Housebuilder Cala Cotswolds lays foundations for growth with new Oxfordshire office and expanded regional footprint

Published by

Peter Davison

Housebuilder Cala Cotswolds, formerly known as Cala Midlands, has announced the next phase in its ambitious regional growth plan.

The business has relocated its head office from Solihull to Oxford Technology Park, which coincides with the expansion of its operating area of Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Solihull to include Wiltshire, Vale of White Horse, and the high-growth area of Oxfordshire.

The Cala Cotswolds team has delivered 1,800 new homes since 2016 across the region, as well as significant community benefits in the form of vital social and infrastructure improvements, including £11.4m in Section 106 agreements.

Cala Cotswolds is one of eight regional businesses within the Cala group, which has been owned by Legal & General Capital since 2018.

Cala continues to establish itself as one of the UK’s largest homebuilders. It expects to deliver over 3,000 homes across the group this year and will employ more than 1,200 people. Flagship Cala Cotswolds’ developments include major consortium projects such as Nobel Park in Didcot, where Cala Cotswolds has already begun development work under its sister brand, Legal & General Homes, with the Cala brand set to start on site later this year.

The 1,239 home mixed-use development encompasses schools, community facilities and improved connections via footpaths, cycle paths and public highways. In line with Cala’s wider commitment to sustainability, Cala Cotswolds will be delivering a first for the business in England at its site in Alderton, Gloucestershire, where timber frame construction will be used across all of the 28 new homes. It will launch later this year.

As part of this new phase of growth, Cala Cotswolds is actively seeking further immediate and strategic land opportunities, having outlined potential for 1,300 new homes to be added to its pipeline over the next three years.

To support this growth, Cala recently expanded the land team with the appointment of Caroline Owen as Senior Planning Manager, Luke Alexander as Land Buyer, and is currently recruiting a land and planning director to be based in the Oxfordshire office.

Andrew Dicker, Managing Director of Cala Cotswolds, said: “We’re at a pivotal point as a business having identified significant potential for growth across Oxfordshire, as well as Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and Solihull.

"Moving our base to Oxfordshire is going to be transformative – putting us at the heart of a region that has strong public and private sector support for economic growth, including housing.

“We are actively seeking to build on our existing investment in the region by sourcing more land.

"Our focus is on sites in towns and larger villages with the capacity for 50 homes or more where, through our value-add approach and industry-leading design, we can deliver desirable, high-quality developments.”

“Ultimately, we have the appetite and the capability to be delivering high-quality homes for new and existing communities in fantastic parts of the country.

"Our repositioning and new base at Oxford Technology Park have set us up for further future success.”

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.