One of London’s best known and most successful agents is moving on, to “pursue other career opportunities”.
Liza-Jane Kelly, sales director at flagship LSL agency Marsh & Parsons and whose name is synonymous with the firm, is leaving after 12 years. During her time with the company, the firm has grown from seven branches to 27, and now employs over 330 people.
The news comes just over a year since Peter Rollings retired from his role as Marsh & Parsons’ CEO, to spend more time with his family, and to become a ‘brand ambassador for the company – a post he still holds.
Kelly is originally from Dublin and started her career with Ireland’s largest estate agent, Sherry Fitzgerald, which subsequently backed Peter Rollings’ purchase of Marsh & Parsons.
Kelly herself moved to London in 1999 to join Hamptons International. In 2005 she joined Marsh & Parsons as director and equity partner.
Marsh & Parsons was sold to LSL in 2011, and Rollings stepped down last year.
It is understood that Kelly will be taking a break before moving on to her next challenge.
She leaves at the end of the month.
She said yesterday: “I have had an exciting and incredibly rewarding 12-year journey at M&P and I am extremely proud of everything we have achieved during that time. We’ve rapidly expanded the number of offices, whilst always maintaining a great culture and working environment for our people. Our customer service has on more than one occasion been recognised as being the best in the industry, most recently winning The Times and The Sunday Times’ Overall UK Estate Agency of the Year Award.
“I am very grateful to LSL for their faith and support in the M&P brand. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at M&P and I’m looking forward to embarking on my next career challenge in due course.”
David Brown, chief executive of Marsh & Parsons, added: “Liza-Jane has contributed an enormous amount to M&P over her 12-year tenure; she has passionately and diligently helped grow the business into what it is today. I am grateful to her for her hard work and support.
“M&P has a fantastic culture embedded within it and an excellent track record for delivering great customer service and results.”
An announcement about Kelly’s successor will be made in due course
Her husband, Keith Gorny, was also a board director of Marsh & Parsons, leaving last year.
Comments (1)
I suspect that Kelly has been slowly ground down by the relentless fiddling that any big company cannot help itself doing. LSL will be the same as all the others, controlled by bean counters who are only able to count the beans and look at ways of reducing the costs rather than increasing the front end input. They should concentrate in just couunting the beans and leave the bean production to those who know how to produce them. On top of that the unrelenting requests for information that keep coming in the form of another excel spreadsheet mean that she is probably spending all her time compiling data, each time a new higher up comes on board another load of spreadsheets start being sent around! Soon all the talent with the big boys will have moved on to create niche players using traditional estate agency skills rather than counting beans. Oh that was what happend last time around!! LSL you purchased a great company you should let the natural talent do the job of selling property rather than filling in data.