TPFG now UK’s largest property manager in esate agency – claim
Chief Executive Gareth Samples and CFO David Raggett have bright hopes for the rest of 2024 after revealing a solid set of results to the City yesterday.
The Property Franchise Group (TPFG) announced ‘solid’ final results for 2023 yesterday and with it the promise of more to come for the rest of the year, highlighting how the merger with Belvoir has made the combined operation the biggest within the agency sector.
As The Neg revealed yesterday group revenue increased to £27.3m (2022: £27.2m) while management service fees (MSF) increased to £16.1m (2022: £15.9m).
Once again lettings underpinned the company’s’ performance with lettings accounting for 60% of total MSF and up a record 11% to £9.9m.
OUTPERFORMED
Meanwhile sales outperformed a 19% reduction in UK sales completions year on year with the year-end sales agreed pipeline increasing 4% to £23.1m.
Indeed, the merger with Belvoir Group earlier this year has created one of the UK’s largest multi-brand lettings and estate agency groups.
“Performance so far this year has been incredibly positive – we’re up in terms of sales activity and profitability already,” TPFG’s Chief Executive Gareth Samples (main picture, left) tells The Neg.
“For most of the industry 2023 was pretty tough. We’re delighted to have moved the numbers forward and obviously increase dividends.”
CHALLENGING SALES MARKET
Although 2023 was ‘a challenging sales market’ Samples says that lettings was positive both in terms of rental inflation and the level of income derived from the sector.
“If you look at the numbers then the amount of business that comes from lettings, we are predominantly a lettings business.
“Again, post 2023 with the merger of Belvoir they are predominantly a lettings business too so we now look after 153,000 properties on behalf of landlords – which I think is number one in the UK in terms of estate agency. We’ll do 28,000 sales between us and probably 20,000 mortgages.”
DOMINANT INCOME STREAM
“Our dominant income stream is and always will be lettings,” he says. “That lettings income is more resilient that sales income as you do go through the peaks and troughs of the sales market. Sales is an important complimentary stream to lettings but the group in terms of income is weighted towards lettings.”
TPFG Chief Financial Officer David Raggett (main picture, right) couldn’t agree more.
“I described [the results] as a solid performance, and it was. When everybody else last year was putting out profits’ forecasts suggesting they were going to be down on where they thought they’d be and here we were saying we wanted to grow! We were asking ourselves are we doing the right thing?”
“We’ve got a very resilient business,” he adds. “We know what’s going to come off our managed portfolio in any year. So as long as we’ve built a decent pipeline and we can see that progressing we know what’s going to come out the first six months of the year. By the time we get to August our pipeline is written for the year and that’s our income for the year – anything written after that is for 2025.”
BUSINESS STRUCTURE
The way TPFG is structured means that Raggett and the rest of the board always have an indication of where they are at in any point of the business cycle.
“Of all of the years that I’ve been at the helm – four years now – 2023 was probably the most challenging environment that we’ve seen (excluding covid),” says Samples.
“The quality of the results that we’ve delivered demonstrates the resilience of the franchise model and the fact that we’re predominantly a lettings business.
“We look after over 600 individual business owners and a lot of the credit goes to them in terms of the effort that they’ve put in locally to drive their business forward in challenging conditions and deliver their own individual result which ultimately makes up our results.”