What happened

Graham has been appointed to build No.1 Kings, a 28-storey, 255-home residential tower that becomes the first phase of the £1.2bn Kings waterfront regeneration in Liverpool, trade press including Construction Enquirer and Place North West reported this week. The appointment follows what developer Davos Property Developments, working with Beetham Davos, called an intensive period of negotiation with shortlisted contractors. Liverpool City Council approved the scheme in February, and demolition and site clearance are already complete.

No.1 Kings has a gross development value of around £80m and will deliver build-to-rent homes with ground-floor retail, resident amenity space and a rooftop social area. The developer says the tower is fully funded by the project's shareholders, removing one of the usual sticking points on schemes of this size. The wider Kings masterplan runs to nine buildings, with a proposed 70-storey tower, including a five-star hotel, planned for a later phase subject to separate planning consent.

Why it matters

Liverpool's waterfront has had its share of stalled and recycled schemes over the years, so a fully funded first phase moving to construction, rather than another announcement, is the detail worth noting. For Graham, it is a foothold on a nine-building masterplan that, if later phases follow through to planning and funding, represents years of residential tower work on a single site. For the wider Liverpool market, it is a signal that build-to-rent investment in the city is still moving even as housebuilders elsewhere report profit warnings and stalled sites.

What it means for careers and hiring

This is a live site hire, not a framework announcement that takes months to translate into roles. Expect Graham's Liverpool office to be building out a site team over the coming months, with site managers, engineers and quantity surveyors who have high-rise residential and build-to-rent experience top of the list. For commercial professionals specifically, a fully funded private scheme tends to move faster from appointment to site mobilisation than a public framework, so timing an approach now, while the team is still being assembled, matters more than it would further down the line. If the later 70-storey phase progresses, this also becomes a multi-year pipeline worth tracking for anyone building a case for staying in, or moving into, the North West residential market rather than chasing opportunities further south.