Bronwen Rapley

Group Chief Executive
Onward Homes

After 12 years as a property lawyer, Bronwen joined the housing profession working at what became Your Housing Group.  She led on governance and legal and delivered some major growth and regeneration projects.  She moved to the HCA in 2013 where she was responsible for housing associations who were not complying with the regulatory standards and the regulator’s response to insolvency.  In 2016 she joined Onward Homes as Chief Executive. Onward Homes has 41,000 homes across the north west and is an agent for large scale regeneration in many of those communities.

Nicola Elsworth

Head of Public Sector Land
Homes England

Nicola is Head of Public Sector land for Homes England in the North West, leading a team of surveyors and planners in de-risking and disposing of Homes England substantial land portfolio, as well as leading on the Government’s Garden Village and Housing Infrastructure Fund programmes in the North West. 

Nicola is a Town Planner with 17 years’ experience working in the public and private sectors, focusing on planning policy, strategy, site promotion, development economics and viability, infrastructure delivery and community engagement. Working predominantly in the housing and commercial sectors, she has done extensive work on the promotion, de-risking and disposal of large scale development sites. She has considerable delivery experience in the co-ordination and submission of large scale outline and detailed planning applications.

Michael Howard

Managing Director
Urban Bubble

Michael Howard is Managing Director of multi award winning urbanbubble, a residential property management company who have recently diversified into sales & lettings, city centre holiday accommodation and the new market of Build to Rent (BTR).

Graduating from the University of Leicester, Michael went on to carve out a successful career as a six sigma practitioner, working as a Programme Manager for Centrica. It was his growing frustration at the declining levels of service from his own managing agent that led to his change of career.  Michael took the bold decision to singlehandedly manage the block he lived in during his spare time. He did this successfully and in 2008 urbanbubble was born. Despite the challenging conditions that the property market faced in urbanbubble’s early years, Michael’s dedication and drive to raise the standards in residential property management ensured that urbanbubble became the success that it is today.

Today, urbanbubble employs over 100 team members, populating two offices; Liverpool and its 6,000 sq ft Head Office in the heart of Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Its property management portfolio continues to grow, now responsible for 6,000 units in Manchester and 1,000 in Liverpool. This is only set to grow with a pipeline of an additional 5,500 units in Manchester and 3,000 in Liverpool over the next 4-5 years.  These numbers don’t include the Build to Rent (BtR) instructions with Legal & General, who appointed urbanbubble as its operational partner to help deliver their first build-to-rent scheme, The Slate Yard in Salford.  Legal & General, through Legal & General Capital and LGIM Real Assets, entered the Buy to Rent (BTR) market in 2016, in partnership with PGGM. Legal & General now has a circa £1bn fund to invest and build new large scale rental development properties, with over 1,000 build to rent homes under construction or in planning. In addition to Salford, Legal & General has BTR properties going up in Bath, Leeds and London. This has the potential to turn urbanbubble  from a parochial, ‘done good’ managing agent to a national operator. Watch this space!

Guy Butler

Co-founder
Glenbrook

Guy founded his career with 15 years at Grosvenor based in London. He worked on three main projects – Festival Place Basingstoke, Liverpool ONE and a £1bn development in Mayfair.  His expertise spans the whole investment and development process, from funding, purchase and sale, through to design, planning, financial appraisal and leasing. 

Guy read Land Management at Reading University and European Property Investment at City University. Guy is on the scrutiny committee for the Cheshire and Warrington Local Economic Partnership (LEP) and is the immediate past Chairman of the Chester Growth Partnership. He is also a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.