Grainger was established in Newcastle in 1912 to acquire and manage tenanted residential properties. The business developed locally and organically until the 1970s and 80s, when a number of major businesses, some recently denationalised, began to release their tenanted housing stocks.
Grainger duly acquired large tenanted estates from British Coal, British Rail, Reckitt & Colman and others, and floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1983 with gross assets of £18 million.
In 1985 the company entered land development with the acquisition of 350 acres of land between Basingstoke and the M3. The land was sold to house builders after Grainger had provided the infrastructure.
In 1989 Grainger acquired Channel Hotels and Properties which owned over 700 London flats and resulted in the opening of its first London office.
The next major expansion came between 2001 and 2003, with the acquisition of Bradford Property Trust (BPT), creating the largest quoted residential property portfolio in the UK.
Since then, Grainger has become a much broader-based business, with growing contributions from property development, regeneration and equity release activities.
