Connells moves from profit to loss, Skipton’s results reveal
Figures from latest results from parent group Skipton Building Society show contracting housing market has hit estate agency giant hard.
Connells Group made a loss of £500,000 during the first six months of 2026, Stuart Haire (main image), Group Chief Executive of its parent organiation Skipton Building Society, has revealed.
This contrasts starkly with the same period last year when profits at Connells Group, which includes the eponymous estate agency but many others including all the Countrywide brands, were £28.4million.
The loss has been pinned on the weak sales market this year caused by a “later than usually Budget and political uncertainty” and that the market remains active but cautious.
Skipton says Connells therefore had a “challenging” first half of the year with the number of exchanged contracts 7% lower than last year and a sales pipeline down 5%.
The creaky conveyancing system is also blamed and that it is “taking longer, on average, for a sale to progress from offer-agreed to exchange” although lettings saw improvements in income from fees to landlords. The company increased its lettings book marginally to 122,872 properties under management.
Restructuring
The other main pressure on Connells is the ongoing restructuring of the company’s operations following the Countrywide merger and the refurbishing of tired branches, something new Chief Executive Helen Charlesworth has been keen on from the get-go.
This includes new technology across its 1,200 offices, including 15,000 new PCs and telephones.
Haire, who is Charlesworth’s boss, adds: “As noted, the market for housing transactions has been more subdued compared to the same period last year, which was significantly impacted by the stamp duty change at the end of March 2025, which positively impacted transaction volumes then.
The Society continued to perform well however, with profits of £99.6m.”
These results mark a turbulent few months for Connells Group, which has seen its former boss David Livesey win an age discrimination claim at an Employment Tribunal after his hasty and somewhat brutal exit from the firm after 33 years working there.
Also, other executives have left the company recently including Richard Twigg, its former interim Chief Executive prior to Charlesworth’s arrival.
Stale, pale, male, as the FTSE so often shows is also sometimes a prudent approach. Alison Platt is still a case study in mis-management that led to Countrywide going under, only for its assets to be bought by the Connells Group. Hopefully those shiny offices and PC’s will turn the tide, though as AI is increasingly doing the agency work – see the ‘Dwelly Roll-up AI model’, maybe there is not such a need for 15,000 laptops and mobiles, as a majority of workflows are being automated by digital brains rather than using the neural pathways of humans. Hopefully not the case, but Netflix who started out as a Blockbuster enterprise, took on Goliath and used ML to target their customer more effectively than a company 100 times richer, seeing them off in a few short years. Agency is a people business, but UX is scarce in all agency operations as too many moving parts, software fixes this.