken, pursuing ambitious joint ventures and the disposal of some key assets to facilitate investment in the development pipeline included. These included:
- A new joint venture with Norges Bank Investment Management through the sale of an approx. 25% stake in a mixed-use portfolio of 175 predominantly office and retail assets in Mayfair.
- The start of works on site at South Molton, London West End’s largest mixed-use development.
- A North American joint venture partnership with two Canadian investors to deliver Phase 1 of Brentwood Block in Burnaby, British Columbia. This is part of a wider C$1.8bn, 7.9-acre master-planned development featuring 1,730 new homes, one of the largest rental housing projects in the region.
- We made good progress against its strategy to realise capital to fund and deliver a £6.6bn development pipeline and expand lending activities. One such example was the sale to Landsec of our 23% stake in Liverpool ONE.
- Progress in the Group’s food and agtech portfolio, including construction of a full-scale manufacturing facility for sustainable fertiliser in Missouri, US, by Ostara, which increased overall production capacity tenfold. in addition, AeroFarms reached profitability last year – a first for a full-scale vertical farming company.
3. We made great progress in playing our part to help address some major environmental and societal challenges.
As an organisation that thinks long-term, we continued to value and invest in the pursuit of positive environmental and social impact as a core part of its strategy. We believe this is ever more important given the growing calls for retrenchment in these areas in some quarters.
- We established pathways to align our activities with the science-based target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and action was taken to deliver progress.
- Our UK property business, delivered a 26% carbon reduction across scopes 1, 2 and 3 since 2019 (approx. 15,600 tonnes) thanks to a 40% reduction in supply chain emissions and the achievement of 1m sq ft of retrofitted space since 2020, part of our £90m Energy Savings Fund.
- In 2024, and for the first time, we baselined our natural capital across 55,000ha of rural estates, using innovative methods to measure soil health and ecological biodiversity.
- Our social enterprise, Grosvenor Hart Homes, was designated last year as a registered provider of social housing. GHH’s mission is to improve outcomes for vulnerable children, young people, and their families through high-quality, affordable, and secure homes paired with tailored support services.
- And £3.1m was contributed by Grosvenor businesses to philanthropic initiatives in 2024, predominantly supporting the Westminster Foundation’s work with vulnerable young people.
Financial: CFO Perspective
Grosvenor is best known for our international property activities, which range from our longstanding association with London’s Mayfair and Belgravia to operating one of North America’s longest established property businesses focusing on Vancouver, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. We also have a third-party-managed portfolio of investments which include student housing in Brazil, medical facilities in the US and logistics in Australia, India and the Netherlands. Yet, our wider commercial activities span a diverse range of sectors, aligned to a common purpose of delivering lasting commercial, environmental and social benefit.
Beyond real estate, we manage a portfolio of 23 investments in companies that are reshaping food and agriculture for the better around the world, as well as an independent risk adviser and insurance broker.
Our rural estates manage over 750 commercial and residential properties, as well as a timberworks business using sustainably grown British timber and one of the UK’s leading dairy and arable farms.
In our Annual Review, we share the performance and key developments for each of these individual businesses, rather than aggregating them into a single measure, which, given the wide variations in the activities described, would not offer a meaningful metric.
A challenging environment
While we have seen some easing of inflation, the economic environment we faced in 2024 remained challenging, with muted investor confidence and interest rates remaining higher for longer than originally anticipated. Volatility in the geopolitical environment has also continued, with significant elections in both the US and UK, as well as the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine fuelling uncertainty. Against this backdrop, our commercial businesses delivered a strong performance, well ahead of our expectations at the start of the year.
Our property business delivered notable improvements in our key metrics of profitability and total return. Valuations have been resilient, particularly in the UK, supporting the positive total return, and we have continued to achieve pleasing growth in underlying profits. Similarly, we have seen good progress in many of our food and agtech investments, with increasing profitability and multiple successful fundraisings in a difficult market, demonstrating the strength of these businesses.
We take a disciplined approach to financial risk management, ensuring appropriate levels of liquidity and balance sheet resilience. While the economic, political and market outlook remains uncertain, our low gearing and high levels of financial capacity mean that we have the agility and flexibility to respond to changes in the operating environment, including taking advantages of opportunities as they arise.
Delivering lasting commercial benefit
Local perspectives
To help guide how we meet our purpose of delivering lasting commercial, social and environmental benefit, we focus on five principal objectives:
- Deliver strong commercial results
- Improve land, property, places, goods and services
- Efficiently use natural resources, restore and enhance the environment
- Make a positive impact within communities
- Support long-term charitable causes
Learn more about how each part of the organisation has contributed to delivering on our purpose by clicking through the links below. Or navigate to the 'Our impact' section above to see a selection of case studies from across Grosvenor.
Our impact
Learn more about how each part of Grosvenor has contributed to delivering positive change by watching our short film and reading the selected case studies below.
Report downloads
View or download the documents below to learn more about how we delivered on our objectives
Annual Review 2024
Read our Grosvenor-wide Annual Review to learn more about our key activities and performance highlights.
Financial Statements 2024
Read our Financial Statements to learn more about financial performance across our urban property business in 2024.