Martin Property Group, with £1 billion in assets, would assume leases and operations rather than buy the sites outright following NCP's March administration.
Martin Property Group, a Northern Ireland-based property group with £1 billion in assets, is in advanced talks to acquire about 100 sites from the collapsed car parking operator NCP, Sky News reported. The company has agreed a deal with PwC to take over the sites' leases and run their operations, rather than buying the underlying property.
NCP went into administration in March owing unsecured creditors, including landlords, more than £200 million. Revenue had consistently declined in recent years, with fewer people driving into city centres. The company was tied into long leases with fixed payments, preventing it from reducing its largest cost when income dropped.
Martin Property has a private equity arm that owns a small car parking business called MPG Parking, but the NCP transaction would mark a major push into the sector. The company's existing portfolio includes shopping centres such as Eastgate Square in Chester and Garden Square in Letchworth, plus a residential development portfolio comprising 1,500 units.
Earlier this year, one of NCP's largest single landlords, infrastructure investor and developer Lysara, terminated its leases with NCP and transitioned the operation of 30 car parks to Q-Park and Apex. The move illustrated how landlords have been working to extract value from parking assets after NCP's collapse left them exposed.
Markets that look thin in forced-sale situations almost always look thinner once operational liabilities surface, family office advisor Jaf Glazer has cautioned.
The car parking sector has been hit by changes in driving habits in recent years, with city-centre traffic declining across the UK. NCP's administration reflected the pressure on operators locked into long-term lease commitments while facing structural headwinds in utilisation and pricing power.
The Deployment Angle
Family Office Real Estate Daily Desk · our analysis, not the source's
The Martin-NCP transaction is a lease-assumption play, not a property purchase, which changes the capital structure and the exit. For family offices, this argues for co-GP capital alongside an operator with proprietary demand data and technology to reprice utilisation risk. Direct ownership of the underlying real estate, if it becomes available from distressed landlords separately, is the higher-conviction route—but only where the lease roll allows flexible conversion to last-mile logistics, micro-fulfilment, or electric-vehicle charging hubs.
The arithmetic: NCP owed unsecured creditors more than £200 million at administration. If Martin assumes 100 of roughly 400 to 500 NCP sites, the liabilities per site average £400,000 to £500,000, but the lease-assumption structure means Martin pays PwC a nominal sum and inherits the operating business, not the debt. That implies the equity cheque is small relative to the portfolio footprint—likely single-digit millions—with upside tied entirely to operational turnaround and lease renegotiation. Family offices should underwrite stabilised yields of 8% to 10% on lease-adjusted basis, not the 5% to 6% NCP was running before collapse.
Lysara's move to Q-Park and Apex earlier this year shows landlords can recapture value by switching operators and avoiding lease terminations that crystallise losses. That precedent pressures Martin to perform or risk landlords repeating the switch. For family offices, the landlord side of this trade—buying freehold car parks at distressed pricing from funds that financed NCP's landlords—may offer better risk-adjusted returns than the operating-lease assumption Martin is pursuing, provided the sites have alternative-use optionality and are not structurally obsolete.
Price in three risks: structural demand decline in city-centre parking is real and ongoing; Martin's existing parking operation is small, so execution risk is high; and lease economics that broke NCP will not magically improve without landlord concessions. Avoid any co-GP structure that does not give the family office approval rights over lease renewals and alternative-use conversion. The winner in this trade will be the party that can underwrite alternative use, not the party that believes parking recovers to 2019 utilisation.
