Former LSL boss David Newnes is said to have bought a number of branches of Reeds Rains and Your Move after the parent company announced a huge restructure of job losses and branch closures.
It is understood he may have done so with Nigel Favas, the former managing director of Reeds Rains for almost 30 years until 2012.
The two men have newly registered a business called National Home Move, based in Sale, at Companies House.
LSL, whose brands include Your Move and Reeds Rains, last night refused to confirm or deny the reports that 40 branches have been acquired.
A spokesperson said: “We do not comment on market speculation.”
The much respected Newnes retired at the end of 2014 after an outstanding career at LSL.
LSL said earlier this month that it would chop total branch numbers at Your Move and Reeds Rains from 404 to 280. The only branch numbers to grow, it said, would be the franchised ones, with numbers going from 96 to 136 – a growth of 40.
We have also asked Newnes for comment on the speculation,which chimes with what EYE has been told by LSL staff.
Comments (11)
Well if anyone can make them work it’s David. Best of luck
A potentially smart investment by David and Nigel but which reflects poorly on the LSL Regional Management. David and Nigel are confident they will be able to make a large number of LSL’s branches perform profitably when existing LSL Regional Management cannot !!
If David and Nigel make this deal work then LSL has lost a lot of future profits whilst ruining the morale of their remaining staff through the branch closure programme that was delivered in a shockingly amateurish and blundering way. It’s like some of the bizzare decisions that Countrywide made when Alison Platt was leading them so badly.
I am a manager of one of the branches and we are hugely excited by the prospect of working under a franchise. Incidentally we haven’t been a struggling branch for 6 years.
This news is old, known this for weeks!
From what i understand (although unconfirmed) its a cracking deal, he has also managed to purchase the lettings portfolios of those branches and taken the lettings portfolios of a number of the closed ones.
If i was a shareholder, not sure i would have been happy about this.
I wish them the best of luck. The greatest challenge at the moment is getting enough new business in.
Modernising ideas and new software development could help a lot.
Its all very fresh and hence why LSL won’t want to confirm or deny. They have registered a new company within the last 3 weeks as National Home Move Ltd. They will not be the first or last to set up a big brand by picking over the carcasses of the corporates. Wonder who their backers are?
I think it is a shrewd move by David. One assumes he has picked the ones he wanted. The sales side of estate agency has always been a roller coaster ride regarding profitability. It is a bit like making wine. We have good years, poor years, vintage years and years when it is destroyed, fortunately the good years have been more plentiful than the poor years and the vintage years have more than made up for the lost years. The result has been that over 40 years I have seen established agents make very nice living out of it but most have always known that you have to put aside some of the good stuff for drinking later. The problem that we now have is that Estate Agency is run by accountants and city investors who are only interested in what happens over a very short time scale because that is as long as they will be involved. The market is cyclical and this can be measured by looking at the past 50 years but what is very hard is to guess when the bit of the cycle you want is coming along. So it really becomes luck which determines your success, when you hop on the cycle at the right point and get off again when you are approaching a rough ride. It looks to me that David got on the cycle at the right point when they built up LSL and got off again in 2014 when it was scheduled for a rough ride. I think his timing could be pretty close to being perfect this time, but that is just a bet! I think LSL made the decision to soon but when you are haemorrhaging money you have to do something otherwise you risk bleeding to death, when the decision is being made by people who are only rewarded on today and tomorrow, why take the risk. If you have some of the previous years laid down you can afford to take the long term view.
With a little insight into a couple of agents who are re-jigging their operations, selling off branches and parts of their business I wonder if a certain property advertising platform will bully and intimidate LSL into continuing to pay a monthly subscription for the 40 sold off branches if Mr. Newnes decides he doesn’t want to advertise on their platform and if he did wouldn’t pay the £HOW MUCH? they’re demanding now he’s not part of LSL.
40 branches that will now have to think like independents, if we don’t sell we don’t eat,there’s no one paying our wages but us?
The pride and motivation of being in charge of your own destiny? One only has to look at all the agencies bought back from the Pru in the MIRAS winter (1988-94) to know what’s possible with a move like this.
My very best wishes for the challenge ahead!
If they can be rebranded then this could be a good move but no idea if that’s possible or not.
Bold move taking on 40 (struggling?) branches in this market. Good luck to David