Research on Social Housing Reit PLC (SOHO:LON) from Capital Access Group
The supported housing investment sector took a significant reputational hit as a result of the failure of Home REIT (HOME). HOME has been suspended from trading for more than three years and is now in managed wind-down, offering little hope of any meaningful value recovery for its large base of both professional and individual investors. But while this debacle has undoubtedly been painful for all concerned (not least the vulnerable occupiers of HOME's ostensibly ‘modern, high-quality accommodation'), it does not follow that the marriage of private capital with social good in a closed-end fund structure is doomed to fail. In this note, we contrast the HOME model with that of Social Housing REIT (SOHO), a provider of specialised supported housing (SSH), aiming to show that when a well-defined need coincides with a well-executed strategy, investors and residents alike can benefit in both the short and long term.