The Intermediary speaks with Matthew Robertson, co-founder and CFO of Valouran, about the realities of developing prime residential property in London – from navigating market headwinds and evolving buyer demands to seizing opportunities in heritage-led, amenity-rich schemes.
Valouran has achieved remarkable growth in the past three years. What have been the driving forces behind this success?
When we started the business, we spent quite a lot of time thinking about the name, as people do, and Valouran comes out of the word “valour”, which for us means courage, determination, grit, and a kind of “never say never” attitude. We think you need that to be successful in this business. It’s a difficult sector where you come across so many headwinds – inflation in build costs, taxation changes that make it harder to sell apartments, or things you find on the construction site that didn’t show up on the survey.
There are always challenges and hurdles. The culture we’ve built, led by Alex Michelin and myself and shared by all 25 people in the business, is that no matter what hurdle comes up, we’re determined to find a way to overcome it – to redesign something, to find a way around the challenge. You must be very committed and determined to keep knocking down those walls that appear in front of you to get to the finish line. That’s what we look for when we recruit people, and we like to think that attitude manifests itself in the quality of our work and has helped deliver the really encouraging results we’ve seen in our first three years.
How does your combined experience with Alex Michelin shape Valouran’s vision and approach in the prime London residential market?
I started Valouran about three years ago with my business partner, Alex Michelin, and between us we’ve probably got about 45 years of experience in this kind of development. My background is on the finance side of the business, and I’ve worked in real estate development in this sphere for around 15 years now. Alex and I have both spent our careers focused on prime residential property across London in locations like Mayfair, St John’s Wood, Hampstead and St James’s Park.
That depth of experience shapes our vision in the sense that we understand the financial and practical realities of developing in these areas, we know the cycles, and we know what tends to work and what doesn’t. It informs how we assess and structure projects, how we balance risk and reward, and crucially how we think about the product we’re putting in front of buyers in some of London’s most competitive and scrutinised markets.
What distinguishes Valouran from other developers when it comes to delivering landmark projects in Prime Central London?
What sets us apart is being very forensic about analysing what our customers want, and then constantly adapting to that. You always need your ear to the ground, speaking to your buyers and being really plugged into the market to understand how their preferences are changing.
At the moment, health and wellness are a particular focus. We’re very “laser focused” in all our schemes on providing amenities so that people can scratch that health and wellness itch within their own home or development. At Bishops Avenue Gardens, for example, we’ve got a 20‑metre pool and a 1,000 square foot gym in what is a relatively modest-sized development. At The Whiteley you take that to another level, with around 25,000 square feet of gym and spa including cryotherapy, red light therapy and all sorts of other therapies. That’s very much what buyers want at the moment, and it’s become a major selling point.
Alongside that, we’re leaning into green space and outside living, making sure most units have terraces or balconies and access to generous communal gardens. That combination of closely reading customer preferences, designing accordingly, and being willing to evolve is, I think, what differentiates us.
The prime residential market is evolving rapidly. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities you see ahead?
Like every other business and consumer-facing sector over the last three or four years, we’ve faced some pretty aggressive rates of inflation, and construction has been particularly exposed to that. Raw materials, energy, aluminium, steel – all of these have seen their prices develop significantly over that period. That is levelling out now, which makes cost planning a bit easier than it was three years ago, but we’ve still had this rise in input costs at the same time as the wider macro environment has meant consumers have had less money in their pockets.
We haven’t been able to pass those higher costs on through significantly higher prices for our apartments, because that market has been pretty flat. On top of that, the market has been challenged by macro and fiscal policy. Most of last year, because of the Government’s Budget and all the speculation around possible Stamp Duty increases or Mansion taxes, people sat on their hands and delayed making real estate purchasing decisions.
When the budget eventually came out in November, it wasn’t as bad as feared and was relatively neutral for residential real estate, which allowed people to start thinking again about buying. But by then we were at the end of November and into winter, which is always a quieter time for what we do, because people tend to buy homes in the spring and summer. We effectively lost the bulk of the second half of the 2025 sales market because everyone was so worried about what the Treasury might do.
In terms of opportunities, we’re more confident now and we’ve already seen that with our sales successes in the year to date. We’ve had some green shoots – more deals this February than last February, for example – and we’ve just had a couple of reservations at The Whiteley around £8m. With that budget and macro noise behind us for at least another year, and assuming no sudden negative surprises, we’re hopeful of a more positive sales market through the spring and summer of 2026.
How do you incorporate sustainability and heritage preservation into your developments, and why is this important for Valouran?
In London we tend to specialise in what I’d call heritage assets and in the repurposing and rejuvenation of those. The Whiteley, for example, is a huge development behind a Grade II‑listed façade. At Bishops Avenue Gardens in Hampstead, we’re working with a heritage asset, redeveloping behind and around it within an existing mature garden. We’re also doing a scheme in a former chapel in St John’s Wood, known as Connaught House, where we’re creating five apartments in what was an Anglican chapel that’s had various incarnations as a TV studio and music studio.
Buyers in London want that historic aesthetic on the front – the heritage piece and the architecture – but then a modern way of living with all the amenities behind it. We’ve developed a specialism in delivering exactly that: preserving and celebrating the architectural character while providing 21st‑century living.
On the sustainability and environmental side, particularly at a scheme like Bishops Avenue Gardens, we’ve really leaned into the existing landscape. It’s a two‑and‑a‑half acre garden and we’ve preserved most of the mature trees, planting respectfully around them, and created outdoor living areas like a barbecue and entertaining space that residents can use for private functions. Almost all the units have a terrace or balcony or both, and they all share the large communal garden. That focus on heritage, green space and considered planting is important to us because it aligns with what buyers value and because it creates developments that feel rooted, long‑term and in tune with their surroundings.
Looking forward, what are your predictions for London’s prime residential sector over the next six to 12 months?
It feels like we’ve moved past last year’s economic and taxation uncertainty, and from where we sit now, we’re not hearing any significant noise about major upcoming changes on that front. Provided that continues to be the case, a stable political, economic and taxation environment should help restore confidence in the market and support sales. I think prices will probably be flat this year rather than racing ahead, but stability in itself is positive after such a noisy period.
From a value perspective, London looks relatively cheap compared to what it looked like at its peak in 2014. It has come off what, 45% by some metrics since then, certainly once you adjust for inflation, so we think there’s a value play for buyers and we’re seeing international buyers in particular starting to look at that.
At the same time, there’s a lack of new supply coming through. Inflation, interest rate rises and an increasingly difficult planning environment have all made it harder to get new schemes consented and funded, so fewer developments are progressing. As a developer, while that has been frustrating at times, it also gives us confidence that some of our medium and longer‑term projects will be launching into a market that is relatively underserved by competing new schemes. That should help with saleability and support our achieved prices, given a backdrop of limited supply and, hopefully, increased demand in a stable tax environment.
What advice would you offer to brokers and developers looking to succeed in today’s specialist finance and property market?
Understanding your market and your customer is important. You need to be alive to customer trends, talking to your buyers or clients, getting feedback and feeding that back into the product or service you’re offering so it’s genuinely fit for purpose and as attractive as possible in the shop window.
Linked to that is not being too proud to change and evolve. Just because you’ve done something successfully for five years doesn’t mean that’s what the market is going to want for the next five years. As developers, we try to be very honest with ourselves and ask, if we were designing this today, would we design it the same way? It’s that constant self‑improvement, constant striving to be better, not resting on your laurels and always trying to adapt and evolve to deliver the next new and best thing, that I think is key for both brokers and developers in this specialist market.
