Samantha O'Connor

Dorchester Regeneration

The Dorchester Group was founded in 1996 to focus on residential investment property by taking existing properties and refurbishing them into high quality living spaces. By 2003 we had become one of the largest private landlords in East London having acquired circa four hundred residential homes on a piecemeal basis. The business was then expanded to take on a national presence, where we invested in and/or developed a further one thousand residential homes in most large UK cities often in conjunction with UK house builders. By 2005 we set up an office in Central Europe to focus on large regeneration sites, and have since become one of the largest private owners of real estate in Slovakia with consent for twenty thousand residential units. In 2009 we acquired Heyford Park, a 1,231 acre estate in Oxfordshire with over three hundred let homes and approximately 1.4m square feet of commercial space since gaining consent for a further 763 residential units. This was one of the UK's largest strategic residential land investments made during the global financial crisis. We established Dorchester Regeneration as a separate business within the Group in 2012. Dorchester Regeneration seeks to add value through strategic long term investment and our specific approach to building communities and community infrastructure, with the social infrastructure being of equal importance to the buildings we create. Today the Group has a diversified investment portfolio with residential and commercial real estate assets owned through a variety of private companies and is very much focussed on large mixed use residential led schemes across the UK and Central Europe. We have developed our own housebuilding brand managed through our Dorchester Living Team. We are one of the few developers to be approved to run our own free school and we are also a Registered Social Landlord.