Savills senior team cash in share options worth £4.5m

While most London stockmarket-listed estate agents have reported a difficult property market in recent months, quite the opposite is true of Savills, where the champagne corks have been merrily popping of recent.

A strong performance both in 2017 and this year so far has helped push up the Savills share price, which at £9.79p is about to break through into a five-year high, and up by 6% compared to a year ago.

This has helped enrich half a dozen of the company’s senior management and directors, who on Tuesday collectively cashed in shares gained through its short and long-term share options schemes worth nearly £4.5 million.

Savills pays relatively low basic salaries to its directors and instead remunerates them generously with share option schemes, assuming the business hits its targets.

And targets have very much been hit recently both at its key global and UK business.

Savills’ most recent full-year results published in March revealed a 7% increase in profits at its UK residential operation to £18.7 million while group revenue, which includes both its residential and commercial property operations, increased by 11% to £1.6 billion on which it made a profit of £140 million last year, up 3.5% on 2016.

Tuesday’s shares disposal includes outgoing Group CEO Jeremy Helsby (pictured, left) who transacted stock worth £1.383 million, Head of Global Capital Markets Simon Hope (£586,332), Group Legal Director Chris Lee (£285,965), Asia Pacific CEO Christian Mancini (£389,318), Investment Management CEO Justin O’Connor (£32,434) and Group CFO Simon Shaw (£961,034).

All the directors sold their full share allocations except Chris Lee.

Mark Ridley (pictured, right), who is due to take over the role of Group CEO after running several operations within the company including its UK residential business, also sold shares, in his case worth £826,402.