Adelphi Chambers

Our first commercial-to-residential conversion. A hundred-year-old office building off Southport town centre, going to self-contained flats under Class MA prior approval rather than a full planning application.

This is a different kind of project to the rest of the portfolio, and deliberately so. Adelphi Chambers is a brick office building of about a hundred years old on Hoghton Street, a few minutes from Southport town centre and the station — ground and first floor, freehold, with access from both Wright Street and Hoghton Street and off-road parking for five or six cars. It was built as chartered accountants’ offices and last used as such. We completed on it on 6 May 2026 at £310,000. It is the first thing we have bought outside Liverpool. The route through planning is Class MA: a permitted development right that takes a building in commercial use — Class E — to C3 dwellings through a prior approval application rather than a full planning application. Prior approval is a narrower test than full planning: the council considers a defined list of matters rather than the principle of the development itself, which makes the outcome more predictable and the timescale shorter. It is also a different consent to the one behind our HMOs, which matters, because Article 4 directions are usually aimed at the HMO right rather than at Class MA. Commercial-to-residential opens up towns where the HMO model does not work. Southport is one of them: the room-rental market there will not support the rents an HMO conversion needs, whereas flats do not depend on that market at all. The unit mix is still being worked up. We would rather take the time and get the right scheme than rush the wrong one.