Manchester’s Tower Habit: Luxury Flats and City Politics

Manchester has always known how to reinvent itself. Cotton, canals, music, football, media, and now, its skyline. Over the last decade the city has been rebuilding itself at a ridiculous pace, and the latest version is being built upwards. Everywhere you look, there’s another crane, another tower, another development promising rooftop lounges and “city living” to people who mostly just want a flat near a tram stop.

At the centre of this is Salboy, the developer co-founded by Betfred billionaire Fred Done. Its Viadux scheme has become one of the clearest examples of what Manchester is now trying to sell: not just flats, but a lifestyle product with a postcode, a view and a price tag to match.

And a seriously hefty price tag at that.

The flagship of Viadux rises 40 storeys above Deansgate, built directly into the old railway viaduct arches. Inside are £2.5 million penthouses, 1,000 sq ft apartments, pools, spas, yoga and fitness studios, private cinemas and communal spaces that don’t look much like the old rental stock Manchester grew up on. Service charges on a typical apartment are around £5,400 a year, which tells you this isn’t aimed at somebody trying to get a foot on the property ladder.

Manchester having expensive apartments isn’t the point. Plenty of cities have those. What matters here is what this says about regional residential property as an investment class – and whether the city’s vertical bet can keep working once the politics catches up.

Viadux and the New Manchester Flat

Viadux isn’t your old buy-to-let flat with a laminated worktop and a landlord who thought magnolia was the most exciting colour on a paint chart. It’s something closer to luxury hospitality pretending to be residential property. You’re not just buying square footage – you’re buying managed living, branding, convenience and the faint sense that your building has a better social life than you do.

Then comes Viadux Two, which pushes the whole idea much further. The 76-storey tower currently under construction, is set to become the tallest residential building outside London and will include a Nobu hotel, restaurant and branded residences. That matters because once names like Nobu arrive, developers are no longer just selling flats. They’re selling identity, status and international branding.

Manchester has been drifting in this direction for a while. Salboy already experimented with the idea through an earlier W Hotels-branded scheme alongside Gary Neville’s Relentless Group, fronted by the ex-Manchester United footballer turned businessman. At the time, branded residences outside London still felt slightly experimental. Now they’re starting to look like the model.

The Money Has Changed

The cash flowing into these developments has evolved alongside them.

The first wave was mostly Chinese and wider Asian investors looking for better yields than London could offer. Rents were growing, there was a steady stream of students and graduates, and entry prices were low enough to make the numbers work. Sensible enough. Then domestic and regional investors piled in, often through bulk purchases and club deals, still thinking about occupancy, rent levels and service charges in traditional buy‑to‑let terms.

Now the mix has shifted again. Gulf and Middle Eastern buyers are becoming increasingly important, and a lot of them aren’t treating these flats purely as rental income. Some use them as second homes; others as a way to park money in a UK city that still has room to grow.

The stronger the link to global wealth and branded hospitality, the less these towers look like ordinary buy‑to‑let developments. They start behaving more like hybrid residential‑hospitality assets. If prices are being set as much by the next overseas buyer as by the income coming off the building, you’re no longer looking at a straightforward buy‑to‑let block, and structure starts to matter more.

Manchester’s Affordable Housing Gap

Of course, this is where things start getting politically awkward.

Manchester still has a housing shortage. And for every impressive tower with a pool under the arches, there are people asking why the city centre seems better at producing “wellness suites” than genuinely affordable homes.

That criticism isn’t going away. Nor should it.

And yet, the awkward thing is that the city’s economic growth has been strong. The defence from developers and investors is that higher-income residents living in the city centre support hospitality, retail, restaurants, offices and employment growth.

And there is truth in that. Manchester has outperformed most major UK city regions on economic and employment growth since 2008. The city-centre revival isn’t imaginary. You can see it in the skyline, the employers and the sheer number of people who no longer automatically treat London as the only serious option.

But the politics is still uncomfortable.

There’s growing discomfort around public support and lending connected to some city-centre developments. Because while luxury towers look impressive, a city can’t live on penthouses alone. At some point, voters, councils and ministers start asking who exactly all this regeneration is for.

For investors, that creates a classic risk-reward trade-off. Political pushback is becoming harder to ignore, particularly as housing pressures worsen. But Manchester’s economic growth story is still strong enough that plenty of investors are willing to keep betting on it.

Salboy: Developer, Builder, Financier

Salboy itself has become part of the story. Founded in 2014, it no longer operates like a straightforward developer that buys a site, builds some flats and moves on. Development, sales, construction through Domis, and financing now sit closely together under the same roof, giving the company far more control over how projects are delivered and marketed.

That model has helped it expand well beyond Manchester into London and Cornwall, while also giving it enough flexibility to slow or re-sequence parts of its local pipeline as uncertainty around the new Building Safety Regulator ripples through the high-rise market.

One of the more interesting strands of the current pipeline is Waterhouse Gardens, a lower-rise redevelopment of a former brewery site north of the city centre. Like Viadux, it leans heavily into pools, saunas and amenity-rich living, although in this case with views overlooking Strangeways prison.

Which, honestly, feels like quite an accurate summary of modern Manchester development. Premium lifestyle branding on one side, post-industrial grit stubbornly sitting beside it on the other.

For lenders and investors, the integrated Salboy-Domis model cuts both ways. Keeping construction and development close together can reduce some of the friction that slows projects down, particularly at a time when high-rise delivery risk has become a much bigger issue across the sector. But it also means more exposure becomes concentrated around the health of one wider group. If financing tightens, costs rise sharply or delivery problems emerge, there are fewer places for those pressures to disappear quietly.

Why Finance People Are Watching Manchester

Manchester’s tower boom matters because it’s becoming a live test case for where parts of UK residential property are heading next.

A few years ago, developments like Viadux would probably have been treated as ambitious regional apartment schemes. Now they’re pulling together branded hospitality, overseas wealth, institutional funding and luxury residential living into something much more complicated.

And the market is still trying to work out where the limits are.

How much overseas demand can cities like Manchester realistically absorb? How far can luxury-led regeneration keep running before politics pushes back harder? And what happens to these towers if financing costs stay high for longer than everyone hoped?

That uncertainty is part of the appeal. Manchester still looks cheaper than London, the city continues to grow, and there is clearly real demand behind at least part of the market.

But it also means the city is becoming a useful barometer for how risk, politics and investor appetite collide in the next phase of UK residential development.

The Last Word

Manchester has spent the last decade selling a very confident story about itself. So far, plenty of investors have bought into it.

The city is growing, and developments like Viadux have become symbols of a city that sees itself competing for international money rather than trying to catch up with London.

But confidence is the easy bit during a boom.

The harder part comes later, when the cranes disappear and building finally slows down – and you find out who actually owns the city, who can afford to live in it, and whether it still feels like Manchester at all.