Martin & Co announced this morning that it has acquired the whole of Xperience – the estate agency franchising arm of Legal & General.
It paid £5m in cash plus around £1m for the net assets of Xperience.
Xperience managing director Michael Stoop stays with the business and has become group managing director.
Also part of the deal is a financial services agreement – Martin & Co has agreed a ten-year arrangement with Legal & General under which the latter provides Martin & Co franchisees with access to mortgage, life assurance and general insurance products.
Altogether, Martin & Co has acquired 89 new offices, made up of 75 franchisees, and is now trading in an additional 44 franchise areas.
The deal means that Legal & General has pulled out of the estate agency market.
Altogether, Martin & Co now has 282 franchised offices and one company-owned branch.
It also means that Martin & Co, listed on AIM, now has an extra 20 offices in London via the Xperience brand of Ellis & Co, giving it a total of 46 branches in the capital.
Today’s announcement underlines Martin & Co’s commitment to the sales market. Based on the six months to the end of June, Xperience derived 48.7% of its business from estate agency, compared with just 7.1% at Martin & Co.
However, it also adds an additional 11,000 managed rental properties to the firm’s portfolio.
As of this morning, Martin & Co now manages over 43,000 properties across the UK.
Xperience, which reported revenue of £1.8m last year, has several brands, including Whitegates, Ellis & Co, Parkers, and CJ Hole.
It is estimated that the acquisition will increase Martin & Co’s revenue by around £0.3m in the final two months of this year.
Comments (4)
Well, looks like one group of thoroughly Un offensive nice people had merged / got in bed with / joined up with an equally Un offensive lot! However, main thing is none of the franchisees will give a rats about it as long as they don't get told what to do or have to change names. – Jonnie
Thing is though, in most cases economies of scale only work if you have one brand, hence why Hunters were so keen to push the Bairstow eves franchisees to rebrand. You can't see you can charge a 2% marketing fee and get value out of it covering 4 different brand names….so I suspect that WILL be on the cards at some stage and probably the reason why L&G wanted out of it.
Its also interesting from the perspective that Martin & Co have set their stall out with their announcement that the previous smaller, low risk to them part of their business, sales, would be placing a foot in both camps by offering sellers a chance of online only marketing at a discounted price. I wonder how the franchisees of predominately sales offices will react to the news, which I might add WAS news to them this morning too apparently!
Without running the risk of dragging this merger into an Agents Mutual discussion, but this could prove quite interesting, namely as I believe that all of the Xperience group had previously signed up to OnTheMarket but I do not believe that Martin and Co have announced their intentions yet. Interesting!