Mon 4 Jun 2007
... with Ted Reddick
This month, Michael Dineen meets the fast-thinking, fast-talking, fast-moving owner of Landspeed - Ted Riddick.
Ted Reddick doesn't believe in hanging about. Whether he's astride a bicycle or behind the wheel of a racing car his intention is to cover the ground faster than the others.All of which makes his calling as a land consultant seem appropriate, for he makes it a point of professional honour to negotiate the chicanes of planning with as few delays as possible.
It's apt as well that his company is called Landspeed. And he is a fast talker too; his delivery (as witness the tape I've just played) speaks of a man who would be very impatient with delays of any kind.
Brisk without being brusque he seems to have a temperament suited to dealing with the kind of obstinate Jacks-in-office whose mission in life is to stop the building of new homes - even new homes for the needy.
His toothcomb mind is a match for theirs as he prepares the ground for clients' planning applications, and his important starting point is to be familiar with the local authority's basic policy, its wording and meaning - often misinterpreted by planning officers and councillors alike, as they search out reasons for the big 'No'.
Not a man to be thwarted - unless you are very well prepared.
Having said all that, though it would be unfair not to point out that Reddick is a good humoured man and furthermore he has no ruthless plans to make millions out of the housebuilding industry. He sees Landspeed, almost a one-man band, as an absorbing and rewarding freelance creation that will keep him and his partner gainfully employed almost indefinitely, or anyway as long as the planning process continues to frustrate expansion.
As the industry rearranges itself into ever-larger units, the army of small, focused specialists such as Landspeed grows apace too.
It started in 1999 as a consultancy, the freelance life at last for Ted who had spent the previous 16 years as a company man involved always with land acquisition and planning. From the very start land was his bag, when, as a school leaver, he joined Wimpey as a trainee land negotiator.
This job was a poor second choice for, as an A-level grammar schoolboy, he longed for a career as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Defective eyesight prevented that, so to make the most of the Wimpey job he read voraciously anything he could lay his hands on in the office that was relevant to land acquisition. He read about it in office files, which he took home, and he read about it in the newspapers of several counties.
Few 18-year-old boys thrown in the deep end today would take so much trouble, but it paid off; within a year he had shed the "trainee" part of his title and was a land negotiator - with trainees under him.
His next move was to follow in the wake of an ex-Wimpey colleague who had become a land manager with Abbey Homesteads. He moved to Crest, with the recommendation that Abbey could do no better than offer Reddick his job. In slightly under three years Ted had become a land manager at 22.
He told me that the reason he left Wimpey was that he was not allowed to negotiate land deals. "Too departmentalised" was his description of Wimpey in those days. Abbey gave him this chance, but too much commuting to the office persuaded him to seek a job nearer home.
He chose to join an estate agency Cubitt and West, soon to be absorbed into the grossly expanding Prudential Property Services, whose aim at the time (1987) seemed to be the creation of as many new millionaires as they could in the shortest space of time as they bought up high-street agencies by the hundred.
It was a crazy bubble world where everything was overheating, and being at the sharp end of the estate agency farrago was not to Reddick's liking. He stuck it out for a year - flash car, high pay cheque and all - before deciding to move back into the production side of the industry.
This was the beginning of a seven-year stint with Crest during which he was at one time a senior member of a 50-strong land team; a team, which, after several nights of the long knives, was finally whittled down to one man, Ted Reddick!
His survival record was not, however, rewarded with the directorship that had become his next career goal, so he answered an Estates Gazette ad for a land director with McAlpine.
Here he was working under Mike Freshney who believed the job should include responsibility for planning too, a logic with which Ted agreed wholeheartedly. He had arrived.
Finally, though, Ted Reddick decided that after all these years on someone else's payroll he wanted independence, the freelance life; so he joined the expanding ranks of consultants.
At first he offered advice on all aspects of land acquisition and development and was doing this when he met Gary Stirling who had 15 years' experience of the housing association sector.
Affordable housing, of the kind housing associations provided, has become an increasingly important part of the market and Ted believes the Landspeed Partnership can ensure that housing really is affordable - wherever it is built.
Inevitably, while advising a range of clients, including developers and local authorities, there have been times when Reddick has been asked to take on development work himself.
Thus Landspeed, after only eight years, has three divisions covering the enabling and creation of affordable homes, a development consultancy and a partnership consultancy formed to help landowners and developers understand better the obligations of affordable housing providers.
Names as exalted as Persimmon, Charles Church, Wimpey and Barratt have found it useful to have Landspeed's specialised knowledge of the affordable sector available.
"We can help people save production time," says Reddick, the man in a hurry, the man with hobbies involving speeding on bikes and in racing cars. Whatever the activity he hates loitering!
First published in Show House Magazine June 2008.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but some information contained within this article may have changed since it was first published.
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