Mon 2 Apr 2007
... with Robert Weston
This month, Rupert Bates chews the cud and sups the grape with Weston Homes’ Robert Weston.Strictly speaking it was a builder’s lunch, not breakfast, at Morton’s in London’s Berkeley Square. Just as well. The fine Bordeaux Bob Weston selected would have jarred with cornflakes.
Weston is the founder and chairman of the Weston Group and is an old-fashioned house builder in every sense, basing his decisions on whether they “pass the make sense test.”
In 20 years, Weston, formerly a director of Fairview New Homes, has built up the Weston Group, starting out with backing from Richard Taylor, a Weston non-executive director, to buy a single Essex plot for £55,000, which turned into a four-bedroom house selling six months later for £185,000.
Turnover last year was more than £82 million, with pre-tax profits of just under £14 million. The Group, which also builds commercial developments and business centres, has a current portfolio valued in excess of £600 million, with around 2000 homes in production or planning.
In a world of takeovers and acquisitions, the privately owned Weston Group is a prime target.
“I am regularly being approached by the big players. If they want me, it would have to be cash and they do not get me,” said Weston.
He is quite a big player himself, with ambitious projects including four regeneration schemes in Colchester, Canterbury, Basildon and Maidstone, with a value of around £160 million, providing 950 homes.
“These four projects underline how Weston has repositioned itself from a niche traditional housebuilder to a large developer able to undertake mixed use and mixed tenure regeneration projects.” Mixed use is all the rage with a brand new Mixed Use Development category in the 2007 What House? Awards.
In a market where rampant speculators can distort values, snapping up properties off-plan before flipping ahead of completion, Weston’s old-fashioned virtues and the make sense test again shine through.
“I like to separate the investor and the speculator. I do not want to sell to a speculator. If you are not careful a development will have sold plots back on the market competing against your own product. I am a retailer, not a wholesaler.”
He seeks either owner-occupiers or long-term rental investors, who each year make up between 60 and 80 percent of Weston’s buyers.
“Others can take speculators contracts if they want, but they are not for me. I like to see investors through the whole deal and look after them. That way, you do not tend to get them defaulting on you.”
Weston Homes is also an innovator, with the company’s Genesis Project – high-speed manufacture of high quality fittings in off-site factories – another reason for swift exodus when it comes to sales.
Weston is driven by product quality. Despite being a wealthy man with a six-seater plane, his most prized possession is probably his felt-tip pen, with the boss never happier than when tinkering with floor plans or tweaking specifications.
“I look forward. You run the business through the front windscreen, not the rear.”
Weston Homes is also construction led, rather than sales led, which keeps the staff on their toes.
“We build them and it is up to sales to keep up,” said Weston, who started as a finishing foreman at Fairview and you suspect he got stuff finished. He pushes his 220 staff hard, but in return looks after them with generous company pension and health insurance schemes.
Another old-fashioned strength is lunch – once key to any property deal, but now increasingly marginalised by a new breed of house builder for whom “ hint of blackberry” is the hum of their wireless handheld, rather than the nose of a cheeky claret.
Holding a full pilot’s license, Weston enjoys flying himself and staff to key meetings, but may take a co-pilot for the return leg in case a good lunch materialises. Appropriately enough for this aviator, Weston’s head office is near Stansted Airport.
He likes to play golf with a holiday home in Marbella, Spain and if you cannot get through to him on his mobile, it is probably because he is down a quarry in Italy, looking at new tiles.
Last February Weston sold the heliport at Battersea, having bought it from Harrods three years ago, to Von Essen hotels, as part of a £50 million deal that will see a 70-room riverside boutique hotel built at Weston’s Bridges Wharf mixed use regeneration scheme, which will include the hotel, apartments, live-work units and commercial space.
Weston’s felt-tip would have been most active working on the “super-penthouse” at 41 Millharbour, part a £100 million mixed use development next to Canary Wharf in London Docklands.
Clocking in at 3,700 square feet and £3.25 million, one luxury feature is a champagne fridge. No fears for the quality of the fizz, if Weston should stock it.
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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