First Investments returns to profit
FIRST Investments, the Chorley-based property management company owned by Tim Knowles, returned to profit in the year ending January 2011 despite a 2% drop in turnover to £7.4m.
The company made a pre-tax profit of £64,371, compared with a loss of just under £351,000 in 2010.
First Investments is based at Knowles’s Botany Bay retail warehouse site in Chorley. It is responsible for managing more than 1m sq ft of retail, over 4m sq ft of industrial units and over 400,000 sq ft of office space, which is principally in central London.
Many of these are owned by some of Knowles’ other companies, but others are in the hands of private investors.
Mr Knowles said that the swing in profitability had been due to the fact that it had invested heavily in infrastructure in previous years, setting up offices and recruiting extra staff. It now employs 211 people.
“The simple fact is we haven’t been spending the same money twice,” he said.
He added that in the first eight months of its current financial year, he said the firm had achieved a pre-tax profit of £567,987, which was more than £100,000 above budget. It had budgeted for a full-year pre-tax profit over £667,000, but he said it would “blow that to smithereens”.
He credited a series of new mandates to manage properties for clients as the main reason for improved profitability, and added that it has secured £1.8m in lettings for clients.
Knowles said the company was “not at a size where we can take a property on and not think of it as our own”.
“We’re taking more business on as people are fed up of someone coming in and just placing a For Sale sign on a site,” he said.
He argued that at one location, the company replaced a major property agency which hadn’t completed statutory requirements on a property for at least three years, which could have invalidated its insurance.
Last year’s profit for First Investments was paid into the company’s reserves, although by its year end the company’s liabilities outweighed its assets by £513,243.
