Tue 6 Nov 2007
... with Philip Langford
From movie distributor to managing director of Asprey Homes, Philip Langford's career to date has certainly been interesting. Michael Dineen meets him.
He is a patient man. He operates in that densely developed corner of suburban south-east England where any housebuilding is viewed with deep suspicion by almost everybody.You can hear the tuts and sharp intakes of breath a mile away if anyone so much as breathes the word developer in these quiet streets.
In this claustrophobic world he chooses to work, and it's the very closeness of the suburban community that appeals to him. He actually enjoys the detailed consultation with local objectors (he really doesn't see them as objectionable locals) that would drive most men up the wall.
In fact pre-consultation on one of his schemes was so intense that today he can claim: "Before we even submitted an application for planning, we were on the 13th drawing."
The term "back to the drawing board" was uttered routinely for months before he finished talking to the numerous owners of homes that backed on to the small parcel of land where he wanted to build a modest 23 houses.
Who is this paragon of discreet suburban virtue? He is Philip Langford, managing director of Asprey Homes, which he runs with his partner Bruce Walker, formerly of Crest Nicholson and a team of 40.
Its worth noting, however, that when he had finished consulting patiently with neighbours and the parish council, and had held public meetings to discuss objections, he entered his official application for planning permission - and obtained it within a mere six weeks.
"A lot of our competitors are curious about how quickly we seem to get planning," he told me in his (expanding) Petts Wood office.
"What they don't realise is how many people we talk to, how many times we change the drawings before we even think about a formal application."
And it is this mention of the competition that leads us into what I suspect is a key to his professional approach. He likes to be "hands on" - a favourite phrase of his - from the earliest concept to post-sales dealings with residents.
He knows his manor and spends nearly all his working life detecting development "opportunities" (another favourite word) there, at the right price!
In short, the competing land buyers, often employed by large national builders, will probably be paying over the odds on the open market - and then ducking out once the land is acquired. While Philip Langford and his colleagues prefer to stay in touch with that parcel of land they have spotted and nurtured secretly, in their inscrutable suburban way!
Before anyone produces the time-dishonoured notion that there's something derogatory about the term suburban, I'd like to say that for me the whole idea of suburbia is immensely reassuring.
I'm a product of the suburbs and even now, years after I left them, I like to recall the attractions: the tranquillity, the well-kept gardens, the perpetual year-round scents of flowers and blossoms, the sense of order and the innate respect for privacy.
Well, this is the world of Asprey Homes. It is a world that Philip Langford's team understands. It is also a world he was born into - even his public school was in suburban Ramsgate, and he thanks his old school for giving him "a good grounding in independence."
He was good at sport - hockey, rugger and squash - and he became captain of most of these, but his burning ambition was not to seize further educational opportunities: at sixteen all he wanted to do was leave school and start work.
"I had about £300,000 and got a couple of friends of mine to invest a little capital and this, with a promise of banking support on a two-thirds to one-third basis, gave me nearly a million to start as a developer."
His father's accountancy profession had no influence when he started applying for jobs. He was offered three and "naughtily", he now admits, accepted all three - with work to begin the following Monday
In the event it was the glamour of Columbia Pictures in Wardour Street, Soho that attracted him the most - and held him for a few years as a distributor of film reels to cinemas far and wide.
But life, real and earnest, began only in his early twenties when he found a\ job with a firm of local estate agents and surveyors. He took it because his father, who died young, had a small interest in the Bromley company - and Philip found himself responsible for his mother and two young brothers.
There were two principal attractions in throwing in his lot with Alan de Maid and Colin Gray: they were in the property business - which is what Philip earnestly desired for himself - and also he scented the fresh air of independence, via his late father's financial interest in the firm.
This was during the booming 1980s and, sure enough, Messrs de Maid and Gray, with a few High Street offices to their name, joined the long line of estate agencies to sell out to TSB.
Came the recession in 1988 and Philip was grateful for the TSB salary, but he was still hankering for independence. But he did have what he describes as his "war chest".
This was his share of the sale to TSB and with it he set up a small independent estate agency in 1994 called Langford Russell. He arranged to have an office over the shop and this, at last, was Philip's launching pad for a new career in property development.
"I had about £300,000 and got a couple of friends of mine to invest a little capital and this, with a promise of banking support on a two-thirds to one-third basis, gave me nearly a million to start as a developer."
He found a local housebuilder willing to come in on a series of joint ventures over the next couple of years until the volume of business they were generating demanded the formation of a company - Asprey.
They began work by adding a new house to the end-of-terrace house they had bought and gradually they moved into production of a wide range of homes from flats, semis and bungalows to more imposing executive homes.
Philip, 50 next birthday, is involved now with a seven-strong land buying team, his main daily preoccupation - as well as running the company, of course - but he has no heavy ambitions to turn Asprey into a big company.
They tend to build homes at the upper end of the market today and soon will be at work on their largest operation - 55 homes in Gillingham, Kent.
Asprey's turnover this year is likely to top £30 million, but Philip's fulfilment is in building a smallish number of high-quality homes spread over eight sites - each has an Asprey staffer managing it - in the confines of suburban north Kent.
Any five-year plan?
"Organic expansion - but not tremendously. What we don't want is significant increase for the sake of more units, which could mean losing the quality and uniqueness of Asprey Homes.
"But the main thing about the future for me is that I have to continue to enjoy going to work in the morning."
First published in Show House Magazine November 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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