IT’S only February, and the duplex showflat has already been sold.
“This is the sitting room,” says David Pretty. “Good view, I think you’ll agree.”
He is standing, pin-neat in his spotless, blue suit and crisp, white shirt, looking out on a second-floor balcony over London’s Vauxhall Bridge Road.
The luxury apartment we are in, a well-upholstered fantasy of leather and glass, sits at the apex of a triangular development of flats, homes and shops that bisects two streets.
“This flat sold quick,” he adds. For how much? “About £650,000.” Pause. “Do you think we underpriced it?”
Pretty grins. As a 40-year veteran of the housing industry and chief executive of Barratt Developments, he is an experienced persuader who knows more about selling than just about any other boss in the marketplace.
But it is not his style to push too aggressively. Pretty, the council-house boy who sold Margaret Thatcher her Barratt home on a Dulwich executive estate, is a trim vessel of restrained energy. Aged 61, a grey-haired but lean keep-fit fanatic, he has driven his company into three years of record growth and is now aiming to construct 20,000 homes a year (Barratt built 14,351 in 2005).
It’s a figure few housebuilders have hit in living memory but Pretty, as you would expect from a salesman, is confident. He faces the next two months — the housing market’s key selling time — with careful optimism too. The City agrees, boosting Barratt’s shares to an all-time high this month.
“The selling season starts mid-February,” he says, tapping the sheaf of figures he carries with him. “Steady and stable” are his predictions for how it is likely to go.
But this year will be more important than most for Barratt, a company with sales of £2.5 billion. Overtaken as Britain’s biggest housebuilder by Persimmon, which bought rival Westbury in November, Barratt is expected to hit back soon with an acquisition of its own.
Pretty’s recent appointment of a new finance director with FTSE 100 experience — Barratt is in the FTSE 250 — is seen as further confirmation of the firm’s intentions.
The Barratt boss agrees anything is possible. “We are one of the few companies that have made a success of growing organically,” he says. “But we don’t rule out acquisitions.”
Then he offers me a scone with cream. He also has plates groaning with cakes and sandwiches, brought up from the sales suite below. Attentive charm is all part of the package.
Perhaps the biggest surprise about Pretty is that he never expected to be boss at all. He had been planning his retirement from Barratt in 2002 when he heard that chief executive Frank Eaton had been killed by a car driving the wrong way down a dual carriageway.
He was Eaton’s No 2, sitting in the London office when the call came. “The finance director rang and told me what had happened. It was a sobering few hours.”
Pretty agreed to take over and steady the ship. For the first year, he says, it felt like he was leader “by default”. And then he realised he loved it.
Under Pretty, a new-style Barratt has emerged, built on Eaton’s foundations. The firm, originally a traditional housebuilder, is now Britain’s biggest brownfield-site developer and largest provider of social housing, a move that makes the firm a close collaborator with government.
The Tachbrook Triangle development in Victoria where we meet is a prime example. Behind the glitzy wodge of luxury apartments and refurbished houses, 35% of the site has been given to social housing: cheap flats for renting or joint ownership, sitting cheek by jowl with ritzier neighbours.
That’s quite a change from the days when Barratt, like its rivals, ignored government and was regularly damned as a lazy purveyor of poorly designed boxes, making profligate use of greenfield sites.
Now barely a month goes by without another Pretty proposal for ministers: suggestions on easing planning delays, selling direct to key workers.
Is it calculated self-interest or a burst of social conscience? Pretty laughs. Bit of both, you suspect.
“The challenges facing government are so great and complicated that it is impossible for it to resolve them on its own,” he says. “And if you are organic- growth driven like us, then it follows that you need to try and influence things.”
Others put him at the vanguard of the changes sweeping through housebuilders; better designs, more interaction with government, more creative solutions to fill the gap left by Britain’s dwindling supply of council housing.
“There’s more intelligent engagement now,” says Nick Raynsford, Labour MP and former housing minister, who has known Pretty since the 1980s. “And David is no-nonsense, straightforward, and effective in delivering. Remember, a lot of these bosses weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They know a whole range of people need housing.”
Pretty, the son of a war bride whose marriage to a Canadian paratrooper lasted only two years, was brought up on an estate in Acton, west London.
He says it’s simply good business to spread a housebuilder’s options. “People think we just want to build expensive things, but it’s not true. The reality is we make the same pre-tax margins on first-time housing as on luxury housing.
“And I am council-house boy and can remember what it’s like mortgaging yourself to the hilt. It makes commercial sense for us to have 25% for first-time buyers because they underpin the market.
“It’s the same with social housing. One, I am comfortable with it. Two, we make a profit out of it. Three, it spreads our risks and opportunities. It’s going to be a significant growth market and a lot of rivals are following our lead.”
Likewise with the environment. Hence a new, 1,000- house development in Lancashire includes seven eco-homes, not for sale but simply for demonstration. Buyers can give their views and Barratt can better bridge that gap between the cutting edge and the saleable. It’s clever, toe-in-the- water stuff that could pay dividends later.
Pretty’s marketing nous was forged early as a trainee at Procter & Gamble. He only left to join Bovis, as a land manager, because he liked the cheap loan that went with the job. In 1976 he leapt into Barratt, where he developed a reputation as one of the industry’s sales stars. In 1985 he personally handled the sensitive sale of a Barratt home to Margaret Thatcher — she even made him fishpaste sandwiches in No10.
He left Barratt shortly afterwards, to set up St George, the luxury-apartment developer, with Tony Pidgley, now boss of the rival Berkeley group. By 1990 he was back at Barratt, part of a rescue team that was pulling the firm out of loss.
Pidgley describes Pretty as one of the best marketing men he has known. “He’s just very well organised and thinks things through, and he presents himself very well,” says Pidgley, before laughing, “but I don’t want to promote a competitor.”
That sense of organisation can be seen in the A4 pads Pretty constantly carries with him, and the lists he makes and ticks off. “I like a tidy desk at the end of the day and a list for tomorrow,” he says.
It’s visible too in his adherence to a strict keep-fit routine, working out in his gym four times a week. He ascribes that discipline to the grandparents who helped to bring him up. “They spent their life savings getting my mother back from Canada, and they taught me that you work hard and you never give up.”
Does he still feel he is boss by default?
“No,” he says. “It’s funny how things work out. The very skills Barratt needed for the last three years, to be strong on marketing and on land, were the areas I was strong in.”
He has no qualms in pushing himself forward now. A few find him almost too keen to please, and others worry that his increasing visibility masks deep flaws in Barratt’s growth strategy. Analysts ask if he is now too dependent on urban flat development. The City is waiting to see if he can acquire a rival as astutely as he buys land.
Some outside the finance world also want to see if he can make Barratt more representative of the consumers that it sells to. The firm’s board and regional chiefs include no women or ethnic minorities. That’s fairly common in the sector but still odd, given that women usually make the house-buying decisions.
“You’re right,” says Pretty. “We’ve not been attractive to women because we are a seven-day-a-week industry. It’s less easy for women with families to make a career.”
Those who note the industry’s frequent golf days and clay-pigeon jaunts — Pretty is a crack shot — may find the seven-day-a-week argument less than convincing. “But it is changing,” he adds, anxiously shuffling his papers into order.
So will he be sticking around to make sure? At 61, he is already the oldest of the big housebuilders’ bosses.
“Let’s put it this way. When I’ve told the wife and the company, you’ll be the next to know.” And he laughs guiltily, saying he has got to go, politicians to meet. The office of the deputy prime minister is just around the corner.
David Pretty's working day
THE Barratt boss keeps two offices, one in Newcastle and another in Brentford, west London.
“If I’m in Newcastle, I’ll get up at 6.15am and drag myself to the hotel gym,” says David Pretty.
He arrives in the office at 8.30am and goes into a series of meetings with group finance and corporate directors.
Every Monday morning he also goes through sales figures from his 34 divisions, kept on paper in a file he carries with him. He gives them particularly close scrutiny now, as Barratt enters the peak selling season.
“After a sandwich lunch I try to clear paperwork,” says Pretty, “and fit in a visit to one of our developments.”
He will often finish after 7pm and go straight to a business dinner with staff.
Vital statistics
Born: November 11, 1944
Marital status: married with two daughters and four grandchildren
University: Hull
First job: sales and marketing trainee at Procter & Gamble
Salary package: £1m
Homes: Richmond and Hampshire
Car: grey Jaguar XJ
Favourite book: Birdsong
Music: Randy Crawford
Film: Reach for the Sky
Last holiday: Capetown
Interests: keeping fit, clay-pigeon shooting, reading
Pretty's five tips for the top
- Surround yourself with good people, even if they are better than you
- Focus on the basics of the business. These are usually crucial to success
- Have flair and ideas but balance the flair with discipline
- Spread your opportunities and risks
- Always remember that the customer is king
