Countrywide, the UK’s largest chain of estate agents and mortgage network, is planning a return to the stock market.
Countrywide – whose 46 different brands include Bairstow Eves, Blundells, John D Wood and Hamptons International – quit the London stock exchange in 2007, when it sold at the height of the property market for £1.1bn into the hands of US private equity firm Apollo.
The owner now is another private equity firm, Oaktree, which wrote off 75% of Countrywide’s loans to banks and pumped £110m of capital into the business.
Oaktree, which owns 50% of Countrywide compared with Apollo’s 25%, is now in talks with banks, including Goldman Sachs, about launching an initial public offering for Countrywide. It is not clear what the flotation would value Countrywide at.
The flotation, which could happen this year, has been described by the Financial Times as “one of the most important listings in the UK real estate sector since the collapse of the property market in 2008”.
Countrywide employs 10,500 people and is said to sell one UK home in every 11. Its mortgage business arranged £4bn worth of mortgages in 2011, when the group expanded with the acquisition of Mortgage Intelligence, one of the UK’s largest mortgage distribution channels.
The group that year posted sales of £509m, with pre-tax profits of £35.7m, up a third on the year before.
For the nine months until the end of last September, Countrywide had an income of nearly £400m and an operating profit of over £28m – both figures up on the same period for the previous year, and despite Countrywide saying that its conversion of pipeline business to exchanged sales was the lowest for two years.
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