A great building is no longer enough

Partnership. This was the buzz word at UKREiiF 2026: Public, private, ventures, investments and collaborations finding themselves in a different balance. Not because it’s fashionable, but because the headwinds demand it. Resilience, this year, means recognising we cannot go it alone.

Resilience through partnership means not always being sure of how you get to the outcome – markets are volatile, politics unpredictable – but being committed together anyway. That is a harder, stronger kind of optimism. And the outcomes could be greater for it.

The pressure is acute. Open market sales have plummeted. I heard that it costs three times as much to build a home as to sell it, a staggering statistic that cements the need for patience, and for investors who understand that returns take time. 

In its place: an opportunity for a wider mix of tenures, some funded by the public sector to make schemes viable, most of it for rent, not sale. Single family rental continues to attract serious attention. Is the UK finally accepting rental as a mainstream model?

What does this all mean for architects and designers? If more schemes are built for rental – from transient co-living residents to longer-term family lets – how does design respond? When the metrics of success shift from flats sold to vacancy rates and tenancy duration, the wider neighbourhood starts to matter more. 

To add value, architects need to understand the full lifecycle not just delivery, but the sale, the vacancy, the long-term retention of place.  The operational infrastructure behind a rental landscape can be genuinely positive, but only if the right partnership shapes it from the start.

A broader mix of tenures demands agility between partners to find the balance, and a word I heard more than once: Optionality. Keeping your options open drives viability. This is where design earns its place: how rental and market sale models co-exist within a broader housing ecosystem, even more so when each patch is delivered by a different partner. 

We must address the whole patchwork of a place, what shifting one piece does to the whole, and how – as partners – we face it. 

Partnerships have always been a feature of built environment events – the need for them is what brings everyone to a socially and professionally exhausting three-day whirlwind of panels, parties, fringe events, round-tables, long tables, coffees, lunches and sponsorship. 

But as our political landscape moves toward a more multiparty system, there is something more urgent about partnerships that can hold and deliver places together. Partnership might be how we do the politics of place above the politics of parties.

Harriet Saddington writes for The Developer and will be chairing sessions at the Festival of Place on 10 June at Boxpark Wembley in London.