LAUREL Pub Company, the managed pub business created from the former Whitbread estate, is close to appointing N M Rothschild to handle a sale worth up to £500 million, The Times has learnt.

The list of potential bidders is expected to be headed by Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries and Greene King, both of which are keen to expand their successful community pub divisions.

MidOcean Partners, the private equity firm managing the Laurel investment for Deutsche Bank, is understood to be considering splitting Laurel’s 619-strong estate into two main blocks to try to draw the widest interest. Although there is unlikely to be a lack of bidders for Laurel’s 429 traditional pubs, the recent woes of operators such as SFI Group will make selling its 179 high street bars more difficult. Another 11 pubs are being sold individually.

In a further move to make its community estate more attractive to buyers, Laurel is believed to have held preliminary discussions with London & Regional Properties over the possibility of unwinding the £318 million sale and leaseback on 280 of its pubs completed 14 months ago.

Both Wolves and Greene King favour freehold properties, and a freehold estate would also be of more interest to tenanted and leased operators such as Punch Taverns.

Analysts said that Laurel’s narrow failure in October to buy Scottish & Newcastle Retail had made a sale inevitable. One added: “The decision to split the estate is sensible, given the depressed state of the high street pub market.”

However, a source close to Laurel insisted that selling up was “just one of the options” open to it and that no formal sale process had been started. The source added that Laurel was still eyeing possible acquisitions, including Wizard Inns, the managed pub group put up for sale this week by Nomura.

Laurel was formed in 2001 to buy Whitbread’s 3,000-site pub estate. Since then, almost 2,400 have been sold, many of them to Enterprise inns.