Flexibility is the key to success, says MD at Henry Boot Developments
The managing director at a leading Sheffield-headquartered property development firm says the key to future success is being flexible with opportunities, transactions and the schemes it gets involved with.
Speaking at TheBusinessDesk.com’s Property Professionals Lunch, sponsored by MyBid4It, Ed said: “If you’d have asked me six or seven years ago, what does Henry Boot Developments get involved with? My answer probably would have been everything except residential. That’s not the case anymore.
“I think part of our success over the last five or six years, in particular, has been the fact that we are flexible in our approach as to how we maximise opportunities, how we structure transactions; but also the types of work we get involved with.”
Henry Boot plc was established in 1886 and Henry Boot Developments (HBD) is one of the four main subsidiaries operating under the plc and itself has six regional offices. The firm has a pipeline worth £1bn currently.
Hutchinson reflected on the confidence that the subsidiary could have through the crash in 2008/09, adding that it had the full support of the plc, including through the recession when the company took HBD’s gearing down to a low level.
HBD then moved forward with working on its individual brand. Hutchinson said: “Together with the expertise behind us, and the fact that we had a healthy balance sheet, we managed to get our foot in the door and we secured opportunities.”
Director Vivienne Clements, speaking alongside Hutchinson at the event, talked about how HBD had secured and delivered many successful joint ventures on industrial schemes with councils and government bodies, several of which were “nationally important.”
This includes the multi-million pound Markham Vale industrial scheme in conjunction with Derbyshire County Council, which she said continued to be a very successful long-term project which was performing very well.
She added: “We take a long term view of these partnerships, which operate as good working relationships.”
She asked that people working in the property industry tasked with advising public sector bodies on how to regenerate, or how to bring development forward, worked very closely with the developer. Earlier intervention leads to fewer delays and higher spec, she shared.
Clements added: “Development is forever changing – you have to be quite fleet of foot.”
Hutchinson said: “The key to our strategy moving forward is to be flexible in our approach. That’s both in the type of projects and how we structure our transactions.”
Talking generally about the marketplace, Hutchinson said there was “no shortage of appetite for the placing of large sums of money” by international investors in the UK property market because of the financial climate and exchange rates in the UK.
Clements said that the way that people interacted with space was evolving but it all came down to humans needing to interact with each other and the demand for high quality space. “They need to know that the product that we are delivering is institutionally solid. But the property industry also needs to raise the bar in terms of the change in specifications; how people work in offices and the sort of community experience,” she added.
Hutchinson added the world seemed to be changing at a much quicker pace than it used to and that a major challenge facing the industry was access to skills. He added: “I think one of the biggest challenges we face, and we’ve been talking about it a lot recently, is how do we attract talented young people into our business? How do we sell them something they want to buy into?”
Clement said that 40% of students coming out of university with property related degrees were female, but there was only a 20% retention rate. She added: “Something is going fundamentally wrong with this. When we talk about attracting a workforce, we need to look and take a look at ourselves as to why can we not attract and retain females in the industry.”
