We ask a lot of the people who back us. We ask them to commit capital to specific schemes, on our conviction, before the outcome is visible. It seems only fair that we put that conviction in writing, on a schedule, where it can be checked against what actually happens. That is what these letters are for.
The model, plainly
Yeats is a thematic developer. We hold five themes — self storage, business parks, big box, hotels and residential — chosen because Britain is structurally short of each of them, and we build operating brands to hold what we develop: Boxroom in storage, Engine Works in business space. We do not run a fund. Every commitment a partner makes is to a named scheme they have reviewed, or to a defined programmatic envelope. If we cannot explain a deal simply, we do not do it.
What this year has proven
Engine Works Park opened in Margate in May — 59 units on a plot that had sat derelict since a fire in 2018 — and is now letting. Westwood Cross, the Boxroom flagship, is in delivery. We published our ten-year review of the UK self-storage sector, because a thesis you will not publish is a thesis you do not believe. And the Greenwich story completed its arc: a fragmented peninsula site we assembled, designed and consented was sold to international capital, built out, and trades today as a 300-bed hotel beside The O2. That is the model working end to end.
What discipline costs
Discipline is only visible when it costs something. It means underwriting backwards from achievable rents rather than optimistic ramp curves. It means saying what a scheme's planning status actually is, not what we hope it will be. It means keeping deal economics behind an NDA rather than decorating a website with them. The partners we want notice these things.
What comes next
More of the same, deliberately: letting Engine Works, delivering Westwood Cross, moving the residential and hotel pipeline through planning, and publishing our thinking as we go. We will keep the promises small and the delivery visible.
— John O'Neill, Managing Director