GBR Phoenix Beard goes down the resi route

GBR Phoenix Beard has launched a dedicated residential property arm to fill what it believes is a gap in the market.

GBR Phoenix Beard Residential opened officially for business on March 1 with around 100 clients and contacts of the firm gathering at its Newhall Street headquarters to celebrate the launch. 

The company has already built up a sizeable practice in residential property management in the Midlands, and is retained to manage high profile Birmingham city centre schemes such as Holliday Wharf, Southside and Westgate. 

It plans to operate nationally with recruitment plans for specialist residential staff for the London office already well advanced.

Figures released recently by the Department for Communities and Local Government report that the West Midlands is not building even half the homes needed to ease the region’s housing shortage with annual housing starts to December 2011 down by 5.6 per cent compared with a year ago.

GBR Phoenix Beard sees this as an opportunity as many firms have pulled away from the residential property market and aren’t able to offer a full-service, specialist residential package to clients operating in the sector.

GBR Phoenix Beard Residential is headed up by Simon Stanley, who joined the firm in October from Knight Frank.

He is confident about green shoots in the housing market.

“Not only are the demand, viability, finance and planning constraints which have been frustrating development easing, but there is an increasing realism amongst many landowners with respect to the true value of their interests, and the need for them to participate in a development through revised pricing or even joint venture agreements,” he said.

“This improvement is particularly apparent both within those prime postcodes where we are actively enabling new developments to progress, and also the number of short to medium term option agreements that are being entered into at strategic land opportunities elsewhere.”