Vicky Kells

Vicky is head of our Cardiff office and jointly leads our Social Housing sector team and specialises in charging affordable housing portfolios.

Vicky has extensive experience of working with housing associations, including large national RPs and Welsh RSLs. Other clients include UK clearing banks, building societies, security trustees and private placement investors.

Vicky has published articles on securitisation in the journals Inside Housing and Welsh Housing Quarterly, and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Housing.

Experience

• Acting for Optivo in connection with the refinancing of its £580 million syndicated loan facilities in connection with the amalgamation of AmicusHorizon and Viridian Housing. The team dealt with all due diligence on the refinancing and charging of the AmicusHorizon portfolio of just over 12,000 residential properties, making it the largest single transaction that the team has, to date, handled.
• Acting for London & Quadrant Housing Trust in May 2016 in charging 2,500 rented units to support its £300 million “own name” bond issue. Timescales were tight (eight weeks in which to undertake the due diligence and prepare and negotiate the Certificate of Title) and we were able to achieve this timescale by utilising her project management skills to design and implement innovative IT solutions, which allowed her to monitor and identify any issues at an early stage and to correct any slippage.
• Acting for Home Group in connection with its £78 million AHF facility – charging two separate tranches of stock – including dealing with the first registration of adverse possession of land within existing schemes.
• Acting for One Housing Group in connection with charging to M&G for a £85 million private placement.
• Acting for United Welsh, Melin and North Wales Housing to support funding from £157 million M&G ‘Welsh Housing’ bond. The bond finance had specified drawdown dates which had to be complied with to avoid monies being placed in a trust account. Bespoke project plans were used with each client to overcome timing issues.