The Greycoat CEO’s operating partner model has attracted Goldman Sachs, Oaktree Capital, and Homes England—here’s how the structure works and why it keeps delivering repeat partnerships

When Nick Millican joined Greycoat in 2012, the firm was primarily a consultancy—advising asset owners on planning, development, and management. It hadn’t bought a property in 14 years. When Millican asked if there was a template letter for making an offer, nobody could find one.

Today, Greycoat operates as what the Americans call an “operating partner”—a developer that co-invests alongside larger institutions, contributes specialised expertise, and shares in the upside when projects succeed. The model has attracted partnerships with Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Oaktree Capital, Morgan Stanley, Heitman, and most recently Homes England. At peak, it pushed Greycoat’s assets under management to £2.5 billion.

The transition from consultancy to operating partner wasn’t just a business model shift. It was a complete restructuring of how the firm sources deals, takes risk, and creates value. And it offers a template for how specialist developers can punch above their weight in markets dominated by institutional capital.

The Operating Partner Model

The structure is straightforward in principle. On each deal, Greycoat invests between 5% and 25% of the equity alongside a larger capital partner. They always work with a single joint venture partner per project—never pooled vehicles or investor clubs. Greycoat finds the deal, leads the execution, and earns fees plus a share of profits tied to performance.

“The biggest difference,” Millican explains, “is typically now when we enter into a project, we’re the ones that found it.” This is the crucial shift from consultancy. As an advisor, you wait for owners to bring you problems. As an operating partner, you’re competing to find opportunities first—then bringing in the capital to execute.

In 2021, Greycoat raised approximately £170 million in structured co-investment capital from the principals of a leading European buyout fund—a war chest that allowed the firm to co-invest more substantially alongside its institutional partners. That capital deployment accelerated at the end of 2023, when Millican judged the markethad overcorrected.

“I think at the minute we feel that sentiments have led to an overcorrection of office prices in some areas,” Millican observed. “So some stuff is probably cheaper than it should be if you take a medium-term context, and so we’re quite keen to take on new projects.”

The Goldman Sachs Relationship

The partnership with Goldman Sachs Asset Management illustrates how repeat relationships develop. The two firms first collaborated in 2019 on Procession House, a five-storey, 100,000+ square foot office building in central London. After acquisition, they completed a 16-month decarbonisation refurbishment that achieved BREEAM Excellent certification. The building was pre-let to high-calibre occupants and sold to another investment firm in 2020.

That success led to 20 Finsbury Dials. In December 2023, Goldman Sachs and Greycoat acquired the 140,000 square foot former J.P. Morgan building for a comprehensive “brown to green” refurbishment—Greycoat’s most ambitious sustainability project to date, targeting BREEAM Outstanding, EPC A, and WELL Platinum ratings.

“We are thrilled to partner once again with Greycoat on 20 Finsbury Dials,” said Chris Semones, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. “The investment fits into the ongoing trend of transitioning offices from ‘brown to green’ and aligns with our belief that high-quality and sustainable office buildings in London will continue to enjoy strong demand.”

The “once again” is telling. Institutional investors can deploy capital anywhere. They return to the same operating partners when the relationship works—when deals close on time, execution matches the business plan, and exits deliver the projected returns.

Expanding Into Residential: The Oaktree Partnership

Millican has been candid about Greycoat’s earlier attempt to expand into residential development: “We explored expanding into residential apartment development. We recruited some top-notch professionals and dedicated considerable time and resources to it, but we concluded that competing with major housebuilders wasn’t feasible for us. They had the scale to build more cost-effectively and could afford to outbid us for prime sites.”

That lesson informed a different approach. Rather than competing with housebuilders, Greycoat would enable them—acting as a master developer that acquires complex sites, secures planning, delivers infrastructure, and then sells ready-to-build plots to multiple builders.

In December 2021, Greycoat and Oaktree Capital Management formed a joint venture called Halley Developments to pursue this strategy, starting with Powers Farm in Chelmsford—part of a larger garden community that will deliver over 5,000 homes. Then in December 2024, the partnership scaled dramatically. Greycoat, Oaktree, and Homes England announced a £250 million master developer joint venture designed to unlock large-scale development sites across England.

The partnership targets sites with the potential to deliver more than 1,000 homes each. “Our mandate is to speed up the delivery of new homes by removing the barriers that slow housebuilders down,” said Jon Kenny, Director at Greycoat. “The bringing together of Oaktree’s institutional capital and Greycoat’s land development expertise made possible through Homes England’s support creates a powerful trinity of capability.”

The first acquisition under the joint venture came in March 2025: Bourn Airfield in Cambridgeshire, a site that will deliver 3,500 new homes, two primary schools, a secondary school, and 40% affordable housing.

Why the Model Works

Commercial real estate is fundamentally a local business. Millican is direct about this: “I think it’s very difficult to do it remotely. I think some people have managed to do it, but a lot of people who just gone off and bought buildings in different places have maybe not gone as well as they thought they would when they did it.”

This creates a structural opportunity for operating partners with deep local expertise. Institutional investors have capital but often lack the on-the-ground knowledge to source deals, navigate planning systems, manage contractors, and anticipate market shifts. Developers like Greycoat provide that expertise—but typically lack the balance sheet to compete for large assets independently.

The joint venture structure solves both problems. The institution gets local execution. The developer gets access to institutional capital. And the alignment of interests—both parties profit only when the project succeeds—creates accountability that pure fee-for-service arrangements lack.

“One strategy that has significantly contributed to the growth of Greycoat is our focus on excelling in a single area rather than spreading our efforts too thinly across multiple disciplines,” Millican reflects. “By concentrating on one core competency, we have been able to invest deeply in the necessary resources that drive excellence in this area.”

The Paris Expansion

In 2025, Greycoat opened its first non-UK office in Paris, hiring Arnaud Malbos—formerly of Ivanhoé Cambridge with 17 years of European real estate experience—to lead the expansion. The move represents a test of whether the operating partner model can translate across borders.

“Paris offers the same fundamentals that made London fertile ground for Greycoat’s approach,” Millican has noted: “significant aging office stock, institutional capital flows, tightening environmental regulations, and strong tenant demand for high-quality, sustainable space.”

France’s regulatory environment is, if anything, more favourable to Greycoat’s refurbishment-focused strategy than the UK’s. The country has mandatory embodied carbon regulations, stricter demolition restrictions, and ambitious energy reduction targets under the Décret Tertiaire. Germany is identified as a potential next market.

The pattern is consistent. Nick Millican built Greycoat by identifying a structural niche—refurbishment expertise combined with co-investment capacity—and then systematically attracting institutional partners who need what he provides. The partnerships have grown larger and more strategic over time, from single-building joint ventures to £250 million platform deals. And the model, having proven itself in London, is now being exported to Continental Europe.

Whether that expansion succeeds will depend on whether Greycoat can replicate its local expertise in new markets. But the underlying logic—that specialist developers with co-investment capacity can attract institutional capital by solving problems institutions can’t solve alone—seems likely to travel.