Member Article

Grainger plc profits shoot up on strong sales

Residential property firm Grainger plc has revealed a significant rise in pre-tax profits to £23.1 million, driven by a number of disposals.

The Newcastle-headquartered FTSE 250 company said it had a strong start to the year as it enjoyed a significant rise in net asset values.

Profits included £9.9 million from the sale of a tenanted home porfolio in January. The firm said it did not anticipate any further tenanted portfolio sales this year.

In April the firm acquired a portfolio of 61 freehold homes across nine streets in the affluent London borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Grainger said it was exploring a numbe of other investment opportunities including market-let residential portfolios and build-to-rent projects in London and the South East, as well as a few other regional cities.

Announcing its half year results for the six months to April. Grainger reported net rents fell to £19.5 million from £27.3 million in March 2013.

Andrew Cunningham, chief executive of Grainger plc, said: “We have had a strong start to this financial year. Our core strategy of focusing on balanced income streams, alongside our targeted geographical asset allocation with a weighting toward London and the South East of England, and our specialist active asset management, has ensured that Grainger has been ideally positioned to take advantage of current favourable market conditions.

“As a result, we have succeeded in delivering an exceptional performance, with our assets continuing to outperform both the Halifax and Nationwide house price indices.

“Our sales performance to the end of March has been particularly encouraging and we anticipate further good performance in the second half based on our sales pipeline and the profits to come from our development activities such as Macaulay Walk.

“In turn the cash generated from these sales has enabled us to recycle capital into attractive long term value accretive opportunities.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .