Legal & General continues to strengthen housing team.

Legal & General announces that it has hired Essential Living's Damon Brown and Berkeley's David Jones, as it continues to invest in housing creation activities across the spectrum. Backing a fast growing pipeline of over 70,000 new homes over the next five to ten years, Legal & General is looking to help provide the UK's population with high quality, affordable living at all stages in their life cycle, and has continued to invest in the skill sets to drive its housing strategy forward.

Damon Brown joins as a Construction Portfolio Manager, principally responsible for overseeing the construction activities within Legal & General's principal urban regeneration projects. Legal & General is involved in some of the UK's largest strategically important regeneration schemes that are fast transforming and reshaping Britain's landscape, bringing jobs and housing back into the centre of cities and better utilising our existing infrastructure.

He will also assist with Legal & General's wider housing initiatives, including its investments into Build to Rent and Build to Sell. With over 15 years' construction industry experience, he joins from Essential Living, before which he was a Senior Project Manager at BAM / HBG Construction.

David Jones joins the business from Berkeley Homes as Modular Integration Director, responsible for the interaction between the factory and internal/external clients. Legal & General's modular housing business seeks to modernise the home building industry by producing modern, precision-engineered manufactured units through its 550,000 sq ft factory in the North of England. Due to employ over 400 local people and representing the largest modular homes construction factory in Europe, when at full capacity it expects to produce up to 3,500 homes per year.

Housing is one of Legal & General Capital's (LGC) key strategic sectors, due to the financing gaps that still exist, offering the opportunity for significant shareholder value, both through investments made directly by LGC and through businesses held by the wider Group. Both are new roles to the business and will report into James Lidgate, LGC's Director of Housing.

James Lidgate, Director of Housing at Legal & General Capital, said: "Having built up a strong leadership with relevant housing expertise across our platform, Legal & General owns a successful portfolio of active housing related investments, notably: CALA, our Build to Rent (BTR) model and Legal & General Homes, all of which have proved profitable and which are projected to continue to grow successfully. Differentiated from our investors in this space, Legal & General's long term, develop to hold approach allows it to invest for the future, developing high quality homes with an enduring appeal."