Wed 4 Apr 2007
... with Andrew Wilkins
This month, Michael Dineen talks to Andrew Wilkins of Spring, Castlemore's housebuilding wing, and finds a man who doesn't like to hang around when it comes to business.
You can see the attraction of working for an outfit like Castlemore when Andrew Wilkins explains about snap decisions.Not for him the plc way, with its bureaucratic delays and red tape hindering land acquisition.
"I just stroll down the corridor for a chat with Grahame and two minutes later we have a decision."
Grahame is Grahame Whateley, chairman and proprietor of Castlemore, the Midlands-based commercial property developer; and Wilkins is managing director of Spring, Castlemore's new housebuilding wing.
Castlemore turns over upwards of £100 million, creating large-scale commercial developments including shops, offices - and housing.
In fact, Andrew knew about Castlemore's housing plots - all 6,500 of them - when he was managing director designate of Cala's Midlands operation, back in the summer of 2005 when, you may dimly remember, we won the Ashes.
"Cala had a box for the Edgbaston test on day two, and I invited 12 of the great and the good to enjoy a day's cricket, thinking that maybe we could discuss a joint venture with one of the guests, Castlemore," Andrew told me.
Between overs, presumably. My recollection of that day's play is that it was far too riveting to allow mere business to interrupt it. Wrong decisions could so easily have been made!
Andrew had been with Cala for eight years. He was 33 and pretty well assured of a comfortable career path with the company for as long as he wished. Furthermore he had a mentor and guide in Alan Brown who was, as Andrew says, a friend as well as his boss.
"They had offered me all the openings and opportunities to keep my career on the move, but I was thinking that if I didn't make the jump soon I'd be with them for life."
Even as this was going through his mind he discovered that Whateley was not particularly keen on Andrew's notions of a joint venture for those 6,500 plots.
The reason for this was that he had already decided to set up his own housebuilding wing, a specialist undertaking to work alongside his commercial ventures - and also to go-it-alone with purely domestic schemes.
There are no prizes for guessing that within six months (and after a heart-searching wrench) Andrew was installed as managing director of the new company, with a brief to build up its land bank and to get a profitable housebuilding show on the road.
Land has always been top of Andrew's list of favourite professional pursuits - ever since he began his studies at university.
He started his academic career in the quantity surveying faculty at Nottingham Trent University, but wisely, as it turned out, he decided to change to the University's still unique Residential Development course. He threw himself enjoyably into student life until his final year when, as he says, "I got my head down and did some work". Result: a first-class honours degree.
Of all the modules on the course - design, land and construction among them - it was land acquisition that attracted him the most and with the backing of Grahame Whateley and Castlemore it has been something he can do with enviable speed.
"I spend most of my time now on acquisition and when I meet vendors it gives me pleasure to tell them I'm not representing a plc, I have board approval and I don't have to jump through the red tape and observe all those frustrating procedures which delay everything so much."
His office is in a purpose-built block of understated elegance on the outskirts of the old Black Country town of Halesowen. And when he takes an idea to the man who signs the cheques it is a matter of strolling a few yards along a corridor to the chairman's office.
"Inevitably within ten seconds he goes straight to the crux of the issue; it's an inbred skill with Grahame and two minutes later he'll probably say, Right. Let's buy it."
Heady stuff, and it does mean that the cash-rich Spring-Castlemore team are geared to out-manoeuvre plc rivals and their arthritic bureaucracies when it comes to snapping up a new item for the land bank.
Spring is programmed to be gathering the proceeds of sale for its first homes by November this year. It has major projects - some mixed some purely housing developments - in Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, Southall and Sydenham.
Their flagship is a complex scheme involving 4,500 homes on 90 acres in what Andrew describes as "the most ethnically diverse community in the United Kingdom, with Sikh, Afghan and Somali Muslims" - at Southall.
Naturally Spring is not rushing into a fast building programme, although the need is great. They are fronting a research team to discover the unique requirements of design; and they expect still to be working on the vast scheme in AD2022.
At 36 Andrew Wilkins jokes that this will take him up to his retirement, though I suspect that he'll be far to energetic to quit housebuilding so early, for it has preoccupied him since well before he began his studies at Nottingham Trent; as a teenager, for example, his first experience of holiday work was being paid, as he put it, "to do dogsbodying on small local building projects".
Also he so clearly enjoys the cut and thrust of the land acquisition market place. His severely practical attitude precludes any dreamy ideas about housing "concepts" and when I asked him what Spring specialised in building his consciously toughie response was: "Money-making things!"
To hang a little more detail on to this he tells me that Spring is willing to build anything from a £100,000 one-bedroom flat in the Black Country to a £600,000 penthouse in Bristol's latest - and tallest at 13 storeys - high rise at Temple Quay.
This, like much of his work using Castlemore's expertise and finance, will be a mixed use project, which prompts Andrew Wilkins to volunteer the information that more Greater London homes are built today by developers, such as Castlemore, than by traditional housebuilders.
With the need for ever more inner urban renewal nationally he plainly sees this trend moving out from London - which makes his own decision to join an independent developer seem more than ever like a move in the right direction!
First published in Show House Magazine April 2007.
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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