The housebuilder who wants to stand on firm foundations

All house-building projects start with the foundations. And that’s what Andrew Weaver, chief executive of regional housebuilder Strata, is keen to get right in his company.

“We would hate to be a poor imitation of a Plc, we want to be TLC,” he said.

Strata is a £100m-turnover business based in Doncaster currently building 600 homes a year and with plans to grow to 800 homes annually by 2020 – “if the market stays with us, if everything stays equal”.

Weaver, the fourth generation to run the family firm his great-grandfather started in 1919, believes there are three things to get right – sales, the build, and experience.

Proud of the 5-star rating his company holds from the Home Builders Federation for customer satisfaction, he wants to move beyond comparisons with other housebuilders.

“We want to create touchpoints all the way through the build process,” he said.

“The NPS [Net Promoter Score] – I think that will be really big over the next five years – so we can compare across sectors. We aren’t just benchmarking against housebuilders, we want to benchmark against brands.”

“Our five-star accreditation comes from building quality but we have to change from being a manufacturer to being a service business.”

Customers’ expectations have changed – people can track parcels, so they expect to be updated about their house as it’s being built, he says – and that element of service and trust is important to him.

“It’s good to be cool and funky, but that can lack trust and gravity,” he said.

“‘Grow small’ – how many customers can we look after each year? Growth for growth’s sake is no good.”

Weaver has done a quick tour of two of the properties at Ambition, Strata’s 128-home development in Seacroft, north Leeds.

It is, he says, a place where the children of Roundhay families can afford to buy their first home. Budgets are based on 36 sales per year at a site, but he expects all 128 properties to be sold within two years.

“Please don’t think I’m being bolshy when I say it,” he said. “But it’s a complete misnomer that it’s ‘location, location, location’.”

There is one respect that location is key – and that’s the difference between London, where home ownership is low, and the regions.

“The English psyche is ‘I want to own’,” he said. “The statistics say one thing in London and one thing in the regions. People’s psychology in the north isn’t retrograde, it’s because of income multiples.

“Necessity and desire change depending in how hot the seat is beneath you.”

Strata’s experience at Ambition, and at sites across Yorkshire and the East Midlands, gives him the evidence he needs to be confident that young people have the same wish to be homeowners that their parents’ generation had.

“I am not looking over my shoulder and thinking ‘there’s a sea change of people who don’t want to buy’,” said Weaver.

A bigger concern is the role of some local authorities which push hard for affordable housing to the extent that it can make developments unviable, according to Weaver.

“It all comes back to simple economics on land value,” he said. “There’s a variability. You have to satisfy land owners, and local authorities with section agreements, but the big one is affordable housing.

“The driver is if that is pushed too hard – and in York and Harrogate it can be up to 40-50% – if it is pushed too hard, and the land value too low, the owner can say ‘I’m not selling’ and then there are no houses, and no tax receipts, and money isn’t spent in local shops.

“Viability is always the bone of contention.”

Strata’s Ambition development at Seacroft, Leeds

But for Weaver it is not about squeezing every last drop of value out of a scheme, but about doing it right.

“The medium term looks like more growth. But it’s about behaviours, about being decent people who have got a good reputation and look after the customers,” he said.

He talked proudly about the charity work the company does, led by his wife Leonie, and passionately about Harrogate Town, where his father Irving is the chairman and his brother Simon is manager.

Community and authenticity are important to him, and to his business – “I like to think I have styled it like me”, he said.

But for all the talk of being a “young and vibrant business” where half the staff are under 40, the traditional family values of this company are never far away.

Talking about doing deals with landowners, who can be cautious about what will happen once they sign the contracts, he said: “You can get people who want to sell to people who will leave a legacy. They know if you shake on it and then are prepared to ‘stand on’, you will build right too.”